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

by Ellen Hendriksen

Fundamentally, social anxiety is seeing our true self in a distorted way and believing the distortion to be the truth.

To an anxiety-prone brain, these costs are a small price to pay to avoid danger and rejection. But when they are paid over and over again, we rack up a debt of experience and confidence, not to mention lots of lousy haircuts.

Social awareness is necessary and good. It’s the closest we come to mind reading.

We are wired to be aware of others’ judgment of us because just enough social anxiety maintains social cohesion, and a cohesive group that avoids time-and-energy-consuming internal conflict is more nimble and durable than one weighed down by infighting.

I need to interact with people throughout the day to keep from getting bored and lonely, but I much prefer one-on-one to a big mix.

you may really want to go to the bar with your co-workers but worry they don’t want you there. Or you may love parties but obsess about saying something stupid. You may feel pulled to the microphone but petrified by the crowd. You may be psyched for weekend plans with friends but get overwhelmed and cancel at the last minute, leaving you with a reputation for being flakier than a croissant. To top it off, while the introvert finds time alone refreshing, the extrovert finds it draining; indeed, too much time alone leaves an extrovert with the energy and motivation of a slug.

they were asked to reframe—to think differently, to “actively reframe the belief” and make it “less negative and toxic for you.”

Whatever you call it, it’s a postmortem review of the bloopers reel of your social performance. As post-event processing expert Cyndi Lauper sings, “You can look and you will find me.” So we do: the Inner Critic looks and finds the imperfections—the awkward silence in conversation, the answer that didn’t come out quite right, the time someone laughed at the wrong point of our story—and strings them together into a Möbius strip of lowlights. And it’s this focus on the lowlights that keeps social anxiety going strong over years and decades, despite nothing horrible actually happening or even despite things going well. It’s a vicious cycle: by focusing on the stuff we think went wrong, we conclude, as Loren said, we’re not good at this stuff, which just restarts the dread next time around.

Researchers call it anticipatory processing, though the best word to describe it is simply this: dread.

Anxiety would make a great horoscope writer. It’s hazy enough that we can read just about anything into its predictions.

it. The success of your task is independent of the outcome.