OVERCOMING SOCIAL ANXIETY

AND SHYNESS
A self-help guide using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques

GILLIAN BUTLER
6

Starting points

Overcoming social anxiety involves learning how to break the vicious cycles
that otherwise keep the problem going. There are four main methods:

1 Changing thinking patterns. This method comes first because it

explains how to think again about the dangers and risks involved in
social situations. Because the fear in social anxiety focuses on ideas
about what other people think about you, it helps to learn how to
recognize and to reexamine your patterns of thinking.
2 Doing things differently. Safety behaviors and avoiding things make
the problem worse not better, and trying to protect yourself only
makes you dread social interactions more. The answer is to face
difficulties instead of avoiding them, and to take the risk of doing so
without using safety behaviors for protection.
3 Reducing self-consciousness. This helps you to forget yourself, so
that you can behave more naturally and spontaneously when with
other people. The main strategies involve consciously focusing on
people and things outside yourself, and keeping more in touch with
what is happening around you.
4 Building up confidence. Confidence may grow quickly or more slowly.
When it is slow to change, this may be because you need also to
work on your underlying beliefs and assumptions. You can adapt the
strategies already described to help you to do this, so as to put the
changes you make onto a solid foundation.

A general point
Many people who do things ‘wrong’ socially are not at all anxious about it. They
may be awkward and abrupt, they may interrupt, or get muddled and fail to listen
to what others have to say, or tell risqué jokes or interminable stories, or fall into
long silences, and still people want them around and make friends with them and
choose them for their partners. It may be a kind of insensitivity that allows them
to be this way without being bothered by it, but it may also be mistaken to
suppose that everything stands or falls according to how you behave socially.
What you do may be far less important than it seems. Being yourself may be far
more important, and feeling anxious certainly makes it hard to relax and to be
yourself (whether you are naturally interesting, charming, tedious or repetitive).
The combination of socially anxious patterns of thinking, safety behaviors, self-
consciousness and lack of confidence gets in the way of being yourself, socially.
These are the things that need to change.

Defining your aims

Before you start, stop and think what you want to change. You need to know
what the problem is in order to start working on it, and no two people are exactly
the same. So ask yourself:

How does social anxiety affect you?

What are the ‘signs and symptoms’ that bother you?
How would you like things to be different?

Write down your answers to these questions in as much detail as you can, then
turn back to Box 1.1 here. There you will find some examples of the signs and
symptoms of social anxiety grouped into four categories according to whether
they affect your thinking, your behavior, your body, or your emotions and
feelings. This list may remind you of things that you might otherwise have
forgotten. It also reminds you to think about the four different ways in which the
problem affects you.
You may remember that it is most unusual for someone to have no symptoms
in one of the four categories shown, so if one of them is missing from your list,
think again about what happens to you when you are anxious. You may, of
course, be the exception to the rule, but it may also be that some of the things
that happen to you have become so familiar that you have ceased to notice them.
Do you avoid taking the initiative in social interactions? (This is an effect on
your behavior; it changes what you do and how you act.) Do you make a habit
of blaming yourself if something does not go ‘right’? (This is an effect on your
thinking; for example, thinking that awkwardnesses are always your fault.) Do
you tend to remember the less good things that have happened to you, and that
people have said about you, but forget about the better ones, and the signs of
appreciation and compliments you receive? (Another effect on your thinking; it
reflects the kinds of things that readily spring to mind, or that you easily forget.)
In order to define your aims, you need to look at the list and decide what you
want to change. Be careful at this point, because it is easy to slip into being quite
unrealistic. Nearly everyone sometimes feels shy or nervous, sometimes for no
obvious reason and sometimes understandably: for example, before an event
such as making an important announcement, or when talking to someone
extremely attractive for the first time, or when broaching a delicate issue with
someone in a position of authority, or when they have to make a complaint.
As some degree of social anxiety is perfectly normal, everyone has at times to
deal with situations that are embarrassing or humiliating, or in which they are
criticized, or judged, or evaluated less well than they would wish. Nothing you
can do will stop such things happening. A useful general goal might be to accept
such events as inevitable, without letting them undermine your confidence. The
way you would behave if you reached this goal would be consistent with normal
levels of social anxiety, even though it does not tell you exactly what you should
try to change.
If you can be more precise than this you will find it useful later on. Precise
goals help you to define exactly what you want to change – for instance, being
able to look someone in the eye during a conversation, or no longer avoiding
meeting new people because you feel fearful and vulnerable, or being able to ask
someone in for a meal or out to see a film. Precise goals work best for two
reasons. First, they provide you with specific suggestions about what to work on;
and secondly, they help you define when you have reached your goal, so they
also give you a measure of how you are doing. Write down, as precisely as you
can, what you want to change. If you think it might help, look back over your
list of the signs and symptoms of anxiety that you experience and ask yourself
what you would like to be different. What would you be able to do, if you were
anxious just in the way that everyone is? Would you feel better if you could do
more things, and become involved more often with other people, in ways that
you found more satisfactory, even if you still felt nervous beforehand and
worried about it afterwards? Perhaps your precise goals should allow you some
leeway as far as anxiety goes, as doing things in new ways, and doing new
things, may well make you apprehensive at first.

Keeping track of your progress

When working on a problem like this on your own, or without help from a
psychologist or counsellor or other professional, it is easy to lose track, and
extremely useful to make a habit of writing things down. So, get yourself a
notebook, or find a loose-leaf binder in which you can collect things together.
Allocate a drawer or even a carrier bag for your social anxiety work. Without the
habit of writing, and without a place to keep what you have written, you will
find it hard to remember things that are important, such as how bad you were to
begin with (your signs and symptoms now), what you want to change (your aims
and goals), and when things went right for you as well as when they went wrong.
One reason why it is especially helpful to keep a diary or written record while
you are working on your social anxiety is that many people get discouraged at
first because they see no sign of change. This happens for two reasons:

the first changes are often small;

small changes are easily forgotten.

When you look back you tend to remember the things that went badly and forget
about the things that went well, especially if these just seem to be ‘normal’
activities for others, like answering the doorbell, or chatting to a neighbour, or
walking across a room when you know everyone can see you. One way over this
problem is to use your diary to monitor your progress. You could use it for
writing down what you do differently every day, or for making plans about what
to do next. You could use it for doing the exercises suggested in this book, such
as the ones on changing your patterns of thinking described in the next chapter.
It is helpful later to be able to look back at work that you did earlier.

Trying things out and pacing yourself

Trying new things is an essential part of treatment. Overcoming social anxiety

helps your confidence to grow, and deciding to do something about the problem
can give you a real boost. Some of the things you try out may also be
surprisingly enjoyable, but at the same time doing this work takes courage. The
best strategy is to give yourself regular assignments, rather like doing
best strategy is to give yourself regular assignments, rather like doing
homework, and to accept that you will have to take some risks – when you feel
ready to do so. Doing things in a new way helps to break the old patterns, and it
can feel dangerous at first – like learning to swim or to drive on the motorway in
pouring rain and bad light. You will not have to do anything you consider too
difficult – or anything really threatening or risky. You should also plan your
homework tasks so that you can progress at your own pace. There is no rule
about how fast you should go, as everyone is different.
Other people can make suggestions about what you might do, but only you
can try them out. So you will need to find time for this work. If you are a very
busy person you may have to decide when to give a high priority to working on
your social anxiety, and decide what to give up in order to make time to for it.
Just as when learning anything new, like a new language for instance, you will
improve faster if you work at it little and often. Leaving large gaps when you
forget about it altogether is likely to mean that you lose headway, and the gains
you make may be lost again as they never had a chance to be put on a sure
foundation.

Helpful and unhelpful ways of coping with the problem

Everyone who has a problem of this kind tries to deal with it in their own way,
and many of the ideas they have about how to cope are imaginative, helpful and
productive ones. Your own strategies may be of this kind, and you may want to
keep on using them. If so, you should test them against the following principle:

Helpful strategies are those that have no long-term disadvantages.

In addition to the ones described in the following chapters, they include

developing your skills, talents or hobbies, whether on your own or
companionably, and learning how to relax (which is described briefly in Chapter
14) and finding ways of expressing yourself and your feelings about the
predicament you find yourself in. As already mentioned in Chapter 2, this is
helpful, and has beneficial effects on physical as well as psychological health,
whether or not you have someone you can talk to about your difficulties, and
who will listen with a sympathetic ear. Solitary ways of expressing yourself
include writing about what you feel, speaking about it into a dictaphone or tape
recorder, drawing pictures of how it feels, and expressing your feelings through
music, or dance, or physical exercise.
Less helpful ways of coping with the problem tend to have beneficial effects
in the short term, or immediately you do them, but to have harmful effects in the
long term. Seeking reassurance from others is one of these. It often helps to hear
someone say reassuring things such as ‘don’t worry’, ‘there’s nothing seriously
wrong with you’, ‘it will probably get better in the end’, ‘it’s always nice to see
you’. But reassurance does not last. It calms you down temporarily without
solving any problems, and therefore is rather like ‘getting a fix’: the better it
works, the more you want to seek it out next time you feel bad. Taking charge of
finding your own, lasting solutions to the problem will be far more helpful in the
long run.
Using alcohol to make you feel less anxious is another common, but
unhelpful, way of coping, and it is easy to understand why it is tempting.
Alcohol plays a part in many different kinds of social situations, and it does
often have an immediate calming effect. It makes people feel less inhibited and it
can make them more talkative. But as well as the obvious dangers associated
with using alcohol to solve social problems, and developing the habit of using
too much of it, alcohol also has a depressant effect. It is more likely to make you
feel worse than better, and it interferes with sleep patterns. Many people think
that they will sleep better if they have a drink or two, and indeed they do often
fall asleep more quickly after drinking than they would otherwise. But they often
wake during the night and then find it hard to go back to sleep again.

Planning stress-free activities: a sense of proportion

Anxiety and problems tend to dominate one’s life, especially when it becomes
hard not to think about them. One way of beginning to get a new perspective on
the problem, and on what it means for you, is to make sure that you involve
yourself in things that have nothing to do with social anxiety at all, and that you
enjoy. The sorts of things that people find helpful are physical activities like
exercising or gardening; recreational activities like listening to music, reading,
exploring new places, watching TV, playing computer games; learning
something new, like how to plaster a wall or cook Mexican food; and creative
activities of all kinds: painting, drawing, writing, playing an instrument, home-
making and so on. Whatever you enjoy, or used to enjoy, you should do more of.
Whatever you are curious about, you should start to explore. Try to limit the
effect the problem has on your life so that it does not impinge on the other
possible sources of pleasure and satisfaction that are open to you.

The first approach to feeling isolated, or lonely

The first approach to feeling isolated, or lonely

Being socially anxious can make people feel cut off from others. It can make it
hard to build up a group of friends and to develop intimate relationships. The
main aim of this book is to explain how to overcome this anxiety, and it assumes
that socially anxious people want to be able to become involved with others
more easily and more often, that they do not want to feel isolated and lonely.
However, it is possible to recognize the value of companionship while still
valuing solitary activities. It is important, and healthy, to be able to do things on
one’s own, and to enjoy doing them. Try to make yourself a list of solitary
activities. Prompt yourself by thinking about what other people do, about things
that you used to do earlier in life, or that people in your family do. If you have
more solitary and lonely times than you want at the moment, try to fill at least
some of them with enjoyable or interesting or challenging or creative activities
that you can do – and enjoy – on your own. For example, if you enjoy seeing
new places, then it would be a good idea to plan an expedition, and not to let
difficulties such as having to travel and to eat on your own get in the way.

Some helpful principles to bear in mind

Learn to recognize the vicious cycles that keep the problem going; then
you can work at breaking them.
You will need time and you will need to persist if you are to make the
most of the ideas in this book, so do not worry if change comes more
slowly than you would wish.
Keep the problem in perspective. This means both keeping a check on
the way you are thinking, and making sure that you do not let the
problem dominate your waking life. Remember to leave time in your life
for those things that you enjoy, or are interested in, and are good at.
If you are having difficulty doing things differently, then it may be
helpful to start with easy things first, and to work up to harder ones as
your confidence grows.

Persistence and progress go hand in hand

The more you do, the more you will improve. Sometimes things will go well, but
sometimes they will go less well, and so you may feel discouraged at times. You
will be more likely to build your confidence if you can keep going despite these
normal ups and downs. Everyone has good days and bad days, and problems
normal ups and downs. Everyone has good days and bad days, and problems
always seem worse on a bad one. If you expect a few of these normal
fluctuations they will be less likely to set you back when they happen.

Deciding how to use the suggestions in this part of the book

You have an important choice to make. You could either read through the
following chapters, and use the ideas that fit for you, and that you think would
work, in your own way; or you could resolve also to do the exercises described
and to fill in the worksheets provided (blank copies are provided in the
Appendix).
In a study of people using another, somewhat similar book we found that the
people who did the exercises and filled in the worksheets gained most from their
efforts. So this is probably the best strategy to adopt. But it is important to be
realistic: doing these tasks is time-consuming and sometimes difficult; it can also
be rather tedious, boring and repetitive. Sometimes they may even seem
unnecessary. Perhaps the key point to remember is that the exercises and
worksheets are examples of ways of working that other people have found
useful. To be useful, they do not have to be identical to the ones provided. So
you could adapt them to suit yourself, or change them from time to time if that
makes the tasks more interesting, or use your notebook or diary to keep track of
what you do.

Answers to some of the questions that people often ask

Should you work at becoming socially skilled?

The answer is ‘yes, if you want to’; but remember that:

You can pick up these skills as you go. Most people acquire their ‘social
skills’ without being taught the ‘rules of the game’, just as they learn to
ride a bicycle without knowing the laws of motion. You do not have to
understand how it works in order to do it.
There is no right way of doing things. You can be successful without
being socially skilled. Many people get on well with others but are not
good at these things, or find them difficult. Being socially skilled neither
makes people love you nor prevents them criticizing you.
Skills may come naturally once you feel less anxious. Being anxious,
worried or fearful makes it hard to use your social skills.
 Being flexible will allow you to be more spontaneous. For social life to
flow naturally it is more important to let yourself adapt as the situation
demands than to practise your social skills or to learn precise rules of the
game.

There are many things that people learn to do socially. Here is a list of some of
them; you could probably add some more of your own:

listening to what others have to say

talking in such a way that others listen to what you say
looking at others when you speak to them, and using non-verbal ways of
communicating
making conversation – in general, or to someone important like your
boss, or someone you would like to go out with
introducing people to each other
saying no when you think it would be right to do so, or sticking up for
yourself
telling someone they have done something that makes you angry
being aware of and sensitive to other people’s feelings
expressing your own feelings and opinions
asking someone to do something for you; making requests

All of these skills develop with practice. A few other specific skills for which
training methods have been developed, mostly for use in business or commercial
settings, and which socially anxious people may also find useful, are described
in Part Three, Chapter 12.

How can you learn about conventions?

Conventions are recognized ways of doing things, or patterns of behavior. Many

people feel uncomfortable or unconfident if they do not know the conventions,
for instance if they do not know which fork to use, or what clothes to wear.
Turning up in jeans when everyone else is dressed in their best (or vice versa)
can be embarrassing. This may be especially so for people with social anxiety
because being the ‘odd one out’ attracts attention and so seems to invite
judgment or evaluation by others.
There are several ways to learn about social conventions:
 Ask. Would you mind if someone asked you? Would it be better to admit
that you do not know, or to do ‘the wrong thing’? Maybe it would be
polite to ask. Could you say ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name’?
Use the information provided. Sometimes information is there but you
are too confused to take it in (e.g. notices about wearing ties, or not
smoking, or laying out forks in the order they would be used in).
Observe. Watch what other people do before you make a move yourself,
for example before asking someone to dance. Listen to how others start a
conversation, and look at the way they dress. Observe things that people
take for granted, such as whether their clothes are clean and their hair
washed. Look for things that tell you what is socially ‘acceptable’ in a
particular setting, and what is not. People in different places, interacting
in different ways, develop different conventions, so there is no one right
way.

Watch out for upsetting thoughts if you break a convention. In five years’
time, who will remember that you sat in someone else’s place or spoke out of
turn at a meeting? That you had a moment when you became flushed and
distressed, or that you could not hide the fact that you were bored or irritated? It
is not a law of the land that you have to obey conventions. Indeed, that may be
why they are called ‘conventions’ rather than rules or laws.
Questions about anxiety

Can a severe bout of anxiety do physical harm? No. In particular,

remember that increased heart rate caused by anxiety alone will not
damage your heart any more than increased heart rate caused by exercise
or excitement.
Can prolonged anxiety do you mental harm? The symptoms of anxiety
and panic by themselves, however severe, do not mean that you are
developing a serious mental disorder or going insane. They are normal
reactions developed to protect you in case of a real (rather than a social)
emergency.
Does being anxious make you tired? Yes. When you are anxious you
may find it hard to cope with a normal day. Being anxious and tense is a
drain on your energy. Once you have become less anxious, you will find
you have more energy for other things. This is one reason why it is
important that you balance the anxiety in your life with activities that you
 find relaxing, enjoyable and restorative (see Chapter 14 for information
about how to relax).
What if I am depressed as well as anxious? Many people have periods of
feeling fed up, miserable or sad if their social anxiety goes on a long
time. But these feelings often lift when they start working on the problem
and realize that there is something they can do about it. Depressed
feelings make it harder to keep trying, but they are not a reason for
giving up. If the anxiety improves the other feelings are likely to do so as
well. However, if you feel severely depressed; and if you, or people who
know you, are worried about the effects that being depressed is having
on you, then you should talk to your doctor about it.

Questions about getting better

Should I give up trying for a while and take a good rest? Not if having a
rest becomes a way of not facing up to the problem or working out how
to overcome it.
If I grin and bear it, will the problem go away by itself? Possibly. Some
problems of this kind do eventually diminish. But if you learn what to do
to overcome the problem then you are likely to improve sooner. Also,
you will be able to ‘nip it in the bud’ should you start to feel anxious
again later.
Was I born this way, so that there is nothing I can do about it? You may
have been born more sensitive to stress than other people, or think of
yourself as a shy sort of person, but this does not mean that you cannot
learn how to overcome social anxiety and make many changes for the
better in your life.
Should I go on searching for a ‘cure’? Nobody can cure you of anxiety
altogether, as it is a normal part of everyday life. However, if you learn
how to think and behave differently you will come to react to social
situations differently also, and will be able to cope with them much
better.

Would it be helpful to take some medication?

It could be. There are many different kinds of drugs now available for treating
both anxiety and depression, and new ones are coming out all the time. Some of
them are extremely effective. However, there are many issues to consider when
making this decision. Although they may help you temporarily, they may not
solve the problem in the long run, and some of them become less effective if you
take them regularly, so that you need more to achieve the same effect. Also, if
you come to rely on them, they may undermine your confidence in handling
things without them. Using them regularly as a ‘prop’ makes it harder to build
confidence in your own ability to overcome the problem, and the problem may
come back again when you stop taking them. So this could be a difficult decision
that it would be best to discuss with your doctor. Whatever you decide, it is
worth using the ideas in this book to work at overcoming the problem yourself.
In the long run, learning that you can make the changes that you want to make is
most likely to help you to build the kind of confidence in yourself that helps to
put the social anxiety into perspective.
If you are already taking some medication that you find helpful, then there is
no need to stop taking it in order to use the ideas in this book. The two different
ways of helping yourself can work together. However, if you make two changes
at once, and you feel better because of them, then it is not possible to know
which one helped – or whether they both did. So it is theoretically better to start
one new thing at a time: either using medication or using the ideas in this book.

What if social anxiety Is only a part of the problem?

It is quite common for people who have been socially anxious for a long time to
have some other difficulties as well. For example, some people suffer from
periods of depression, others have difficulty being appropriately assertive, and
are unnecessarily passive and accommodating, or overly hostile and aggressive,
and many people have occasional panic attacks in particularly stressful
situations. Many socially anxious people describe themselves as ‘born worriers’,
and may find that at times they are beset by worries of all kinds, not just about
their social lives. Most people know well that they feel less anxious after having
a couple of drinks, and so it is quite common for people to start using alcohol, or
various other substances, to help them feel more relaxed in company. When this
becomes a habit, or the only way of coping with the loneliness or isolation that
can accompany social anxiety, then one problem can easily lead to another.
If you have other difficulties as well as social anxiety, this book could still be
helpful. You may have to think about which problem to tackle first, or to ask
someone’s advice about this, but it is still worth a try. When you decide that it is
the right time to start, work carefully through it, and try not to give up even if
change seems to come slowly. Remember: it is best to stick to one thing at a
time when trying to make important changes in your life.
time when trying to make important changes in your life.

