Reducing Fears and Insecurities through Real World Experiences

The ideas in the previous plengdut post certainly help reduce counterproductive thinking. However, some beliefs are hardier and will start to fade only when they’ve been overwritten by contradictory real-world experiences. Sometimes you’ll have a fear or belief that you logically know is inaccurate, but it still feels true and limits your behavior.

In these cases, analyzing and debunking your thoughts isn’t enough. For one, your mind won’t give much weight to the conclusions you come to. It responds much more strongly to real-life evidence, and wrong or not, as far as your mind is concerned, it has past experiences that show the belief is reasonable. You may feel like you’ve successfully disarmed a belief, but it will often return.

Reducing Fears and Insecurities through Real World Experiences The ideas in the previous plengdut post certainly help reduce counterproductive thinking. However, some beliefs are hardier and will start to fade only when they’ve been overwritten by contradictory real-world experiences. Sometimes you’ll have a fear or belief that you logically know is inaccurate, but it still feels true and limits your behavior. In these cases, analyzing and debunking your thoughts isn’t enough. For one, your mind won’t give much weight to the conclusions you come to. It responds much more strongly to real-life evidence, and wrong or not, as far as your mind is concerned, it has past experiences that show the belief is reasonable. You may feel like you’ve successfully disarmed a belief, but it will often return. The other problem is that when you have a fear or insecurity, it can generate a nearly endless supply of worried thoughts. If you debunk some of them, new ones will just take their place (for example, if you’re scared to talk to people at parties and defuse your worries about being made fun of, you may develop new ones about accidentally making someone angry). The bulk of this chapter covers how to get used to the social situations that make you nervous. But first, it explains how real-world experiences can affect your mind-set about socializing and reduce insecurities and limiting beliefs that don’t necessarily have a big anxiety component to them. Knowing why you must gain firsthand experiences Real-life feedback can overwrite unhelpful beliefs, but the process is gradual. Say you have the belief, “I’m boring and people don’t enjoy my company.” As you begin to polish your social skills, people will begin to show you that they like having you around. The first few times it happens, you’ll probably dismiss it as a fluke. As it keeps happening, you’ll tentatively start to accept that some people do like your company; you may adopt some more self-assured behaviors, but you’ll largely remain skeptical. With enough time, the way you see yourself will stop lagging behind your actual progress, and you’ll be able to see yourself in a more positive light. Some traces of the original insecurity may always remain, but should be easy enough to act against. The process is the same for useful attitudes like “Don’t care too much about what other people think.” Again, you can’t instantly take on that mentality because you’ve read it’s good to have. On a deeper level, you may fear other people’s opinion of you. However, over many small occasions, you can choose to do things you want to do, but may draw some negative responses (for example, speaking up with a less-popular belief, wearing unconventional clothes). As you continually experience firsthand that acting that way has benefits and that you can handle the consequences, it slowly reinforces the importance of not being overly concerned with what other people think of you. (“When I made that edgy joke, one or two people made mildly uncomfortable faces, but it wasn’t so bad. Everyone else thought it was really funny. And it just felt good not to hold back my sense of humor like I always used to.”) A common piece of social advice in this vein is to “Fake it ’til you make it.” That is, force yourself to act outwardly confident even though you don’t feel that sure of yourself deep down; then let the positive reinforcement that comes from your self-assured behavior build true confidence. This suggestion has limits. You may feel comfortable outwardly faking some confident behaviors, but others will be too nerve-racking and too much of a leap from how you normally act. If you’re really insecure, anxious, and socially inexperienced, you can’t slip on the persona of someone who’s highly confident just like that. However, you may be able to pull off smaller tasks, like introducing yourself to someone at your job when you otherwise would have taken a pass. The importance of facing your fears If a social situation really makes you nervous, you need to put yourself in it until you get comfortable with it. You may never be completely unfazed by the situation, but you can get to a point where your fear is low enough that it doesn’t keep you from going after what you want. Exposing yourself to a fear works because it overwrites your mind’s association of Situation–> Cue to get nervous. However, to do that, you need to be around your fear long enough that you calm down and experience firsthand you’ll be okay. If you briefly put yourself in contact with something scary, then bolt while you’re still feeling nervous, your brain hasn’t learned anything new. When it comes to situations that make you only mildly uneasy, just knowing this may be enough to get you to start changing your behavior. For example, inviting people to hang out may make you mildly anxious to the point that if you live on autopilot, you’ll default to not extending invitations to anyone. Once you’re aware it’s important to offer invites, it may be easy enough for you to take a deep breath and go through with it. If you have a fear that’s more intense, you need to be more strategic about facing it. Psychologists have found the most effective way to face a fear is to gradually expose yourself to it; this is called exposure therapy. You start with a milder variation of your fear, face that until you’re comfortable with it, and then work your way up to more nerve-racking scenarios. You do the exposure sessions frequently enough that you build up some courage momentum. For