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1. You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you
I will state that meditation helps a great deal in regards to letting go of emotional attachments to perception.
Also, probably not a good idea to worship people or historical figures -- or believe whatever historians tell you about someone who lived 100 or more years before said historian existed.
2. Making soup - with chicken bone broth, turnips, carrots, celery, zuccini noodles, parsnips, onion, ginger, garlic, dill, parsley, lemon juice, touch of olive oil, and vegetable broth. No meat.
It's that sort of day. Rainy, drab, cold -- and the cough from hell hasn't left the building yet. But it is better. I actually slept last night without coughing through the night. Also accidentally set alarm for 5:45 am, because cough from hell has made me confused as to what day it is.
This is what happens when you get irritable and the Universe and ask it to do stuff, it gives you a nasty cough and time to realize how good you got it.
3.Caught up now on Emergence -- which has for the most part gotten rid of the pesky one-note villains and zeroed in on the real issue -- which is Joe has adopted an AI little girl, brought her into her home, and not told anyone what the little girl actually is. Granted she didn't know to start either -- but still.
So we're about to move from annoying big tech conspiracy thriller -- to sci-fi relationship drama.
Except I think it has been cancelled. Also villain number #2 -- the real villain escaped into the wind. (I sort of figured out who villain number #2 was when co-worked advised that there was a twist. It wasn't hard from that point.)
I like the cast, but the writing leaves something to be desired.
4. Psychologists Explain How to Stop Overthinking Everything
Basically for all the Chidi's on my correspondence list (including myself).
To overcome overthinking, Pittman recommends you replace the thought. “Telling yourself to not to have a certain thought is not the way to not have the thought,” she says.”You need to replace the thought.” What if she were to tell you to stop thinking about pink elephants? What are you going to think about? That’s right: pink elephants. If you don’t want to think about a pink elephant, conjure up an image of, say, a tortoise. “Maybe there’s a big tortoise holding a rose in its mouth as it crawls,” says Pittman. “You’re not thinking about pink elephants now.”
Talk yourself out of it by noticing when you’re stuck in your head. You can tame your overthinking habit if you can start taking a grip on your self-talk — that inner voice that provides a running monologue throughout the day and even into the night.
“You can cultivate a little psychological distance by generating other interpretations of the situation, which makes your negative thoughts less believable,” says Bruce Hubbard, the director of the Cognitive Health Group and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. This is called cognitive restructuring.
Ask yourself — What’s the probability that what I’m scared of will actually happen? If the probability is low, what are some more likely outcomes?
If it’s a problem you keep ruminating about, rephrase the issue to reflect the positive outcome you’re looking for,” suggests Nolen-Hoeksema.
“Instead of “I’m stuck in my career,” tell yourself or better still write, “I want a job where I feel more engaged.” Then make a plan to expand your skills, network, and look for opportunities for a better career.
Find a constructive way of processing any worries or negative thoughts, says Honey. “Write your thoughts down in a journal every night before bed or first thing in the morning — they don’t have to be in any order. Do a ‘brain dump’ of everything on your mind onto the page. Sometimes that can afford a sense of relief, ” recommends Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist.
You can also control your ruminating habit by connecting with your senses. Begin to notice what you can hear, see, smell, taste, and feel.
The idea is to reconnect with your immediate world and everything around you. When you begin to notice, you spend less time in your head.
You can also notice your overthinking habit and talk yourself out of it. Becoming self-aware can help you take control.
“Pay a little more attention,” says Carbonell. “Say something like: I’m feeling kind of anxious and uncomfortable. Where am I? Am I all in my head? Maybe I should go take a walk around the block and see what happens.”
Recognise your brain is in overdrive or ruminating mode, and then try to snap out of it immediately. Or better still, distract yourself and redirect your attention to something else that requires focus.
“If you need to interrupt and replace hundreds of times a day, it will stop fast, probably within a day,” says Dr Margaret Weherenberg, a psychologist and author of The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques. “Even if the switch is simply to return attention to the task at hand, it should be a decision to change ruminative thoughts.”
