How Avoidance Quietly Makes Social Anxiety Worse
If you want to understand what keeps social anxiety alive, do not look at the frightening situations themselves. Look at avoidance. Avoidance is the engine...
Category
Understanding Social Anxiety
Where Social Anxiety Comes From
No baby is born afraid of being judged. Watch a toddler in a room full of adults and you will see someone magnificently, shamelessly free, dancing and shou...
Post-Event Rumination: The Mental Instant Replay
You survive the conversation, escape with relief, and then, hours or even days later, the replay begins. You review the whole encounter, but not neutrally....
Perfectionism and the Fear of Not Being Enough
Underneath a great deal of social anxiety runs a hidden engine, and its name is perfectionism. Not the healthy pursuit of excellence, but the harsh, anxiou...
The Three Phases of Social Anxiety: Before, During, and After
Fear is not a single event. It is a system, a loop with moving parts. An anxious mind experiences its social fear as one solid wall of dread. A skilled min...
Social Anxiety, Shyness, and Introversion Are Not the Same Thing
People use three words almost interchangeably when they talk about struggling socially: shy, introverted, and anxious. They are not the same, and untanglin...
Anticipatory Anxiety: Why the Dread Before an Event Is So Bad
For many people with social anxiety, the worst part is not the event itself. It is the days before it. You have something on Saturday, and by Tuesday the d...
Why You Cannot Just Relax Your Way Out of Social Anxiety
You have almost certainly been given advice. Be yourself. Just relax. Do not overthink it. Nobody is even looking at you. Confidence is a choice. Notice ho...
When Social Anxiety Is More Than Everyday Nerves
Almost everyone feels socially anxious sometimes: before a big presentation, on a first date, walking into a room of strangers. That everyday nervousness i...
What Social Anxiety Actually Is, and What It Is Not
Social anxiety is one of the most common forms of human suffering, and one of the most misunderstood. People call it shyness, being an introvert, or just n...
Is Social Anxiety Common? You Are Far From Alone
One of the cruelest tricks social anxiety plays is convincing you that you are uniquely broken, that everyone else finds this easy and you alone are failin...
The Physical Symptoms of Social Anxiety, and Whether They Are Dangerous
Social anxiety does not live only in your thoughts. It lives in your body: the pounding heart, the tight chest, the heat rising in your face, the shaking h...