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

by Ellen Hendriksen

But long term, avoidance is disastrous. It is enemy number one of emotional well-being and perpetuates all anxieties, not just social. For social anxiety to become a problem, genetics and learning aren’t enough—the anxiety has to grow and be carefully maintained. Avoidance does just that, and does it perfectly.

put criminal psychopaths and capital-S Socially Anxious individuals through an MRI scanner and found an overactive frontolimbic circuit in the socially anxious and the exact opposite—an underactive frontolimbic circuit—in the psychopaths.

“If you want to be comfortable talking to strangers,” he said, “the only way to do it is to approach strangers while you’re uncomfortable. You have to earn the comfort through being uncomfortable many, many times.”

The perception that we have to feel like doing something before we do it is amazingly common.

But in reality, safety behaviors send a loud and clear message, and it’s exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to do. We accidentally send the message of I’m aloof, I’m distant, I’m snobby, I’m prickly, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Act as if you were not anxious, drop your safety behaviors, and not only will you feel better; you’ll also get a better response. And guess what? No one can tell you’re acting.

Usually, we assume making mistakes is bad. We go to great lengths to avoid screwing up. But assuming we’re generally solid and competent, it actually works the other way.1 The blunder has the magical effect of enhancing the attractiveness of the competent contestant. Why? Aronson and his colleagues conclude that the coffee incident made the contestant more human, more approachable. He’s still impressive but no longer intimidating. It takes him from being superhuman to human, and therefore more attractive. We like people more when they’re imperfect.

We tend to make friends with the people we see most often. Repeated contacts, like seeing your neighbors coming home with the kids, headed to the market, or on the way to mechanical engineering class, are the foundation of friendship.

To have the best shot at friendship, she needs to see a steady drumbeat of the same faces—the same people, regularly.

And then? Keep showing up. Give any new social endeavor at least a season, or around three or four months, but longer is better. Lore has it that it takes six to eight conversations (not just “hi”) before people consider each other a friend.

Then, once you’ve established yourself, a well-kept secret is to take on a leadership role. Remember chapter 8? Playing a role is a blessing for the shy among us because it requires less social improvising.

How to take it to the next level? To jargonize it, we use disclosure, which simply means sharing what we think, do, and feel with others. This seems easy enough, but it’s not intuitive. Folks susceptible to social anxiety don’t often talk about themselves. We’re polite and pleasant, but others often get the impression we’re distant, formal, or otherwise keep the world at arm’s length.

So start with what you’re doing or thinking. Say hi, ask how they are, and share some tidbit about what you’re doing, what you just did, what you’re planning, or what you’ve been thinking about recently. It doesn’t have to be smart, insightful, or articulate—it just has to be about you.

This will feel wrong at first. It will feel like you’re talking too much. It will feel selfish, like you’re taking up too much space or making it about you. But this is only because you are comparing it to being reticent.

Social anxiety makes us masters of ending conversations. It’s easy: a certain tone of finality, saying hi but not stopping to chat, or simply not saying anything more sends the message that we don’t want to talk. Ending conversation is another safety behavior—we’re trying to save ourselves from the anxiety. But we trade the anxiety of the moment for loneliness in the long run.

The third part of crafting a friendship, besides repetition and disclosure, is showing others that you like them. People like those who like them. People also like those who take the initiative.

I once had a colleague who would stop at every co-worker’s office in the morning to say hi. “Just saying hello,” she always said, or “Just checking in.” She called it doing the rounds. Her efforts were thoughtful and made me like her.

Dominance, it turns out, equaled perceived popularity. Warmheartedness equaled actual popularity.

“If you try to be warm and friendly and curious, then everything else—the blemishes and foibles and awkward behaviors all of us have simply because we’re human—becomes much less important to the other person because we’re connecting with them.” And that’s what matters: connection, which is built on warmth and trust.