example, if you were afraid of standing on balconies, you would start on some lower floors and slowly work your way up (literally) to higher ones. Facing your fears isn’t as easy or tidy when it comes to social situations It would be easy to face a fear of standing on high balconies in a way that’s totally controlled and on your terms. Socializing is trickier. People aren’t inanimate features of a building that you just have to be around to get used to. You have to interact with them, and their responses can be unpredictable. Your feelings toward them are more complex too. Most people’s self-esteem isn’t going to be affected that much if they don’t like balconies, but your confidence can suffer if you can’t socialize effectively. It’s also harder to design a tidy way to gradually face many social fears. The social situations you need to expose yourself to may not be available when you want them, or they may not last long enough or go well enough for you to experience the necessary relaxation and sense that things are under control. The progression from one step to the next may not be clear, creating unavoidable large increases in difficulty from one to the next. Real-life friends, classmates, and colleagues aren’t robots that you can endlessly experiment with for your own purposes. This is not to say that facing your fears is pointless when it comes to socializing. The principles of gradual exposure are still very useful. The process of applying them is just messier, and it helps to know that going in. How to face your bigger social fears gradually With the background theory out of the way, here’s a practical step-by-step guide to how you can slowly get used to the social situations that make you uncomfortable. Be at a point where you’re really ready to make changes The approach outlined below is the easiest way to face your fears, but even then the process won’t be effortless. Facing a fear gradually with the aid of coping skills will make the task as pleasant as it can be, but you’re still going to voluntarily put yourself in situations that make you feel anxious. It will take a few months of steady work. So you need to be at a place where you’re really motivated to overcome your fear. It’s not unusual for someone to have a fear for years, but do nothing more than avoid the situations that scare them. Even if they hate how much their fear restricts their life, they still prefer that to the work and discomfort of getting over it. Before facing any fears, get a handle on the distorted beliefs and thinking that contribute to your anxiety in social situations This point is extremely important. If you try to face your fears but leave all of your counterproductive beliefs intact, you’re not going to get far. You’ll go into every encounter feeling like it’s life or death. If it doesn’t go well, according to your unrealistic standards, you’ll come away with the wrong conclusions and feel even more dejected and discouraged. If an interaction doesn’t go smoothly, you need to be able to put it in the proper perspective. Learn and get some practice applying the concepts in previous post first. Following a process for facing your fears gradually The general method for facing a fear is to break it down into a hierarchy from Least Scary to Most Scary variations, then regularly face the fears, beginning at the easiest tasks and working your way up to the tougher ones. You can use rewards and debriefing sessions to stay motivated and on track. Here’s the process explained in detail: Break your fear down into a hierarchy of Least Scary to Most Scary variations Here’s an example using a fear of talking to new people at parties: Go to a party and briefly nod and smile at several people. Go to a party and ask several people a quick question, politely listen to their answer, and then excuse yourself from the conversation. Go to a party and ask a friend to introduce you to several people. Go to a party and introduce yourself to one person who seems friendly and approachable, and who you’re not particularly concerned with impressing. Go to a party and join a group of approachable people. Don’t put pressure on yourself to wow them or say too much. The idea is just to join them. Go to a party, join a group, and try to talk to them a bit more. Go to a party and talk to someone who intimidates you somewhat, but whom you’d still like to get to know. Go to a party and join a more intimidating group. It’s all right if not every step in the hierarchy constitutes a “proper” way to expose yourself to your fears—that is, you face it long enough that you no longer feel nervous. As long as a step is leading up to that, it’s okay. For example, if you’re afraid of going to nightclubs, just setting foot in one for a minute may be all you can handle at first. That’s fine as long as you’re using it as a jumping-off point to stay longer next time. Similar fears can be tackled similarly Social fears come in many forms, and some of them need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. However, some fears are similar and can be faced in similar ways, which is helpful if you experience variations of the same fear: Fears of being in a certain environment, like a party, a dance club, or a movie theater where you’re seeing a film alone. In this case, your goal for each fear-facing session is to put yourself in that environment. Eventually you want to be able to stay there long enough that you start to calm down and realize that nothing bad is going to happen. Fears about certain types of interactions, like making conversation, approaching strangers, or inviting friends to hang out. The interactions themselves are often on the shorter side, so in each fear-facing session, you should try to carry them out multiple times. The first conversation you have might be nerve-racking, but the seventh may feel quite tolerable. Of course, this volume approach isn’t always possible. If you shy away from inviting people out, you may not have enough friends and acquaintances to invite every time you want to practice facing that particular fear. Practice less scary variations of your fear in several ways When creating a hierarchy, you can come up with many easier variations on the situation you’re ultimately afraid of: Do the same basic action as your fear, but a simpler, less intense version (for