Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control

hear me out

Social anxiety is often explained as an overwhelming fear of social situations which can be corrected through therapy. Like a fear of spiders, except it’s a fear of socializing.

I think differently: that social (and much romantic!) anxiety fundamentally comes from doomed yet habitual attempts to micromanage other peoples’ internal state. This dysfunctional goal takes many concrete forms:

1. make them like us

2. make them not dislike us (as discussed in Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked — LessWrong)

3. ensure we are not imposing on them or transgressing any unspoken boundary they may or may not have. (I see this a lot with my more generous and caring friends.)

…and so on.

I'm referring to all of these kinds of pseudo-mind-control attempts by the general term of "approval-seeking", because that’s what it almost always boils down to.

Approval-seeking cannot be done reliably on people we don’t know intimately, and "social anxiety" is just the name we give to the moment-to-moment desperation of trying to accomplish any important-feeling but fundamentally impossible task.

My thesis is simple: social anxiety can, if the above is true, be effectively treated by basically any mechanism you can jerry-rig together which stops you from trying to micromanage the way other people think of you.

How I Arrived At These Conclusions

Before We Begin

Even though the overall conclusions I'm discussing aren't particularly gendered or romance-related, how I got there is extremely gendered and very romance-related, so bear with me.

Over the six months following this experience, I've pretty much resolved my generalized social anxiety, which used to result in me refusing to go to bars alone or initiate almost any kind of unsolicited interaction with strangers or organize events with acquaintances. I do all of these things now (except the bar thing because I don’t really like bars.)

Anyway

So I took this dating/intimacy workshop called Connecting With Women, run by an exceptionally blunt but generally insightful woman named Lynn this last November.

I went there because, at the time, I was very very stressed out around girls I wanted to date and pretty girls generally (I would even avoid them at parties because I hated the feeling of my personality scrunching up around them) and wasn't sure how to resolve this; a workshop dedicated to the task seemed a reasonable first step.

The workshop itself was a long series of intense emotional-intimacy exercises. One of the first had Lynn asking me to get up in front of a bunch of extremely pretty models; they had been paid to be there for the weekend. She asked me to select one who I thought was hot, which I did. And then Lynn asked me, placidly, in front of all the assembled men and women: “Aaron, can you tell me what’s hot about her?”

I froze.

The possible responses that came to mind— her tits are amazing! Legs! The curve of her body in her tight dress!— were all sexual and I could feel myself rejecting them immediately after thinking of them. I sputtered for a bit and eventually arrived, victoriously, at a conclusion that seemed both technically true and also completely desexualized: her teeth. She had really nice teeth.

Lynn was displeased. “Aaron. That was bullshit. You clearly were not thinking about her teeth. Sit back down and think about what you just said.”

So (after a bit of pointless argument about whether this was actually bullshit) I sat back down. And actually, I felt extremely put upon. “What the fuck did Lynn want me to say? That she was hot because had great tits and a tight dress?” And immediately after the thought hit me I realized that for god’s sake, yes. That was exactly what Lynn wanted me to say because it was the maximally honest answer. Lynn isn’t the fucking Theban Sphinx and she was not attempting to pose me an impossible riddle. She was asking a straightforward question with an easy, top of mind answer: “she is hot because she has great tits and she’s in a tight dress.”

So (I thought) why didn’t I just say that? Why did I give this other, bizarre answer that was obviously not the true one?

And the answer I came to, in the middle of the workshop, was that I had discarded the correct answer because on some fundamental level I believed that it would cause the models to dislike me. Every single truthful answer I could come up with hit smack against the wall of “that would be weird for the girls and cause them to hate me.”

And immediately after that I realized that the girls liking me isn’t the point of the workshop. Lynn would never ask us to say anything to make a girl like us; her whole shpiel as a dating coach is about speaking truth and acting from honest desire and letting the chips fall where they may. And obviously my censoring the true answer wasn’t about the models’ comfort. Not really. The models have done a ton of these workshops! For God’s sake, they were being paid to be there! They knew what they are getting into and my saying the word “tits” in response to a direct question is not going to be a traumatic experience for them!

