I've had this problem for a while now, and I think I'd be a lot happier if I could find a productive way to practice and get better at handling it.

A good way to describe the problem is like this: let's say that you have an amp hooked up to a microphone, and you hold that microphone up to a speaker. You end up getting noisy feedback.

The inside of my head is kind of the same way. Sometimes, when I try to speak, I become uncomfortably aware of the way I sound, my choice of words, inflections, and the mental picture of how I appear to other people, and I get caught up in this feedback to the point that I struggle to finish a thought. My short term memory disintegrates, I struggle to hold on to a thread, and this in turn feeds my anxiety even more.

There are lots of circumstances where I'm comfortable in my own skin, the problem doesn't manifest, and I can articulate high-level things that feels natural. Usually, this is in the presence of people I feel comfortable around. Unfortunately, this makes basic interactions feel awkward and unnatural, and I often worry that there's something wrong with me.

I know that practice (and perhaps therapy) could help improve this, but sometimes attempting something as basic as recording a video to talk about my thoughts and ideas on a given subject feels impossible.