KEY POINTS
Get yourself a notebook, or folder. Decide where to keep your social
anxiety work.
Write down your own signs and symptoms of social anxiety. Try to find
at least one in each of the four categories: those that affect your thinking,
your behavior, your body and your feelings or emotions.
Define your aims as precisely as you can. Ask yourself: what do you
want to be different?
Check with yourself: how will you find the time for your social anxiety
work? Can you set aside a time to think about it properly once a week?
And plan to do something towards realizing your aims most days?
Go at your own pace. No two people are the same, and it is more
important to discover what works for you, and how quickly you are able
to change, than to be influenced by what other people do.
7

Changing thinking patterns

Imagine you arrive at a friend’s house for a meal and find the room full of
people you do not know. There is a pause in the conversation as you
walk in and you think: ‘Everyone is looking at me.’ This makes you
nervous, so you leap at the offer of a drink but feel hot and conspicuous
when someone asks you your name. You think: ‘They must all have
noticed how nervous I am’, as you avoid catching anyone’s eye and look
round for somewhere to put your drink down in case it spills. You wonder
if you will ever be able to think of anything to say and start to feel
uncomfortably hot. The louder people talk the more you think ‘I really
don’t belong here’, and ‘Nothing I could think of to say would interest
these people’. This makes it harder for you to join in the conversation, so
you keep quiet and retreat into your shell, aware of how inept you must
seem in other people’s eyes. You look out for a way of leaving early,
hoping that you can slip away without drawing too much attention to
yourself.
The next day you can’t stop thinking about how you must have
appeared to the other people there. Images come to mind that bring back
all the embarrassment and nervousness that you felt at the time. You
decide you will never do that sort of thing again. Other thoughts also go
through your mind, about how hard it is to make friends, and how
inadequate you feel compared to other people. You wonder if you can
ever change, as you have always been shy. Other shy people seem to
have managed to grow out of it, so you also ask yourself whether there is
something wrong with you. The longer this train of thoughts goes on the
more dispirited and the sadder you feel.

This example shows how thoughts, feelings and behavior influence each other
This example shows how thoughts, feelings and behavior influence each other
all the time to keep social anxiety going, and it has been written to illustrate
some of the many ways in which patterns of thinking can affect people who are
socially anxious or shy. Read it carefully and count the number of thinking
patterns you can find. Only some of them are described as thoughts, to show
something of the huge variety of ways in which what is in your mind can work
to keep social anxiety going: in this case, wondering, deciding, becoming aware
of yourself and having images are all involved. The last paragraph shows how
one thought leads on to another, in an increasingly distressing stream which
reflects the meaning to you of what happened, and its implications – as you
understand them.

Different kinds of thoughts

You may have noticed your thoughts, and the way that they can make you feel
anxious and affect how you feel and what you do, or you may hardly have
noticed them at all. When they go unnoticed this may be partly because
thoughts, or cognitions, are of many different kinds, and partly because there is
often no reason to express them in words. This is not something that people
usually ask you to do, and making the attempt can sometimes provoke the
feelings that go with the thoughts, and make you feel worse. Nobody really
wants to think about exactly how foolish they appeared. Nevertheless, it is
important to know about the different types of thoughts, so that you will be more
likely to recognize them when you have them. They include ideas, expectations
and attitudes; they may come as images, impressions or memories; they may be
beliefs and assumptions or ‘rules for living’ that go without saying. All of these
ways of thinking reflect what goes on in your mind in different ways, and they
can all play a part in the vicious cycles that keep social anxiety going. This is
true even if you are not fully aware of some of them, and even if you do not
usually put them into words, or recognize them as ‘thoughts’.
Some examples may make this clearer. Thoughts can be like half-formed
ideas, for instance about being different from other people without being able to
say exactly how. They may be reflected in images or impressions of yourself
which come from an earlier stage of life. These could be based on memories of a
particularly painful experience, such as being rejected or bullied, or singled out
for criticism. Many people, for example, report suddenly feeling small when
confronted by unexpected criticism, or by someone in authority over them, and
they describe having related images, such as an image of themselves as a child
facing up to a large and critical teacher. Often such images have something in
common with what is happening in the present, even when the person who has
them cannot immediately recognize what this is.
Expectations like expecting to be judged are common in people who are
socially anxious, and having an expectation is more like having an attitude that
influences the way you think about things, than having a thought. Negative
beliefs, for example about being inadequate or incompetent or unacceptable,
often go with low self-confidence (‘I can’t ever seem to do things right’).
Thinking this way also reveals a lack of belief in yourself. Beliefs that influence
social anxiety may be about other people as well as yourself. For example, you
may believe that everyone is always watching out for other people’s failings and
noticing their shortcomings, or that everyone is more confident and competent
than you are. If this is what you believe, then you may have developed
assumptions and rules for living that fit with this belief, such as ‘If you do
something stupid people will criticize and reject you’, and ‘Never stick your
neck out. Make sure you keep yourself well in the background’. These are all
ways of thinking, and some of them are harder to recognize than others.

The main strategies for changing thinking patterns

This chapter describes the main strategies for dealing with thoughts that make
you feel bad, and that help to keep the social anxiety going. Despite the
complexity of the examples above, the strategies are quite straightforward.
Basically there are two steps: learning how to identify what is in your mind,
what you think; and learning how to reexamine the ways you think. So even if
your problem seems to be confusing, and you find it difficult to disentangle its
different aspects, the straightforward examples in the rest of this chapter should
help you to learn what to do, and start you moving in the right direction. This
chapter focuses on thought patterns that are relatively easy to recognize,
including some that are relevant to everyone – even those people who are only
rarely socially anxious. Chapter 10 focuses on the types of underlying
assumptions and beliefs that can make it hard to build up more confidence in
yourself socially, and can therefore slow down your progress if you do not make
a special effort to change them also.
In brief, the aim of the strategies described in this part of the book is to learn
how to tune in to your thoughts and then to take another look at them. The idea
is that the way you are thinking keeps the social anxiety going. It is what you are
thinking that reveals what social situations mean to you and that explains why
particular situations seem to be ‘socially dangerous’ – to be risky or threatening.
particular situations seem to be ‘socially dangerous’ – to be risky or threatening.
Finding another way of seeing things will make you feel better and be more
helpful to you.

Step 1: find out what you are thinking

The first step is to become aware of what runs through your mind when you feel
tense or anxious. This is easier said than done because the sorts of thoughts –
and images – that make anxiety worse are often difficult to identify. They come
and go quickly, and may also have become automatic. They may be like bad
habits: you may not be fully aware of them because they are so familiar, as if
you had been looking through tinted spectacles without knowing that they were
there.
Think now about a recent situation in which you felt socially anxious. When
you can remember the situation quite clearly, try to answer these key questions.

Key questions for step 1: identifying your thoughts

What went through your mind when you started to feel anxious? And
after that? And when it was all over?
What was the worst thing that might have happened at the time?
What is it about this situation that matters to you?
What does having this experience mean to you?
What does it mean about you?

Did any of your thoughts make you feel worse? If so, which ones?
When identifying the thoughts that are important and relevant for you, look
for those that fit with the way you felt. Sometimes it is easy to make this fit: if
you felt embarrassed and remember thinking that you might have offended
someone by mistake, then this obviously seems to fit. Sometimes it is much
harder. For example, you might have felt totally rejected, even though nothing
that you can remember seems to have provoked that feeling. When this happens,
keep asking yourself the key questions. Try to stand back from the problem far
enough to identify your personal perspective on it. Maybe the pervasive feeling
(for example, a sense of being rejected) reflects one of your attitudes or beliefs,
or particular memories that you have, and thinking about what the situation
means to you and why it matters to you helps to identify these thoughts.
 Using a three-column ‘Thought record for identifying thoughts’, like the one
shown below in Table 7.1, is a good way to pinpoint thoughts, and it also helps
to separate them from the feelings that went with them. A blank copy of this
worksheet for you to use is provided in the Appendix (together with copies of
the Key Questions and of other worksheets that will be described later). Writing
things down is a good way of developing the habit of recognizing what you are
thinking, and noticing how your thoughts influence the way that you feel. So
make yourself some copies of the worksheet, or draw it out in your notebook,
and keep a record for a few days of situations in which you feel anxious or upset.
Always start by thinking of specific situations or incidents that happened to you
recently, and that you remember well. Use these as cues to help put into words
the things that go through your mind when you are anxious: the thoughts, ideas,
attitudes, images and so on, as in the examples provided. Make yourself a copy
of the key questions too, and keep it to hand, so that you can use them as
prompts. Note down:

details of the situation; what it was and when it occurred;

what feelings you experienced (e.g. fear, anxiety, fed up, shaky);
your thoughts, or what was in your mind when you felt that way.

Your aim at this stage should be to pay close attention to your thoughts when
you feel anxious or upset. See if you can put into words the things that go
through your mind, as in the examples shown in the table.
You may find this difficult if it seems to you that the anxiety just comes ‘out
of the blue’, without there being any thoughts behind it; if so, it may be worth
doing something that makes you feel anxious, just so that you can pay special
attention to the thoughts that run through your mind when you do. Another
option is to ask yourself the key questions about what the situation means about
you, or means to you, as answers to these questions may help you put some of
your attitudes and expectations into words. These are not like thoughts that run
through your mind at the time, but they are still ‘cognitions’, and can have a
significant impact on the way you feel, and on what you do when confronted by
a difficult situation.

TABLE 7.1: THOUGHT RECORD FOR IDENTIFYING THOUGHTS

Situation Feelings Thoughts, impressions, etc.

(be specific) (there may be (keep the different
 more than thoughts separate)
one)

The boss asks to see me Nervous He thinks my work is no good

Worried

Left alone with an attractive Terrified I’m making a fool of myself

person Miserable Nobody likes me much

Going out with friends to the Panicky They’ll think I’m odd
bar Shaky I can’t tell jokes
Heart racing

An acquaintance drops in Embarrassed I can’t relax and be normal

Remembering being stuck for Flustered I’m useless

words Mortified I can’t do things right

Thought I’d said the wrong Ashamed I’m as red as is humanly possible
thing Fearful

A colleague got angry with me Humiliated Feel small and insignificant, like I did at
Rejected school

It is useful to be as accurate in observing your feelings and thoughts as you

can, and it is easy to forget. So use your notebook and keep it to hand as far as
possible. Get into a habit of making a mental note of what happens and writing it
down as soon as you can. If you always start by thinking about specific
situations, about things that have happened to you quite recently, you will find it
easier to identify the thoughts because you will know where in your memory to
start looking for them. It is important not to just dwell on the feelings
themselves, but to use them to prompt you to think about your thinking. Doing
this exercise is like becoming an expert mechanic who listens to the sound of the
engine, watches how the car performs, and then tunes in to possible sources of
trouble.
Sometimes people feel bad – anxious, nervous or embarrassed, for example –
apparently for no reason at all. However, there always is a reason; it just may be
difficult to work out what it is. The thoughts come and go quickly, and attitudes
and beliefs do not have to be put into words to influence how you feel. Think
about any memories, fleeting images or general impressions that occurred when
you felt anxious. This often helps in understanding why you felt so bad at the
time. It may help you to recognize how your thoughts – what happens in your
mind – keep the problem going. If you had an image of being yelled at in public
and wanting to run away and hide, it would not be surprising to feel distressed
and conspicuous. Such impressions may continue to influence the present even
though they really belong in the past; and images provoke strong feelings, so
they tend to keep the vicious cycle of thoughts and feelings spinning.

Patterns of biased thinking

Different kinds of thoughts typically occur before, during and after the situation
that caused you problems. Before the event you may make predictions:
predicting that you will do or say something wrong, or in some way reveal your
‘inadequacy’. During the event many people go in for mind reading, or guessing
how other people are reacting to them and what they are thinking; or they
catastrophize, and assume that what happened was far worse than it really was.
Afterwards it can be difficult to stop dwelling on what you think went wrong,
judging and criticizing yourself and making assumptions about how you came
across and how others reacted – like doing a post mortem. These are all biased
ways of thinking – biased in the sense that they are influenced by the habit of
taking an anxious perspective on things – and therefore they are likely to be
inaccurate. Like looking through a pair of distorting spectacles, these ways of
thinking are especially likely to be associated with misperceptions and
misinterpretations about what is really happening, as well as with feeling bad.
Getting rid of the bias and getting your thoughts back in perspective will make
you feel better, but first you need to recognize that the bias is there. Some
common forms of bias are summarized below, together with some examples of
the thoughts that might go with them. The reason for explaining them here is that
most of us have preferences, which may help to explain why we readily fall into
habitual patterns of thinking. Once you have identified your preferences, you
will be in a position to spot the thinking bias in action: ‘There I go again – mind
reading or guessing what other people are thinking’, for example. If you can do
this you will have made a major step in overcoming your social anxiety.

Taking things personally. Supposing that somebody else’s actions were

directed, personally, towards you: for example, when someone leaves the
room or looks away while you are talking.
Taking the blame. Taking responsibility when it is not yours: ‘He was
really angry. It must be my fault. I wonder what I can do to make it
better?’
 Mind reading. Believing that you know what others are thinking: ‘She
thinks I’m not talkative enough’; ‘He doesn’t like people who are shy’;
‘They know just how hopeless I am at this’.
Discounting the positive. Rejecting good things as if they did not count
(or using a negative filter): ‘She only said that to make me feel better’;
‘Anybody should be able to order a meal. Doing that OK is no big deal’;
‘They were just being polite’.
Emotional reasoning. Mistaking feelings for facts: ‘I’m so embarrassed, I
know everyone is looking at me’; supposing you are inadequate because
that’s the way you feel.
Catastrophizing. Thinking that if something goes wrong it will be a
disaster: ‘If I put a foot wrong this relationship is totally doomed’; ‘If this
goes badly I will never be able to show my face here again’.
Over-generalizing. Assuming that because something happened once,
this means it will always happen: for example, because you spilled a
drink, or failed to see a joke, you will always do something clumsy or
miss the point.
Predicting the future, or fortune telling. ‘I’ll never be able to feel
comfortable talking to someone attractive’; ‘I’ll always be on my own’;
‘Nobody will ever invite me along’.
Labelling, or name-calling. ‘I’m useless . . . inept . . . stupid . . . inferior’;
‘Other people are unfriendly . . . critical . . . hostile . . . superior’.
Wishful thinking. Supposing things would be better if they were different.
‘If only I were cleverer . . . more attractive . . . wittier . . . younger . . .
more like others.’

Step 2: looking for alternative ways of thinking

Looking for alternative ways of thinking is one of the main things you can do to
make yourself feel better. The rest of this chapter explains how to do this using
pencil and paper, and how to do it in your head. More methods are also
described in the next three chapters on doing things differently, reducing self-
consciousness and building up confidence. All these strategies can be used to
help you to rethink your attitudes to your social life, your assumptions about it,
and the way that you approach it.
Once you know what you are thinking the next step is to reexamine your
thoughts. The aim is to learn to question your thoughts, rather than accept them
as facts; to explore them, and the facts that spring to mind when you think about
them, to see whether they fit together, make sense and are helpful to you. When
you do this you will find that there is no one right way of seeing things. Rather,
there are many possibilities, some of which can make you feel worse, and others
of which can make you feel better. Thinking when you are having a meal with a
few people that everyone else is doing things right, but you are doing them
wrong is only one of the many options – and one which fits with feeling so tense
and nervous about what you say and do, and so self-conscious about it, that it
becomes hard to relax or to eat, or to think of anything else. Here are some of the
other options:

everyone is doing some things ‘right’ and some things ‘wrong’;

nobody but you is thinking in terms of right and wrong anyway;
there are so many different ways of doing things that it matters little
which you choose;
people are more interested in what you think than in whether you do
things the ‘right’ way;
doing things differently from others makes people curious about you, but
nothing more than that.

The point is that there is a far wider choice of ways of thinking than springs to
mind at first. You could see the clouds in the sky as a sign of rain, and feel
disappointed, or you could see them as a chance of sunshine and feel altogether
more cheerful, but there are many other options as well. The main idea is that the
way you think, and what you choose to think about – given that you can learn
how to choose to think about something in different ways – will affect the way
you feel. Learning how to think things through gives you more control over the
way you feel.
For example, someone who thought, ‘They think I’m peculiar’ would be
likely to feel unhappy or rejected. They might feel less upset if instead they
asked themselves, ‘How do I know what they are thinking?’, and then answered
that question with the new thought, ‘Maybe I’m just guessing. I may be no odder
than lots of people.’ Often socially anxious people are making guesses such as
this one, and jumping to conclusions about what others think of them.
What would you think if someone you knew well but had not seen for a while
passed close by to you in the street but did not even smile? Would you think
something like, ‘I must have done something to offend them’, or ‘I don’t
suppose they really like me’? If so, this is a good example of the kind of
guesswork that ties in with the fear that others will think badly about you, but
guesswork that ties in with the fear that others will think badly about you, but
which is not based on the facts of what happened. Stop and think for a minute
about what you would really think in this situation.
Questioning your upsetting thoughts
You can learn to find alternatives to upsetting thoughts such as those described
above by asking yourself some more key questions. Here are some of the
questions that other people have found useful. It might be worth copying these
out into your notebook, so that you have got them to hand when you need them.

Key questions for step 2: looking for alternatives

What are the facts? What evidence do you have to support what you
think? What evidence is there against it? Which way of thinking fits best
with the facts? The fact that you think something does not make it true.
What possible alternatives are there? What would you think if you were
more confident? How might someone else view this situation? What
would you say to someone else who was thinking in this sort of way?
What would someone who cared about you say?
What is the worst possible way of seeing things, or the worst thing that
could possibly happen? What is the best way of seeing things, or the best
thing that could happen? Which is most realistic? Or most likely to be
right?
What biases might be affecting your thinking? For example, are you
jumping to conclusions? Exaggerating? Over-generalizing? Are you
predicting the future as a certainty? Or mind reading? Or focusing on the
negative side of things at the expense of everything else?
What can you do that would be helpful? What personal skills and
strengths do you have to help? What past experience of dealing with
similar problems? What help, advice and support are available to you,
from others or from books? What can you do to change things? If you
can’t change the situation, can you keep an open mind about what it
means?

Answering your upsetting thoughts

Use these questions to help you to rethink, and write your answers down, so that
you do not forget them. A simple two-column thought record on which to do this
is shown in Table 7.2, and a blank version of this form for you to copy, together
with the key questions, is provided in the Appendix. The aim is to search your
mind for other ways of thinking, recognizing that these may not come easily at
first. Some examples have been provided in Table 7.2, and a space has been left
first. Some examples have been provided in Table 7.2, and a space has been left
for you to use, if you wish, to reexamine your thoughts about being ignored by
someone who knows you well. Can you find another way of thinking about it?
Sometimes people think they can reexamine their thoughts without writing
things down – doing it in their heads – and, indeed, sometimes they are right.
Nevertheless, for everyone it is important to do this exercise in writing enough
times to be sure that you really can identify alternative ways of thinking and put
them into words. Otherwise it is tempting to be satisfied with a rather vague
notion of another way of seeing things, and vague ideas are less likely to have a
beneficial effect on how you feel than ones that are clearer. Putting the new
ideas into words, which you are forced to do if you complete a thought record
like the one in Table 7.2, brings them into focus.

TABLE 7.2: THOUGHT RECORD FOR LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES

Upsetting thoughts Possible alternatives

(take one at a time) (there may be more than one)

I sound really stupid Perhaps everyone does once in a while Even if I did, it would not
mean I was stupid

They can see how Possible, but that needn’t make them think I’m a bad person. Maybe
nervous I am they are thinking of other things altogether, and have not even
noticed me

That person
completely ignored
me

The essence of the method is to keep an open mind, and not to get led astray by
your fears. These tend to push you into extremist positions: ‘Everyone could see
that I made a complete idiot of myself’, rather than leading you towards a more
balanced, and usually more accurate, way of seeing things, as in the examples
below:

Maybe people are not judging or evaluating me, or even noticing me

particularly.
Maybe I can’t tell what people are really thinking.
Maybe I feel worse than I look.
Maybe people don’t reject you for being nervous – after all, it happens to
 everyone sometimes.
Maybe I’m just as good as they are, underneath.

Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Try to think as you might if you had none
of the bad feelings that have sent you in search of help. Take yourself on a mind-
trip, and see if you can find other perspectives to explore.

Finding ‘good’ alternatives

Good alternatives come in many shapes and sizes, and you are the person who
can judge whether the ones that you find will work for you. A good alternative is
one that makes you feel better, that fits with the facts (not with your fears or
suspicions, or with a biased interpretation of the facts) and that helps you to do
the things that you want to do. You could look at the alternatives that you find
alongside the goals that you set yourself to begin with, and ask yourself whether
the new way of thinking would help you to achieve those goals.
Good alternatives also help you to break old patterns of thinking like the
biases listed earlier. Watch out for your preferences and see if you can spot them
in action at times when you feel bad: ‘There I go, discounting the positive things
again.’ Unlike biased ways of thinking (especially catastrophizing, or over-
generalizing), helpful alternatives can usually be phrased in moderate or ‘open-
minded’ language, as in the ‘maybe’ examples listed above. They make you feel
less pressurized, and help you to adopt a balanced and flexible view of things
rather than an extremist one.