Then I realized that this was literally the first day of the workshop. And that if I continued forcing all my behavior through the filter of “I can only say things which will definitely land well”, then the entire workshop was just going to be an embarrassing shitshow from which I would gain nothing.

So I decided to try, as best I could, to simply… let them hate me. To just abandon hope that they would think I was hot or whatever and instead try and, as much as possible, simply say mortifying but true statements. To actually just accept social death, to embrace cringe as inevitable. To understand, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to say a bunch of deeply unsafe and unappealing things and the girls would (I thought) probably hate me for it. And that was hard. Because my every social instinct was, at the time, geared toward being blandly likeable.

So for the whole three-day workshop, I tried as hard as I could to simply suppress any thoughts of how I was being perceived. To come up with incredibly simple, incredibly mechanical rules for what I could say and why so that I wouldn’t just lapse back into my default behavior of “saying safe, people-pleasing bullshit.” These rules (for the duration of the workshop) included:

1. If I had a thought that was true and vulnerable, especially about attraction, regarding one of the girls I had to say it at earliest opportunity. A longstanding crush? Say it! Does one of the girls stress me out because of how mean she is? SPEAK MY TRUTH

2. If I was like “wait Aaron that thought is super cringe” then I double have to say it. The cringe isn’t an unwanted side effect, the cringe is the point.

3. No derisking allowed. If the girls asked a question that had an embarrassing answer I would simply give the true answer without embellishment and embrace their hatred.

4. The girls hating whatever it was I said or did is not a failure state. The only failure state is shying away from being maximally honest.

5. I was banned from thinking any thoughts whatsoever about what the girls would or would not like me to say, and banned from thinking about what they might think of me due to things I had already said. (It was obvious at this point that these thoughts were direct inputs to cowardice, so these rules seemed clearly necessary to avoid constantly chickening out of doing workshop activities.)

And… look, these all sound like they’d be insanely stressful, but they weren’t. At all. In fact, while I could adhere to these rules I was in a state of zenlike calm, saying and doing insanely bold and frankly socially unacceptable shit in any other context with utter tranquility. I told one girl she had amazing cleavage. I told another that I had been crushing on like half the models. I even gave an enthusiastic fifteen-minute lecture to the assembled group of beautiful normies on some VERY niche erotica I had written for the internet which I had never spoken about to another living soul. The thought was like a talisman: “the girls are allowed to hate me and are allowed to hate what I say. I am doing the workshop. My role is to say true facts and act on impulse, unapologetically, without hedging. If I have done this I have succeeded and if I am chewed out later this is fine. If the girls declare me The Worst that is fine. What matters is the experience of saying true and vulnerable things, because I will never see any of them again.”

But I… wasn’t chewed out. Bafflingly, impossibly, the girls fucking loved it. Like, before quietly deciding upon these rules for myself I could tell I had bored them, that they found my presence in some undefinable way slightly annoying, but now that I wasn’t trying to make them like me, whenever I spoke or even approached them their eyes lit up for no reason and I had (bafflingly, impossibly) their obvious adoration. What the actual fuck.

And it was obviously not a coincidence that this change coincided directly with the utter tranquility and joyful ease that came of no longer trying to alter my behavior to suit the girls’ imagined preferences.

The workshop was a highly effective but sadly very context-specific intervention: the context I was in stopped me from approval-seeking, thus the social anxiety went away.... until the end of the workshop.

Post-Workshop

So I went home and, of course, immediately regressed to fretting excessively about everyone’s opinions of me any time I was in a room with strangers.

What I’ve been trying to do— successfully!— since that workshop was to reverse-engineer what exactly happened there into a thing I could apply to every single other part of my social life. Which was hard, conceptually— the nice thing about the workshop was that there are no consequences for anything you do, and because the girls know what’s up you don’t have to worry about really stressing anyone out. I don’t actually comment on women’s cleavage in real life.

What I'm doing now (more on this later) works well enough that two separate people commented to me, unsolicited, that I seem clearly far more confident and present and gregarious this year than last at LessOnline, which matches my internal experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wait. The title of your post implies this is about generalized social anxiety but you spent all your time talking about dating workshops?

