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You just need to see that who you are is already perfectly sufficient. Fundamentally, social anxiety is seeing our true self in a distorted way and believing the distortion to be the truth. We magnify (or even flat-out imagine) our bad points. We worry about our perceived flaws, all while completely forgetting the myriad gifts we have to offer. You don’t need to co-opt someone else’s confidence when you can discover your own. All you need to grow is a willingness to try.
You just need to see that who you are is already perfectly sufficient. Fundamentally, social anxiety is seeing our true self in a distorted way and believing the distortion to be the truth. We magnify (or even flat-out imagine) our bad points. We worry about our perceived flaws, all while completely forgetting the myriad gifts we have to offer. You don’t need to co-opt someone else’s confidence when you can discover your own. All you need to grow is a willingness to try.
This fear costs us: it makes it hard to meet people, get close to them, and have a good time. It makes it hard to ask for what we need. It can make others think we’re snobby, unfriendly, or cold, when really we’re just nervous. At its worst, it can leave us depressed and isolated. And of course, the fear gets in the way of being ourselves.
“The point is that you’re comfortable with yourself and you make people around you feel comfortable. They feel they can talk to you. That’s your superpower.”
We miss out, either because we’re physically absent or because we’re stuck in self-monitoring mode, worrying that we’ve said something stupid or that we’ve screwed up. This is how social anxiety gets in the way of living the life we want to live.
Now, a non-anxious introvert may leave the party early, too, but there’s none of the self-criticism and self-consciousness involved. Many of us would really, honestly, like to go home and read, practice guitar, or putter in the kitchen. No judgment, no self-flagellation, no convincing ourselves we don’t care. We choose to walk out the door; fear doesn’t choose for us.
What I do remember is that through my anxious filter I thought she was disappointed in me or annoyed that I couldn’t muster the courage to speak up. Now I know better.
Remember: genetics isn’t destiny. The brain, with its genetic programming and evolutionary shaping, influences behavior, but it goes both ways: behavior also influences the brain. This is all very good news. It means that through practice and a little help from the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy1 you can rise above your social anxiety and be yourself—your true, authentic self.
This time, NO ONE LIKES ME was quickly countered with “Well, that’s not the case,” “I can name a bunch of people who like me,” or, “Hey, just because that’s flashing in front of me doesn’t mean it’s true.”
Inner Critic expect great things from you. Only the best performance will do. The Critic wants you to do better, to be perfect, so it pushes you to perform while at the same time undermining your faith in your ability. Your flawless social performance is somehow supposed to emerge effortlessly and fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. The Inner Critic’s good intentions try to keep us safe but instead leave us floundering, pressured, and insecure.
To sum up, when your Inner Critic kicks the anxiety into gear, first ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Answer as precisely as possible; remember: specify, specify, specify. Then ask: “How bad would that really be?” “What are the odds?” “How could I cope?”
In other words, mindfulness is not your actual thoughts or experience. Rather, it is a method for watching your thoughts and experience. It is the realization: Oh, I’m thinking X, I’m hearing Y, I notice Z. What’s more, you can choose where you direct your attention. You can watch your thoughts, your breath, or the snaps, crackles, and pops of your own body. Just as you watch the image projected on the movie screen, you watch your thoughts or sensations float and dart across the field of your consciousness.
instructions to the mindful group concluded, “The purpose is to be aware of your thoughts and feelings and accept your experience in the present moment.”
In my conversation with Dr. Neff, she noted, “We can’t skip ahead and say, ‘Don’t believe the Inner Critic.’ We need to turn toward the Inner Critic and ask, ‘How are you trying to help me?’ People often find their Inner Critic and self-compassion want the exact same thing.”
But using self-compassion, you might then tell yourself, Oh, sweetheart, I know you’re scared. You don’t know the neighbors very well and this is intimidating. You’re not alone—everyone feels awkward and weird sometimes and everyone was new to the neighborhood at one point. You know from experience that just showing up is the worst part. It gets better from there. You’ve done hard things before, and I know you can do this, too, even while you’re feeling nervous.
It’s hard to talk kindly to ourselves when we’re used to being hard on ourselves. But here’s where the mindfulness comes in again. The sense of, Oh, I’m watching a movie, can be used to watch your anxious thoughts without judgment and allow you to try again.
“Okay, Pranav,” he said. “Everyone gets anxious; everyone has their stuff. You’re working on this; you’re committed to trying.” He sat up a little straighter. “Plus, you can handle feeling awkward for a few minutes. If you survived the last few years, you can make some phone calls. It’s okay to feel awkward as long as you keep moving forward.”