It takes practice, but with time, you will be able to easily recognise when you are worrying unnecessarily, and choose instead, to do something in real life rather than spending a lot of time in your head.
For example, convert, “I can’t believe this happened” to “What can I do to prevent it from happening again?” or convert “I don’t have good friends!” to “What steps could I take to deepen the friendships I have and find new ones?” recommends Ryan Howes, PhD.
Don’t get lost in thoughts about what you could have, would have, and should have done differently. Mental stress can seriously impact your quality of life.
An overactive mind can make life miserable. Learning how to stop spending time in your head is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
The only thing that worked for me is guided meditation for ten minutes each day. Doesn't replace the thoughts so much as let's them pass on by like watching clouds or leaves go by me on a stream.
5. The Jungle Prince of Delhi
6. Thanksgiving History Lesson - A Second Grade Teacher Realizes She was Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions
“I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions,” Tonia Parker, a second-grade teacher at Island Creek Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., told TIME.
It can sometimes seem that the way kids are taught about Thanksgiving, a staple of American education for about 150 years, is stuck in the past; an elementary school in Mississippi, for example, drew backlash for a Nov. 15 tweet that included photos of kids dressed up as Native Americans, with feather headbands and vests made of shopping bags. But the approximately 25 teachers at that Washington workshop were part of a larger movement to change the way the story is taught.
“I believe it is my obligation as an educator,” said Kristine Jessup, a 5th-grade teacher at Brookfield Elementary School in Chantilly, Va., “to ensure that history does not get hidden.”
The Thanksgiving story that American schoolkids have typically learned goes something like this: the holiday commemorates the way the pilgrims of Plymouth, Mass., fresh off the Mayflower, celebrated the harvest by enjoying a potluck-style dinner with their friendly Indian neighbors. In many classrooms, the youngest children may trace turkeys with their hands to mark a day for feasting, or dress up as pilgrims and Indians for Thanksgiving pageants. Older kids may study the reasons the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic and how their endurance fostered America’s founding values.
But, while the meal known as the First Thanksgiving did happen—scholars believe it took place at some point during the fall of 1621 in the recently-founded Plymouth colony—that story reflects neither the 17th century truth nor the 21st century understanding of it. Rather, the American public memory of Thanksgiving is a story about the 19th century.
What really happened back in the fall of 1621 is documented in only two primary sources from colonists’ perspectives. Edward Winslow’s account of the bountiful harvest and the three-day feast with the Wampanoag people runs a measly six sentences, and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s later account is about the same length—evidence, argues historian Peter C. Mancall, that neither colonial leader considered the event worth more than a paragraph. As Plymouth became part of Massachusetts and Puritans gave way to the Founding Fathers, nobody thought much about that moment. When George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789, his proclamation of gratefulness made no mention of anything related to what happened in Plymouth. Then, around 1820, a Philadelphia antiquarian named Alexander Young found Winslow’s account. He republished it in his 1841 Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a fateful footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.”
7. Ufology from Fringe Field to Serious Science
For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor to UFO research.
Take Richard Hoffman, a 25-year information technology expert on contract with the U.S. Army’s Material Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a Senior Lead Architect, he keeps the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.
He’s also a UFO researcher.
“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”
Hoffman is one of three board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). Unknown or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.
“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long term scientific study of cases.”
The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather, digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data like radar tracks and video may exist.
8. A Psychologist Explains How to Beat Social Anxiety
The problem isn't your social skills.
[No, it's that people are scary.]
It is rarely helpful to tell a shy person to “just be yourself!” Riffing on that frustrating exchange, clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen has written a book that she hopes will answer the question the anxious person usually asks in return: How?
Hendriksen received her doctorate from UCLA and today works at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She is the author of How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, out last week from St. Martin’s Press, which she describes as “a book I wish I had when I was 20.”
The Verge spoke with Hendriksen about the most helpful techniques to combat social anxiety, daring to be average, and why most people’s social skills are just fine.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Let’s start with the basics. In the early chapters, you define social anxiety as “self-consciousness on steroids.” Can you be more specific about what that means? What is social anxiety?