PRESSURIZING THOUGHTS

Examples of pressurizing thoughts would be ‘I must think of something

interesting to say’, ‘I should be able to like people more’, ‘I ought to try harder
to be amusing and entertaining’. Pressurizing thoughts contain pressurizing
words, like must, should and ought, which many people use to motivate
themselves, or to urge themselves on to do better and to ‘improve’. They work
against you because the pressure adds to the tension and anxiety, and because
they suggest that there are definite rules that you must obey rather than various
sets of conventions which have grown up gradually and that in practice are
frequently broken. Think of the people you know who break the conventions but
do not worry about it.
Looking for less pressurizing alternatives may feel uncomfortable at first, as if
something bad might happen if you did not do what you ‘ought’ to do. One way
something bad might happen if you did not do what you ‘ought’ to do. One way
round this problem is to try thinking in terms of preferences, not pressures.
Prompt yourself with: ‘It would be better if . . .’, rather than push yourself with
‘must’, ‘should’ or ‘ought’.

EXTREMIST THOUGHTS

Extremist thoughts contain extreme words such as always, never, totally, nobody
and so on. ‘They totally ignored me’, ‘People never like me’, ‘I am always
messing things up’, ‘Nobody feels shy after the age of 30’. By their very nature,
extremist statements are most unlikely to be true. Perhaps they could be true, but
it would be worth taking notice if this happened: like being able to run a four-
minute mile, or meeting someone as clever as Einstein.

Sometimes the pressurizing and the extremist words come together: ‘You should
always be polite’, ‘I should never show that I am angry’, ‘You must always let
other people come first’. These statements are like rules for living, and they tie
in closely with the underlying beliefs and assumptions that everyone absorbs and
internalizes as they grow up. In some circumstances they make sense – and these
examples illustrate well the kinds of things that parents and teachers tend to say,
and the kinds of ‘rules’ they may try to incorporate into the home or the
classroom. However, we are all at times impolite, angry and in pursuit of our
own goals. We often want to do things our own way irrespective of what others
want. So, instead of combining the pressure and the extremism when this
happens – and hitting yourself with a ‘double whammy’ – it helps again to look
for more balanced and moderate ways of seeing things. Instead of using phrases
that sound like hidden threats – as if there were an unspoken ‘or else . . .’ behind
them – look for more helpful alternatives. Threats work less well than rewards
when you are learning something new, and they also add to feelings of
nervousness, apprehension and anxiety.
Some of the options might be: ‘Things often work out better if you can be
polite’, ‘Everyone gets angry at times – but it does make a difference how you
show it’, or ‘It’s perfectly all right for me to come first at times’. Note how these
more balanced alternatives point the way forwards, and define the kinds of
strategies that it can be helpful to develop, such as ways of negotiating
differences, expressing anger and taking turns.

What makes searching for alternatives difficult?

‘YES, BUT . . .’
Being anxious goes with worrying about what might happen next; about what
else could possibly go wrong, and about how bad it would be if it did. This
makes it easy to doubt any new perspectives, and to follow each one up with a
‘Yes, but . . .’: ‘Yes, I know they seemed to like me, but they don’t really know
what I’m like’, or ‘Yes, I didn’t say anything stupid, but then I hardly said
anything at all’. Doubting is another way of discounting, and the way to
overcome it is to use the strategies of cognitive therapy: identify the discounting
thought and reexamine it, to see if it really makes sense. Maybe people cannot
tell what you are really like until they get to know you better. Maybe saying
more, and taking more initiative when you are talking to people, would be a
fairer test of your thought about appearing stupid.
Another difficulty with finding alternatives arises when people pay too much
attention to the internal voice that puts them down, or deals out the criticism, or
hands out the blame when things appear not to go well. All of us engage in an
internal conversation with ourselves at times, as if we were talking – usually,
though not always, inaudibly – to another self: ‘you fool’ we say – as if we did
not know that quite well already. This internal monologue, or dialogue, tends to
incorporate messages that we have heard elsewhere. Sometimes it has
recognizable characteristics of our parents, teachers or friends: ‘If you don’t
speak up, no wonder people can’t hear what you say’; and sometimes it reflects
our own self-opinion: ‘You’re useless.’ The trouble with this internal voice is
that it comes from inside, and is far more likely to reflect opinion than fact. Once
again the answer is to stick to the facts, and not to be misled by some outdated
ways of thinking that may have little to do with the present, and which make you
feel bad.

FEELING LOW

Feeling discouraged, demoralized or depressed also makes it hard to see things

another way. It is as if the black mood colours the way we see things, and places
a negative filter on the way we think. If this happens to you, the first step is to
remind yourself how close is the relationship between thoughts and feelings.
Think about a time when you felt different, and scan your memory for specific
examples of how you thought about things then. You will need to see if you can
amplify the scanner, and focus it clearly, as such examples can become nearly
invisible when a low mood spreads a confusing, obscuring haze over everything.
The main idea to hold on to is that feeling that something is true does not make it
true, although it does make it difficult to see it another way until you focus hard
on the specifics of exactly what happened, and disentangle the facts from your
feelings about the facts.

How to make it easier for yourself

Most people who have suffered from something as debilitating as social anxiety
or shyness, something that can interfere so profoundly with their lives and with
the way that they would like to be when with other people, try hard to overcome
their difficulties. They do whatever they can – and often their ideas are good
ones. They try to keep going, and not to run away from things. They try to ‘say
something to themselves to make themselves feel better’ – which is a fairly good
description of the general aim of cognitive therapy provided by someone who
had suffered from the problem for over 15 years before seeking help for it. They
try not to dwell on the problem and on the uncomfortable sensations that it
produces. They try to relax and to keep things in perspective, and to build their
lives as best they can. So it is not for want of trying that the problem persists.
Targeting these efforts more effectively and more efficiently, so that they
succeed in breaking the vicious cycles that otherwise perpetuate the problem, is
highly likely to be more helpful. But it may be difficult at first. Doing new
things in new ways can be alarming and feel risky. Helping yourself takes
courage and it takes persistence.
If you knew someone else who was undertaking such a task, how would you
set about helping them? What would they require from you? Three important
contributions to their efforts would be compassion, understanding and
encouragement, and it is far easier to see how to give these things to someone
else than to oneself. Most people make themselves exceptions to the rule when it
comes to ‘self-improvement’, or ‘self-help’, and go in for self-blame, criticism
and name calling instead. ‘It was all my fault’, ‘I’m clumsy and awkward’,
‘Wimp’, ‘Coward’. These are obvious examples of negative and unhelpful ways
of thinking, and shy or anxious people can be far more creative than this when
putting themselves down. It would be easier to make effective changes if you
became more compassionate with yourself, and spent some time working out
how to understand your own particular version of the difficulty and what keeps it
going. This would be far more likely to encourage you in the effort to change.
Although this may sound obvious – or trivial or patronizing – the point is worth
making because it is so easy to ignore the damaging effect of saying such things
to oneself.
In the next section there is a summary of the ideas in this chapter and some
more ideas about how to put them together so that you can use them effectively
to change the way you feel, and to help you when starting to do things
differently.
differently.

Putting the steps together

The two steps for changing thinking patterns are learning how to identify what is
in your mind and learning how to reexamine the ways you think. Putting these
two steps together helps you to get better at finding the ways of thinking that
make you feel better, and it also helps you think about how to put the new ways
of thinking into effect: how to start changing your behavior as well as your
thinking. Changing behavior is the topic of the next chapter, so here we will
concentrate on combining the steps for changing patterns of thinking.
The way to do this is shown in Table 7.3, and blank copies of the complete
thought record for you to copy and use as you wish are provided with the other
blank worksheets in the Appendix. You will notice that there are two extra
columns in the complete thought record that did not appear in the two earlier
parts of it. The first of these, ‘Change in feelings’, is for noting down how
working on your thoughts changed the way you felt: all of the options are
available, from making you feel much worse (–10), through no change at all (0),
to making you feel much better (+10). As you will see from the examples, some
new ways of thinking have less effect than others, and some, like the last one
shown here, may still give you some ideas about what to do even if they do not,
at the time, make you feel any better. Remember, you are looking for new ways
of thinking that make you feel better and that help you to do the things that you
want to do, and it may take some practice before you can find them successfully.
 The second new column is headed ‘Action plan’, and asks you to think about
what you would like to do differently. The point of this column is to remind you
that you will gain most if you are able to put the new ways of thinking into effect
to change your behavior as well as your thinking. The next chapter explains
more about how to do this, and here you should think about what you would like
to be able to do differently, so that you can then work towards this, by degrees if
it is too difficult to do all at once. You can use any of the ideas in this book to
start you thinking about what kind of action plan you would like to be able to
make for yourself. The examples in the completed record shown in Table 7.3
have been constructed to illustrate how to use this worksheet, and should make
the whole process clear. But remember, if you have difficulty with it, you can
adapt it to suit your needs better. Many creative, socially anxious people make
up their own ways of doing this work, and use their notebooks to keep their own
versions of these records.
 It is important to be honest with yourself when you fill in these worksheets,
even if facing up to the difficulties that you have, and to thoughts that much of
the time are only half realized, makes you feel worse at first – or makes you feel
embarrassed. As you get better at finding alternatives, you will be able to use the
method to change the way you feel, and to devise the action plan that you want.
It is also important to do this exercise on paper. Thinking things through in
one’s head is far more difficult than it might seem, and it is easy to skim over
difficulties or to formulate rather vague alternatives and plans if they do not have
to be written down. As the method becomes familiar to you, you will be able to
dispense with the writing, and do more of it in your head, in the situations that
actually provoke your anxiety. As one person said when she tried this, there is a
risk at first of being suddenly carried away on a mounting rollercoaster of
anxiety, and of getting in such a flap that you can no longer think rationally or
clearly. However, what she discovered was that if she found a way of taking a
break and calming down, then she could ‘take stock and get a grip’, and rational
thought could return. This person also reminded herself that she was trying to
change patterns of thinking that had been there for years – and no one had said it
would be easy. It does get easier with practice, and when the methods for
changing patterns of thinking described in this chapter are combined with those
for changing behaviors, reducing self-consciousness and building confidence
that are described in the next chapters.

Making flashcards, to help you remember new patterns of thinking

Old patterns of thinking are like bad habits, and tend to come back again and
again, and it is only too easy to slip into your favourite biased ways of thinking
(see here). One way of helping yourself to break these old habits is to make
flashcards that help you to develop new habits. Flashcards are small reminders
of new ways of thinking that you can carry around with you. The reason why
people use cards is that cards last longer than bits of paper, and they can be put
in your pocket or wallet and kept to hand more easily than your notebook.
So get yourself a card, and on one side of it write one of your typical upsetting
thoughts, such as ‘Everyone can see how nervous I am’, or ‘I always make a fool
of myself’, or ‘They think I’m not worth having around’, or a question about
your favourite bias: ‘Am I mindreading again?’ On the other side write down the
alternative ways of thinking that you think are helpful. Use the back of the card
to summarize the work you have done, and to remind yourself of other ways of
thinking, and of things that have happened that go against your old patterns of
thinking. Carry the card with you at all times. Then you can use it whenever you
thinking. Carry the card with you at all times. Then you can use it whenever you
need: when going out to do something difficult; as you arrive somewhere and
before you go in to do whatever you have come to do; after you leave and before
the undermining post mortem begins; or just to give yourself a much-needed
boost if your confidence feels as if it is flagging.

KEY POINTS

Thoughts affect how you feel, and feelings affect how you think. Changing the way you
think will help you to feel better. There are many different kinds of thoughts, many of
which most people never have to express in words.
The first step is to identify the ways you think.
Some patterns of thinking reflect biases. Biased ways of thinking are unlikely to be right.
Many of us have ‘favourite’ biases, and if you know what they are it will be easier to work
against them.
The second step is to look for alternative ways of thinking.
Good alternatives can usually be expressed in moderate or balanced terms.
Doubting yourself and saying ‘Yes, but . . .’ makes finding alternatives difficult.
It is easier to find alternatives if you use the kind of compassionate, understanding and
encouraging approach that you would adopt if you were helping someone else.
Completing thought records is extremely helpful. Although the exercises in this chapter
can be done in your head, they will be much more effective and much more useful to you
in the long run if you also practise doing them on paper.
Copies of the three thought records used in this chapter can be found in the Appendix.
Summarize the work you do on a flashcard, and use it as a reminder of new and more
helpful ways of thinking.
8

Doing things differently

The last chapter explained how to find out more about the way you think about
the situations that you find difficult, and how to go about keeping your thinking
in perspective. This chapter is about finding out what happens when you do
things differently. It explains how to test your thoughts out in action, and how to
carry out experiments that help you to behave in the ways that you would like to
be able to. Thinking about the things that you do differently, about how they go
and what they mean, helps to build your social confidence and to reduce social
anxiety. Thoughts, feelings and behavior are closely linked. If you think that you
do not fit in well with the people around you, then you may feel dispirited, and
do what you can to ensure that you only make relatively superficial contact with
them. So it is important to act differently as well as to find different ways of
thinking. The two together will help you to feel better.
Experimenting with new ways of doing things, such as being more outgoing,
asking more questions, or making the effort to meet new people, allows you to
discover whether other ways of thinking might be more realistic and more
helpful. Acting in new ways provides a direct test of what you think. This is
especially clear when your thoughts involve predictions about what will happen
next. Thinking ‘I shall feel dreadful the whole time’, or ‘I won’t be able to get
my point across. I will get muddled and confused’, makes you want to protect
yourself. Keeping safe, by avoiding things and in other ways, means that you
never know if your predictions are right. Taking the risk of doing things
differently can tell you whether the predictions you were making were right or
wrong. You might have been upsetting yourself for no good reason.
This is where the second strategy comes in: doing things differently. Most
people with social anxiety want to protect themselves from the embarrassments
and humiliations that they fear. So they try to keep themselves safe from
disaster, and they avoid doing the things that make them feel most at risk and
their lives become restricted. Often the way they are thinking makes this seem
like the only sensible option. Safety behaviors and avoidance are understandable
reactions to feeling anxious, but in the long run they maintain the difficulty
rather than resolve it. Dealing with thoughts is a beginning, but changing your
behavior is essential if you are going to put your new ideas into effect.

What would changing your behavior mean?

In order to gain the most from this chapter it is important to recognize the ways
in which being socially anxious or shy affect your behavior. Various ways of
doing this are described below, but first read through the following passage,
answering the questions it poses as you go.
Think of something you would like to do, but are inhibited from doing at
present because of being socially anxious. Some examples may help you start
thinking along the right lines: make the first move towards getting to know
someone better; ask someone you do not know well to do something with you;
look for a new job; disagree with someone in authority; make requests such as
asking someone to help you out, or turn their music down, or give you the pay
rise you deserve; invite people into your home; accept the offer of further
training or a position with more responsibility or a promotion; or take advantage
of an opportunity to stretch yourself and acquire a new skill. Use these questions
as prompts to clarify where your potential lies.

1 What exactly would you be able to do if you felt less anxious?

Then ask yourself what gets in the way of doing things that you would like to do,
and prevents you realizing this potential. At one level the answer is probably
‘my social anxiety’. But at another level it is also because of what these
situations mean to you. This is what keeps you thinking about them as sources of
potential embarrassment and humiliation, and makes them seem too risky to
attempt. It is as if trying to do them would put too much at stake. Something
might go wrong. The dangers and threats are inhibiting and hold you back. The
meaning that they have for you interferes with the way you would otherwise
behave.

2 If you did try them, what do you predict would go wrong?

The inhibition that prevents you realizing your potential reflects the way you
think and has a powerful effect on what you do. When something seems
think and has a powerful effect on what you do. When something seems
threatening then you think about how to protect yourself, and the two main ways
of doing this are by keeping yourself safe and by avoiding things. Giving up
safety behaviors and avoidance, when done in the ways described below, helps
you to find out whether the threats were sufficiently serious to warrant this
degree of protection. It has the potential to change their meaning for you, and in
this way continues the process of change that was begun by working on your
thoughts.

3 If your prediction was wrong, and things consistently turned out better than you feared they
might, what would it mean to you? What would it mean about you?

Answering these three questions is intended to make you think about what you
would be able to do if you were not so anxious or shy, and about what it would
mean if you could, so that when you follow through the ideas below and start to
change what you do, you also follow through these changes by thinking about
their implications. Changing your behavior and doing things that you find
difficult is important, but it is most effective if you stop and think about what
you have done afterwards. Your courage in doing something that you thought
would be difficult will be best rewarded, and most likely to release you from
inhibition, if you follow the steps for changing your behavior that are set out
below, and think about your answers to these three questions again from time to
time.
The reason why this is necessary is that many people who are socially anxious
go on doing things that they fear even when they feel terrible, like going to
places where they will meet new people, or eating in other people’s houses, but
find that doing so has no lasting effect. They want to realize their potential and
to be themselves, and they hope, correctly, that not doing these things is likely to
make them worse. But often such courage is not rewarded, as the problem
persists despite it. One reason for this is that the courageous action, or change in
behavior on its own, has no profound implications for you. It does not change
your expectations and predictions about what might happen next time unless you
work on these too. You can always dismiss the occasional success as a lucky
break, or assume that other people rather than you were responsible for its
successful aspects. Courage can be turned to more profitable use if you go
through all four of the steps described below when changing your behavior, so
that you can test out your predictions as you go, and make your changes
maximally informative. Eventually this will give new meaning to your
interactions with other people – and indeed to the times when these interactions
do not go according to plan.
Ways of doing things differently: mini-experiments

No special skills are needed to change your behavior. It is not as if you have to
learn a whole new language, but more like finding a way of releasing you from
inhibition, so that you can be yourself and feel more comfortable with that. The
two main ways of behaving differently are giving up safety behaviors, and
facing things rather than avoiding them; and the main method that helps you
decide how to do things differently is to carry out mini-experiments. To do this
all you need to be able to do is to be curious about what happens when you do
things differently. In the rest of this chapter you will find a detailed description
of exactly what to do, but first it may be useful to have an outline of the main
experimental method of changing your behavior.
Adopting an experimental approach to what you do involves trying things out
in different ways in order to find out what happens when you do things
differently – how other people react, how you feel, and so on. The four main
steps are shown in Box 8.1 below, and the next sections of this chapter will show
how they can be used in practice to change safety behaviors and avoidance.

BOX 8.1: STEPS IN A MINI-EXPERIMENT FOR DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

With a particular situation in mind:

1 Identify exactly what you do now (your safety behaviors, what you avoid etc.).
2 Identify the connection between what you do and what you think: for example, identify your
predictions, expectations, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, memories . . . etc.
3 Do something differently, in order to find out what happens when you do. The aim is to use
your curiosity, as well as your courage.
4 Evaluate what happens. Think about it afterwards, with an open mind, and work out
whether your thoughts were right.

How to do this in practice is described below.

Changing safety behaviors

As was discussed earlier, one of the difficulties about social situations is that you
cannot control other people. At any moment they may do something that you
find threatening, like ask your opinion, or introduce you to the person you feel
least able to talk to, or move away while you are talking to them. Safety
behaviors are things that you do to protect yourself from such threats. They
decrease confidence in the long run because they leave you with the message
that you need protection: that you would be unsafe without it. For example, if
you had not looked away you might have given the impression that you had
something to say when all you could think about was the complete blank inside.
Using safety behaviors also has the effect of suggesting that they worked: that
they succeeded in preventing the threat being realized, or the disaster happening.
So when you looked away you effectively moved out of the conversation,
leaving other people to take it up. No one seemed to realize how blank you felt
as the conversation went on – leaving you behind perhaps, but without making
you the focus of a social awkwardness, an embarrassing silence.
Safety behaviors, like letting your hair fall in front of your face, or smoking so
as to have something to do with your hands, keep the problem going as they
prevent you learning that the disasters you fear are more imagined than real.
They can also make the situation worse, especially when they become
noticeable, or if they provoke a reaction from others. For example, trying not to
draw attention to yourself by speaking quietly may mean that someone asks you
to repeat what you have just said, so you have to say it again more loudly, with
everyone listening. In the same way, saying nothing personal about yourself, so
that you keep the ‘real you’ hidden, can make people curious about you –
especially if they want to be friendly – so they start asking probing questions.
Everyone invents their own safety behaviors, so only you know exactly what
you do. Some common examples include looking down so no one can catch your
eye, wearing light clothing in case you get hot and sweaty, leaving the room
immediately the meeting is over so that you do not have to get involved in ‘small
talk’, and trying to be especially careful about what you say, or to make sure that
it makes sense. Many socially anxious people keep an eye on the escape route
when they feel uncomfortable, and arm themselves ahead of time with excuses
for getting away. Most of them also try not to attract unwanted attention. You
will find more examples in Chapter 1, see here.