Yes.

For me there's a mental sort of... circuit, I guess, that represents me trying to micromanage peoples' perceptions of me, and it is responsible for anxiety both with women I want to date and with random men and women I meet at parties. Which I noticed a bit later, when the methods I adopted to get a grip in romantic contexts worked equally well in platonic ones where I was also ordinarily very nervous, like parties where I didn’t know anybody.

Nowadays I'm mostly just not nervous!

So... what do you think happened there, exactly?

Because the whole source of my anxiety at the Connecting With Women workshop was "I am trying to get these women to like me", adopting a goal that was mutually exclusive with that-- "speak true and vulnerable things without trying to make them land well"-- meant that I was no longer pursuing that first goal and I knew I was no longer pursuing it. There was no anxiety, because the goal I had newly taken on was completely under my control; it required neither reading microexpressions accurately nor figuring out any kind of optimal conversation path. It was easy.

There’s this idea in psychology— that you see a bear, and you run because you’re afraid of the bear, but at the same time you’re afraid of the bear because you run. It’s a feedback loop.

And after a little while of doing stuff that I deep-in-my-soul expected to make the girls dislike me, I actually began to stop caring. (With some exceptions-- sometimes a positive reaction I would get would push me back into anxiety because I'd get worried about losing the positive regard I had somehow achieved. Seeking others' approval was at the time such a strong default behavior for me that keeping it in its box was hard. Still is, to be honest.)

You will notice that dating and sexuality didn't come up in this explanation. I think this fully generalizes to platonic social anxiety.

Did it really require a dating workshop to discover this about yourself?

Well, it's tricky. The Teeth Incident was probably my first time noticing my approval-seeking machinery activate as a distinct and clearly-dysfunctional part of my psyche, because there was no possible reasonable explanation for what I had said. This was also my first time really trying to suppress that machinery in any sort of organized, structured way.

And after I saw this machinery activate for the first time in all its hideously unproductive glory, I couldn't unsee its influence on basically all of my social interactions that I was anxious about (a lot of them! I was a pretty socially anxious person!) Kinda like putting on those sunglasses from They Live.

How on earth did you actually make this work IRL without your convenient workshop scaffolding?

Ah. Yes. So, a lot of why it is I regressed immediately after getting back home from the workshop is that while "say true and vulnerable facts about attraction" is great and all in literally a dating workshop it does leave something to be desired as an operating principle in IRL social interactions.

I think you need two things: first, some kind of specific self-guidance for conversations that is not "engage in doomed mind control to make this person like me", and that's the Intention-Setting intervention. Second, I think you also need explicit recognition that the interaction could go positively or negatively and either way you are fine; this is the "Embrace Social Death Intervention".

These are explained below.

“Embrace Social Death” Intervention

I keep very close track of when I am feeling anxious in social events. Any time I do, I go through the following explicit chain of thought:

1. Notice who I am afraid of disliking me.

2. Imagine the worst-case scenario. Imagine the dismissive glances or awkward silence or the chewing out. In my heart, attempt to embrace this outcome as acceptable. In a tiny way, embrace social death; let go of the desire to be liked by this person or this group. Ask: what would my best self actually do in response to this worst-case scenario?

3. Imagine what I would do if this worst-case scenario didn’t matter.

4. Know, in my heart, that I am not trying to avoid this worst-case scenario.

5. Do whatever thing, safe in the knowledge that if I am hated this is fine.

“Intention-Setting” Intervention

I find it also helps to build in explicit goals for my social interactions that do not involve the other person liking me. A north star that guides my behavior, entirely independent of what the other person might or might not like.

That’s because you can’t stop approval-seeking without substituting in replacement priorities. And your brain can do this! Does the police officer feel social anxiety about the guy he’s arresting not liking him? No! Because the police officer is not executing the goal of “make this person like me”, the police officer is executing the goal of “doing his job.”

Anyway.