example, talking to someone approachable vs. someone you’re more on edge around, going to a club on a slow weekday night vs. on a busy weekend). Do the same action as your fear, but cut it off early (for example, asking someone a quick question and making an excuse to leave vs. sticking around to talk, like you hope to do eventually). Do something different from, and easier than, your fear, but that brings up similar feelings (for example, instead of chatting to strangers at a music festival, chatting to shop clerks or asking people on the street for directions). Practice the exact thing you fear, but in a controlled, artificial setting (for example, role-playing assertiveness techniques with a therapist or in a social skills training group). If you’re very afraid of something, initial steps may be imagining yourself facing your fear or looking at pictures related to it. It can also help to start dealing with other non-social fears you may have so you can build your confidence in your ability to overcome your anxieties (for example, facing a milder hesitation toward learning to drive). Here are a few more examples of fear-facing progressions: Feeling uncomfortable in nightclubs Go to a non-intimidating, low-key pub in the afternoon on a slow day. Go to a non-intimidating pub in the evening on a slow day. Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a slightly busy night. Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a busier night. Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night. Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night. Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub at night when it’s busy. Go to a quite intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night. Go to a quite intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night. Go to a quite intimidating nightclub at night when it’s busy. Feeling uneasy with speaking up in groups Have several hierarchies going at the same time: Start with short, simple contributions and then work your way up to more lengthy, involved, or controversial ones. Start by speaking up in smaller groups, and build up to sharing in bigger ones. Start with groups that are low key and easy to chime in to, and work up to rowdier discussions where you have to be assertive to be heard. Start with friendly groups that don't scare you, and work up to speaking in ones that intimidate you more. Work up to dropping your safety behaviors Safety behaviors get in the way of overcoming fears. Even if you successfully face a situation, in the back of your mind you can always reason, “Well, X is still dangerous. It was just the safety behavior that got me through it.” They keep you from realizing that your fear is manageable and that you can handle it without any help. If you use any safety behaviors and they seem to help you, by all means stick with them at first. But as you make more progress in facing your fears, try to drop them and go it alone. Face the actual situation that scares you; doing zany, gutsy stunts won’t help much Some people, when thinking about facing their social fears, say to themselves, “I’m generally afraid of rejection, so I’ll get over that fear by doing a bunch of outrageous things to mess with strangers and get shot down as hard as possible. If I can get used to going up to random people and acting like a chicken, then anything else, like talking to guests at a party, will be a cakewalk.” It does take guts to act strangely around someone you don’t know, and it may help build your courage, but the carryover to more low-key, day-to-day social situations isn’t as big as you might think. When you’re purposely being odd and screwing with people, you know deep down that it’s just a lark. You’ll probably never see that person again, and you’re not putting the “real you” on the line. It’s not the same as approaching someone to make genuine conversation and knowing the other person is going to respond to your true personality and interpersonal skills. Start facing your fears, beginning with the least scary items The item in your hierarchy you decide to start with has to feel manageable. It should push your limits, but only a little. It’s okay if it makes you slightly hesitant and requires some willpower to face, but no more than that. If the thought of doing it makes you frozen and jittery, it’s too much for you to handle right now. You need to begin with something simpler. People often quit when facing their fears and then declare that the process doesn’t work because they jump straight to a step that’s too overwhelming. Ideally your starter task should feel so simple that you think, “This is too easy. Do I even need to do this? Maybe I should start with something harder.” Only move up the ladder when you’re fully used to the previous step. “Used to” means it only causes you mild anxiety, and is even starting to feel mundane and boring. You may reach this point for some steps in a day. You may have to stick to other steps for a few weeks. Don’t be in a hurry to complete your hierarchy. There’s no award for finishing quickly, especially if you rush so much that you don’t really lock in your improvement. The relevant thing is facing the fear, not the outcome of the interaction When you’re exposing yourself to a fear, your goal is to put yourself in a certain situation and get used to it. Don’t worry about any other outcomes. If you want to get more comfortable chatting to people at parties, all that matters is that you’re starting those interactions. For now, it’s irrelevant if you weren’t an enrapturing storyteller. If you want to get used to inviting people out, as long as you asked, it’s unimportant whether they said yes or no. Once you’re on the scene, know some ways to get yourself to face your fear When you’ve arrived at the situation where your fear is, you then have to take the step of actually confronting it. It’s very common to get there and then hesitate for a good while before taking the plunge. The end of the previous chapter covered some ways to get yourself to act. Once you’re face-to-face with your fear, have ways to cope in the moment Once you’re facing your fear, you’re going to feel anxious. You’ll start to calm down if you stick around long enough, but until then, it helps to have some other ways to deal with your anxious symptoms. The