Social anxiety is a perception that there is something embarrassing and deficient about us, and, unless we work hard to conceal or hide it, it will be revealed and we will be judged or rejected for it.
We can all relate to the experience of looking in the mirror and zooming in on a perceived flaw like a zit. There is a sense of wanting to hide that perceived flaw and that leads you to, say, throw on some tinted moisturizer. That feeling — that urge to hide — is the exact same feeling that one gets with social anxiety, except with social anxiety it’s about our internal self, about our personality or our social skills or simply who we are as a person.
The one thing I always like to add is that social anxiety is a package deal, and it often comes bundled with strengths like high standards and empathy and being helpful and altruistic. People who have social anxiety are often good listeners and conscientious and they work hard to get along with fellow humans. And those are all really amazing strengths that won’t go away even as people work on their social anxiety.
In the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about introverts and extroverts, and people often confuse being introverted with being socially anxious. But, in fact, introversion and social anxiety are separate. How can people tell which is which?
Introversion is how you’re wired, whereas social anxiety gets in your way. Introverts get their energy by being alone or in small groups, while extroverts get their energy from larger groups of people.
Non-anxious introverts are perfectly happy to leave the party early, but people with social anxiety often leave because they feel so worried and want relief. Social anxiety is something that is holding you back due to fear instead of due to choice. A classic example is that students with social anxiety will forgo the part of their grade that’s based on “class participation.”
Ellen Hendriksen. Photo by: Matthew Guillory
And socially anxious extroverts do exist. I was talking just the other day to a man who is a teacher and a standup comic. He loves being in front of people, but he’s also simultaneously afraid that they are judging him. You can get energy from other people and still be anxious around them. Or you can get your energy by being alone and not be bothered by it at all.
So, let’s get to the meat of it. How do you overcome social anxiety?
Go forth and do. I often talk to clients who say, “I wish I could hit pause on the world and I could retreat and work on myself and gain confidence and remerge confident and be ready to live my life.”
That is backward. A nice analogy is that of mood and action. We often think we have to “feel” like doing something before doing it. We think we have to feel like going to the gym before going to work out. But if we lace up our shoes and go to the gym, often our mood catches up, and we’re glad we went. With confidence, it’s the same thing. We have to put action before feeling confidence because when we see ourselves doing challenging things, we start to believe we can.
You offer a few “magic questions” for socially anxious people to ask themselves before an event. How can these help?
The first trick is asking people to be really specific. Anxiety is often vague and says things like “everybody will hate me” or “something bad will happen” or “what if something bad happens?” So if we can specify, what exactly we’re afraid of, who exactly would “hate you,” sometimes that’s enough and we realize that our anxiety is not particularly credible and that the worst-case scenario that it’s spinning and is setting off our alarm bells is not likely. Part of that is asking what the odds of these worst-case scenarios really are.
The second question is “how bad would that really be?” and the technique is called decatastrophizing. That’s simply asking, “Is this truly a catastrophe? Would I die? Is this irreparable?” And the vast majority of the time, the answer is no.
The third is “how can I cope?” If we have a plan to either rectify the situation or take care of ourselves and move on, that will make us feel better knowing that we have a plan and we can care for ourselves regardless of what happens. That helps refute the two most fundamental lies of social anxiety.
What are they?
The first is that the worst-case scenario is a foregone conclusion and is definitely going to happen. And the second is that “I can’t deal.” When we avoid experiences, we don’t get the evidence to disprove those two lies of social anxiety. We don’t see our own capabilities. So these questions can act like this nice runway to help launch us into action and to go ahead and try to do those things that we’re a little bit scared of.
One piece of advice I found compelling was to “be brave for one minute.” What’s the thinking behind that?
The vast majority of social anxiety is anticipatory. Oftentimes, once we take the leap and are in the moment, we do feel anxious at first, but if we can resist the urge to avoid pulling the plug, the anxiety will naturally plateau and start to decline. But by avoiding anxiety, we never get to find that out. So, by committing ourselves to being brave for one minute and also dropping our safety behaviors, that’s where the learning occurs.