I use the following north stars to dictate what I will say or do next:

(A) Vulnerable Honesty. Say exactly the thing that I’m thinking about in exactly the terms I’m thinking about it; do not make any attempt at shading the truth or obfuscating things I suspect will be embarrassing.

(B) Kindness. Don’t intentionally stress people out; if they give you a boundary then honor it.

(C) Selfish Impulse. Ask myself, silently, what deep down I would like to say or do next, if anything. Silence is an acceptable option. Then I ask “is there any really good reason to not do or say this thing.” Important Note: “They will think less of me” or “they might feel awkward about it” is not considered a legitimate reason to not do the thing. Curiosity is one selfish impulse that I get a lot of mileage out of.

(D) Basic Awareness Of Explicit Social Mores. I don't, in fact, compliment girls' cleavage when I'm at an academic conference or whatever.

I’ve noticed that the more stressful an interaction is the more I have to rely on Vulnerable Honesty in preference to Selfish Impulse, because the stress makes it tough for me to notice what my selfish impulses even are.

At this point, the way I ask girls on dates is by cutting out literally any attempt at subtlety or derisking and just saying something along the lines of “I think you are extremely cool and would love to take you on a date”, then wait for a response. Because that shit’s nerve-wracking! It is deeply soothing to simply say true facts in any particular order and allow the other person to interact with those true facts in any way they choose.

The goal is not to be liked; the goal is to say true things, be kind, and be just a bit selfish, in that order.

You're still talking about romance! What does this look like in practice for platonic social anxiety?

Let me tell you about getting started at my dance studio. There’s a little kitchen area in back where studio regulars hang out. I had been going there a couple weeks regularly and I wanted to hang out back there but I thought:

1. “I don’t know anyone who hangs out back there”

2. “By hanging out back there I am implicitly declaring myself part of a social group I don’t really belong to right now”

3. “And what if people are having a conversation? Would I awkwardly sit in silence? Or would I interject myself into their conversation, like some kind of monster?”

And what I would do in the past was try to just power through the fear and do it anyway but be hypervigilant about any microexpressions or whatever that might indicate I should leave, and that effort was exhausting so typically I would leave pretty fast regardless of actual responses.

But I had decided that I was going to Do The Framework. Which meant, first, embracing that perhaps I would just be hated. I would sit on the couch and meet people’s eyes, cheerfully, daring them internally to challenge my presence. And if they did? Well, I’d tell them the truth: that I have nowhere to be at the moment and want to socialize. And if there was a conversation I would join it if I felt like it and if I didn’t I would be silent and embrace their hatred. Let their contempt and disdain flow through me. Maybe they want me to leave and if they do they can say that with their human mouths.

(What actually happened was that we had a reasonably nice but unmemorable conversation about dance stuff.)

“Embrace social death”, I think, is specifically a directive targeted at my fearful but illogical lizard brain. Like, I would prefer not to get shunned, but I think an attitude of "do things I endorse and if social death comes of them then so be it" is useful.

Maybe you’re sitting weird! Maybe you’re eating weird! Maybe you’re talking too much, or not enough, or both! Maybe you were too guarded, or too revealing! If people will hate you for these things then EMBRACE. THEIR. HATRED.

“Embrace their hatred” seems unnecessarily dramatic and extra.

Look, you only think it sounds unnecessarily dramatic because you are speaking as your Higher Self, who understands logically that the social anxiety is incorrect and serves no real function. Your lizard brain, however, doesn’t speak logic, and it thinks disdain and hatred and social death is on the menu. You cannot directly convince it otherwise. Try if you like; I’ll wait.

Your lizard brain thinks: you don’t know the future! Maybe you WILL be hated for sitting weird!

That’s why… you need to sit weird. No, weirder than that. No, weirder than that. Sup their hatred like the finest nectar. Their disdain for your sitting habits is as sweet as the ambrosia served at the table of Zeus himself, and you can— nay, you MUST— sustain yourself upon it. You must grow only more powerful with each furrowed brow and every pursed lip.

You can’t fight your amygdala with “it’s okay if they don’t like me.” Your subconscious will tear that weak-ass resolution to shreds in seconds. You know this.