Steps towards giving up safety behaviors

There are four steps to go through, and all four together make up a mini-
experiment. The first is becoming aware of what you do to protect yourself. The
second is thinking about exactly what could go wrong. It specifies the danger
from which the safety behavior would protect you, and involves identifying what
you predict would happen if you did not do it. The third step is to find out what
happens if you do things differently. The last step is drawing conclusions from
what you have done. These steps are described in more detail below.
STEP 1: IDENTIFYING WHAT YOU DO

In order to solve the problem of safety behaviors you need first to become aware
of them. This is not so easy as it might seem, as some of them may be so
habitual that you no longer notice them. There may be things that only you know
you are doing, like rehearsing in advance what you want to say, or ones that
others can see, like wearing the ‘right’ sorts of clothes. There are likely to be
things that you do not do as well as things that you do: for example, talking
about yourself and your feelings, or telling a story or a joke. It is particularly
helpful to give yourself prompts when identifying your safety behaviors. So
think about a recent situation that you found difficult, and ask yourself what you
did to ensure that you did not feel too vulnerable or exposed. You might also
find it useful to think about what would have made the situation worse for you,
like having to talk without notes, or not being able to have a drink before you
went out. Using ‘props’ is a common way of keeping safe.
Write down all the safety behaviors you can think of, and keep adding to the
list as you become more aware of what you do. Do some people provide a
‘reassuring presence’ for you, so that just having them in the vicinity makes you
feel better? Do you use them as part of your safety system?

Key questions for identifying safety behaviors

What do you do to prevent bad things happening?

How do you protect yourself from the social embarrassments that you
fear?
If you feel suddenly at risk, what is the first thing you do?
What do you do to prevent other people noticing your symptoms?
What do you do to ensure that you do not do anything wrong?
What do you do to hide your problem or to stop it showing?

STEP 2: MAKING A PREDICTION

Step 2 involves thinking about what would happen if you gave up your safety
behaviors, and stopped trying to protect yourself. You can identify your
predictions best by thinking about specific times and events when you have felt
bad. Pick a particular one that you can remember clearly. Or start by thinking
about something that might happen quite soon, and ask yourself what you fear
might happen to you. There are many questions you could ask yourself at this
stage: for example, What are you predicting will happen? What is it that you
fear will go wrong for you? What would happen if you did not protect yourself?
But the most important key question to answer is this one:

What is the worst thing that could happen to you?

Make sure that you let yourself ‘look into the abyss’ and try to put into words the
catastrophe that you predict will happen. Write it down, to make sure that you
know exactly what it is. Sometimes your worst fear, on inspection, sounds not
too bad when brought out into the open, and sometimes it sounds so extreme that
you can immediately see that it is not likely to be correct – like thinking that
everyone will openly point at you, or laugh at you. Other predictions have more
reality behind them. Someone who let her hair fall in front of her face to hide her
blushes feared that people would ridicule her – as indeed her school friends once
had – if they saw her hot, red face glowing like a beacon when someone spoke to
her. Someone else who kept trying to tell jokes at work feared that he would be
rejected and become totally isolated if he did not join in the general banter.
Think about how to word your predictions so that they are testable.
Predictions about yourself are perhaps the easiest to test: ‘I shall shake, and spill
my drink’, ‘My anxiety will get out of control’. Predictions about other people
need to be specific if they are going to be testable. You might predict that other
people will stare at you, or that they will ignore you. These predictions can be
tested, but no experiments are likely to reveal exactly what other people think of
you. Predictions about other people’s thoughts and attitudes are hardest to tackle.
Predictions about their behavior are much easier. In order to test a prediction
about being rejected and becoming totally isolated, for example, you would first
have to work out how you would know if this was happening. You would have
to define the objective signs of being rejected, and be sure that you were not
using signs, like someone turning away from you, or yawning, as signs of
rejection. These things could happen for so many other reasons that the signs are
not objectively clear, and leave too much room for you to give your own
personal and anxiety-driven meaning to them, about being rejected or becoming
totally isolated. So in this case it would be better to test the specific prediction
that you will feel rejected, or that other people will not start conversations with
you, or that they will not respond to your comments, look you in the eye, or ask
you to join them and so on.
When people predict other people’s reactions to them, for example predicting
that they will not take them seriously, it is especially difficult to make the
prediction testable. How would you know whether people took you seriously?
How would anyone know? You could decide what would count as not being
taken seriously, and define specific criteria for that, like never listening to what
you say, or always ignoring your opinion. But definitions that use ‘extremist’
words, like ‘never’ and ‘always’ are only rarely likely to be true (see here). The
point here is that sometimes the attempt to look for specific predictions itself
reveals that the prediction is so general – or so overgeneral – that it is most
unlikely to be correct. It will be most helpful if you make specific predictions
that seem realistic to you. Then testing them out will tell you something you did
not already know.

STEP 3: FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU GIVE UP USING YOUR SAFETY BEHAVIORS

This is the point at which you have to think about how to change your behavior:
about the kind of mini-experiment you will carry out. Think first of a situation in
which you would like things to be different, such as using the telephone when
other people are listening, or starting a conversation with someone. What will
you do differently? Be quite specific about it. You should choose one of the
safety behaviors on your list and create an experiment for yourself, to test out
what happens if you go into this situation ‘unprotected’: for example, if you look
people in the eye when you talk to them instead of avoiding eye contact, or say
what you think instead of just agreeing with them; if you relax your grip on the
telephone or the pencil or the coffee mug instead of tensing yourself up in an
effort to control the shaking. The aim is to find out if the danger you fear is real,
and in order to do this you need to drop your armour and see if the disaster you
fear comes to pass.
This is the hardest step, and the one that feels most risky at first. It is worth
doing because it starts the process of building up confidence in your ability to
adapt to the situations that arise and to respond to them in the way that feels right
for you. If you feel anxious the first time you do it, try again and see if by
degrees your anxiety starts to die down.
A reminder: there is no fixed, rigid and right way of doing things socially, but
there are many ways. Your way, once you have learned to relax and to be
yourself, will be just as good as the next person’s. Trying to keep yourself safe
tends to make you more tense and inflexible than you otherwise would be.
Giving up your safety behaviors, once you have got used to doing without them,
allows you to adapt as the situation unfolds, and frees you up to interact in new
and more natural ways, even though it feels alarming at first. The person who
tried to hide her blushes carried out the experiment of tying back her hair and
holding her head up straight, in full view of everyone around her. The person
who kept trying to tell jokes tried keeping quiet until he had something to say
instead.

STEP 4: EVALUATE WHAT HAPPENS

Think about what actually happened when you behaved differently. Make sure
that you are sticking with the facts and not jumping to conclusions about what
other people thought, or assuming that because you felt anxious you did
something stupid or revealed your basic weaknesses. Ask yourself: Did the
prediction come true? Were you right? Or were you misled by your anxiety?
Seeing things in an alarming light whose shade was determined by your fear
rather than the facts? In the Appendix you will find a ‘Thought record for
changing behaviors’. Fill in one of these, using the example shown in Table 8.2
to guide you, in order to bring your experiment to a useful conclusion. Although
you may be able to do this in your head, it takes a surprising amount of practice
to do it accurately and well, and the worksheet will help you to make the most of
the experiments that you do.

What if the worst thing happens?

Dropping safety behaviors will feel risky. It will take courage, because it always
seems possible that the thing you fear most will really happen. There are two
answers to this problem. First, the thing that you fear very rarely does happen.
Indeed, it is more likely to happen if you keep using the safety behavior than if
you give it up. For example, the person who kept trying to hide her blushes was
inadvertently drawing attention to herself when she tried to hide. She attracted
the attention she was trying to evade, and this made her more likely to blush.
When she stopped trying to hide, and let the blushes come and go as they
pleased, she realized that other people took their cue from her. They too paid
little attention to the blushes, and continued to interact with her in a perfectly
normal way. And the person who stopped trying to tell jokes and keep up the
banter with his colleagues at work quickly realized that the tense and nervous
jokes he usually contributed had mostly fallen flat. They were more likely to
invite the ridicule that he feared than allowing himself to be the quiet person that
he really was.
 Secondly, if the thing that you fear most does happen, then it may not have the
catastrophic implications that you assume it does. Imagine you have kept
yourself safe by never letting anyone know what you feel, and by not saying
what you really think. Then you decide to take your courage in both hands, and
to disclose something important about yourself to someone you respect, and they
seem to dismiss you and your feelings, or they seem bored and uninterested. Ask
yourself: How would you know what they thought? And what they felt? Or what
their reactions meant? Could they have misunderstood what you said? Or were
they being insensitive because they did not realize how important it was for you?
The fact is that often other people do not respond in the ways that one hopes that
they will, but there are many reasons for this. Socially anxious people tend to
take such happenings personally, and to mind read, but other people’s unhelpful
or insensitive reactions do not make you less acceptable as a person, or make
your feelings less important and meaningful.
Facing the fears by stopping avoiding things

Avoidance is not doing something because it makes you fearful or anxious. It is

one of the more extreme versions of keeping safe. There are many kinds of
avoidance, and some of them are easier to recognize than others. Examples of
obvious types of avoidance include not going to places where you know you will
meet people, not using the telephone, not eating in public or asking questions,
not speaking to strangers, not asking someone out for a date, refusing invitations
and so on.
More subtle types of avoidance are so familiar, and so much part and parcel of
the way people behave when they are socially anxious, that they are not even
aware of doing them. They include not starting conversations or not initiating
contact with people; not accepting a challenge; or never doing things on your
own. Some people become very good at skimming the surface of social
situations, and might make a habit of arriving at them late and leaving early. At a
party you could still avoid talking to people by helping with the food and drink,
or with the clearing up, and find a way of only half paying attention to other
people. One person with severe social phobia described this as being ‘both there
and not there’, and for him it happened whenever he was with a group of people
who were talking among themselves. He wanted to be part of the conversation,
and to feel that he belonged to the group and was accepted by them, but still
disengaged himself, and felt detached for much of the time. Perhaps you know
what he meant.

Experiments for facing things rather than avoiding them

The same four steps can be used to plan how to face rather than avoid the things
that you find difficult:

1 Identify what you avoid.

2 Identify the connection between what you avoid and what you think.
3 Do something differently: in this case, face the fear rather than avoid it.
4 Evaluate what happens. Think about what happened, as objectively as you
can. Then work out whether your thoughts about what might happen were
right.

The first step sounds relatively easy, and often it is. However, when thinking
about precisely what you avoid, remember that you are probably the only person
who knows exactly what that is, and how you manage to avoid it. Try to notice
when you feel like avoiding something, and when you get that sense of wanting
to withdraw or hide yourself away that leads to avoidance. A good test of
whether you are avoiding something or not is to ask: ‘If I were confident, would
I do it?’
The second step, identifying the part played in your avoidance by the way you
think, means asking yourself what you predict, or expect might happen if you
did it. What is your worst fear? Do you have any memories or images about
similar situations that explain why they seem to you to be so alarming? The key
questions for identifying thoughts may be useful here; see Chapter 7, see here.
The third step, acting so as to face the fear rather than avoiding it, is always
the hardest, and often it helps to build your confidence up by doing easier things
before you move on to harder ones. So you could start by greeting people when
you meet them and build up to full-length conversations. Or you could start by
listening to others and watching what they do, and build up to asking someone
out for a date. Or you could involve yourself in helpful activities in your local
neighbourhood, or join an evening class, as a step on the way to making more
personal relationships and better friendships. Your aim should be to be able to do
the thing that you are avoiding.
The fourth step has two parts: observing what actually happened, and working
out how this fits with what you originally thought, or what your observations
mean. It is only too easy to dismiss or to discount the things that happen as a
result of carrying out experiments, especially if nothing in particular goes wrong.
If you managed to do something new for you, like make an appointment to get
your hair cut, then it is easy to think of this as the kind of normal activity that
should present you with no particular problems. This is why it is so important to
identify your original thoughts, for example your expectations and predictions,
before you go ahead and do something that you might not otherwise do. Doing it
this way puts you in a position to find out whether your expectations, or
predictions, are confirmed or not. For example, you might expect to feel
embarrassed and humiliated by having to watch yourself in the mirror while
having your hair cut, or predict that the person cutting your hair will make a
personal remark about you, or ask you personal questions. If you know exactly
what you expect to happen, you can find out whether your expectations are
confirmed or were wrong. In this way, doing things differently can help to
change the way you think as well as to change what you do. So next time your
expectations and predictions, based on your new findings, should be different.

Keeping records of your experiments

Keeping records of your experiments

Keep a written record of the risks that you take, and of what happens at the time,
in your notebook. Otherwise you will not know how you are getting on. It is
surprising how easy it is to forget, especially when a success for you (using the
telephone when people can hear what you say) may feel like normality for
someone else. A written record allows you to see clearly what you are changing,
and it helps you plan what to do next.

Other kinds of experiment

Using experiments to guide you, when you decide to do something differently, is

a way of making the most of everything that you do, so that the changes in how
you think, feel and act fit together. When this happens your confidence will
grow more quickly. For this reason it is worth being as creative and imaginative
as you can when thinking up experiments to change your behavior. We have
focused here on how to change safety behaviors and how to face things instead
of avoiding them, but there are also other kinds of experiments you could do. For
example, you could go to some places as an observer, instead of a participant,
and notice what other people do, and whether any of them show signs of being
anxious or shy. Or you could experiment with the way you make use of the basic
elements of social interaction, such as listening to other people, looking at them,
working out what they feel about what they are saying, asking questions when
you want to find out about others, saying what you think, expressing your
feelings and so on. These are all ways of oiling the wheels of social
communication that help people to join in with others, and give them a better
sense of belonging rather than feeling like an outsider. Experiment with doing
them more and with doing them less than usual, to find out what effect this has.
Another experiment that is particularly informative for people who fear that
their symptoms will be noticed – and think that it matters when they are – is
intentionally to make the symptoms worse. So you could make yourself shake
visibly, or stumble over your words when saying something, or repeat yourself
on purpose, and then observe what happens. Identify your prediction first: the
catastrophe that you fear. Then use your observation to find out whether your
prediction was right. This is particularly hard to do for people who believe that
there is a right – and therefore a wrong – way of doing things, and that their way
is bound to be wrong, but for them, it is also particularly helpful.

Should you be trying to learn how to do things right?

Should you be trying to learn how to do things right?

In a way shyness and social anxiety are all about what you do: about what you
fear you might do, or might not do. The fear is that you will act in a way that
will be humiliating or embarrassing, or do something that reveals your symptoms
of anxiety; that you will behave in a way that is unacceptable, or do something
wrong – knock something over, or blurt out something personal at an
inappropriate moment. The fear of showing yourself up by the way you act is
inhibiting, and prevents you behaving as you otherwise would. But focusing on
changing behaviors is not about learning how to ‘do things right’. Nor is it about
learning how to behave so that ‘bad’ things do not happen to you. Nothing you
can do will guarantee protection from the occasional rejection, or moment when
you feel embarrassed and painfully conspicuous. Everyone has times when they
cannot think of anything of any interest to say to anyone; when they are
undeniably boring. Social awkwardnesses will continue to plague us all, but the
meaning of them can change. They can come to feel less dangerous and
threatening. They can be less inhibiting, and have less devastating implications
for one’s personal sense of adequacy or acceptability – becoming more like
making a trivial mistake such as leaving your umbrella behind or running out of
toothpaste.
Changing behaviors has a powerful effect partly because it allows you to do
the things that you want to do, and also because it can help to change meanings.
Carrying out behavioral experiments such as the ones described in this chapter
allows you to re-evaluate social threats and dangers so that they come to have a
different meaning for you. They make it possible to find out whether your more
anxious predictions and expectations, for example about how you might
embarrass or humiliate yourself, are correct. Changing what you do is another
way of finding out whether taking another viewpoint, or adopting another
standpoint, helps you to feel more confident in the ways that you interact with
others. So changing your behavior also helps you to realize your potential and to
be yourself in a less inhibited way.

A digression about conventions

Some people think that in order to get better they should learn how to behave
correctly, as if there were a right way of doing things. Indeed, there are some
situations in which the conventional ways of doing things are rather like rules,
and then it can certainly feel more comfortable to know what the rules are: for
example, how to order a meal, make an appointment to see the doctor, or do
what is expected of you as a member of a sports club or church or evening class
or committee. Learning the rules in such situations has been described as being
like learning a ‘script’. The script is useful because it tells you how to behave,
but rule books are not written with flexibility in mind. Sometimes it is not
possible to use the usual script even though you would like to, for example when
someone starts a personal conversation with you at work, or if you meet your
doctor in the supermarket.
Rules and scripts are helpful, but they can also be limiting. An efficient and
busy hotel receptionist who suffered from social anxiety had remarkably little
difficulty carrying out her job. She had been well trained, and had been told
exactly how to handle the various types of problems that arose in her work,
including dealing with complaints and untoward rudeness. She had been able to
rehearse and practise all the skills that she needed on the job, and applying these
skills was merely a matter of following the rules. There was nothing personal
about it. Indeed, she could do the job regardless of how she was feeling at the
time, as it had become rather like switching into automatic, and putting on her
professional mask.
But although she knew her ‘script’ well, without it she felt, literally,
‘unmasked’. In more personal situations, when there were no rules to guide her,
she felt at sea and at risk. She was deeply embarrassed by not being able to think
what to say to a colleague whom she met when out for a walk at the weekend.
Her first attempts to overcome the problem involved looking for the rules of the
game: hunting for a ‘script’ that would help her out. But more personal, and
especially more intimate, relationships develop their own conventions, so to
speak, which means that you may not always know exactly what to do ahead of
time. It is rather that one has to learn to do what feels right, and to respond
flexibly to the demands of the situation as it develops. So this chapter is intended
to help you to develop the confidence to adapt the way you behave to the
situation that you find yourself in. The emphasis is therefore on thinking about
how to realize your potential rather than look for rules or conventions, which in
their own way can inhibit your ability to express yourself in the way that feels
right to you.
No special skills are needed to be able to do this. It comes without teaching,
and is more a matter of feeling able to be yourself, and finding the ways of doing
so that work for you rather than against you. There are some special skills –
‘advanced skills’, so to speak – that it can be helpful to learn, and these are often
described in books to help people progress further in their business or
management careers. Some of these are explained in Part Three. You already
have all the skills that you need for using the ideas in this chapter, although it is
have all the skills that you need for using the ideas in this chapter, although it is
certainly possible that when you are feeling anxious it is hard to use them in the
ways that you otherwise would.

Taking risks and making mistakes

Changing behaviors involves taking risks, and one of the things that holds
people back is the fear of making mistakes. This will seem more risky if you
think that mistakes matter: if you think that the mistakes you make will make
others think badly of you, or make you conspicuous (however temporarily). But
everyone makes mistakes, most of which are invisible to anyone but themselves,
and most mistakes have no more significance than tripping over a kerbstone.
Most of them turn out to be useful, too, as you can learn something from them,
like to look where you are going more carefully. So experiments done in the
ways described here help you to break the vicious cycles that otherwise keep the
problem going, help you to do more of the things that you would like to do, and
help you to feel more comfortable about doing them. They work by providing a
new source of information, which helps you to think again about these mistakes,
or ways in which you suppose that your behavior might have been wrong.

Some general points about doing things differently

Keep going
When it comes to changing their behavior, some people give up because they do
not consider that they have made any progress. This can happen even though
other people see a change. Take care not to underrate your achievements. Watch
out for upsetting thoughts about your progress. Progress may seem slow at first
but it will gradually become more substantial and more noticeable to you. If it
was easy, you would have done it before. You might also find it much easier to
remember the things that went badly than those that went well, or those that just
felt normal. Perhaps the difficult times seem more important, as well as more
distressing, than the easy ones, which then get forgotten.

Acknowledge your achievements

If you learn how to praise yourself for your successes, your confidence will grow
faster. Each time you achieve something it is a success. Small successes turn into
larger successes. Give yourself credit for all of them. Make a habit of giving
yourself a mental pat on the back, and see if you can get someone else to notice
yourself a mental pat on the back, and see if you can get someone else to notice
your achievements. If you have a colleague, friend or relative who knows about
your difficulties, maybe you could tell them, as well as writing it all down in
your notebook. Most people underrate their achievements to start with. This is
particularly likely to happen if the risks you decide to take involve doing things
that most people seem to find easy, like ordering a meal, or saying no when
someone asks you to do something.
Here are some examples of how people downgrade their successes. Below
each of these upsetting thoughts you will find an example of the sort of answer
that might be more helpful.

Thought: ‘Yes, but anyone could do that.’