Tell me more about the safety behaviors.
This concept comes from the work of psychologists Lynn Alden and Charles Taylor. People who are socially anxious engage in “safety behaviors,” which are simply behaviors that trying to help you tamp down anxiety in the moment. For example, if you’re at a party and feel anxious, you hover on the edge of the room or you scroll on your phone or you might rehearse what you plan to say beforehand to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid. People generally do know what their safety behaviors are. And they do make us feel better, but it comes across as off-putting or rigid. They send the wrong message, and folks who are socially anxious don’t always realize that.
What do we gain when we drop the safety behaviors?
Alden and Taylor challenged people to drop their safety behaviors to see what would happen. When they did that, their conversation partner in this experiment rated the people who dropped these behaviors as more likable and more authentic. We become the way we are naturally with our closest friends.
These behaviors take up a lot of bandwidth. If you’re thinking about how you come across, and there is very little room left over to just be our authentic, friendly self. When we drop our safety behaviors, the gaps are naturally filled in with listening and curiosity and interest and we come across as more genuine and therefore our conversation partners like us more.
That seems related to a chapter in the book devoted to explaining why most of us don’t have terrible social skills. Why do you believe that?
With most people, it’s not so much that our social skills are lacking, it’s that our inhibitions get in the way and prevent us from using our social skills. We monitor ourselves and overread everything. “Oh, she just shifted in her seat, does that mean she’s bored?” Or, “I hope I don’t sound like an idiot.”
With all that happening, there’s very little room left over to pay attention to what’s happening in the moment or even to stand properly or to not spill our wine. So when we’re feeling particularly inhibited and anxious, it seems like we have no social skills, but we do.
Instead, try to turn your attention inside out, focus on anything except yourself. Look at who you’re talking to, ground yourself in your surroundings, listen closely to what is being said. And that turning of attention from the internal commentary can greatly reduce anxiety and help us make use of our skills that we naturally have.
I will state that meditation helps a great deal in regards to letting go of emotional attachments to perception.
Also, probably not a good idea to worship people or historical figures -- or believe whatever historians tell you about someone who lived 100 or more years before said historian existed.
2. Making soup - with chicken bone broth, turnips, carrots, celery, zuccini noodles, parsnips, onion, ginger, garlic, dill, parsley, lemon juice, touch of olive oil, and vegetable broth. No meat.
It's that sort of day. Rainy, drab, cold -- and the cough from hell hasn't left the building yet. But it is better. I actually slept last night without coughing through the night. Also accidentally set alarm for 5:45 am, because cough from hell has made me confused as to what day it is.
This is what happens when you get irritable and the Universe and ask it to do stuff, it gives you a nasty cough and time to realize how good you got it.
3.Caught up now on Emergence -- which has for the most part gotten rid of the pesky one-note villains and zeroed in on the real issue -- which is Joe has adopted an AI little girl, brought her into her home, and not told anyone what the little girl actually is. Granted she didn't know to start either -- but still.
So we're about to move from annoying big tech conspiracy thriller -- to sci-fi relationship drama.
Except I think it has been cancelled. Also villain number #2 -- the real villain escaped into the wind. (I sort of figured out who villain number #2 was when co-worked advised that there was a twist. It wasn't hard from that point.)
I like the cast, but the writing leaves something to be desired.
4. Psychologists Explain How to Stop Overthinking Everything
Basically for all the Chidi's on my correspondence list (including myself).
To overcome overthinking, Pittman recommends you replace the thought. “Telling yourself to not to have a certain thought is not the way to not have the thought,” she says.”You need to replace the thought.” What if she were to tell you to stop thinking about pink elephants? What are you going to think about? That’s right: pink elephants. If you don’t want to think about a pink elephant, conjure up an image of, say, a tortoise. “Maybe there’s a big tortoise holding a rose in its mouth as it crawls,” says Pittman. “You’re not thinking about pink elephants now.”
