This happens infrequently to me, almost always when I’m in conversation and I can’t find the word I want. It feels like my brain pauses and I can’t bring myself out of it. I still have a sense of time passing, but other than that I’m blank.
Does anyone else get this?
Yes, this happens to me too. I don’t know about you, but for me there might be a component of slight social anxiety that makes my brain go blank in that situation.
A long pause mid-sentence is awkward, so you feel time pressure, but at the same time you realize that the word isn’t close to the surface and you can’t seem to detach from the situation and start digging. You end up waiting for the word to magically appear, but at the same time you’ve already given up looking for it.
I think the key is to recognize this situation and start rephrasing way sooner. Just accept that you won’t be able to be as precise in your phrasing. You can always fix that later.
Oh that’s interesting.
I don’t know if it’s anxiety, but I definitely feel the pressure not to keep the person or people I’m talking to hanging.
The problem I have is that I don’t feel it coming on. It’s just suddenly there, so recognizing the situation and rephrasing doesn’t feel possible: once I’m stuck, I’m stuck. It’s like missing a step when you’re going up stairs: you can’t skip the stumbling part.
What I meant was not so much to keep it from happening, but rather to recognize that it’s happening and to give up and move on. Don’t even try to finish the sentence, just start over and explain it in a different way. Yes, you will still have the awkward gap, but at least you can recover from it and keep the conversation flowing.
Actually this is also something that language learners need to cope with to reach fluency. Language learners often have a lot of gaps in their vocabulary that they need to circumvent in realtime. To do so, they instinctively learn to use filler words and to rephrase.