Answer: ‘Not if they felt as anxious as you.’
Thought: ‘I should have done it better.’
Answer: ‘I will, in time. Now I will do what I can. No one could do more than
that.’
Thought: ‘No one else would think that was important.’
Answer: ‘Maybe not. But I know how important it is to me.’

Downgrading your success makes you feel bad, and it makes it hard to keep
trying.
Upsetting thoughts, as already mentioned, affect both your feelings and your
behavior. Make sure you know how to deal with them. Encouragement works far
better than criticism because it makes you feel better and helps you to keep
trying. So encourage yourself as you would encourage anyone who was learning
how to do something new. Try not to criticize or undermine yourself. If doing
new things makes you more anxious, then remember that this kind of anxiety is
highly likely to be temporary, and the gains you make will last if you keep on
doing them.
Dealing with setbacks
Everyone has ‘ups and downs’, and what you did successfully yesterday may
seem impossible today. It is important to realize that setbacks are a normal part
of progress and that you need not be discouraged by them.
If at any stage you seem to be stuck, or even to have slid backwards, it could
be because you are trying to run before you can walk. Recognize that you may
have to take things slowly, and that breaking old patterns of thinking and of
behaving takes time. Sometimes you will find the old ways of keeping yourself
safe re-emerge, but what can change once can do so again. Even a small change
means that you are not stuck with the problem, but need to keep working on it.
Watch out for feeling discouraged, and use your new thinking skills to keep the
Watch out for feeling discouraged, and use your new thinking skills to keep the
setback in perspective. Everyone should expect a few setbacks, so when they
happen to you try to take them in your stride, and do not let them interfere with
your plans. If you do not give up you will overcome the problem in the end.
Setbacks are often more apparent than real. You may have a bad day because
you were tired or not very well. It is not that you have got worse, but rather that
being tired or unwell makes everything you do a bit harder. Or other people may
unexpectedly plunge you into a situation that you were not yet ready for. For
instance they might suggest that you come with them to a disco, or ask you to
explain why you disagreed with a decision made at work. Remember that other
people are far less aware of your anxiety than you are. They may not even notice
it at all. So try not to let a bad patch spread. If you need time to take stock, to
muster your strength and your energy, then take that time before you continue
making the changes that you find most difficult.

Adopting an ‘ever ready’ attitude

If keeping yourself safe keeps the problem going, then taking risks helps to
overcome it. So take every opportunity that arises and, for instance, go to the
pub or talk to someone in a bus queue if you have an unexpected chance to do
so. You will find, if you can do this, both that you will improve faster and that
ordinary everyday activities become less of a strain. You will no longer react to
them as if they were really dangerous or frightening.
Try to stop keeping yourself safe even when doing everyday tasks, and instead
of buying what you want without a word, deliberately talking to shop assistants
or cashiers instead. Look at ordinary activities to see if you can find a way of
turning them into useful ways of making progress.

What if taking risks, and doing things differently, makes me very

anxious?

You will not be able to overcome the problem without experiencing some degree
of anxiety, but the more confident you become the more quickly this will
diminish. Think of handling your anxiety differently at different times: before,
during or after taking the risk of doing something differently.
Beforehand
Once you have decided to go ahead and do something difficult it is sensible not
to keep dwelling on it. It is not wise to give free rein to your imagination when
thoughts or images of potential disasters come to mind. These will only make
thoughts or images of potential disasters come to mind. These will only make
you feel worse, and it is more helpful to stick with your decision to act, and then
to distract yourself in any way you can to stop yourself worrying about it. Keep
yourself as busy and occupied as possible. You will find more ideas about how
to do this in Chapter 9.
After the event
Try to stop yourself going in for a ‘post mortem’. Looking back at what
happened from the point of view of someone with social phobia, it is only too
easy to interpret everything that happened in terms of your own sense of failure,
inadequacy or distress. Post mortems of this kind are as unlikely to be accurate
as exaggerated ‘fishy’ stories about the size of the one that got away.

At the time

The key to coping with your feelings at the time is to pay less attention to them.
The aim is to focus more on what is happening around you and less on your
internal thoughts, feelings and self appraisals. The third strategy for overcoming
social phobia, reducing self-consciousness, explains how to do this, and this is
the subject of the next chapter.

KEY POINTS
Doing things differently is one of the most productive ways to build your confidence.
The way to do this is to think of yourself as carrying out small experiments, to find out
what happens when you change your behavior.
Experiments can help you give up using safety behaviors which otherwise keep the
problems going.
Facing things instead of avoiding them also breaks one of the cycles of maintenance,
and experimenting with doing this makes it easier to do.
There are many ways in which experiments can help you to change your behavior, and
you might be able to think of more ways for yourself.
It is less important to worry about whether you will do things wrong, or break a social
convention, than to start doing things in the way that you really would like to.
When thinking back on the things that you have done differently it is important not to
dismiss or discount your successes. Doing new things may make you more anxious at
first, but it will also help to build your confidence in the long run.
9

Reducing self-consciousness

emong193
Self-consciousness comes from focusing your attention inwards, on to yourself,
so that you become painfully aware of what is happening to you. At its worst,
self-consciousness dominates your attention and makes it difficult to think of
anything else but your inner experience – and this can become totally paralyzing.
A bout of self-consciousness can afflict you in any social situation, regardless of
how well you know the people you are with. Entering a room full of people, or
saying goodbye when you leave, appear to be situations which are especially
likely to provoke it, possibly because at those times it is more difficult to do
what is expected of you socially without drawing attention to yourself.
Self-consciousness goes with feeling conspicuous and, for socially anxious
people, that goes with feeling vulnerable. It can be provoked, or made worse, by
becoming aware of any of the symptoms of social anxiety. For example, not
being able to concentrate or think straight, feeling nervous, noticing how hot you
are, hearing the sound of your own voice, having the impression that you are
being scrutinized, doing something clumsy, catching a glimpse of your hand
movements, worrying about some aspect of your appearance or your
performance could all make you feel self-conscious.
The less self-conscious you are, the easier it is to be yourself, and to join in
spontaneously with what is going on around you. The most helpful strategy to
learn in order to become less self-conscious is how to direct your attention on to
other things, so that you break the pattern of inward focusing which makes you
so self-aware. The idea is that if you can ‘lose yourself’ or ‘forget yourself’, you
will be better able to ‘find yourself’ – to be your ‘real self’ and feel comfortable
being that way. The assumption behind using these familiar phrases here is that
there is nothing new or special that you have to learn in order to be able to
interact more naturally with other people, because things will work out fine if
only you can manage to become less self-conscious about it. When watching a
only you can manage to become less self-conscious about it. When watching a
gripping film, or when studying a timetable in order to decide which train to
catch, concentrating on what you are doing means that you notice little else. The
cinema may be draughty and the rail station crowded and noisy, but these things
are irrelevant to what you are doing, and can go completely unnoticed until you
disengage yourself, and give them some of your attention. If you gave other
people, and things outside yourself, a similar degree of attention there would be
less space left for noticing the discomfort and tumult inside.

The effects of self-consciousness

Feeling self-conscious makes all kinds of symptoms worse: the sensations

themselves, the need for self-protection and to resort to using safety behaviors,
the inability to act naturally and numerous kinds of socially anxious thinking. At
the same time it serves as a reminder of how unpleasant the symptoms are and
increases the fear that others will notice them. It focuses attention on what others
might think and on the fear of how they might react, and it makes you feel
uncertain and unconfident. All of these reactions make it difficult to become
fully involved in particular situations or social interactions. As the mind is
occupied with internally generated information, the capacity left over for picking
up other kinds of information is limited, and what does get through tends to be
hazy, insufficient or inaccurate. This is one reason why being self-conscious
interferes with the ability to carry out ordinary activities in a natural and smooth
way, so that your elbow knocks the flowers from the table, or your tie lands in
the soup, or you hesitate when greeting someone between the handshake and the
kiss, and suddenly feel that you do not know what you are expected to say or do,
or where to put yourself.
We know this is happening from research as well as from what people say
about their anxiety. Researchers have found that socially anxious people
remember fewer details of the situations they have been in compared with other
people, and also that they rate other people’s facial expressions more negatively
than others do. It is as if they know a great deal about themselves, but rather less
about things outside themselves, and use their socially anxious imagination
when they fill in the gaps. Socially anxious people tend to measure the degree of
risk involved in a particular situation not in terms of social factors such as what
might happen, or who might be there, but in terms of how they might feel. Also,
the worse they feel the more dangerous the situation seems to be. Internal
information becomes the measure of the amount of risk involved.
 In terms of the model described in Chapter 5, and shown here, self-
consciousness is at the centre of all the main vicious cycles that keep social
anxiety going, and some complex, real-life examples of these cycles are
provided next. These have been chosen to illustrate how, much of the time, the
effects of self-consciousness do not come separately, but are mixed up together.
When you read through the examples, try to notice the many different ways in
which feeling self-conscious works to keep the problem going.

James and his girlfriend were going to have a meal with her parents. He
did not know them well yet, and as soon as they walked in at the door he
thought to himself that they were sizing him up. Suddenly he became
aware of every movement he made, and everything he thought of saying
seemed to present itself for inspection before he said it – only to be
censored at once. His mouth felt too dry to talk, and he felt too awkward
to ask for a drink. All he could think about was his inner foolishness, and
the need for the situation to come to end. ‘How long is this going to last?’
was the question in his mind. Then suddenly everyone was laughing, and
he had clearly missed the joke. He had the terrible thought that he must
have done something odd, or said something stupid, and that they were
laughing at him. Later his girlfriend told him that no one had noticed
anything at all. Although he had been rather quiet at first, to her this had
seemed understandable – and only natural.

As Sandra came into the office the head of her department stopped as
he rushed by and asked if she would make a couple of announcements
for him at their group’s early morning meeting. He had unexpectedly
been called out, and as he hurried away, he thrust a piece of paper into
her hand with something scribbled on it. Sandra was extremely nervous
about having to do this and she knew that the longer she had to worry the
worse she would feel. So she decided to do it immediately, and walked
straight into the meeting room without even taking her coat off. The
meeting was just starting, so she went to the front of the room, explained
why she was there and read out the first part of the message. But the
second part had been scribbled so hurriedly that it was almost impossible
to read. She hesitated, and suddenly she heard her voice dying away. As
the silence went on she was convinced that all eyes were upon her,
standing there awkwardly, still in her overcoat. In her mind’s eye she had
a vision of how she must look. She described herself later as childish
looking; tall, shapeless like a lanky adolescent, with the bit of paper
fluttering in her trembling hands, peering at it short-sightedly for a clue as
to what it might mean. It seemed like an eternity before she thought of
explaining that she could not read his writing and passed the note to
someone else. When they could do no better than she had done, her
confusion died away, but only partly. The image of seeing herself as
others saw her haunted her for the rest of the day. Each time it came
back she was covered with confusion again, feeling hot and foolish, as if
stripped of all protective armour.

Andrew was talking on the telephone when three people he knew

walked into the room, talking loudly to each other. As he became aware
that they could hear everything he was saying, he lowered his voice. One
of them noticed this and told the others to be quieter, and in the hush that
followed his voice appeared to Andrew to echo round the room. He could
no longer concentrate on what he was saying, or understand properly
what was being said to him. He spoke even more quietly, until he was
almost whispering, and the silence around him appeared to grow.
Frantically he wondered how to end the conversation, and so he made
some excuse (that later he could not remember), and hung up. He was
astonished when he looked up that the others were no longer there. They
must have walked through the room and out the other side. It was the
thought that they might have been listening and judging him that had
made him so self-conscious, and had dominated his thoughts to the
extent that he was unaware of anything else.

BOX 9.1: SUMMARY OF THE EFFECTS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

1 It focuses attention on to yourself so you notice:

sensations like feeling hot;
behaviors, like fiddling with your hands;
emotions (or feelings), like feeling embarrassed;
thoughts, like ‘They think I’m peculiar’.
2 You tend to see yourself as you suppose others see you.
3 It makes you want to protect yourself: by keeping yourself safe or escaping from the
situation.
4 It is difficult to notice other things accurately at the same time, although you may also notice
some things of particular significance to you, like a fleeting expression on someone’s face,
without noticing much else.
5 You feel increasingly at risk, and all these effects get more pronounced, and make the
 5 You feel increasingly at risk, and all these effects get more pronounced, and make the
problem worse, the longer they go on.

An exercise

As a way of understanding better what happens to you, and its various effects,
think about some specific instances from your own experience. Try to think
through one or two of them in enough detail to identify how self-consciousness
makes you feel more vulnerable. It is often difficult to work out how it deprives
you of accurate information about what is going on, as of course you will have
no memory for the information that you never picked up in the first place, and
you may have filled the gaps using your own imagination. But you may
remember how, when your attention is turned inwards, it becomes difficult to
follow what people are saying, to notice what they are doing, and to judge how
they are really reacting. It is easy to suppose that they can see all the signs of
anxiety and inadequacy that you feel, and to suppose that when they see them
they are judging you – negatively, of course – on the basis of them. Many of the
conclusions that people reach when they feel self-conscious are based on their
inner experience of the feelings, sensations and actions that they find so
distressing: ‘I said so little, and felt so embarrassed that they could see how
inadequate and useless I am.’ It is as if they are so aware of these things that they
suppose that other people must be so too. For each specific situation you can
think of, answer these two questions:

What conclusions about yourself did you come to after a time when you felt self-
conscious?
What conclusions do you think other people came to about you at the same time?

Reducing self-consciousness

The key to reducing self consciousness is to learn how to focus more of your
attention on what is happening outside yourself, instead of on what is happening
inside; to forget yourself enough to become absorbed in your social life instead.
To do this, you need consciously to concentrate on diverting your attention away
from yourself and on to other things, including the other people around you – the
source of the fear. The attitude that helps you to do this is one of curiosity. Your
task is to watch what happens, and to think openly about it, just as a scientist
might when investigating a new field. Adopting this attitude helps you to interact
with others more smoothly and more naturally. Listen to what they say, and look
at what they do before coming to a judgment about how they are reacting. Think
of yourself as exploring so as to reach a considered opinion that another
dispassionate observer of the same situation would also agree with. Try to make
sure that you are not relying on guesswork, as this is highly likely to be
influenced by your expectations and assumptions.
Of course, this is easier said than done. As you know, when you feel bad it is
difficult not to think about yourself, and to turn your attention away from your
distress. Painful experiences tend to dominate our attention, and not many
people could obey the instructions above without more guidance as to how to set
about it. So it is helpful to think of learning to divert your attention as a two-
stage process:

1 Deciding not to think about the unpleasant experiences.

2 Filling your mind with something else.

Deciding not to think about the unpleasant experiences

It would be useful for unpleasant thoughts, feelings and sensations to grab your
attention if the risk involved was a real one, and you really were in some danger.
So first remember that the danger is more imagined than real. If you doubt this,
go back to Chapter 7, and see if you can use the thinking skills described there to
help you find a new perspective: one that helps you to keep thoughts about social
danger and catastrophe in perspective. Secondly, ask yourself whether there is
anything to be gained by dwelling on the unpleasantness that you experience.
Does it have any benefits? Does it give you any advantages? For example, do
you think that it might help to prepare you for the worst? Or allow you to make
your escape before the thing that you fear most actually happens? Thoughts such
as these are common, but in practice focusing your attention on yourself, or self-
consciousness, has far more disadvantages than advantages.
See if you can write down the advantages for you of not thinking about these
unpleasant experiences, and make the decision to turn your attention away from
them when they intrude – which undoubtedly they will, at least at first. When
your heart is thumping and you cannot find the words with which to express
yourself, the disadvantage of paying attention to your feelings is that it makes
you worse: increasingly self-aware and self-conscious. Before long you just wish
that the ground would open and swallow you (mercifully) up. One advantage of
forcing yourself to focus on people and things around you is that it gives you
some recovery time. Use the examples given at the start of this chapter, and the
information in Box 9.1 above, to prompt you to think of more advantages for
you.

Focusing on what is happening around you

The aim of this strategy is to enable you to rely less on guesswork. You should
try to give more attention to the person or people with whom you are interacting,
so that you can listen better to what is being said, look at the other people
involved, and notice their reactions as well as your own. The aim is not to focus
100 per cent of your attention on them and to forget yourself entirely, but to be
able to achieve a balance between internal and external focusing. You would not,
for example, keep your eyes fixed (unnaturally) on someone else, but rather
allow yourself to make eye contact and to look away just as you might if you did
not feel anxious at all.
If this seems too difficult at first, then one way to make it easier might be to
give yourself something to do at the same time, like the task of finding out
something about the other person or people involved. Ask yourself what you
think of the way they dress, or how you can tell what they are feeling, or what
their occupations are. Find something about them that interests you. Imagine that
you were going to describe them to someone else, and notice some of their
characteristics.
When your mind wanders
When deciding not to think about unpleasant experiences, and turning your
attention to something else, you may find that your attention wanders off, or
appears to be grabbed once again by your internal sensations and feelings. This
is entirely normal, as attention is not a static, unchanging system, but an active,
dynamic one. Unless we are especially relaxed and sleepy, our attention
constantly shifts, as if we were always scanning and interrogating our
surroundings. So, even when you have made the ‘right’ decision, and have
succeeded in making yourself focus on something outside yourself, you may find
that you quickly lose the new focus. When this happens, just repeat your original
plan. Turn your attention outwards again; and it may help to think about
something external (and unthreatening), and to do something to help engage your
attention as well. Then the two strategies described so far, changing patterns of
thinking and doing things differently, can fit together with the ones introduced
here for reducing self-consciousness.

The two-way experiment

The two-way experiment can help you to learn how to control what you pay
attention to. It involves trying things out in two completely different, contrasting
ways, and comparing what you notice and what you feel on the two occasions. It
means adopting the attitude of curiosity and finding out what happens if you pay
attention exclusively to yourself, even exaggerating what happens when you feel
self-conscious, and then doing the opposite. That would mean forcing yourself to
pay attention exclusively to someone else or to something outside of yourself. It
takes some courage to carry out this experiment, and you need to think carefully
about it before you start. Where and when could you do it? How will you
explore the difference between the two occasions? An example follows.
One relatively easy way of carrying out such an experiment might be to
choose a setting when you are not much involved, or even not involved at all,
with the people around you, such as when standing in the supermarket queue, or
sitting on a bus or train with other people nearby. First, focus on yourself. Notice
all the physical sensations that you can feel. Are you hot or cold? Hungry?
Tired? Can you feel your clothes? Is anything too tight or too loose? What are
your feelings and emotions? Is anything particular running through your mind?
Any images? Or impressions? Or memories? In order to keep up the internal
focusing for long enough for the experiment to be useful you should probably
continue doing this for three to five minutes. If your mind wanders, then bring it
back to yourself. It is all right to let your mind wander on to your own concerns
and worries, if you like, but if it wanders away from yourself then just bring it
back again and keep up the internal focus.
Then ask yourself the two assessment questions: How did you feel? and What
did you notice? When answering these questions you could use your curiosity as
a prompt. Were you surprised by how many things were going on inside? Did
you become more aware of your inner experiences? If so, did this change them
in any way? Make them more or less intense? And what did you notice? Do you
know anything about what the other people around you looked like? About their
expressions, appearance, conversations and actions, for example? Could you
describe something about one of them? Or describe exactly what one of them
was doing while you were focusing on yourself? You should make sure that your
answers are clear to yourself. Make a mental note of them, or even write them
down, before going on with the experiment.
The next step is to reverse the experiment. For another few minutes try to
focus your attention exclusively outside yourself. Notice something about each
of the people around you. Without obviously staring at them, see if you can be
sensitive to something about them, such as how they might feel, how lively or
energetic or lethargic they seem, how physically fit they might be – anything you
can think of that might be of interest to you. If it seems natural and appropriate,
then talk to them. Allow yourself to get into conversation, and allow your
curiosity to lead the way. Then ask yourself the two assessment questions again:
What did you feel this time? and What did you notice this time? Make sure your
answers are clear again, by making either a mental or a written note.
Finally, to sum up the experiment, and think about what you have learned,
compare your answers to the two sets of questions. Draw some conclusions on
the basis of what happened, first about the effects of focusing your attention
internally, and second about the effects of focusing your attention externally.
What did you do in order to use your curiosity, and focus externally? How did
you do it? Could you do it again, in more demanding situations?

BOX 9.2: SUMMARY OF THE TWO-WAY EXPERIMENT

1 The internal focus: pay full attention to yourself, e.g. for three to five minutes.
2 Answer the assessment questions:
How did you feel?
What did you notice?
Make your answers clear to yourself. Make a mental or written note of them.
3 The external focus: pay full attention to other people, e.g. for three to five minutes.
4 Answer the assessment questions:
How did you feel?
What did you notice?
Make your answers clear to yourself. Make a mental or written note of them.
5 Compare the two:
What was different?
What was the same?
6 Summarize your conclusions:
Which way made you feel better?
Which way gave you more of the information that helps you along, socially?
Was the external focus difficult to achieve? How did you do it?
Do you need more practice to achieve the desired effect? If so, when could you try
it again?