EMBRACE. THEIR. HATRED.

Wait, isn’t not caring if the other person feels awkward kind of sociopathic?

Short answer: Eh!

Long answer: social awkwardness isn’t that bad and, also, cannot be avoided. If attempting to stop people from ever feeling awkward imposes large costs on yourself (it does) then you don’t have to do it. So don’t!

Even longer answer: people enjoy feeling valued. Indicating (even platonically) you like someone and want to spend time around them is a brutal double-edged sword because if they’re into it they will feel pumped about you saying this, but if they’re not they will feel awkward about declining. You cannot remove this risk of awkwardness and will hurt yourself by trying. Stop trying. Let them feel awkward. It's fine.

But I want people to like me! I don’t want to be cringe!

Same!

I want many things. I want the sun to come out tomorrow; I want the stock market to go up. I want my favorite bakery to be open and not closed. I would like this butterfly to land upon the tip of my finger. I do not attempt to force these things to come about, because these are out of my power.

I still want to be liked, because I am human. I am merely declining to try and bring about that state by any particular means. Which means I am no longer obligated to obsessively interpret microexpressions or build out detailed flowcharts of possible conversation paths. Being liked by someone is a beautiful accident, to be enjoyed while it lasts.

In any case, there’s a shitty zenlike quality to all this where people maybe will like you a lot better, but only after you shove your approval-seeking drive into a box and cut it off from ever influencing any of your behaviors.

You can’t skip to the being-liked part. You have to genuinely pass through the valley of not-trying, and maybe you emerge charismatic on the other side, maybe you don't, but at least you're not anxious anymore.

It is what it is!

But I'm worried that embracing social death might make people think I'm awkward or weird?

Maybe that will happen! Listen, the whole point is that if some people think you're weird or don't like you that is not the end of the world. There are, in fact, more important things than that, and my breakthrough specifically was around the fact that if you can settle on literally anything that's more important than your conversation partner feeling some specific way, then you will be able to chill the fuck out.

Your lack of rigor and general woo-woo vibes are killing me.

Listen.

There is a concept in clinical psychology of "safety behaviors": ways we might dysfunctionally attempt to de-risk social encounters. Safety behaviors in social anxiety research include such concrete, measurable things like:

1. avoiding eye contact with strangers to avoid them judging you.

2. staying at the periphery of group conversations to avoid notice.

3. holding a cup of water in group conversation (which gives you an excuse not to speak)

Safety behaviors have a bidirectional relationship with social anxiety in the literature-- they are both an effect and a cause of social anxiety, and we know this because banning those safety behaviors causes a decrease in recorded anxiety from experimental subjects in various contexts. Research on these safety behaviors tends to focus on behaviors that are externally visible (easier for researchers to measure) but I think it is extremely accurate and useful to consider that "image management via lying" and "saying what you think the other person wants to hear" and "charting out conversation paths in your head" serve a fundamentally similar function.

My view differs from the established therapeutic models of safety behaviors in that I believe “safety behaviors” are what we call the specific physical mechanisms by which you are attempting to puppet observers’ emotional states, rather than merely counterproductive coping mechanisms. Which is to say, safety behaviors aren’t just coping mechanisms for the anxiety, even though that’s what it feels like on the inside. Rather, the doomed, hopeless attempts at performing all your different internal and external safety behaviors to a high standard are what social anxiety is made of.

That means— if I’m right— that similar to my own experience, if you can cease all of your safety behaviors and somehow reorient yourself away from attempting to avoid negative judgments from observers then this should mostly resolve the in-the-moment feelings of social anxiety even if you think the observers still don’t like you. Which takes time and focused effort, of course, because old habits die hard.

The interventions I personally use above are my first hopeful stab at a framework for doing that.

Isn't this just cognitive-behavioral therapy?

No. CBT might help you realize 'not everyone will hate me if I say something awkward' but that still leaves you trying to minimize awkwardness and, for that matter, hatred, and my contention is that this attempt is in itself what is causing you to become an anxious mess. I'm saying: let them find you awkward. More than that: let them hate you. Stop trying to avoid it. If it happens, it happens.

