What To Do If You’re Socially Anxious

I’ve always struggled with social anxiety. Since I’ve made quite a few posts on this in the past, I suppose it’s more of an open secret at this point. However one thing that’s always bothered me is that I’ve never shared my own theories and mechanisms with dealing it publicly. That changes with this blog post.

Years ago fellow internet writer Tim Urban released a blog post entitled Taming The Mammoth that talked about his own theory about social anxiety. He writes that back when we were cavemen, our tribe was everything — make a wrong move socially, or speak your mind a little too much, and you starve to death. And since most of our genetic wiring comes from our neanderthal days (which took up much, much more of our total genetic cycle) this is why we act in the more cautious way that we do.

Now, it can be argued that in this day’s environment, you probably won’t be exiled or executed for a minor social foible. But just like I mentioned in The Rise of Anxiety, things have gotten a little more interesting in the internet era. A minor social foible can now lead to embarrassment on the scale of millions, or perhaps being outright cancelled — so maybe the exile portion is still there.

Now, I’m happy to tell you the chances of you getting in such crosshairs is slim to none. It’s more of an explanation as to why more people have social anxiety, not what actually happens. Still, fear is a powerful thing.

I also do believe there is a real bias that “normal people” have against the socially anxious. Most of them don’t like socially anxious people because they usually do not “play along” with social games. I’ll give you an example: when I was in middle school we had a section of our class that was dedicated to a group discussion. We were expected to find times to speak up, share our thoughts, et cetera. The teacher got really upset that I wasn’t participating in this session, and threatened to flunk my grade because of it. Of course, I wasn’t speaking up because of my social anxiety, and I couldn’t explain my reason to the teacher because of, well… social anxiety! Fortunately things worked out, but it’s clear even in this more anxiety-ridden era it would help if there was more education on the irrational fears many people suffer from.

Now, I’ve gotten a lot better since middle school, and I’ve made major strides towards improving my social performance. I want to end this post by explaining some of the strategies I’ve used to get to this point. As with most things in life, these aren’t guaranteed to work, but they’re worth trying:

• Practically – Try incremental adjustment. When I first got to college, I made it my life goal to get better with my social skills, and defeat the disorder that plagued me for a better part of the past six years. What helped me the best here was the idea of incrementally dipping my toes a bit deeper and deeper into the pool. I’ll give you an example only my friends with social anxiety disorder will really understand: at the school union, I would go to the Subway, and I would listen to what the person in front of me was ordering. When it came time for my order, I would look down at the ground and repeat word-for-word what the other person said. If I didn’t look at the person, it just felt like I was giving some information to myself — like some sort of test. This helped me learn how to order food, and I learned some pretty good Subway orders along the way. Eventually I worked my way up to looking up at the menu or the ingredients instead, and modifying the order. Then doing my own order, ocassionally looking in the direction of the cashier. To be perfectly honest, I’m still working on looking at them directly in the eyes.
• Philosophically – Focus on yourself before others. This seems rather counterintuitive, but it helps to understand which conversations you’re avoiding because of your anxiety and which ones you’re avoiding by choice. Just because you need to improve your social anxiety doesn’t mean you need to become an extrovert. If you know not every conversation has to be challenged, you feel a lot more self-esteem after skipping the convos you know you don’t need, which provides the confidence to hit the ones you do. I realized this in college as well — I used to do a lot of networking for jobs before I realized I was more confident (and also interested) in just having conversations with interesting people and interesting subjects, which ended up leading me down the path of success anyway.

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