Doing a brief two-way mini-experiment when talking to someone is particularly

informative, and you may need to carry out a few two-way experiments to gain
the maximum benefit from them. Rather like pulling a pendulum back before
swinging it in the other direction, this experiment allows you to compare two
extreme ways of paying attention, and you might want to think about achieving a
happy medium in the end, allowing your attention to come and to go more
naturally and spontaneously.

Making use of observation: curiosity in practice

If you went to the departures gate at an airport you would see lots of people
saying goodbye to each other. At the arrivals gate you would see another lot of
people meeting up and greeting each other. As a curious observer of people in
this setting you would notice that there are an enormous number of different
ways of parting and greeting. What happens depends on many things: the age of
the people, how well they know each other, their nationality, their moods, how
long they will be, or have been, apart, who else is with them and so on. There is
clearly no single way, and therefore no objectively right way, of conducting this
common social interchange, even though it is one of the most basic of all.
But shy people, and people who are socially anxious, often talk as if they were
in danger of ‘doing it wrong’ – as if they had a notion of an ideal way to behave.
They also assume that what they do will fall short of this ideal, and therefore run
the risk of being ‘unacceptable’. But whose is the ideal? Looking at widely
disparate groups suggests either that ideals are very different between people or
that the range of acceptable practice is much wider than anxious people suppose
it is. In the end people do whatever they feel comfortable with, or what works
for them. Which is why there is no need to be self-conscious about the way you
do things, at least from other people’s point of view.
If there are no absolute ideals for how we should behave, moment by moment,
with each other, then there is no reason to suppose that doing something in an
unusual way, or in a way that feels wrong, attracts the attention of others. Here
are some facts that socially anxious people have found out, through the
experiments that they have conducted. If you were able to turn yourself into a
scientist again, curious to find out about the social life around you and how it
works, you could double-check these findings, and see if they were true for you,
and in your circumstances, too.
Some observations made by others

Usually symptoms of social anxiety feel worse than they look. When you
think everyone can see the shaking or nervousness that you can feel, you
are usually wrong.
Even when people do notice, they usually pay little attention, as it does
not have much significance for them.
 People often look calm even when they do not feel calm.
Most people do not notice much about what others do. They are more
likely to be preoccupied with their own concerns.
Most people do not spend much time judging, criticizing or evaluating
others.
Practically no one is completely happy with the way they are, or with the
way they manage to get on with others.

One of the odd things about social anxiety is that it produces a number of
paradoxical effects. You may feel as if you are the centre of attention at the same
time as feeling so inferior and inadequate that you believe that no one is at all
interested in you. You may become preoccupied with yourself and with what is
happening to you, and susceptible to painful bouts of self-consciousness, but at
the same time be quite uncertain about your identity – about who you are. You
want to do things right, and to be acceptable, but still want your individuality to
be recognized and to be able to realize your potential. You do not want to be
disregarded, but yet want to be invisible. You think you are not worth noticing,
but are quite sure that everyone notices you. You want to keep the bad feelings
in check, but find it hard to stop doing things that make them worse. Some
people, noticing these paradoxical effects, can be misled into thinking that being
socially anxious is a kind of self-importance; that it is based on the assumption
that you matter so much that everyone pays, or should pay, you lots of attention.
In fact, social anxiety is more often based on the opposite assumption – that you
are in some way weak, inferior, inadequate or less good than others, combined
with the fear that this, supposedly inherent, inferiority will be noticed and have
dire consequences for your ability to get on with people and to feel that you
belong.

A postscript on self-consciousness and keeping safe

When overtaken by a bout of self-consciousness it can be extremely difficult to

wrest your attention away from yourself – hence the practical suggestions above
to help you do it, and hence the need to practise by first focusing your attention
externally in situations that are not too threatening. There is another possibility,
also, that might help to explain why it is difficult to put the suggestions in this
chapter into effect. This is that the inward focus that goes with self-
consciousness, and increases it the longer it continues, can be another way of
protecting yourself. It can feel as if you dare not focus your attention on the
outside world, for fear of what you might find out there – as if you were fearful
of picking up other people’s negative signals. This fear makes it hard to turn
your attention outwards: to look straight at someone when you know you are
about to blush, or think you have made a fool of yourself in some way: to let
them see you ‘at your worst’, and have to watch their reactions when they spot
your vulnerability. It is easier to glance briefly up and then look away, retreating
into yourself again, than to give up the self-protection altogether. But brief
ventures into the outside world in this way tend to increase your fear rather than
to reduce it. They alert you to the possibility of danger out there without giving
you long enough to assess its reality or to think about how to defuse it.
The self-protective attempts of inward focus are understandable but they fail.
They fail to protect you because they curtail your curiosity and make it
impossible to confound your fears. So fear of what is out there increases the fear
of what might happen next (anticipatory anxiety); it demands your attention in
the present moment, and the bad feelings tend to haunt you afterwards. In other
words, inward focus affects your perception – what you notice, and therefore the
information that gets into your mind; it affects the way you interpret the
information that you have perceived, and influences how you think about it; and
it determines the kind of information that you store about what happened, so it
also affects what you remember afterwards. The ideas in this chapter are mostly
about how to change what you notice: how to make sure that you keep in touch
with what is really happening and do not deprive yourself of accurate
information about the world outside yourself. The theme running through this
chapter is that self-consciousness, focusing your attention on to your inner
experiences, fills your mind predominantly with information that makes you feel
worse.
Of course, this affects your thinking and your behavior as well as your
feelings. So the methods for changing patterns of thinking and for doing things
differently fit together well with those for reducing self-consciousness. It makes
good practical sense, when starting to work at overcoming your shyness and
social anxiety, to concentrate on one method at a time. Then you can work out
which aspect of the problem to focus on first, or to put most energy into
changing, because it causes you most problems. But in the end you will find that
the methods fit naturally together, so that thinking differently and reducing
negative patterns of thinking help you to do things in different ways, and to
become involved, socially, in more spontaneous, less self-conscious, ways. In
the next chapter we will expand these ideas, and also focus more on the
information that is stored in memory. Although you cannot change your
experience – you cannot change what has happened to you – you can use your
experience – you cannot change what has happened to you – you can use your
memory differently, so that you are no longer haunted by past memories and
restricted by unnecessary fears. The aim of the next chapter is to explain what
you can do to build your confidence.

KEY POINTS

Self-consciousness comes from focusing your attention inwards.

It is at the centre of all the vicious cycles that help to keep the problem going.
It also makes the problem worse.
Focusing attention inwards fills you with information about yourself and your reactions to
feeling anxious. It also means that you have less attention available for things outside
yourself. So feeling self-conscious leaves you short of accurate, detailed information. It
leaves you with a hazy impression of what was going on.
Reducing self-consciousness involves: working out how self-consciousness affects you;
deciding not to think about unpleasant experiences; filling your mind with something else.
It is extremely helpful to use your sense of curiosity. Think of yourself as a scientist who
is finding out more about social interactions. You could carry out two-way experiments, in
easy situations first; and you could turn yourself into an accurate, interested and curious
observer.
It may take some courage to stop retreating into yourself, and instead to focus on what is
happening around you. Although the retreat feels safer, it can make you vulnerable to
episodes of self-consciousness. Facing the world is a far safer option in the end.
Self-consciousness influences what you perceive, how you interpret it and what you
remember. Broadening your focus of attention changes what you perceive; working on
your thoughts can change how you interpret what happens; and doing things in a new
way starts to fill your memory with new things, so that the three strategies described so
far fit together well.
10

Building up confidence

Everyone who suffers from social anxiety is likely to benefit to some degree
from the three strategies described so far: changing thinking patterns, doing
things differently and reducing self-consciousness, especially if they do some of
the exercises described in Chapters 7, 8 and 9. You may find that making these
changes is enough, or you may continue to feel shaky and at risk for
considerably longer than you had hoped – as if something could still go wrong
for you at any time. If you cope better with your difficulties at times, but still
feel unconfident underneath, as if the changes do not rest on a sure foundation,
then do not be tempted to give up. Persistence is likely to lead to progress, even
when the changes seem too slow and insubstantial to make a noticeable
difference at first. The reason for working systematically on building up your
confidence as well is that it helps to hasten these changes.

Where does confidence come from?

Many people assume that confidence is something that you either have or do not
have, as if it were determined by the fact that you inherited a strong personality,
or was written in the stars. But this assumption – whatever it is based on – is
false. Another common assumption is that confidence comes from experience;
from the things that happened to you and from the way you were treated as you
grew up. If, for example, the people around you were encouraging and
appreciative, and did what they could to foster your development; if they were
not too harsh in their use of criticism and punishment, and built you up rather
than undermined you; if you fitted in well at school and were able to make
friends – then you should have all that is necessary for being confident. If not,
then the opportunity for becoming confident has been missed once and for all,
and the foundation is just not there. But this is not true either. As was explained
in Chapter 4, many factors combine to make you the way you are. Whatever
your age, and whatever your life-story might suggest, your self-confidence can
still increase.

BOX 10.1: NON-SOCIAL ACTIVITIES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO CONFIDENCE

Being able to driving a car, or cook a meal, or plan a holiday.

Choosing what you like in the way of music, or pictures, or plays; TV shows, or films;
books to read; sporting activities; hobbies, e.g. gardening, photography, making a
collection.
Skills: playing a sport, or musical instrument, or making things, or using a computer or
word processor.
Running things: a house, or a club or a business.
Working skills: organizing yourself, planning your day, managing your time efficiently.
Keeping your financial or tax affairs in order.
Using your knowledge: identifying plants, or cars, or antiques; doing crosswords;
improving your home.

There are some facts about confidence that it might be useful to know. First,
there are many different ways in which someone can be confident, or
unconfident. I am confident that I can cook a good meal for a family celebration,
but unconfident that I can learn to use the program on my computer for drawing
diagrams. A shy or socially anxious person might have no qualms about various
demanding or highly sophisticated activities, like climbing a mountain, or being
able to understand the chemical composition of a new drug, but still find it
difficult to enter a room full of people. So the degree of confidence that you feel
is not a fixed quantity, but depends on what you are doing. This means that you
should beware of thinking of yourself as unconfident as a person, and instead try
to divide your confidence up into its component parts. Some examples of the
many, non-social, activities that contribute to feeling confident are listed in Box
10.1.

Is self-confidence different from this?

This is a difficult question to answer. People who are not self-confident talk as if
they have a general lack of confidence, and they can describe some of the ways
in which this affects them. These include such things as being tentative in the
way they approach things; being reluctant to try anything new or to show
initiative; being more prone to uncertainty and to doubt before, during or after
doing something they find difficult; and wanting to seek reassurance from
others, and to keep their perceived weaknesses well hidden. It is as if their lack
of self-confidence makes them feel inadequate or inferior or incompetent
compared to the people around them, and as if others do not have similar doubts;
as if lacking self-confidence sets them apart from other people, and makes them
different.
But even for people who say they have no self-confidence at all, there are
some things that they feel confident about. One difference between them and
others is that they undervalue, ignore or discount these things, as if they were not
important and had no significance. So they might be able to map read, or keep
small children amused for an afternoon, or keep their potted plants alive
throughout the winter, or install a new computer program; but such things do not
weigh with them. They discount them as if they had no personal meaning, and
assume that their kind of ‘unconfidence’ is somehow more fundamental than
this. Having compared themselves with others, they draw conclusions in terms
of what this means about them ‘as a person’, and then assume that their
presumed defects matter more than other, less socially relevant, abilities, such as
being good at keeping accounts, or writing letters, or sports.
But confident people also have doubts about themselves. This is because the
amount of confidence that self-confident people feel at any particular time is not
fixed and constant from moment to moment, even though it may appear to others
to be so. So the confidence they feel does not depend only on what they are
doing. It depends on other things too, such as their general attitudes about what
matters, and their moods; on how they are feeling. At low moments, when
feeling dispirited or tired or lacking in energy and initiative, the feeling of
confidence may seem to ebb away. Sometimes it springs back as soon as the
feeling changes for the better, and sometimes it is slow to return. Anyone’s
confidence can take a jolt, for instance if they suffer a painful rejection or an
apparently endless run of bad luck, or make a mistake that they ‘should have
been able to foresee’. Confidence ebbs and flows, and this means that everyone,
confident people included, sometimes worries about things that normally would
hardly bother them – and sometimes with good reason.
As already mentioned, many people – even most people – can look confident
even when that is not how they feel. Some consciously adopt a veneer of
confidence, and then they can, for example, introduce their partner to a colleague
even when they feel nervous. Others may, almost unconsciously perhaps, draw
on the assumption that, even if they ‘do it badly’, it will not really matter. So
they might stumble over the words, or make the introduction in a gauche and
they might stumble over the words, or make the introduction in a gauche and
awkward way, but not let this bother them too much. They can allow it to flow
out of the mind like water flows down the river, go on to the next thing without
dwelling too much on the temporary embarrassments that happen to everyone.

Behaving ‘as if’

When you put on the veneer, then people tend to take you at your own
estimation – and assume that you are as confident as you look. This is one reason
why socially anxious people often suppose that they are less confident (and less
competent) than others. They are aware of what it feels like inside and cannot
easily tell how unconfident other people feel. It is also why one of the most
useful and helpful strategies to adopt is to behave ‘as if’ you were more
confident than you feel.
Ask yourself, when joining a conversation for instance, or when you are about
to enter a room full of people and feel like sliding invisibly through the door, and
slipping quietly round behind those who are already there, how you would
behave if you really were confident. How would you enter the room then? How
would you look? Or move? Or behave? How would you stand? Adopting a
confident posture, and being ready to meet other people’s gaze, for example,
changes the whole situation. It helps you to interact in an apparently more
confident way, and then has a remarkable effect on how confident you feel. This
is because the behavior and the feelings link up. The link is obvious when you
feel anxious and behave nervously, but less obvious when you behave
confidently and then feel better. So behaving the way you want to feel can bring
about the thing you want to happen.
The effect will be even stronger if, knowing that thoughts, feelings and
behaviors interact, you add in the link with thoughts, and give yourself an
encouraging message or adopt a confident way of thinking as well. Again, if
your head is full of self-doubts and self-denigration you will feel bad and your
behavior will be less confident. Instead, saying something to yourself that
reflects the confidence you do not yet feel, but would like to feel, such as ‘It’s
fine to be the way I am’, or ‘I’m doing OK’, ‘I want to be friendly’, or ‘None of
these people are really out to threaten me’, may help to bring about the sense of
confidence from which the rest follows. Behaving ‘as if’ this were true can make
a big difference to how you feel, to what you do, and also to what happens to
you next, as different behavior from you elicits different behavior from others
and so on.
Seeking out success

Nothing works so well as success when trying to defeat anxiety, so another

valuable way to build confidence is to take part in activities in which ‘success’,
in social terms, is easier to come by, or to think of ways of joining in that oil the
wheels of communication once you get there. Researchers have found that
people forget themselves and their anxiety more easily if they are involved in
activities that are helpful to others. Participating in altruistic activities such as a
community project to raise funds for a new playground, or to make access to the
local shops easier for disabled people, provides a context in which many people
can more easily forget themselves, and it provides a sense of belonging that can
help to counteract the socially anxious person’s sense of difference or isolation.
Working together with others on a joint concern eases communication in many
ways, whatever the particular cause: political, social, educational, cultural,
sporting or of some other kind. People who doubt their competence, or
acceptability, or adequacy, in other situations find that being able to contribute
as part of a group helps to remove these doubts. So, if there is some cause that
people around you are involved in, or one that is of particular interest to you,
then joining in could provide the kind of success experience that gives your
confidence a boost. With the boost behind you, it is often easier to tackle
something harder that might feel more personally relevant, like asking someone
out for a date or speaking up in front of a group.
Doing things with people you find especially unthreatening provides another
helpful context for confidence building. Whom exactly you find unthreatening
will depend on you; examples include people younger than yourself, or children,
or older people, or single people, or people who have young families, or people
who live in a certain neighbourhood, or people who need help in some way, or
family members and so on. The principle is a simple one: success breeds
success. If you can seek it out, then you will be able to use it to build up your
confidence.

Underlying beliefs and assumptions

Confidence grows when things go well for you, and it comes partly from doing
things that you find difficult, rather than avoiding them or withdrawing from
them. The more you do, the more likely it is that your confidence will grow.
However, for some people there are certain underlying beliefs and assumptions
that persist despite the changes they make. Then it is useful to focus on changing
those underlying beliefs and assumptions as well, and the three strategies
described in Chapters 7, 8 and 9, ‘Changing Thinking Patterns’, ‘Doing Things
Differently’ and ‘Reducing Self-Consciousness’, provide valuable tools for
doing this when combined with the strategies described in this chapter. This is
because the different levels of thinking, or cognition, at which they operate fit
closely together, and what happens at one level influences what happens at the
others.

A reminder about the different levels of cognition

The three levels of thinking distinguished in Chapter 3 were the level of

attention, the level of automatic thoughts and the level of underlying beliefs and
assumptions (see here). The deepest cognitive layer, so to speak, according to
this way of dividing thoughts up, is the level of the beliefs, which for all of us
reflect our basic attitudes: ‘I can handle most of the things that come my way’;
‘People are usually trustworthy’; ‘Things are bound to go wrong some of the
time’. As these examples show, one way of dividing up the sorts of beliefs that
people have is to think of them in terms of whether they apply to yourself, to
other people or to the world in general. Assumptions are like rules for living that
fit with the underlying beliefs: ‘If I was asked to do something new I could
probably learn how to do it’; ‘If people are friendly towards you, you can mostly
believe what they say’; ‘If things sometimes go wrong, then it is important to
remember that they sometimes go right too’. As these examples show, thinking
at any level can be predominantly positive as well as being predominantly
negative.
At the next level are automatic thoughts that reflect what comes into one’s
mind, or the continuous, moment-to-moment stream of consciousness, whether
or not it has been put into words: ‘This is going to be difficult’, ‘He was really
friendly to me’, ‘This is about to go horribly wrong’.
At the level of attention are all the things that people notice and pay attention
to: the internal feeling of dread and sense of hesitation, and all the features of
self-consciousness that were discussed in the previous chapter, as well as
glimpses of other people’s smiles and frowns.
These three levels of thinking fit together. Someone who believed that other
people were mostly hostile, assumed he should ‘never let his armour drop’,
thought that they were always looking for ways to put him down, noticed their
failure to smile or say ‘good morning’ to him. If you believed, underneath, that
‘People are usually critical and rejecting’, then you might assume that ‘If you
meet someone new, you should be wary of them, and keep on your guard’; think
thoughts such as ‘They don’t like me’, and notice your nervousness when faced
with strangers. The point of emphasizing this idea here is that when negative
beliefs and assumptions predominate over more positive ones, or are especially
powerful, they can continue to influence your thinking and what you notice
despite your best efforts to change your thinking patterns, your behavior and
your self-consciousness. Then they need special attention. Learning how to
change your beliefs and assumptions as well will help you to make all the other
changes that you would like to make.

Where do beliefs and assumptions come from?