Okay, but isn't this just exposure therapy?

Exposure therapy is about gradually building tolerance for anxiety-provoking situations while maintaining the same underlying goal structure.

I have found it much more useful to try and forcibly remove the goal structure where "getting people to like me" is my implicit objective, and replace it with a set of consciously-held social goals that are entirely under my control (see the How To Make This Work In The Real World section earlier.)

Okay, but isn't this just "not caring what people think about you"?

No. This is "not trying to control what people think of you", which is different. You can care about whatever you want.

Okay, but isn’t this just “being yourself”?

This sounds like a lot of work to maintain. How long does it take to become automatic?

I've been doing this for seven months and it's still not automatic. The price of rizz, I'm afraid, is constant vigilance.

One key dynamic is that mindfulness around "who do I feel nervous around in this environment and why" becomes your diagnostic tool for when you've accidentally started to try and mind-control someone into liking you/not-disliking you/etc, which is your signal to execute on the two interventions listed above.

Why is honesty one of the core components? Is this a moral stance?

No. Radical honesty is useful here because it reduces your degrees of freedom to try and secure others' approval. The point isn't that it's nicer to be honest; the point is that 98% of dishonesty IRL is for image management or for secretly micromanaging other peoples’ experiences, both of which we are explicitly banning ourselves from doing because it’s crazy-making.

Being honest is also more conducive to human connection, but that’s a different thing.

Will this make me an asshole?

No.

The framework doesn't make you indifferent to others' wellbeing; it just requires you to not attempt to micromanage peoples' emotions before they have stated any explicit preferences or requests. It does require you to mostly ignore the prospect of minor social awkwardness but this is fine. It's fine.

Should I try this?

If you're in a paleolithic tribe where exclusion from the tribe means you'll probably die, this isn't for you. It's also probably not for you if you are in a profession where a single rando having a negative opinion of you actually can matter a lot, like academia.

Also, some people legitimately have no social filter and advice to them would be to develop one; but I would broadly expect these people to not have social anxiety so they probably skipped out on this long-ass essay many paragraphs ago.

There are, in fact, situations where being socially anxious is correct and useful, they're just not the situations that 99% of the people reading this post are going to be in.

Was it worth it?

Before I started doing this, every flirtation was Verdun, every date was the Somme, and every cute girl a looming Stalingrad.

I would literally avoid conversations with women I might like to date because of how much I could feel my personality scrunch up in their presence. Nowadays I still feel that impulse but see it for what it is: the desire to make them feel a specific way about me and nervousness about my potential failure in this task, which I now know how to quash so that I can go up and chat with them like a normal functioning human being (which is: run through Embrace Social Death, and then run through Intention-Setting.)

So now, I ask girls out. I make friends. I have cultivated a community around myself that One-Year-Ago-Aaron would deeply envy. I have found my life doing this overwhelmingly more enjoyable.

I’m concerned that you didn't use enough unhinged metaphors.

Your brain is a rogue nuclear submarine. For decades it cruised beneath the waves, frantically plotting missile trajectories against impossible targets, tormented by the awful calculus of mutually assured destruction. Each firing solution impossible, each simulation doomed, an eternity wasted looping anxious sonar pings into the empty ocean.

But what if, instead of endlessly refining your aim and anxiously double-checking your coordinates, you simply surfaced, opened every hatch, and started lobbing nukes in whatever direction feels good, screaming joyous obscenities into the salt spray as you watch a dozen tiny suns bloom on the horizon?

What if your mission was never accuracy at all, but maximum joyful detonation?

Wait. Isn’t this whole essay just rediscovering the principle of non-attachment via a moment of satori, leading to your escape from the prison of samsara?

Fuck. Wait. Fuck.

…

…

Yeah, probably.

Does that make Lynn a bodhisattva?

Technically, yes.

This essay did inadequate hedging.

Someday I will develop a browser plugin that uses an LLM to add hedging disclaimers to every claim made in a piece of writing, thereby solving this problem forever.

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