previous chapter covered this as well. Partial progress is an accomplishment too It’s important to give yourself credit for even partial progress toward facing a fear. For example, if you’re fearful of talking to strangers at pubs, you may go out to several venues and not be able to talk to anyone for three outings in a row. However, on the first night you were only 40 percent of the way there. On the second night you were 70 percent close, and 90 percent on the third. Maybe on the fourth night you finally did it. That interaction wouldn’t have been possible without those other three sessions, which may have appeared to be failures if you only looked at them in more simplistic “either I talked to someone or I didn’t” terms. Debrief yourself after each exposure session Each time you face your fear, it may bring up some counterproductive thinking, such as “That person thought I was a creep when I said hi to them. Why do I even bother? I’ll never get the hang of this.” You must not unquestionably swallow these thoughts, or you may set yourself further back than where you began. Use the principles from last plengdut post to address that thinking properly. Don’t dissect only the insecure thoughts you had. Remind yourself of what went well too. Did you face the fear with a lot less hesitation compared to last time? Did you find yourself thinking in any constructive ways that helped you feel more confident? Build up a written record of your small and large successes. Reward and congratulate yourself every step of the way Every time you accomplish something listed in your hierarchy that you couldn’t do before, you should give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself. Your reward doesn’t have to be anything big, just something that adds a little oomph to your day and caps off the sense of accomplishment you already feel. This is another effective behavioral psychology principle that makes the process easier. Something can seem less scary if you know a treat and sense of satisfaction are waiting for you on the other side. You can also use rewards in different ways to motivate yourself: Specify something you like doing (for example, checking your favorite websites), and then tell yourself you can’t do that until you meet your fear-facing goals for the day. This approach can be extremely effective if you pick the right carrot for yourself. You’ll find yourself sitting around thinking, “Man, I really want to play more of that game I just bought. I guess I’d better get out there and try talking to people.” When you meet your daily objective, you’ll be proud of yourself and looking forward to the fun activity you’ve earned. Face your fears on a regular basis and work up your hierarchy Map out a schedule for how you’ll work through each subfear. Not every fear lends itself to daily practice, but you can improvise. You may not be able to go to a party six days a week, but you could pledge to practice starting conversations by going to some Internet meet-ups. The more often you work on exposing yourself to your fears, the better, because it keeps the momentum going. Building up your courage is like exercising to increase your physical fitness. You’ll tend to lose your courage “gains” if you leave too much time between exposure sessions. You may not lose your gains completely, but you’ll lose enough that you’ll have to take some extra time to regain the few steps you lost. Don’t think you’re cured after facing a scarier fear one time The first time you successfully face one of your bigger fears, you’ll probably be over the moon. In your excitement, you may feel like you’ve solved all of your problems, but you’ve really only taken the first step. It’s common for people to face their fear during one session and then get discouraged when they go out a few days later and find they’re nervous all over again. Facing your fear for the first time is a huge accomplishment, but you need to repeatedly face it to solidify your progress. It’s like lifting weights. If you want to be able to consistently move a certain amount, you have to regularly exercise with it. You’ll often face your fear for the first time on a day when you’r unusually confident, but then you’ll find it takes more work to get to the point where you can reliably deal with it when your mood is more average. You have to face your fear again and again and again to overcome it. You will hit snags It’s rare to plan out a fear hierarchy and effortlessly move up it. You have to be flexible and make adjustments as you go. You may find you have the order of the steps wrong. You could complete one rung and find the next step is too challenging, so you need to find a task to bridge the two. It’s also common to encounter an early step that is too hard to do once you’re face-to-face with it, even if it seemed surmountable on paper. You’ll need to add something more basic ahead of it. The key is not to get discouraged when these hiccups happen; just keep making tweaks so the overall project stays doable. Finally, your progress may seem to slip at times. You may go out one day and face your fears easily, feel on top of the world, and then try again the next day but find you’re nervous once more. When this happens, keep moving forward and focus on the overall improvements you’re making. To use the exercise analogy again, when people take up strength training, they’ll have the odd bad workout, even though they’re getting stronger on the whole. This is completely normal. If you conquer a fear and then go a long time without facing it, you’ll probably regress If you do regress, it will take work to get your courage back, though it will come much quicker than the first time. Once more, it’s like exercising. It’s always easier to get back into shape than to get fit from scratch. A common scenario is for someone to work to overcome their social fear, go on to achieve their other interpersonal goals, and then “get out of shape” because they no longer need to deal with the old challenge. For example, someone with fears around initiating conversations and inviting people out gets comfortable with those skills, makes a bunch of friends, and no longer needs to meet anyone new. If they want to freshen up their social circle years down the road, they may find they’re nervous about approaching people again.