People are not born with their beliefs ready made. These beliefs are more like
conclusions that they have come to on the basis of what happens to them.
Thinking patterns develop over many years, and when people have had
longstanding difficulties such as those that affect their social lives, then they
have often drawn more drastic conclusions than others, and have stronger, more
dominant, negative beliefs and assumptions than those others. For example,
someone who remembered being punished severely and unpredictably as a child
came to believe: ‘I am always doing things wrong’, and developed a rule for
living to go with this belief: ‘If you keep out of the way, you will also keep out
of trouble.’ The important point about this is that, in these circumstances, the
belief made sense, and the rule for living that went with it served a useful
function. This is true even though this person had not put these ways of thinking
into words before seeking help.
In this example, the belief and its associated way of thinking helped the
person avoid some of the punishment that might otherwise have come his way.
But ‘keeping out of the way’ is not such a useful rule later on in life, when
wanting to be able to meet people, make friends, start work, and build up
satisfying partnerships and relationships. So ‘old’ beliefs are sometimes
outdated, and one of the aims of the methods described next is to help you to
update and revise any of your beliefs that get in the way of change, and to
develop new rules for living that work better for you now. When underlying
levels of thinking change, then the surface ones become easier to change too.
Often we do not know where the beliefs and assumptions that we have ended
up with came from. But sometimes they seem to have developed after particular
distressing events, like being teased and rejected at school, being harshly
criticized, or feeling humiliated and embarrassed in front of people whose
opinion was important. Such experiences can provide compelling evidence for
the beliefs at the time, and leave you with painful memories or images, but they
do not prove that the beliefs are generally true. Someone who was teased or
bullied at school might well come to hold a belief such as ‘I am unacceptable’,
and this belief could persist until it is brought out into the open and re-examined.
When such beliefs and assumptions prevent you making progress, it is
important to learn to step back and take a cool look at them. The aim is to think
about them again, as if from a completely different standpoint, and to see them
as someone else might see them. Ask yourself whether the belief seemed once to
be true, but is now outdated; or whether it is exaggerated. Is anybody totally
unacceptable, for instance? Is this more like a feeling – based on unpleasant,
distressing memories – than a thought based on hard fact? Learning how to
change beliefs and assumptions should help you, when answering questions such
as these.
How beliefs and assumptions work
Our beliefs and assumptions provide the framework with which we approach the
world. It is as if everything that happens to us, everything we see, think and
involve ourselves in, has to be sifted through this filter on its way in.
An analogy may be helpful. Imagine that the way in which all of us filter the
information that comes to us is like a window on the world. Then the shape of
that window, and the colour of the glass in it, and where we stand in relation to
it, determine what we see. If the window is too small, or has coloured, dirty or
uneven glass in it, then it will limit or distort what we can see. If we could look
through another window instead – or come closer so that we could see out
properly, or open it wide so that we did not have to peer through the glass – then
we would see things differently. All of these actions would give us a new
perspective; but most of us do not do these things because we assume that our
view of the world is realistic. We do not stop to think about the characteristics of
the window we may be looking through, but suppose that our view is the correct,
or even the only possible, one.
For example, a friendly invitation to come out for a drink, seen through the
eyes of someone who believed that nobody liked him, provoked these
comments: ‘She must have been pushed for company’; ‘She probably just felt
sorry for me’; ‘Maybe she wants me to do something for her’; and later he
added, ‘Nobody wants me around’ – as if the invitation had in fact never
happened. He had, in fact completely forgotten about it by the time he was
prompted to talk about it a few days later. From his perspective, the friendliness
of the invitation was not even part of the picture.

Changing underlying – or undermining – beliefs

Changing underlying – or undermining – beliefs

Underlying beliefs reflect what things mean to you. They often ‘go without
saying’, and they may be hard to put into the exact words that fit for you, partly
because meanings are sometimes elusive. They also seem obviously true when
you believe them, so that there seems to be no point in questioning them. But
this is wrong, as beliefs can be just as false, misguided, unhelpful or outdated as
any other kinds of thoughts.
Some examples of the beliefs of other socially anxious people may help you
to identify the kinds of beliefs that undermine your confidence. Remember, as
described in Chapter 3, these beliefs may be more like an underlying sense of
yourself than a clear statement that you regularly put into words, and they tend
to reflect categorical judgments – or judgments that are supposedly absolutely
right or wrong and admit of no half-measures, such as ‘I am odd . . . weird . . .
different . . . boring . . . unattractive’, or ‘I am inferior . . . inadequate . . .
unacceptable . . . unlikeable’. They reflect your ideas and impressions about how
other people are too: ‘Other people are always judging you . . . criticizing . . .
never unconfident or anxious’; or ‘Others don’t like people who are nervous . . .
shy . . . quiet’ (see here). These beliefs often sound – and may feel – like
statements of fact, although in reality they reflect opinions and attitudes rather
than facts, and therefore can be questioned, re-examined and rephrased, perhaps
in less categorical, or absolute, terms. Two straightforward steps for helping you
do this are described next.

Step 1: Identifying your own personal beliefs

Start by thinking of a recent situation in which you felt socially anxious: a

situation in which your individual version of the problem caused you distress or
difficulty. It is best to have a particular situation in mind (like ‘going to Jenny’s
house last week’), rather than a type of situation (like ‘meeting new people’).
Good examples would be situations like a time when you got angry with
someone but could not say so, or a time when you heard the voices of people
talking in the room you were about to enter and stopped because you were
suddenly flooded with feelings of anxiety and dread. Then you should think
through this situation from beginning to end, without avoiding anything about it
that might make you shudder again in retrospect, or make you feel reluctant to
face up to its full implications.
Identifying beliefs and assumptions can be a painful business, so give yourself
time and try not to rush into it. Remember that many other people have similar
beliefs. You are not the only one who has to work at them in order to feel better,
and do the things that you want to do. Make yourself go through all the details of
and do the things that you want to do. Make yourself go through all the details of
what happened by describing them to yourself, or by talking yourself through it
again, or by imagining that you can see it all on an internal video screen. Pay
attention to the thoughts, the general impressions and the images that come to
mind, and to any internal monologue or dialogue with yourself that was going on
at the time. Focus on what you think you did ‘wrong’ in that situation. Then ask
yourself the following key questions:
Key questions for identifying beliefs

What do you think were your shortcomings?

How are you judging yourself?
What did it mean to you, that it was so problematic?
What does it mean about you?
What are the attitudes of others?
What does this tell you about them?

The aim is to clarify what the situation meant to you then, and what it still
means to you – and about you – now. Then, with one of your ‘social failures’
fully in mind, complete each of these sentences:

1 I am .............................................................
2 Others are ....................................................

Use whatever words come to mind to express your inner beliefs. Your own
words will reflect the particular shade of meaning that is important to you, so
although many people may have the same kinds of beliefs, for example about not
being likeable, or acceptable, or attractive, they will express them in different
ways, and these slight differences reflect their different personalities and
experiences.
You could broaden your understanding of yourself and your underlying
beliefs by thinking through other difficult or embarrassing events that have
happened to you as well. You may find that you always come to the same
conclusions, or you may find that you have a relatively large set of beliefs, and
that different ones come to the fore at different times. If so, ask yourself whether
one of the beliefs is more important or more fundamental to you than the others.
More fundamental beliefs, or core beliefs, tend to be ones that arouse the
strongest feelings, and are most closely related to your worries and fears. They
are the ones that make you want to protect yourself most, and to seek out ways
of keeping yourself safe, as facing up to them and to their implications is
especially painful. Nobody wants to come to the considered conclusion that
‘nobody likes me’, for instance, and this is harder if the conclusion reflects an
even more fundamental judgment about yourself, such as: ‘I’m not the sort of
person people can like.’
At this stage it is important to remember that categorical beliefs such as this
are extremist statements (see here), and likely to be wrong, and they are also
changeable; but you cannot change them without knowing what they are. If
identifying the belief makes you feel worse, or much worse, try to console
yourself with the thought that the bad feelings will not last, and the worse you
feel the more likely it is that you have succeeded in identifying the crucial
beliefs for you. That does not make the beliefs true: it just makes it more
important that you learn how to re-examine, and modify them.

Step 2: Changing beliefs

The second step, just as when changing other kinds of thinking patterns (see
Chapter 7), is to re-examine these beliefs, and to separate the facts from the
opinions. However true they seem at first, such categorical beliefs are very likely
to be exaggerations or overgeneralizations, and they should certainly be
questioned. Here are some more key questions to ask yourself:
Key questions for changing beliefs

Would you judge someone else who felt like you do in the same way?
What would you say to someone else who held a belief like this one?
Are you being fair to yourself?
Are you going in for ‘character assassination’, rather than sticking to
what happened on one particular occasion?
Are you forgetting that everyone makes mistakes, gets things wrong, and
feels socially uncomfortable at times? That no one can be perfect?
Are you ignoring your strengths and focusing on your weaknesses?
Ignoring the successes and friendships, while focusing on failures and
embarrassments?
Are you falling into a biased pattern of thinking? Catastrophizing?
Taking things personally? Mind reading? Emotional reasoning? (See the
list here.)
Are you drawing conclusions on the basis of your childhood or
 adolescent experiences?
Are you judging yourself as you have (once) been judged? If so, what
makes the person, or people, who judged you right now? Who is the best
authority on you? Other people or yourself?

The easiest way to start this work is to use one of the thought records that
were described in Chapter 7. The blank versions of these forms and the key
questions for copying are in the Appendix. Write your belief down in the column
for upsetting thoughts, and then work through the form in the way that was
explained in Chapter 7.
Questioning underlying beliefs can occasionally have dramatic effects. This
happens when it is immediately obvious that the ‘old’ belief is so exaggerated or
so extreme or so outdated that it must be false. For example, Simon, who was
bullied and tormented while he was at school, and had subsequently done his
best to keep out of sight and therefore out of mind, realized when answering
these questions that one of his basic beliefs was ‘Everyone out there wants to
pick on me’. As soon as he started to question this belief he realized that,
although it had seemed true once, it was (now) false. No one had really picked
on him for years. But the fear that they might do so was still there, and because
the belief had not been brought out into broad daylight and given proper
consideration it was still affecting his behavior. In this case Simon’s negative
thinking pattern – the undermining belief – started to change quickly, and the
change was consolidated because Simon also started doing things differently.
The next thing Simon did was decide to change all the ways, large and small,
in which he had learned to keep himself out of sight – and this was hard work.
The behavior patterns that went with the belief that people would always pick on
him were second nature by the time he had left school, so that as an adult he
hardly noticed when they occurred. For example, he never – if he could help it –
made a suggestion or asked anyone a question; and he was used to positioning
himself behind other people, in the least conspicuous place he could find. He had
been doing these things so long that he was no longer consciously aware of
doing them. So although it was relatively easy for him to recognize that the
belief was now false, changing still took time and effort, and it involved doing
things differently – including choosing different, more colourful clothes to wear
– as well as changing his (outdated) patterns of thinking. So working at changing
behaviors is important when working on beliefs; otherwise old habits persist, and
contribute to maintaining the difficulties.
As might be expected, at times Simon found that doing things in a new way –
‘as if’ most people would accept him in the normal way – filled him with fear
‘as if’ most people would accept him in the normal way – filled him with fear
and dread. This is understandable too. Anyone would feel fearful if they did
something they truly believed was risky and threatening. This is the social
equivalent of putting your head in the lion’s mouth, and it makes feeling anxious
about behaving in a new way almost inevitable. But it does not mean that you
cannot change, or that trying to change is bad for you and could make you
worse. It just means that confronting an old fear brings the fear out into the open,
and this is not pleasant. More ideas about how to do this follow, but first it is
worth saying something about how knowing what your beliefs are, and being
able to use this knowledge, helps you to make lasting change.
Socially anxious people are not cowards or wimps, and they have all faced
their fears and suffered their symptoms repeatedly by the time they seek help.
Their fear and anxiety are real and disturbing, but somehow facing up to the
fears, and doing things that they find threatening, have not changed the problem.
Some of the vicious cycles that keep the problem going have already been
described, but there is another reason why their courage so far has not succeeded
in changing their expectations, and this is that they did not know how to use this
courage to change their underlying beliefs. So when things go well for them they
tend to react as if they have ‘got away with it’, or had a lucky escape, and not as
if they have learned anything new. In order to change expectations it helps to
understand more precisely what the expectations are based upon – to understand
the beliefs as well. Then the courage involved in doing new or difficult things is
more likely to be rewarded, as old patterns of thinking change too.
The example of Simon might suggest that learning to question your beliefs is
easy. But often it is not. This example has been chosen for two reasons: first, to
show that it can be done, and secondly because many people know ‘at some
level’ that their undermining beliefs are not really true, even though they feel as
if they are. So they might feel inadequate even while knowing in their rational
minds that they are not. This is an example of emotional reasoning, and this type
of negative thinking pattern is particularly common when longstanding beliefs
are undermining your confidence. The first line of defence against it has already
been described in Chapter 7, ‘Changing Thinking Patterns’: it is to start
rethinking the beliefs, and distinguishing the thoughts from the feelings, by
working through a few of your difficult situations using the ‘thought records’
described earlier.
It is harder to change the framework with which you approach the world, and
to rethink your beliefs, than to re-examine the kinds of negative patterns of
thinking described so far. It can take a lot longer to convince yourself that it
makes sense to change your mind when your belief has shaped your social sense
of yourself for a long time. If you truly believe that you are different or peculiar,
and that this makes you unacceptable or inadequate, then it is difficult to see
things another way, and everything you do seems at first to fit with the old
belief. So the rest of this chapter describes some more ways of working on
stubborn, long-lasting and undermining beliefs.

Searching for new information

The first of these involves starting a search for new information: information that
contradicts, or does not fit with, your belief, using the ‘counter-belief worksheet’
shown below in Boxes 10.2 and 10.3. A blank copy of this form for you to copy
is provided in the Appendix with the other worksheets.
The reason for developing this worksheet is that all of us habitually look out
for, notice and remember information that fits with our beliefs, rather than that
which does not fit with our beliefs. If I think I am no good at making pastry, then
what I notice each time Christmas comes round and I have to make the mince
pies again is that I cannot remember how to do it without looking it up in a book,
that I bother about whether I am doing it right, and that the end result is never
quite up to scratch (and often more like cardboard than pastry). If you think that
you stick out like a sore thumb (and that this will make people pick on you) then,
similarly, you tend to keep on the lookout for danger signs, and to notice when
other people look at you, or when someone turns a questioning, or supposedly
threatening, gaze in your direction.
To start this search, work through some counter-belief worksheets, as in the
examples provided in Boxes 10.2 and 10.3. Two examples have been provided
here because it is often easier to see when someone else’s framework for
approaching the world needs to be modified than to see that one’s own
framework should be, so the first example has no (or little) social relevance, and
the line of argument in it should be quite obvious. The second focuses on a
relatively common socially anxious belief, and might be harder to follow for
people who share this belief.
The steps to go through are these. First write down your belief on the line at
the top. Then rate how much you believe this now (0–100 per cent). Think of
yourself as doing a forward search, into the future, rather than a backward search
into past situations, as this makes it easier to pick up new information than it
would be if you relied only on your memory. So think ahead to a situation that
you feel anxious or worried about that is relevant to this belief and write it down.
Then make your prediction. Ask yourself, on the basis of your belief, what do
you think will happen? This is like defining the framework provided by your
you think will happen? This is like defining the framework provided by your
negative thinking pattern. It is like identifying your expectation, or prediction.
Next, you should define your search plan: what to look out for, so as to step
outside this framework. As you can work out from the examples, this is easier to
do if you have made a clear prediction first. These three parts of the worksheet
should be completed before you enter the situation in question; the next two,
concerning the outcome of your search and your conclusions, can only be filled
in after the event.
When the event is over, think about what happened, and how that fitted with
your expectations and predictions. Summarize your findings, and write down
what the search has revealed (the ‘adequate’ or ‘passable’ pastry, instead of the
tasteless cardboard). Finally, think about the whole exercise, and draw your own
conclusions. Try to step outside your usual framework sufficiently to be able to
see things afresh. Some key questions you could ask yourself are:

Has it alerted you to things that you might not otherwise have noticed?
Has it demonstrated to you how this belief keeps your thinking stuck in a
particular pattern?
Has it disconfirmed any of your predictions or expectations?

The last step in this exercise is to think back to your original belief. There are
two kinds of changes that you are looking for. First, rate the degree to which you
believe it now on the same (0–100) percentage scale. Secondly, ask yourself if
you would like to modify your original belief in any way. Useful modifications
would make your belief less extreme, or less negative.
The more new information you find, the more likely it is that your belief
rating will start to shift, as your search weakens that belief’s hold on you, but
this may take some time. If you have held the belief in question for some years,
and have focused more on the things that support it than on the ones that
discredit it, then the exercise will be difficult. It is hard to start seeing things in a
new way, without the old, familiar framework.
If you can adopt the state of mind that this worksheet encapsulates, and keep
up the search for new information, then belief change will follow by degrees.
One person reacted to doing this exercise with the comment: ‘I’ve been thinking
like this so long, that I did not even realize that it could be questioned’.

BOX 10.2: COUNTER-BELIEF WORKSHEET 1

Belief: I’m no good as a cook
How much do you believe this (0–100 per cent)? 80 per cent

The Forward Search Plan

BEFORE THE EVENT

1 Think of a future situation that will be difficult for you
My husband’s birthday, when I will have to make him a birthday cake and all the family will be
there.
2 Your expectation or prediction (this should fit with your belief)
I will not be able to remember how to do it, and will spend hours finding a recipe. I will get in a
horrible mess in the kitchen, and something is bound to go wrong. It will fall flat, or be heavy and
sticky. Or it will be dry and hard. No one will want to eat it and most of it will be left over.
3 Search plan: What should you be looking out for?
Things I do remember how to do. Being quick to find a recipe. The amount of mess, and the
amount of time it takes. What the cake turns out like. How much gets eaten.

AFTER THE EVENT

4 Outcome: What actually happened?
Much better than I expected. Found a recipe OK. Did make a horrible mess, but it looked good
enough. Also most of them ate it and my daughter said it was good. Someone left a lot but my
husband asked for some more the next day.
5 What conclusions can you draw from that?
It’s far less clear than I thought it would be: good and bad bits mixed up. Probably overall not as
bad as I predicted, and it tells me I would find it a lot easier if I only did that kind of thing more
often.

Rethinking your original belief

How much do you believe it now (0–100 per cent)? 40 per cent (At least I could learn how!)
How would you like to modify your belief, now? I’m not a very good cook . . . yet.

BOX 10.3: COUNTER-BELIEF WORKSHEET 2

Belief: I am not acceptable as I am

How much do you believe this (0–100 per cent)? 65 per cent

The Forward Search Plan

BEFORE THE EVENT

1 Think of a future situation that will be difficult for you
Having to meet some of my parents’ friends at the weekend.
2 Your expectation or prediction (this should fit with your belief)
I will go quiet. I hate small talk, and I can’t do it, so there won’t be anything to say. I shall feel that I
have let them down.
3 Search plan: What should you be looking out for?
Whether other people go quiet too sometimes. Moments when I do have something to say. The
kinds of things people talk about. How my parents react to having me there. Whether they say
anything that suggests they are disappointed in me.
AFTER THE EVENT
4 Outcome: What actually happened?
I felt awful at first, and could only say standard things. But one person asked me about work, and
then there was more to say. There were a few moments when everyone was quiet. It certainly
wasn’t just my fault. Mum is worried about me, being on my own so much. But she was happy
about how the event went, so I can’t have spoiled it for her.
5 What conclusions can you draw from that?
Saying the ‘standard’ things did start me off, in the end, and then we got out of the small talk quite
quickly. I was lucky that someone asked me about work. I’m certainly not the only one who goes
quiet at times. I am probably more worried about letting my parents down than they are. They just
want me to be happier.

Rethinking your original belief

How much do you believe it now (0–100 per cent)? 50 per cent
How would you like to modify your belief, now? It’s not acceptable to me to be so anxious, and so
much on my own, but being that way doesn’t make me unacceptable – at least to my parents and
their friends.

Building more positive beliefs

Carrying out a search for new information will help you to modify negative,
underlying beliefs, and it can also help you to construct the firm foundation from
which your confidence can continue to grow. Searching for new ways of looking
at things, as you remove the old framework, also helps you to build more
positive beliefs.
Positive beliefs, if they are to be most helpful to you, should be phrased in
moderate terms, and each person has to work out for themselves what kinds of
positive beliefs are likely to work for them. One person settled for the statement:
‘I’m a mixture of good, bad and indifferent, much like everyone else.’ Another
person said to themselves: ‘I’m OK as I am. It’s OK to be me.’ So try to find the
words in which you would like to encapsulate a more positive belief for yourself.
You should be looking for a belief that helps you to work against the old,
negative way of thinking, and that fits with reality, and this means avoiding
extremist terms. It is probably not true for any of us that we are wholly and
completely lovable, attractive, acceptable, adequate and so on, even though
people who love us may accept us totally. Loving and accepting people, when
you truly know them, more often means loving and accepting them ‘warts and
all’ – which in turn means that letting people know you ‘warts and all’ is just
letting them know you. It is not letting them ‘see through you’, or discover your
hidden faults and weaknesses in a way that leads inevitably to the end of the
relationship.
 Use your notebook here, to try out new, positive beliefs. Write one down on
the top of a new page, and every day collect some new information that fits with
it. Remember this may be out of sight at first. Keep searching, and it will come
into view.

Changing assumptions

Beliefs reflect categorical judgments: ‘I am useless’; ‘People are always judging

you’. Assumptions are like rules for living that are based on beliefs, and they are
often expressed using words like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘have to’. However,
when it comes to changing assumptions, it is most useful to put them into words
as ‘if . . . then . . .’ statements. Beliefs and assumptions can both be either helpful
or unhelpful. An example of an unhelpful assumption frequently made by people
who are socially anxious is: ‘If people knew what I was really like, then they
would reject me.’ Such assumptions get in the way of recovery because they
affect your behavior – they determine what you do, such as try to be different
and to hide your ‘real self’. Another common assumption is: ‘If others want to
know me they’ll let me know.’ Someone who lives by this rule is unlikely to
take the initiative in contacting people or making new friends. The only way to
find out if the assumption is incorrect – or indeed correct – is to start taking the
initiative. So changing assumptions involves doing things differently:

What assumptions do you make about yourself?

