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?
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.