The other problem is that when you have a fear or insecurity, it can generate a nearly endless supply of worried thoughts. If you debunk some of them, new ones will just take their place (for example, if you’re scared to talk to people at parties and defuse your worries about being made fun of, you may develop new ones about accidentally making someone angry).

The bulk of this chapter covers how to get used to the social situations that make you nervous. But first, it explains how real-world experiences can affect your mind-set about socializing and reduce insecurities and limiting beliefs that don’t necessarily have a big anxiety component to them.

Knowing why you must gain firsthand experiences

Real-life feedback can overwrite unhelpful beliefs, but the process is gradual. Say you have the belief, “I’m boring and people don’t enjoy my company.”

As you begin to polish your social skills, people will begin to show you that they like having you around. The first few times it happens, you’ll probably dismiss it as a fluke.

As it keeps happening, you’ll tentatively start to accept that some people do like your company; you may adopt some more self-assured behaviors, but you’ll largely remain skeptical.

With enough time, the way you see yourself will stop lagging behind your actual progress, and you’ll be able to see yourself in a more positive light. Some traces of the original insecurity may always remain, but should be easy enough to act against.

The process is the same for useful attitudes like “Don’t care too much about what other people think.” Again, you can’t instantly take on that mentality because you’ve read it’s good to have.

On a deeper level, you may fear other people’s opinion of you. However, over many small occasions, you can choose to do things you want to do, but may draw some negative responses (for example, speaking up with a less-popular belief, wearing unconventional clothes).

As you continually experience firsthand that acting that way has benefits and that you can handle the consequences, it slowly reinforces the importance of not being overly concerned with what other people think of you. (“When I made that edgy joke, one or two people made mildly uncomfortable faces, but it wasn’t so bad.

Everyone else thought it was really funny. And it just felt good not to hold back my sense of humor like I always used to.”) A common piece of social advice in this vein is to “Fake it ’til you make it.” That is, force yourself to act outwardly confident even though you don’t feel that sure of yourself deep down; then let the positive reinforcement that comes from your self-assured behavior build true confidence. This suggestion has limits.

You may feel comfortable outwardly faking some confident behaviors, but others will be too nerve-racking and too much of a leap from how you normally act. If you’re really insecure, anxious, and socially inexperienced, you can’t slip on the persona of someone who’s highly confident just like that. However, you may be able to pull off smaller tasks, like introducing yourself to someone at your job when you otherwise would have taken a pass.

The importance of facing your fears

If a social situation really makes you nervous, you need to put yourself in it until you get comfortable with it. You may never be completely unfazed by the situation, but you can get to a point where your fear is low enough that it doesn’t keep you from going after what you want.

Exposing yourself to a fear works because it overwrites your mind’s association of Situation–> Cue to get nervous. However, to do that, you need to be around your fear long enough that you calm down and experience firsthand you’ll be okay.

If you briefly put yourself in contact with something scary, then bolt while you’re still feeling nervous, your brain hasn’t learned anything new. When it comes to situations that make you only mildly uneasy, just knowing this may be enough to get you to start changing your behavior.

For example, inviting people to hang out may make you mildly anxious to the point that if you live on autopilot, you’ll default to not extending invitations to anyone. Once you’re aware it’s important to offer invites, it may be easy enough for you to take a deep breath and go through with it.

If you have a fear that’s more intense, you need to be more strategic about facing it. Psychologists have found the most effective way to face a fear is to gradually expose yourself to it; this is called exposure therapy.

You start with a milder variation of your fear, face that until you’re comfortable with it, and then work your way up to more nerve-racking scenarios. You do the exposure sessions frequently enough that you build up some courage momentum. For example, if you were afraid of standing on balconies, you would start on some lower floors and slowly work your way up (literally) to higher ones.

Facing your fears isn’t as easy or tidy when it comes to social situations

It would be easy to face a fear of standing on high balconies in a way that’s totally controlled and on your terms. Socializing is trickier. People aren’t inanimate features of a building that you just have to be around to get used to. You have to interact with them, and their responses can be unpredictable. Your feelings toward them are more complex too.