What assumptions do you make about others?
And about who is responsible for the success or failure of your social
encounters?

See if you can identify some of the assumptions you make, expressing them as
‘if . . . then . . .’ statements. Do you assume that if something goes wrong, then it
must be your fault?
Identifying your assumptions will tell you how to try to change your behavior,
as the new behavior should remove the disadvantages of the old, socially phobic
behavior. It involves taking a risk, and will certainly not feel safe at first, but it
provides another way of challenging the underlying belief that you need to keep
yourself safe from potential harm. Once you truly realize that protective
behaviors of all kinds, including those that are closely related to underlying
beliefs and assumptions, do not really work, then you will find that you can let
them go, and ‘be yourself’. Realizing that ‘it’s all right to be the way I am’ is
them go, and ‘be yourself’. Realizing that ‘it’s all right to be the way I am’ is
one of the keys to becoming more self-confident.
Someone who believed he was likely to be rejected took great care to hide
from others what he was really like, and said very little, but this undermined his
confidence as he became increasingly isolated and lonely. It follows that one of
the most effective ways of changing your assumptions is to change your
behavior. Only if you experiment with doing things differently, and try a new
behavior, such as letting people know what you are really like, will you be able
to find out if the assumption is correct. For example:

Assumption: ‘If you disagree with people they will never accept you.’
Old behavior: Always agree. Keep your opinions to yourself.
New behavior: Try saying what you think.
Evaluation: Find out what happens when you do (carry out a search for new
information).

After doing something differently, take a moment to think about it. Some of
the possibilities in this case might be that you find yourself engaged in an easier
kind of conversation, or that saying what you think leads to an interesting
discussion. Or you might feel that you are able to make a better kind of contact
with people, or even that they react to you differently, for example in a more
interested or friendlier way. A summary of the stages to go through when
working to change assumptions is shown in Box 10.4.
Many assumptions can be phrased in two ways: either in terms of what you
should do, or in terms of what you should not do. For example, if you assume, or
live by the rule that saying what you think will lead to conflict, this could be
worded either in this way: ‘If I say what I think then there will be an argument’,
or in this way: ‘I will get on better with people if I never disagree with them.’
Re-examining this assumption follows the same principles, whichever form it
takes, and doing so can have many different consequences. It could reveal that
the fear of conflict had led to exaggerating the dangers of disagreements, or that
the ability to handle conflict, or to handle the strong feelings when conflict
arises, had been over-estimated. Obeying rules for living such as this one means
that disagreements and conflicts are avoided, and this deprives people of
experiences that could be helpful. In the end confidence is more likely to come
from accepting that disagreement and conflict are inevitable, facing up to them
when they occur, and learning how to handle them when they do. (If this is a
particular difficulty for you, you may find the ideas summarized in Chapter 12
helpful.)
BOX 10.4: SUMMARY OF STAGES FOR CHANGING ASSUMPTIONS

1 Identify your assumption. Think of this as a ‘rule for living’, that fits with your beliefs. It might first
be expressed in words like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘ought’. Write it down as an ‘if . . . then . . .’ statement
before going any further.
2 Identify the behavior that fits with the assumption. This is the ‘old behavior’ that reflects how you
put the rule for living into practice. Ask yourself, what does this assumption or rule make me do?
How do I behave so that I do not break this rule?
3 Do something differently. Choose a new behavior that allows you to break the old rule, and to
rethink your assumption. You could do this in an easy way first, and build up to harder ways later.
4 Evaluate what happens. Try to step outside your old framework once again. Think about how
things went, about what it means about you that you could choose a new way of behaving, and
about what it would mean to you if you could go on like this until you felt more confident.

NB: You may feel anxious when you do this, at first. Try to hang in there when you do, so
that you can build your confidence.

It is true that expressing opinions may reveal differences between people, but
avoiding the expression of these differences, or protecting oneself from having
to face them, makes them seem worse than they otherwise would. It is the beliefs
and assumptions that make it seem best to avoid ‘disasters’ and to protect
yourself from risks. Changing the beliefs and assumptions helps to de-
catastrophize such unpleasantness.

A flashcard, to help you remember the main points

This is a long chapter, and it could be useful to make yourself a flashcard (see
here) as a reminder of the main points. Flashcards are especially helpful when
trying to remember new ways of thinking. On one side of the card you should
write a belief or assumption. On the other you should summarize new ways of
thinking. You could include reminders of any of the confidence building ideas
that have come from reading this chapter, any new information that comes from
your searches, or from doing things differently, or any ideas or images that came
to mind as you read and that you would like to remember. One person drew
some windows on the back of a flashcard, to remind herself about the different
perspectives that can come from different places, and from looking through
different kinds of glass. What this meant to her was: ‘Maybe I have been wrong,
in my beliefs. Maybe there is another way of seeing things. Maybe it is worth
going on looking, and trying out doing things differently.’ A complicated
message can be summarized in a few brief symbols. The following key points
may also be helpful.
KEY POINTS
Confidence is not one thing, but many. It develops from experience, and it comes and
goes. Even confident people sometimes feel unconfident.
You can build confidence by behaving ‘as if’ you were confident, and by seeking out
successes.
Underlying beliefs and assumptions can undermine confidence. They provide the
framework within which you see the world, or the window through which you view it.
They developed during a lifetime of experience, and they can be changed.
There are two main steps for changing beliefs: first you need to identify them, so that you
know what they are; then you need to re-examine them.
To do this, you will need to step outside the old framework, and search for new
information.
Building up more positive, helpful beliefs also gives your confidence a surer foundation.
So does changing the assumptions that go with your beliefs. This involves changing old
patterns of behavior as well as old patterns of thinking.
11

Putting it all together

You are unlikely to have read this book unless you have suffered from shyness
or social anxiety for some time, and when a problem persists it is hard to see
where to begin when you want to change it. If you would like to use some of the
ideas you have read about so far, then you have already made a step in the right
direction. If not, stop and think for a minute. What are your doubts and
reservations? Does it all sound too complicated? Do you wonder if you could
ever do any of the things described? Do you think that people who can use these
ideas probably have a relatively mild problem, and that yours is too deep-seated
to respond to the suggestions made here? These sorts of thoughts are common,
and if this is what you think, then you probably feel discouraged too, and find it
hard to imagine things being any different.
If so, remember that there may be another way of seeing things. The methods
for dealing with patterns of thinking described as the first strategy for
overcoming social anxiety can be used to examine thoughts about being able to
change as well as other kinds of thoughts. Try them and see what you think then.
How would you find out if you could overcome your wish to keep yourself safe?
Or whether you could divert your attention away from your sense of
embarrassment and distress when you feel self-conscious? Probably only by
‘trying and seeing’. This chapter provides some ideas that are intended to make
this easier to do. It aims to help you work out how to get the most out of helping
yourself, and it starts with a summary.

Summary of strategies for overcoming social anxiety

All the methods described here are intended to help you to break the vicious
cycles that otherwise keep the problem going. Although the methods can be
simply described, they are not ‘simplistic’, or superficial. They are based on a
simply described, they are not ‘simplistic’, or superficial. They are based on a
sophisticated way of understanding the problem, and they all take some time to
learn. You have to learn what to do before you can use them effectively. So do
not expect the problem to vanish overnight, and remember that social anxiety is
a normal part of life. Most people would feel anxious if they were going for an
interview, or if they were publicly criticized, or unexpectedly asked to speak at
an important meeting or at a friend’s wedding. Nothing you can do will get rid of
all social anxiety. But you can learn to overcome the anxiety that interferes with
your life, or restricts you, and to keep that anxiety within manageable bounds.

Changing thinking patterns. This method is designed to help you to

recognize and to re-examine the way you think. It comes first because the
fear in social anxiety focuses on ideas about what other people think
about you; on the fear that you will be ‘found wanting’, or be ‘found
out’.
Doing things differently. Fear makes you want to keep safe, but safety
behaviors and avoidance make the problem worse, not better. Although it
feels risky, it is better to stop trying to protect yourself in these ways, as
that is the best way to learn that you do not need to do it.
Reducing self-consciousness. Self-consciousness comes from focusing
your attention onto yourself. This makes you increasingly aware of
uncomfortable sensations, feelings, thoughts and behaviors. Consciously
focusing on people and things outside yourself instead allows the distress
to die away and keeps you more in touch with what is happening around
you.
Building up confidence. Confidence may grow quickly, or it may change
more slowly. When it is slow to change this may be because you need
also to work on your underlying beliefs and assumptions. You can use
the strategies already described to help you to do this, together with some
others which help you to step outside your old framework for seeing the
world, and search for information that helps you to build a new one.

In order to make the most of your efforts to change, and to keep track of
progress, you should get a notebook for your social anxiety work, and use it
regularly, even when things are going well and you no longer think it is
necessary. Occasional notes made at such times are invaluable when you later
have a setback, if you can use them to remind yourself of the changes that you
made, and how you were able to make them. Otherwise you may be tempted to
think that the improvement was illusory, and that when things deteriorate again
that you have just reverted to type. A more helpful way of understanding such
ups and downs is to recognize that they are inevitable, and happen to everyone.
Patterns of thinking tend to reassert themselves, just like other old habits, and the
effort to counteract them may have to be repeated from time to time, until they
die away or are replaced with new ones.
Making use of the various worksheets provided will also help you to gain
more from the ideas in this book than you otherwise would. Everyone has their
own, personal and slightly different version of social anxiety or shyness, so you
may want to adapt the worksheets and exercises to suit yourself. Nevertheless, it
would be sensible not to take too many short cuts with them, especially of the
kind that allows you to leave out the bits that you find difficult, or avoid going
into situations that make you anxious. Recovery is not possible without
experiencing some of the fear and distress that have sent you in search of help.
The reward is that, as things change, and your confidence grows, the fear starts
to subside.

How do the different strategies fit together?

You might wonder whether it matters which of the strategies for overcoming
social anxiety listed above you start with. They have been presented in this order
because it is logical. The sequence starts with strategies for changing negative
patterns of thinking because thinking plays such a central part in social anxiety
(see Chapter 3). Doing things differently comes next, because once people feel
fearful they naturally want to protect themselves, and so they take action to do
so. But the actions that they take, mostly using safety behaviors and avoidance,
prevent them from overthrowing their expectations, and fuel the vicious cycles
that keep the problem going. The methods for reducing self-consciousness come
next because when doing social things, feeling self-conscious about it adds
another layer of difficulty. Strategies for building confidence come last as not
everyone needs to learn these methods. Sometimes making other changes is
sufficient. It would therefore be sensible to work through the book in this order
if that makes sense to you.
But the order is not invariable, and people who start in different places can
also benefit. For example, you may find it easier, and more practical, to work at
changing your behavior first. This will be most effective if you stop and think
about the meaning of the changes you make, so that you do not fall into the habit
of discounting them, or dismissing them, when you find that some things were
easier than you thought they would be, or find that you are suddenly able to do
things that other people take for granted and treat as ‘normal’. When anyone
makes a deliberate change of this kind, they deserve the credit for doing so, and
at least some of the change they achieve must be attributable to the efforts that
they make, and to a change of heart in the way that they were approaching their
problems.
Another way of starting is to work first on giving up your safety behaviors,
and later to focus on your patterns of thinking, when you summarize what
happened and what this means. Sometimes, despite what you might have feared,
the interactions you become involved in when not trying to keep yourself safe
are so much more satisfying that this gives the process of building – or
rebuilding – your confidence a good start.
Yet another way is to focus first on the kinds of behavioral changes that
enable you to change your assumptions, or the social rules that you tend to live
by. Assumptions tell you what you ‘should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’ do: ‘Unless I
dress up smartly and wear lots of make-up, people will not find me attractive’, or
‘You have to be witty and amusing, or people will just ignore you’. Working on
these assumptions immediately suggests what these people should do: dress less
smartly, wearing less make-up in the first case; stop making the effort to be witty
and amusing in the second. Adopting an attitude of curiosity while doing this
both makes it easier to do and helps in defining the (usually inhibiting) effects of
trying to be something other than what one is.
A theme that runs through all of the methods suggested in this book is that of
‘finding out what really happens’. You can conduct experiments, or fill in
worksheets, or focus your attention on what is happening around you rather than
inside you, but whatever you do it will be most helpful if you think about it
afterwards, and ask yourself how it went. What was the outcome? Doing this
makes you into a practical scientist, when overcoming your problem, and helps
you to find out what works best for you; and it also stops you thinking about
yourself all the time. Theoretically, it can, so to speak, give you something else
to think about when you feel anxious, and therefore take your mind off yourself.
Thinking about yourself is, socially speaking, inhibiting and stultifying. So you
should foster the curiosity that is inherent in this way of working, and try not to
worry too much about finding a ‘right’ way of doing things. With this curiosity
to the fore, you could begin with any of the methods that seem to you
particularly interesting, or likely to be helpful in your particular circumstances.

Some principles to bear in mind

 Do not throw yourself in at the deep end. It is sensible to start with taking
small risks, and to tackle harder things, which involve a greater degree of
risk or threat, once you have built your confidence and know more about
how the methods work for you.
When you have had one successful experience, do not leave things there,
but try the same thing again, as soon as you can. Consolidate your gains,
and remember that the more you do the more likely you will notice a
change. Do not give up if this is slow to come at first.
Do not work at the problem in fits and starts. If you do, your progress
will follow suit, but your moods and feelings may exaggerate the stops
and starts until you feel alternately pleased and cast down, as if you were
riding a rollercoaster. Instead, try to keep up a steady push in the right
direction, for example for two or three months in the first instance.
Be realistic about the things you decide you will try. Do not decide, in
your head or on paper, to do something that in your heart of hearts you
know is too difficult, and that you will be most unlikely to be able to do.
Success is built upon success, so it does not matter how small the success
is that you start with. It may be as small as making fleeting eye contact,
or remembering to smile at someone in the morning. If it works, and you
repeat it often enough to know that there are occasions when it does not
work as well as others, then you will be able to move on faster than if
you had started with something that gave you a sense of disappointment
or failure.
When you have decided which of the strategies to start with, give it a fair
trial before you move on to something else. This is tempting if the
strategy does not seem obviously helpful the first few times you try it, or
if you get bored with doing similar things rather often. Stick with each
one until you are sure you understand how it works for you. That way
you are likely to be able to make the most of all of the strategies that you
need.

Enlisting the help of other people

Overcoming this kind of problem can be lonely work. You are the only one who
knows exactly how you feel, the only one who has to face deciding what to do
about the problem, and the only one who can take appropriate action. Many
people who are shy or socially anxious deal with the problem on their own either
because they do not want to tell others about their difficulties or because they do
not know people whom they are able to tell.
Working at it alone can be extremely effective, and if you do that then you
will know that when things change you are solely responsible for that change. It
can also be helpful, though, to have a friend or supporter who is prepared to
help, and if that person has the time to read about the problem, that may help
them to help you most effectively. Above all, you need their encouragement. It is
more helpful if you tell them what you are trying to do. Then they can ask you if
you did it, and they might be able to help you out if you meet with difficulties or
get stuck. It is not so helpful if they try to push you harder than you are ready to
go, or if you rely on them to come with you when you have to face something
difficult, or to provide a ‘quick fix’ of reassurance at ever-increasing intervals.

Some common difficulties

When anxiety seems to ‘come out of the blue’

Sometimes symptoms of anxiety can sweep up unannounced, and reach

apparently overwhelming proportions when least expected. People often
describe this experience as if the anxiety ‘came out of the blue’, with nothing to
set it off or explain it that they can think of. On careful examination later it
usually turns out that there was a link between something that was happening
and the symptoms of anxiety, but the link was difficult to find or to understand.
It may have been that the link was in the meaning of the situation (‘this means
total rejection again’), rather than in anything specific that happened. Or it could
be that a fleeting image encapsulated the meaning of the situation (an image of
being humiliated and laughed at). Or a similarity in the situation with earlier
distressing events could be the trigger: the sound of someone’s voice, the colour
of something they are wearing, the smell of the food cooking and so on.
If this happens to you, think first about what the situation means to you, or
meant to you. This may give you sufficient clues to work out the connection. But
if you find no connection at all, do not conclude that you are going mad, and
losing control of yourself or your feelings. Try to accept that often we are not
able to identify and recognize all the possible connections and links that are
there. It is more helpful to accept that there are likely to be some that we will not
be able to fathom out.

WHEN THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT YOUR SYMPTOMS

Sometimes there seems no point in telling yourself that you might not tremble or
shake because you know that you will, and you also know that there is nothing
you can do to prevent it, much as you wished that there were. You will not be
able to find in this book any methods that will guarantee that you will not
tremble – or indeed suffer from any of the other symptoms of shyness or social
anxiety, such as tripping over your tongue and finding that the words you
intended to say have come out wrong. The key to dealing with this difficulty is
once again to think in terms of what it means to you when these things happen.
If you believe that it means something dire about you, for example that you are
inadequate or a useless wreck that no one would want to know, then you may be
suffering from the effects of your own, personal (understandable but
exaggerated) viewpoint. The meaning of the symptoms rather than the fact of the
symptoms should once again be the target for change, and using the strategies
for changing patterns of thinking, for changing beliefs and for building
confidence are the methods that are most likely to be helpful.

WHEN PAINFUL MEMORIES PERSIST

Some people feel as if memories of the distressing and painful things that
happened earlier in their lives keep returning to haunt them. They may have
distinct memories or dreams of particular events that recur, bringing at least
some of the original distress with them. It is not easy to lay such memories to
rest. However, a few suggestions might be helpful. Researchers have found that
if people can communicate about these events and the feelings they had at the
time, they start to feel better, even if the communication is about something that
happened many years ago and is in writing, or spoken into a tape recorder, rather
than made directly to another person. There is something about being able to
express oneself that helps to relieve this type of distress.
Another strategy that some people have found works for them is to think
about what the painful memory means to them, and to develop a new image in
their minds that transforms this meaning, and takes away the pain. The idea is to
construct a new image, even if it is an unrealistic one, in which the person’s
needs at the time that they were most distressed are met in some way. So the
meaning of the new image is that they are comforted, or rescued, or helped or
supported or accepted in some way, and the symbolism of the imagery
represents this transformation of meaning. If you would like to try doing this for
yourself, you should think about what it was that you needed, or still need, to
relieve you of the distress that you feel, and give your mind free play when it
comes to imagining how this might come about. Then when the distressing
memories return you can consciously call the new image to mind.
WHEN YOU FIND IT HARD TO STOP THE ‘POST MORTEM’ THAT CAN FOLLOW AN
EPISODE OF DISTRESS

The post mortem makes things worse. It is a way of thinking that brings all the
negative biases, attitudes and beliefs into the front of your mind, and uses them
to interpret, and even to elaborate upon, the bad side of what actually happened.
The longer a post mortem goes on, the worse it makes you feel. It can sometimes
seem increasingly convincing, even though it usually involves a gradual shift
away from reality. There is nothing useful about it. Despite what some people
think, going over in your mind the things that happened, what you said and what
other people said, what you both did, the way you looked and felt and so on,
does not end in useful conclusions about how to do things better. It provides no
valuable clues about how to overcome the problem. Far better to close down the
process as soon as you notice it happening, and to distract yourself with
something more interesting instead.

WHEN LOW SELF-ESTEEM GETS IN THE WAY

Low self-esteem is different from low self-confidence. It is about your values,

and whether you live up to them; it is about your sense that other people value
and accept you irrespective of your achievements, and it is about whether you
value yourself. When self-esteem is high people feel good about themselves, and
when it is low people feel bad about themselves, as if they were ‘worthless’ or
did not count, or had nothing to contribute. Then they become inhibited and hold
themselves back, and their ability to contribute shrinks a bit.
Low self-esteem is like a particular kind of belief: a belief about yourself and
your value, or worthiness. It can be built up in much the same ways as
confidence can be built, and using many of the same strategies. If this is a
difficulty for you, then it would be best to focus particular attention on
identifying your ‘self-beliefs’. Try to give words to your low self-esteem, and
then work at changing it in the ways described in the previous chapter.
When you do this, remember that there are no generally accepted yardsticks
available for judging the things upon which self-esteem is apparently based.
Self-esteem reflects an opinion about you (your own), rather than facts about
you, and this opinion may be independent of what other people think. They may
think highly of you despite your own (low) self-esteem; or you may feel that
they disapprove of you and reject you, and make you feel that you are different
and do not belong, and your self-esteem could still be high. You may be wrong
about their judgments, and using the ideas in this book will help you to discover
that they think far better of you than you suppose; or they may be making a
wrong judgment about you, possibly because they do not know you well. If so,
as you improve they will have a better chance of discovering their mistake. In
either case, it would be a mistake to let other people’s opinions, their approval or
disapproval, acceptance or rejection, become the measure of your own value.