Talk yourself out of it by noticing when you’re stuck in your head. You can tame your overthinking habit if you can start taking a grip on your self-talk — that inner voice that provides a running monologue throughout the day and even into the night.
“You can cultivate a little psychological distance by generating other interpretations of the situation, which makes your negative thoughts less believable,” says Bruce Hubbard, the director of the Cognitive Health Group and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. This is called cognitive restructuring.
Ask yourself — What’s the probability that what I’m scared of will actually happen? If the probability is low, what are some more likely outcomes?
If it’s a problem you keep ruminating about, rephrase the issue to reflect the positive outcome you’re looking for,” suggests Nolen-Hoeksema.
“Instead of “I’m stuck in my career,” tell yourself or better still write, “I want a job where I feel more engaged.” Then make a plan to expand your skills, network, and look for opportunities for a better career.
Find a constructive way of processing any worries or negative thoughts, says Honey. “Write your thoughts down in a journal every night before bed or first thing in the morning — they don’t have to be in any order. Do a ‘brain dump’ of everything on your mind onto the page. Sometimes that can afford a sense of relief, ” recommends Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist.
You can also control your ruminating habit by connecting with your senses. Begin to notice what you can hear, see, smell, taste, and feel.
The idea is to reconnect with your immediate world and everything around you. When you begin to notice, you spend less time in your head.
You can also notice your overthinking habit and talk yourself out of it. Becoming self-aware can help you take control.
“Pay a little more attention,” says Carbonell. “Say something like: I’m feeling kind of anxious and uncomfortable. Where am I? Am I all in my head? Maybe I should go take a walk around the block and see what happens.”
Recognise your brain is in overdrive or ruminating mode, and then try to snap out of it immediately. Or better still, distract yourself and redirect your attention to something else that requires focus.
“If you need to interrupt and replace hundreds of times a day, it will stop fast, probably within a day,” says Dr Margaret Weherenberg, a psychologist and author of The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques. “Even if the switch is simply to return attention to the task at hand, it should be a decision to change ruminative thoughts.”
It takes practice, but with time, you will be able to easily recognise when you are worrying unnecessarily, and choose instead, to do something in real life rather than spending a lot of time in your head.
For example, convert, “I can’t believe this happened” to “What can I do to prevent it from happening again?” or convert “I don’t have good friends!” to “What steps could I take to deepen the friendships I have and find new ones?” recommends Ryan Howes, PhD.
Don’t get lost in thoughts about what you could have, would have, and should have done differently. Mental stress can seriously impact your quality of life.
An overactive mind can make life miserable. Learning how to stop spending time in your head is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
The only thing that worked for me is guided meditation for ten minutes each day. Doesn't replace the thoughts so much as let's them pass on by like watching clouds or leaves go by me on a stream.
5. The Jungle Prince of Delhi
6. Thanksgiving History Lesson - A Second Grade Teacher Realizes She was Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions
“I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions,” Tonia Parker, a second-grade teacher at Island Creek Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., told TIME.
It can sometimes seem that the way kids are taught about Thanksgiving, a staple of American education for about 150 years, is stuck in the past; an elementary school in Mississippi, for example, drew backlash for a Nov. 15 tweet that included photos of kids dressed up as Native Americans, with feather headbands and vests made of shopping bags. But the approximately 25 teachers at that Washington workshop were part of a larger movement to change the way the story is taught.
“I believe it is my obligation as an educator,” said Kristine Jessup, a 5th-grade teacher at Brookfield Elementary School in Chantilly, Va., “to ensure that history does not get hidden.”
The Thanksgiving story that American schoolkids have typically learned goes something like this: the holiday commemorates the way the pilgrims of Plymouth, Mass., fresh off the Mayflower, celebrated the harvest by enjoying a potluck-style dinner with their friendly Indian neighbors. In many classrooms, the youngest children may trace turkeys with their hands to mark a day for feasting, or dress up as pilgrims and Indians for Thanksgiving pageants. Older kids may study the reasons the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic and how their endurance fostered America’s founding values.
