How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

by Ellen Hendriksen

it was my own resistance that made me miserable, not the practice itself.

use a little magic: we can put action before motivation.

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.

while you’re in the tough early stages, base your achievement on what you do rather than how you feel.

Oddly, it’s much easier to work within constraints. Give me some direction, some structure, or a model to follow, and magically I feel much more confident. Contrary to common sense, limitations get things moving.

Even if there’s no predetermined job, you can still create structure by giving yourself an assignment.

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.

Playing a role that is chosen for you is like constructing a false front. Your precious resources get poured into the image while the actual building—the real, authentic you—is left wanting. The false front may be impressive or even intimidating, but its intention is to fool, to deceive.

Aisha’s role was that of a champion—she filtered her actions through what would be best for her families. And through the safety of constraints, she was able to build her building until she didn’t need her scaffolding anymore. She had outgrown the structure of her role. She could still be an advocate. But now she could advocate as herself.

The only word of caution: don’t choose a structure that allows you to avoid. Helping with the dishes after a dinner party is generous, but if it keeps you in the kitchen while everyone else is chatting over coffee on the stoop your building goes neglected.

To climb the peak and go over the top doesn’t actually take that long—maybe ten seconds to a minute. So commit to being brave for one minute. Once you do that, it’s all downhill from there. As we stay with it, it gets easier.

So ask yourself what you would be doing if you had faced down your fears and were on the other side.

practice things that scare you, but don’t practice being a jerk. Practice being the authentic you, not a pissed-off, unhinged you.

Even though we feel like we are concealing our flaws, people can see us. I know that sounds obvious, but while we’re busy trying to keep ourselves safe we’re actually sending an entirely different message. We rehearse what to say in order to come across as well-spoken but end up appearing preoccupied.

safety behaviors send a loud and clear message, and it’s exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to do.

First you need to have a good understanding of what safety behaviors you are using. Then you can do some experimental testing and see what happens if you remove the safety behavior.”

Once all the bandwidth used for rehearsing sentences or managing their appearance was freed up, authentic friendliness—the good stuff—naturally filled in the gaps.

when we use safety behaviors we know we’re coming off as fake. We know it’s not our true self that we’re presenting to the world—instead, it’s a filtered, highly managed version. Safety behaviors are designed to hide your true self, the one your Inner Critic says is flawed. But instead, safety behaviors keep us stuck in the idea that we’re unlikable or deficient. We never get the chance to prove those ideas wrong.

The way you ask makes a big difference, Jia discovered. Even though he was still anxious, without his safety behaviors Jia appeared as if he were not anxious.

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.”

😭

if you approach something as if it’s totally reasonable, it will be. Or you can just pretend you’re Beyoncé. Or, in this guy’s case, Trojan Man.

affirm yourself with the values you are 100 percent rock-solid sure about, even if they have nothing to do with the task at hand.

you can gain strength by affirming your own courageous acts.

when participants brought to mind a memory of their own integrity—the time they stood by a friend when no one else did, the time they could have thrown a colleague under the bus but didn’t—they were able to look pictures of angry faces square in the eye. So affirm your truths. Affirm the times you did the right thing. Remind yourself of your best and your best will show up.

But if your practice doesn’t go as planned, ask yourself who was acting inappropriately. For her Challenge List, Camilla asked a stranger for the time, but the stranger ignored her. Who was out of line, Camilla or the stranger?

practice gone wrong is often great fodder for conversation. Everyone loves embarrassing stories; it humanizes you, shows you have a sense of humor, and you might even get an embarrassing story in return.

realized how many opportunities I missed because I was afraid of people rejecting me, but I was just rejecting myself.”

social anxiety is fundamentally a distortion: it’s a mistaken belief that something is wrong with you and everyone will notice. That you’ll be Revealed.

simply aim for the majority of your attention to be on task. Even 51 percent is fine.

Putting your attention on something other than the task at hand (“Maybe if I focus on my breathing I’ll feel better” or “Must. Check. Twitter.”) is distraction and not what we’re aiming for. Instead, redirect your focus to what you’re supposed to be doing.

Try this courageous and challenging thing—changing your behavior—so you can learn something new.”

We fear judgment but then, oddly, twist ourselves into a pretzel to find it. This is called attention to threat.

When we selectively zoom in on turned backs and grumpy scowls, we miss the nodding heads and smiling faces surrounding them.

When you’re out and about, count how many people you see wearing glasses. Then count how many people are wearing earbuds. Or count how many people have facial hair. The counting is conscious, but it unconsciously teaches you to shift your attention to faces.

physiological signature of anxiety: Blushing is the dilation of blood vessels. Sweating is a natural consequence of raised body temperature. Shortness of breath and dry mouth are explained by your muscles’ increased demand for oxygen and water. Cold hands and feet? Victims of the sudden diversion of blood to your biggest muscles. Shaking hands or lips? Blame the adrenaline that floods the body, leaving us trembling like a revving motor. Muscles get fatigued from being coiled like a spring. And finally, the gastrointestinal system discharges any, uh, extra weight, thus lightening the load so we can run faster or fight more nimbly.

This awareness of one’s own body (or lack thereof) is called interoceptive awareness.1 Interoceptive awareness, unsurprisingly, is more sensitive in individuals with any kind of anxiety.

It 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.

Huge discrepancies exist between how we think we look and how we actually look. What we imagine in our mind’s eye—the funhouse mirror—is distorted. So don’t ask your anxiety how you look. Instead, remember that seeing is believing.

Exercise feels a lot like the pesky sensations of anxiety: a pounding heart, sweating, shortness of breath, and, of course, turning red.

Does exercise create a positive association with anxious feelings, and therefore makes them easier to deal with in the moment?

if something rude is said it says more about them than you. Being judged does not render the judgers correct.

Few of us expect our lives—social or otherwise—to be truly perfect. Instead, perfectionism is about never being good enough.

If one side of perfectionism is bookended by sky-high expectations, the other is anchored by lower-than-a-worm beliefs in one’s ability.

textbook perfectionism: there’s a gap between perceived expectations and your belief in your ability to reach them.

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.

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 lands closer to “totally incompetent.” When a perfectionist like Rosie inevitably fails to live up to her unattainable social standards, she takes it personally. “I suck at this; therefore, I suck,” is the conclusion.

Judgment, anger, and hypersensitivity to criticism don’t look like the stereotype of social anxiety; instead of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, it’s the sheep in wolf’s clothing, baring fangs when we feel cornered by potential judgment or humiliation.

If we’re wired to see ambiguous social cues as rejection—a smile as mocking rather than friendly, a lapse in conversation as boredom rather than a pause—our brains will find what we’re looking for. The innocuous becomes rejecting. And what does our lizard brain do with a threat? Fight or flight. Hiding in the bathroom stall is flight. But if we think our acceptance is being thwarted, we might get angry. Then it’s fight all the way.

FOMO has evolved over the years, it’s become apparent that it comes in different flavors. To find yours, ask yourself, “If I did miss out, what would that mean about me?”

First, remember that people put their best foot forward on social media, posting only the highlight reel of their lives.

Rosie decided to experiment with having some conversations that met 50 percent of her standards. It was instant relief. She only had to be funny, confident, or smart to a level of 50 percent: “It was like the opposite of Lake Woebegone,” she said. “I was trying to be average.”