Most people’s self-esteem isn’t going to be affected that much if they don’t like balconies, but your confidence can suffer if you can’t socialize effectively. It’s also harder to design a tidy way to gradually face many social fears. The social situations you need to expose yourself to may not be available when you want them, or they may not last long enough or go well enough for you to experience the necessary relaxation and sense that things are under control.

The progression from one step to the next may not be clear, creating unavoidable large increases in difficulty from one to the next. Real-life friends, classmates, and colleagues aren’t robots that you can endlessly experiment with for your own purposes.

This is not to say that facing your fears is pointless when it comes to socializing. The principles of gradual exposure are still very useful. The process of applying them is just messier, and it helps to know that going in.

How to face your bigger social fears gradually

With the background theory out of the way, here’s a practical step-by-step guide to how you can slowly get used to the social situations that make you uncomfortable.

Be at a point where you’re really ready to make changes

The approach outlined below is the easiest way to face your fears, but even then the process won’t be effortless. Facing a fear gradually with the aid of coping skills will make the task as pleasant as it can be, but you’re still going to voluntarily put yourself in situations that make you feel anxious. It will take a few months of steady work.

So you need to be at a place where you’re really motivated to overcome your fear. It’s not unusual for someone to have a fear for years, but do nothing more than avoid the situations that scare them. Even if they hate how much their fear restricts their life, they still prefer that to the work and discomfort of getting over it.

Before facing any fears, get a handle on the distorted beliefs and thinking that contribute to your anxiety in social situations

This point is extremely important. If you try to face your fears but leave all of your counterproductive beliefs intact, you’re not going to get far. You’ll go into every encounter feeling like it’s life or death. If it doesn’t go well, according to your unrealistic standards, you’ll come away with the wrong conclusions and feel even more dejected and discouraged. If an interaction doesn’t go smoothly, you need to be able to put it in the proper perspective. Learn and get some practice applying the concepts in previous post first.

Following a process for facing your fears gradually

The general method for facing a fear is to break it down into a hierarchy from Least Scary to Most Scary variations, then regularly face the fears, beginning at the easiest tasks and working your way up to the tougher ones. You can use rewards and debriefing sessions to stay motivated and on track. Here’s the process explained in detail:

Break your fear down into a hierarchy of Least Scary to Most Scary variations

Here’s an example using a fear of talking to new people at parties:

Go to a party and briefly nod and smile at several people.
Go to a party and ask several people a quick question, politely listen to their answer, and then excuse yourself from the conversation.
Go to a party and ask a friend to introduce you to several people.
Go to a party and introduce yourself to one person who seems friendly and approachable, and who you’re not particularly concerned with impressing.
Go to a party and join a group of approachable people. Don’t put pressure on yourself to wow them or say too much. The idea is just to join them.
Go to a party, join a group, and try to talk to them a bit more.
Go to a party and talk to someone who intimidates you somewhat, but whom you’d still like to get to know.
Go to a party and join a more intimidating group.

It’s all right if not every step in the hierarchy constitutes a “proper” way to expose yourself to your fears—that is, you face it long enough that you no longer feel nervous. As long as a step is leading up to that, it’s okay.

For example, if you’re afraid of going to nightclubs, just setting foot in one for a minute may be all you can handle at first. That’s fine as long as you’re using it as a jumping-off point to stay longer next time.

Similar fears can be tackled similarly

Social fears come in many forms, and some of them need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. However, some fears are similar and can be faced in similar ways, which is helpful if you experience variations of the same fear:

Fears of being in a certain environment, like a party, a dance club, or a movie theater where you’re seeing a film alone. In this case, your goal for each fear-facing session is to put yourself in that environment. Eventually you want to be able to stay there long enough that you start to calm down and realize that nothing bad is going to happen.
Fears about certain types of interactions, like making conversation, approaching strangers, or inviting friends to hang out. The interactions themselves are often on the shorter side, so in each fear-facing session, you should try to carry them out multiple times. The first conversation you have might be nerve-racking, but the seventh may feel quite tolerable. Of course, this volume approach isn’t always possible. If you shy away from inviting people out, you may not have enough friends and acquaintances to invite every time you want to practice facing that particular fear.

Practice less scary variations of your fear in several ways

When creating a hierarchy, you can come up with many easier variations on the situation you’re ultimately afraid of:

Do the same basic action as your fear, but a simpler, less intense version (for example, talking to someone approachable vs. someone you’re more on edge around, going to a club on a slow weekday night vs. on a busy weekend).
Do the same action as your fear, but cut it off early (for example, asking someone a quick question and making an excuse to leave vs. sticking around to talk, like you hope to do eventually).
Do something different from, and easier than, your fear, but that brings up similar feelings (for example, instead of chatting to strangers at a music festival, chatting to shop clerks or asking people on the street for directions).
Practice the exact thing you fear, but in a controlled, artificial setting (for example, role-playing assertiveness techniques with a therapist or in a social skills training group).

