Social anxiety: the eight-step programme

1. Before you start

You prepared your sentence for twenty minutes, and when your turn came you said it too fast, looking at your notes. You cannot hear your name in a group without your heart speeding up. You do not call people back. You turned down a promotion because it would have meant chairing meetings. Or else you go, everything goes fine, and in the evening you replay the whole thing looking for what went wrong.

You have probably been told you should build your confidence. That is not false, and it is completely unusable as an instruction.

This text offers something else. It describes a precise mechanism, in three pieces, and each of the three can be dismantled.

Two things straight away.

This is not shyness, and it is not a character trait. Social anxiety disorder is a recognised condition, one of the most common there is. Section 3 explains the difference, and it matters.

And it is one of the best-treated disorders in the whole of psychiatry. In head-to-head comparisons, cognitive therapy designed specifically for social anxiety does better than other psychotherapies and better than medication. That is not encouragement: it is the result of a meta-analysis (a study that pools and compares the results of around a hundred trials), cited in section 9.

One figure goes with that: the gap between the onset of the disorder — usually in adolescence — and the moment someone finally receives an appropriate treatment is often more than ten years. A large part of that delay comes from one belief: that this is simply how you are, and nothing can be done.

One sentence, if you read nothing else

The problem is not what you do wrong in social situations. The problem is that you are not there — you are busy watching yourself.

2. Social anxiety, in two minutes

Here is the whole mechanism. The rest of the programme only dismantles it piece by piece.

You enter a situation where you might be judged. A meeting, a lunch, a queue, a phone call.

Your attention turns inwards. Instead of being on other people and on what is being said, it fixes on you: your voice, your hands, what you just said, the impression you are giving. That is the central piece, and the least known.

From then on you have only internal information to judge how it is going. You feel your heart, your heat, your dry mouth — and you conclude that it shows. That conclusion produces a mental image of yourself, seen from outside, generally very far from reality.

So you do things to limit the damage: saying less, preparing each sentence, avoiding eye contact, keeping your arms close, not speaking up. These are safety behaviours.

And you leave with no new information, because you watched nothing of what was actually happening. In the evening you replay the scene in your head, with your distorted memories — and that replay confirms everything.

Camille, 31

Camille is a lawyer. In meetings she prepares her sentence mentally, rereads it three times, delivers it at speed, then spends the next forty minutes assessing whether she was ridiculous. She cannot remember what anyone else said after her.

Result: she is seen as quiet and competent. She is convinced she is seen as incapable. And she has no way of knowing, since she looked at nobody.

The day she stopped preparing in a meeting and simply listened to the others and looked at their faces, two things happened: she spoke more naturally, and she observed that nobody was scrutinising her.

That is the entire programme. The rest is method.

What the programme does, in this order

1. Map your situations, thoughts and safety behaviours precisely.
2. Relearn how to put attention outside — the basic skill.
3. Drop the safety behaviours, and watch what happens.
4. Compare your image of yourself with what other people actually see.
5. Build a ladder of situations, treated as experiments rather than ordeals.
6. Cut the anticipation beforehand and the post-mortem afterwards.
7. Test your predictions and your social standards.
8. Consolidate and plan for setbacks.

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