But, while the meal known as the First Thanksgiving did happen—scholars believe it took place at some point during the fall of 1621 in the recently-founded Plymouth colony—that story reflects neither the 17th century truth nor the 21st century understanding of it. Rather, the American public memory of Thanksgiving is a story about the 19th century.
What really happened back in the fall of 1621 is documented in only two primary sources from colonists’ perspectives. Edward Winslow’s account of the bountiful harvest and the three-day feast with the Wampanoag people runs a measly six sentences, and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s later account is about the same length—evidence, argues historian Peter C. Mancall, that neither colonial leader considered the event worth more than a paragraph. As Plymouth became part of Massachusetts and Puritans gave way to the Founding Fathers, nobody thought much about that moment. When George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789, his proclamation of gratefulness made no mention of anything related to what happened in Plymouth. Then, around 1820, a Philadelphia antiquarian named Alexander Young found Winslow’s account. He republished it in his 1841 Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a fateful footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.”
7. Ufology from Fringe Field to Serious Science
For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor to UFO research.
Take Richard Hoffman, a 25-year information technology expert on contract with the U.S. Army’s Material Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a Senior Lead Architect, he keeps the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.
He’s also a UFO researcher.
“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”
Hoffman is one of three board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). Unknown or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.
“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long term scientific study of cases.”
The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather, digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data like radar tracks and video may exist.
8. A Psychologist Explains How to Beat Social Anxiety
The problem isn't your social skills.
[No, it's that people are scary.]
It is rarely helpful to tell a shy person to “just be yourself!” Riffing on that frustrating exchange, clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen has written a book that she hopes will answer the question the anxious person usually asks in return: How?
Hendriksen received her doctorate from UCLA and today works at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She is the author of How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, out last week from St. Martin’s Press, which she describes as “a book I wish I had when I was 20.”
The Verge spoke with Hendriksen about the most helpful techniques to combat social anxiety, daring to be average, and why most people’s social skills are just fine.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Let’s start with the basics. In the early chapters, you define social anxiety as “self-consciousness on steroids.” Can you be more specific about what that means? What is social anxiety?
Social anxiety is a perception that there is something embarrassing and deficient about us, and, unless we work hard to conceal or hide it, it will be revealed and we will be judged or rejected for it.
We can all relate to the experience of looking in the mirror and zooming in on a perceived flaw like a zit. There is a sense of wanting to hide that perceived flaw and that leads you to, say, throw on some tinted moisturizer. That feeling — that urge to hide — is the exact same feeling that one gets with social anxiety, except with social anxiety it’s about our internal self, about our personality or our social skills or simply who we are as a person.
The one thing I always like to add is that social anxiety is a package deal, and it often comes bundled with strengths like high standards and empathy and being helpful and altruistic. People who have social anxiety are often good listeners and conscientious and they work hard to get along with fellow humans. And those are all really amazing strengths that won’t go away even as people work on their social anxiety.
In the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about introverts and extroverts, and people often confuse being introverted with being socially anxious. But, in fact, introversion and social anxiety are separate. How can people tell which is which?
Introversion is how you’re wired, whereas social anxiety gets in your way. Introverts get their energy by being alone or in small groups, while extroverts get their energy from larger groups of people.
Non-anxious introverts are perfectly happy to leave the party early, but people with social anxiety often leave because they feel so worried and want relief. Social anxiety is something that is holding you back due to fear instead of due to choice. A classic example is that students with social anxiety will forgo the part of their grade that’s based on “class participation.”
Ellen Hendriksen. Photo by: Matthew Guillory
And socially anxious extroverts do exist. I was talking just the other day to a man who is a teacher and a standup comic. He loves being in front of people, but he’s also simultaneously afraid that they are judging him. You can get energy from other people and still be anxious around them. Or you can get your energy by being alone and not be bothered by it at all.
So, let’s get to the meat of it. How do you overcome social anxiety?
Go forth and do. I often talk to clients who say, “I wish I could hit pause on the world and I could retreat and work on myself and gain confidence and remerge confident and be ready to live my life.”
