I have done all sorts of embarrassing things in the name of social anxiety practice:

the Inner Critic looks and finds the imperfections—the awkward silence in conversation, the answer that didn’t come out quite right, the time someone laughed at the wrong point of our story—and strings them together into a Möbius strip of lowlights. And it’s this focus on the lowlights that keeps social anxiety going strong over years and decades,

Each of the four core fears from chapter 1—our anxiety, our appearance, our character, our social skills—lends itself to a different self-concealment strategy. If we’re anxious about appearing anxious—say, blushing—we might cover our face and neck in makeup or wear turtlenecks. If we’re anxious about our appearance, we might not talk to people we

when I say “be yourself,” I mean that true self. The self you are without fear. And believe it or not, it’s safe to show that real self to the rest of the world.

If you have too much of a good thing—too much behavioral inhibition, too much social awareness—take heart. Too much is way better than too little. Remember the apple tree. Better to have an apple tree that grows abundantly and requires pruning than one that withers away and dies. Better to have an “excess of sensibility” to the presence of your

Eye contact. Aim to make eye contact between one-third and two-thirds of the time you’re talking with someone. Less than one-third signals anxiety, avoidance, or submission; more than two-thirds gets too intense. You don’t have to drill into them eyeball to eyeball. Connect, look away, reconnect, look away.

The answer is, yet again, to lower the bar.

One hundred percent of my pitches to those same magazines were met with “not a good fit at this time” or worse, silence.

He desperately wanted things to go well, which made him anxious, which made him monitor his performance. But all the management limited his attention and, ironically, made things go poorly. His Inner Critic’s forecasts about poor performance became a self-fulfilling prophecy.