If you’re very afraid of something, initial steps may be imagining yourself facing your fear or looking at pictures related to it.

It can also help to start dealing with other non-social fears you may have so you can build your confidence in your ability to overcome your anxieties (for example, facing a milder hesitation toward learning to drive).

Here are a few more examples of fear-facing progressions:

Feeling uncomfortable in nightclubs

Go to a non-intimidating, low-key pub in the afternoon on a slow day.
Go to a non-intimidating pub in the evening on a slow day.
Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a slightly busy night.
Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a busier night.
Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night.
Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night.
Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub at night when it’s busy.
Go to a quite intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night.
Go to a quite intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night.
Go to a quite intimidating nightclub at night when it’s busy.

Feeling uneasy with speaking up in groups

Have several hierarchies going at the same time:

Start with short, simple contributions and then work your way up to more lengthy, involved, or controversial ones.
Start by speaking up in smaller groups, and build up to sharing in bigger ones.
Start with groups that are low key and easy to chime in to, and work up to rowdier discussions where you have to be assertive to be heard.
Start with friendly groups that don't scare you, and work up to speaking in ones that intimidate you more.

Work up to dropping your safety behaviors

Safety behaviors get in the way of overcoming fears. Even if you successfully face a situation, in the back of your mind you can always reason, “Well, X is still dangerous. It was just the safety behavior that got me through it.”

They keep you from realizing that your fear is manageable and that you can handle it without any help. If you use any safety behaviors and they seem to help you, by all means stick with them at first. But as you make more progress in facing your fears, try to drop them and go it alone.

Face the actual situation that scares you; doing zany, gutsy stunts won’t help much

Some people, when thinking about facing their social fears, say to themselves, “I’m generally afraid of rejection, so I’ll get over that fear by doing a bunch of outrageous things to mess with strangers and get shot down as hard as possible.

If I can get used to going up to random people and acting like a chicken, then anything else, like talking to guests at a party, will be a cakewalk.” It does take guts to act strangely around someone you don’t know, and it may help build your courage, but the carryover to more low-key, day-to-day social situations isn’t as big as you might think.

When you’re purposely being odd and screwing with people, you know deep down that it’s just a lark. You’ll probably never see that person again, and you’re not putting the “real you” on the line. It’s not the same as approaching someone to make genuine conversation and knowing the other person is going to respond to your true personality and interpersonal skills.

Start facing your fears, beginning with the least scary items

The item in your hierarchy you decide to start with has to feel manageable. It should push your limits, but only a little. It’s okay if it makes you slightly hesitant and requires some willpower to face, but no more than that. If the thought of doing it makes you frozen and jittery, it’s too much for you to handle right now.

You need to begin with something simpler. People often quit when facing their fears and then declare that the process doesn’t work because they jump straight to a step that’s too overwhelming. Ideally your starter task should feel so simple that you think, “This is too easy. Do I even need to do this? Maybe I should start with something harder.”

Only move up the ladder when you’re fully used to the previous step. “Used to” means it only causes you mild anxiety, and is even starting to feel mundane and boring. You may reach this point for some steps in a day. You may have to stick to other steps for a few weeks.

Don’t be in a hurry to complete your hierarchy. There’s no award for finishing quickly, especially if you rush so much that you don’t really lock in your improvement.

The relevant thing is facing the fear, not the outcome of the interaction

When you’re exposing yourself to a fear, your goal is to put yourself in a certain situation and get used to it. Don’t worry about any other outcomes. If you want to get more comfortable chatting to people at parties, all that matters is that you’re starting those interactions. For now, it’s irrelevant if you weren’t an enrapturing storyteller. If you want to get used to inviting people out, as long as you asked, it’s unimportant whether they said yes or no.

Once you’re on the scene, know some ways to get yourself to face your fear

When you’ve arrived at the situation where your fear is, you then have to take the step of actually confronting it. It’s very common to get there and then hesitate for a good while before taking the plunge. The end of the previous chapter covered some ways to get yourself to act.

Once you’re face-to-face with your fear, have ways to cope in the moment

Once you’re facing your fear, you’re going to feel anxious. You’ll start to calm down if you stick around long enough, but until then, it helps to have some other ways to deal with your anxious symptoms. The previous chapter covered this as well.

Partial progress is an accomplishment too

It’s important to give yourself credit for even partial progress toward facing a fear. For example, if you’re fearful of talking to strangers at pubs, you may go out to several venues and not be able to talk to anyone for three outings in a row.