That is backward. A nice analogy is that of mood and action. We often think we have to “feel” like doing something before doing it. We think we have to feel like going to the gym before going to work out. But if we lace up our shoes and go to the gym, often our mood catches up, and we’re glad we went. With confidence, it’s the same thing. We have to put action before feeling confidence because when we see ourselves doing challenging things, we start to believe we can.
You offer a few “magic questions” for socially anxious people to ask themselves before an event. How can these help?
The first trick is asking people to be really specific. Anxiety is often vague and says things like “everybody will hate me” or “something bad will happen” or “what if something bad happens?” So if we can specify, what exactly we’re afraid of, who exactly would “hate you,” sometimes that’s enough and we realize that our anxiety is not particularly credible and that the worst-case scenario that it’s spinning and is setting off our alarm bells is not likely. Part of that is asking what the odds of these worst-case scenarios really are.
The second question is “how bad would that really be?” and the technique is called decatastrophizing. That’s simply asking, “Is this truly a catastrophe? Would I die? Is this irreparable?” And the vast majority of the time, the answer is no.
The third is “how can I cope?” If we have a plan to either rectify the situation or take care of ourselves and move on, that will make us feel better knowing that we have a plan and we can care for ourselves regardless of what happens. That helps refute the two most fundamental lies of social anxiety.
What are they?
The first is that the worst-case scenario is a foregone conclusion and is definitely going to happen. And the second is that “I can’t deal.” When we avoid experiences, we don’t get the evidence to disprove those two lies of social anxiety. We don’t see our own capabilities. So these questions can act like this nice runway to help launch us into action and to go ahead and try to do those things that we’re a little bit scared of.
One piece of advice I found compelling was to “be brave for one minute.” What’s the thinking behind that?
The vast majority of social anxiety is anticipatory. Oftentimes, once we take the leap and are in the moment, we do feel anxious at first, but if we can resist the urge to avoid pulling the plug, the anxiety will naturally plateau and start to decline. But by avoiding anxiety, we never get to find that out. So, by committing ourselves to being brave for one minute and also dropping our safety behaviors, that’s where the learning occurs.
Tell me more about the safety behaviors.
This concept comes from the work of psychologists Lynn Alden and Charles Taylor. People who are socially anxious engage in “safety behaviors,” which are simply behaviors that trying to help you tamp down anxiety in the moment. For example, if you’re at a party and feel anxious, you hover on the edge of the room or you scroll on your phone or you might rehearse what you plan to say beforehand to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid. People generally do know what their safety behaviors are. And they do make us feel better, but it comes across as off-putting or rigid. They send the wrong message, and folks who are socially anxious don’t always realize that.
What do we gain when we drop the safety behaviors?
Alden and Taylor challenged people to drop their safety behaviors to see what would happen. When they did that, their conversation partner in this experiment rated the people who dropped these behaviors as more likable and more authentic. We become the way we are naturally with our closest friends.
These behaviors take up a lot of bandwidth. If you’re thinking about how you come across, and there is very little room left over to just be our authentic, friendly self. When we drop our safety behaviors, the gaps are naturally filled in with listening and curiosity and interest and we come across as more genuine and therefore our conversation partners like us more.
That seems related to a chapter in the book devoted to explaining why most of us don’t have terrible social skills. Why do you believe that?
With most people, it’s not so much that our social skills are lacking, it’s that our inhibitions get in the way and prevent us from using our social skills. We monitor ourselves and overread everything. “Oh, she just shifted in her seat, does that mean she’s bored?” Or, “I hope I don’t sound like an idiot.”
With all that happening, there’s very little room left over to pay attention to what’s happening in the moment or even to stand properly or to not spill our wine. So when we’re feeling particularly inhibited and anxious, it seems like we have no social skills, but we do.
Instead, try to turn your attention inside out, focus on anything except yourself. Look at who you’re talking to, ground yourself in your surroundings, listen closely to what is being said. And that turning of attention from the internal commentary can greatly reduce anxiety and help us make use of our skills that we naturally have.