“Those first months that I was on the street stopping strangers, I was so scared every time I walked up to somebody. There’s something about approaching someone and the possibility of being rejected that inherently makes you nervous.”
“I just had to do it so many times. There were no longer any unknowns … there was nowhere for my imagination to go and create this kind of anxiety in me. I had seen it all before, I knew that I could handle it, and so I got to the point where I could just approach people very comfortably without any worry or anxiety about what their reaction would be.”
Not that I ever admitted it, but it was my own resistance that made me miserable, not the practice itself.
Just like Brandon, we don’t have to wait until we feel like doing something before we do it. Instead, we start doing it, and the feeling will catch up.
Lo and behold, the exact same thing happens with confidence. There’s a myth that you have to feel confident to be ready. In truth, you gain confidence by doing things before you’re ready, while you’re still scared. Go through the motions and your confidence will catch up.
Just like Brandon talking to strangers, the first few times will be the most difficult. Experience hasn’t yet balanced out our fearful imaginings of all possible worst-case scenarios. So while you’re in the tough early stages, base your achievement on what you do rather than how you feel. You were anxious and you said hi. You were sweating bullets and you asked for a raise. You didn’t have the perfect answer ready and you raised your hand. You felt like throwing up and you asked her out. Your anxiety isn’t credible, so don’t ask it for feedback. Instead, look at what you did. Let your
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So here’s the difference between structure that hinders you and structure that’s a stepping-stone to the ultimate role of being yourself: the role should come from within, not from someone else. It can’t come from your impossible-to-please mother, your boss, your current crush, American society, or whoever else. Instead, your role should be chosen and inhabited only by you.
“What would be best for the families?” When she showed up at meetings with bigwigs, it was for the families. When she spoke up at a roundtable, it was for them. When she presented, it was for them.
Nothing happened. This is the ideal outcome: nothing. Nothing our imaginations can conjure. Nothing our Inner Critic can predict. Even rejection, once experienced, is seldom as bad as we imagine.
Thankfully, you don’t need to be as thorough as Brandon or Albert. You don’t need to approach 130 attractive women, much less ten thousand strangers. The first approaches are the hardest: the first conversation, the first book club, the first softball practice. But don’t stop at one. At your next opportunity, do it again. And again. Each time, both the intensity and duration of your anxiety will lessen. Your mountain of anxiety will erode into a molehill. And your confidence will grow into a mountain.
Challenge by challenge, I keep learning that consequences are never what they seem. And even if something went wrong, I could handle it. And guess what? You could, too.
But most interesting is that participants who dropped their safety behaviors thought the confederates liked them because they seemed less anxious. But in reality, the confederates said they liked them because they were friendlier, talked more openly, conveyed interest, and were actively engaged. In other words, the participants thought their partners liked them because they did less of the bad stuff, but in reality the partners liked them because they did more of the good stuff. Once all the bandwidth used for rehearsing sentences or managing their appearance was freed up, authentic
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When I talked to Jia about this discovery, he said, “I realized that what I was asking was out of the realm of the social norm, but the way I was asking was not. I didn’t blow a horn or do a dance. I came in being very respectful. And people usually respond in kind.”
Remember Replace and Embrace from chapters 5 and 6? They’re not just a running start; you can use them as cleanup, too. Ask yourself how truly horrible was the experience? It feels cringe worthy now, but who will remember in a few days? (Probably no one besides you.) How often do things like this happen to people? (Probably often.) How many people has this happened to? (Lots—chalk one up for the human experience.)
Finally, remember the confidence myth. You don’t gain confidence in a vacuum and then go off and conquer the world. Instead, you learn to be confident, to have courage, to get over anxiety, to live your life authentically, by doing challenging things. And an authentic life includes some rejection, some awkwardness, and some embarrassment. But guess what? It also includes deep satisfaction in your accomplishments, even when they don’t turn out exactly as you pictured them. And with ongoing practice, you’ll find it also includes many Moments and even some elation. By practicing, you’ll learn
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They can tell you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t belong here. You look stupid.
And, most important, we can focus on the task at hand, which is called, appropriately enough, task-focused attention.
Diego did exactly this. He practiced shifting his attention away from monitoring and weighing his words. With all the freed-up bandwidth, he focused on his tasks: taking vitals, listening to his patients’ questions, and yes, performing Pap smears and testicular exams. As he practiced, he felt a palpable difference. He realized so much of his attention had been focused inward, which he thought had been helpful but had left little for his job. Now he doesn’t let himself get sucked into a whirlpool of self-absorbed prophecies. By turning his attention inside
Even better, by the end of that first year in the hospital, by turning his attention inside out Diego also turned his evaluations around. The residents found him attentive and focused. The attendings wrote that he was observant and responsive. He had mastered taking histories, doing physicals, and yes, performing testicular exams, but he knew the key to being a good doctor wasn’t any of those things—instead, it was paying attention to his tasks, not his anxiety.