However, on the first night you were only 40 percent of the way there. On the second night you were 70 percent close, and 90 percent on the third. Maybe on the fourth night you finally did it. That interaction wouldn’t have been possible without those other three sessions, which may have appeared to be failures if you only looked at them in more simplistic “either I talked to someone or I didn’t” terms.

Debrief yourself after each exposure session

Each time you face your fear, it may bring up some counterproductive thinking, such as “That person thought I was a creep when I said hi to them. Why do I even bother? I’ll never get the hang of this.” You must not unquestionably swallow these thoughts, or you may set yourself further back than where you began. Use the principles from last plengdut post to address that thinking properly. Don’t dissect only the insecure thoughts you had. Remind yourself of what went well too. Did you face the fear with a lot less hesitation compared to last time? Did you find yourself thinking in any constructive ways that helped you feel more confident? Build up a written record of your small and large successes.

Reward and congratulate yourself every step of the way

Every time you accomplish something listed in your hierarchy that you couldn’t do before, you should give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself. Your reward doesn’t have to be anything big, just something that adds a little oomph to your day and caps off the sense of accomplishment you already feel. This is another effective behavioral psychology principle that makes the process easier.

Something can seem less scary if you know a treat and sense of satisfaction are waiting for you on the other side. You can also use rewards in different ways to motivate yourself: Specify something you like doing (for example, checking your favorite websites), and then tell yourself you can’t do that until you meet your fear-facing goals for the day.

This approach can be extremely effective if you pick the right carrot for yourself. You’ll find yourself sitting around thinking, “Man, I really want to play more of that game I just bought. I guess I’d better get out there and try talking to people.” When you meet your daily objective, you’ll be proud of yourself and looking forward to the fun activity you’ve earned.

Face your fears on a regular basis and work up your hierarchy

Map out a schedule for how you’ll work through each subfear. Not every fear lends itself to daily practice, but you can improvise. You may not be able to go to a party six days a week, but you could pledge to practice starting conversations by going to some Internet meet-ups.

The more often you work on exposing yourself to your fears, the better, because it keeps the momentum going. Building up your courage is like exercising to increase your physical fitness. You’ll tend to lose your courage “gains” if you leave too much time between exposure sessions. You may not lose your gains completely, but you’ll lose enough that you’ll have to take some extra time to regain the few steps you lost.

Don’t think you’re cured after facing a scarier fear one time

The first time you successfully face one of your bigger fears, you’ll probably be over the moon. In your excitement, you may feel like you’ve solved all of your problems, but you’ve really only taken the first step.

It’s common for people to face their fear during one session and then get discouraged when they go out a few days later and find they’re nervous all over again.

Facing your fear for the first time is a huge accomplishment, but you need to repeatedly face it to solidify your progress. It’s like lifting weights. If you want to be able to consistently move a certain amount, you have to regularly exercise with it.

You’ll often face your fear for the first time on a day when you’r unusually confident, but then you’ll find it takes more work to get to the point where you can reliably deal with it when your mood is more average. You have to face your fear again and again and again to overcome it.

You will hit snags

It’s rare to plan out a fear hierarchy and effortlessly move up it. You have to be flexible and make adjustments as you go. You may find you have the order of the steps wrong.

You could complete one rung and find the next step is too challenging, so you need to find a task to bridge the two. It’s also common to encounter an early step that is too hard to do once you’re face-to-face with it, even if it seemed surmountable on paper.

You’ll need to add something more basic ahead of it. The key is not to get discouraged when these hiccups happen; just keep making tweaks so the overall project stays doable.

Finally, your progress may seem to slip at times. You may go out one day and face your fears easily, feel on top of the world, and then try again the next day but find you’re nervous once more.

When this happens, keep moving forward and focus on the overall improvements you’re making. To use the exercise analogy again, when people take up strength training, they’ll have the odd bad workout, even though they’re getting stronger on the whole. This is completely normal.

If you conquer a fear and then go a long time without facing it, you’ll probably regress

If you do regress, it will take work to get your courage back, though it will come much quicker than the first time. Once more, it’s like exercising. It’s always easier to get back into shape than to get fit from scratch.

A common scenario is for someone to work to overcome their social fear, go on to achieve their other interpersonal goals, and then “get out of shape” because they no longer need to deal with the old challenge.

For example, someone with fears around initiating conversations and inviting people out gets comfortable with those skills, makes a bunch of friends, and no longer needs to meet anyone new. If they want to freshen up their social circle years down the road, they may find they’re nervous about approaching people again.

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