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

by Ellen Hendriksen

“Yourself” is always changing. You’re a living, breathing entity, and you’re not the same person at ten or twenty that you are at thirty, forty, fifty, and beyond. You’ve changed over the years, and you will continue to change. But here’s the thing: you get to choose the direction.

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

You’ll feel less anxious by living your life.”

There’s no fear of The Reveal because there’s nothing to hide.

what we’re really afraid of is The Reveal. Ultimately, social anxiety is the fear that whatever we’re trying to hide will be revealed to everyone like a gust of wind sweeps away a bad toupee. We think there is something wrong with us and therefore try to conceal it.

Put another way, social anxiety is about concealment. It’s less about fear and more about shame, a word that can be traced to the Indo-European root skam, meaning “to cover.” In short, shame makes us want to hide.

When it comes to social anxiety, bad is stronger than good. This makes sense: preparing for good stuff isn’t crucial to survival, but anticipating bad stuff is.

Whatever your fear, it boils down to one thing: I am not good enough. And furthermore, everyone will see.

To sum up, if the Inner Critic’s cherry-picking of past lowlights happens before a big moment it’s called anticipatory processing. If it’s after the fact, it’s post-event processing. Either way, it’s hyper-focusing on stuff gone wrong. In each case—before and after—the Inner Critic puts us under the magnifying glass. But it’s a magnifying glass that not only enlarges; it also distorts. It makes us interpret the neutral as negative.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

Anxiety is often vague: Everybody will think I’m weird! Something bad will happen! People will judge me! I will do something stupid! Anxiety would make a great horoscope writer. It’s hazy enough that we can read just about anything into its predictions. Watch for the red flags of imprecision—“always,” “never,” “everybody,” “nobody.”

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?”

Somehow we think harsh criticism will motivate us, convince us to change, or that it’s necessary to punish ourselves into some sort of submission. And while we instinctively know the coach insulting the kid is wrong, it’s not so easy to realize the Inner Critic is wrong, too. Not only wrong, but ineffective. Telling ourselves we can’t do it, that we don’t have it in us, that we shouldn’t bother trying only makes us want to hide. To conceal. To avoid.

Self-compassion is about creating that same sort of supportive, kind, encouraging environment from which you can gather the courage to choose wisely. In short, self-compassion is the opposite of self-judgment.

This is a use-anywhere little exercise that can pull you out of worry and ground you in reality. Here’s how to do it: Work your way through your five senses.

When you talk to yourself with compassion, you invert the Golden Rule—rather than treating others as you would like to be treated, you also treat yourself as well as you would treat others.

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.

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.

Everyone loves embarrassing stories; it humanizes you, shows you have a sense of humor, and you might even get an embarrassing story in return.

The more you practice, the easier it gets.

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.

The take home? 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.

Studies show that whether we’re having a bad hair day, wearing a conspicuous T-shirt, screwing up a volleyball game, or sucking at old-school Nintendo (how awesome are these studies?), we consistently overestimate the amount of attention paid to us. When we feel weird, odd, or stupid, our felt sense of others’ scrutiny shoots sky-high, but in no case is the social spotlight nearly as bright as we think.

there are no social skills deficits in social anxiety

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

We like people more when they’re imperfect. This is why self-deprecation is so charming and why celebrities who trip on the red carpet come away looking adorable.

Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so.

It feels like we have no idea what to do, feels like we have nothing to say, feels like we’re going to screw up or do something stupid. But the feeling that we have no social skills is the result of anxiety, not the other way around.

Having nothing to say or feeling conspicuous is a problem, to be sure, but it’s not a skills problem; it’s a confidence problem.

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.

We are empathetic—we have the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. We are conscientious—we do things thoroughly and well. Those high standards of ours propel us to success in what we do.