Why does a smart, capable woman like Mei turn to Jell-O when faced with a PowerPoint deck? Let’s ask Mei: “I just feel like a babbling idiot. I’m worried I’ll lose it and that everyone will think I’m an anxious freak.”
reminded her of a nature documentary she once watched—deep-sea volcanoes might erupt on the ocean floor, but the surface hardly shows a burble.
This idea isn’t new: way back in 1936, in his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote that the person you are talking to “is a hundred times more interested in himself and his wants and his problems than he is in you and your problems.” We’re each at the center of our own worlds, but we forget that every other person is in the same position.
Let’s sum up our myth busting: Contrary to the feeling that we’re transparent and in the spotlight, our thoughts and bodies usually get overlooked. How we feel isn’t how we look, plus even if they do notice, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll judge us. Noticing usually stops with noticing.
And as a bonus, if something rude is said it says more about them than you. Being judged does not render the judgers correct.
“I remember actually thinking to myself, ‘I have no idea how to be a normal person,’” she said, remembering the conference. “I felt that awkward. I was convinced something was wrong with me.”
What’s going on here? First, we hold ourselves to strict, near-impossible standards but are understanding and compassionate to everyone else. As if that double standard weren’t bad enough, we also try to see the best in others, but assume others will see the worst in us. When you think about it, our assumption that others will be judgmental and rejecting is actually quite ungenerous of us. The most damaging perfectionistic mind-set, however, is when our worth becomes contingent upon our social performance. Anything less than perfect isn’t good enough, which in the land of dichotomous thinking
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All this social-media-induced social anxiety has less to do with the specific platform—indeed, the MySpace and chat rooms of yesteryear inspired the same anxiety as the apps du jour. But no matter the platform, social media is a performance. And performance pulls for perfectionistic self-presentation. To be sure, individuals have cultivated a public image since the dawn of time (Ponytailed or curly powdered wig? Fedora or derby?), but now, armed with smartphone cameras and filters, we can manage others’ impressions as never before.
So what’s the cost of FOMO, besides feeling anxious, envious, and insecure? It turns us inward, which also lies at the heart of social anxiety. But when we turn inward, like Diego at the hospital, we miss what’s going on around us. And that’s the biggest cost of FOMO: actually missing out.
There are two ways for Vivian, or any of us, to resist the pull. First, remember that people put their best foot forward on social media, posting only the highlight reel of their lives. We tend to post when things are going well—vacations, accomplishments, kids doing cute things, photos in which we look hot. No one posts cleaning the cat litter, picking up tampons on sale, or a bad hair day. Everyone experiences these things just as often as you—it’s just that those moments aren’t on display. Resist comparing their filtered image to your everyday, unfiltered reality.
And indeed, when self-consciousness gets the best of us we may think our empty weekend, empty calendar, or empty bed is the result of our lack of social skills. We think there’s some rule we don’t know, some magic we’re not privy to. This brings us to the fifth myth: I have lousy social skills. Getting sucked into social anxiety makes us say things like “I don’t know how to make conversation,” “I’m not very good at small talk,” “I have nothing to say,” “I always end up doing something stupid,” or, like Rosie, claim not to know how to be normal. Skill
Because I always end up doing something embarrassing, you might say. Or, I always cause awkward silence. Or, People look at me funny and I can’t tell whether they didn’t hear me or they think I’m an idiot. Okay, here’s what’s happening: social anxiety only strikes when there is a fear of judgment, a fear of The Reveal. You’re probably open, relaxed, or funny with your partner, your family, or close friends. But with strangers or people you don’t know well, you get inhibited and think you have no skills.
And sometimes they do slip-slide away. Our worries become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it’s not just you. It’s so common it has a name: anxiety-induced performance deficits. This is when, precisely because we’re anxious, we start to act oddly. We go blank. We spill our drink. We fall, and not in an adorable Zooey Deschanel kind of way. In a cruel twist of irony, this sets off other people’s alarm bells and creates awkward moments.
When we’re feeling inhibited, we’re already overthinking. We can’t access our skills unconsciously anymore, so sometimes we have to remember them consciously. Big asterisk: you already know how to do all these, but when we feel intimidated and inhibited we magically forget.
