Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Less (2017)

  It takes place not in the ancient monastery itself, where one can buy honey from cloistered bees, but in a municipal hall built in the rock beneath the monastery. Being a place of worship, it lacks a dungeon, and so the region of Piemonte has built one. In the auditorium (whose rear access door is open to different weather: a sudden storm brewing), the teenagers are arrayed exactly as Less imagines the hidden monks to be: with devout expressions and vows of silence. The elderly chairpeople sit at a kingly table; they also do not speak. The only speaker is a handsome Italian (the mayor, it turns out) whose appearance on the podium is announced by a crack of thunder; the sound goes out on his microphone; the lights go out. The audience goes “Aaaah!” Less hears the young writer, seated beside him in the darkness, lean over and speak to him at last: “This is when someone is murdered. But who?” Less whispers “Fosters Lancett” before realizing the famous Brit is seated just behind them. The lights awake the room again, and no one has been murdered. A movie screen begins to unroll noisily from the ceiling like a mad relative wandering downstairs and has to be sent back into hiding. The ceremony begins again, and as the mayor begins his speech in Italian, those mellifluous, seesawing, meaningless harpsichord words, Less feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns. For he does not belong here. It seemed absurd when he got the invitation, but he saw it so abstractly, and at such a remote distance in time and space, that he accepted it as part of his getaway plan. But here, in his suit, sweat already beginning to dot the front of his white shirt and bead on his thinning hairline, he knows it is utterly wrong. He did not take the wrong car; the wrong car took him. For he has come to understand this is not a strange funny Italian prize, a joke to tell his friends; it is very real. The elderly judges in their jewelry; the teens in their jury box; the finalists all quivering and angry with expectation; even Fosters Lancett, who has come all this way, and written a long speech, and charged his electronic cigarette and his dwindling battery of small talk—it is very real, very important to them. It cannot be dismissed as a lark. Instead: it is a vast mistake.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She led me past the door and around the building to a smaller, darker entrance at the back. Here a set of rather steep and treacherous-looking steps took us downwards, to what must once have been a cellar; at the bottom there was a door of frosted glass, and behind this was the room - the Boy in the Boat, I remembered to call it - that we had come for. It was not a large room, but it was very shady, and it took me a time to gauge its breadth and height, to see beyond its spots of brightness - its crackling fire, its gas-lamps, the gleam of brass and glass and mirror and pewter at its bar - into the pools of gloom that lay between them. There were, I guessed, about twenty persons in it: they were seated in a row of little stalls, or standing propped against the counter, or gathered in the furthest, brightest corner, about what seemed to be a billiard table. I didn’t like to gaze at them for long, for at our appearance they all, of course, looked up, and I felt strangely shy of them and their opinion. Instead I kept my head down, and followed Florence to the bar. There was a square-chinned woman standing behind it, wiping at a beer-glass with a cloth; when she saw us coming she put both glass and towel down, and smiled. ‘Why, Florence! How grand to see you here again! And how bonny you are looking!’ She held out her hand and took Florence’s fingers in her own, and looked her over with pleasure. Then she turned to me. ‘This is my friend, Nancy Astley,’ said Flo, rather shyly. ‘This is Mrs Swindles, who keeps bar here.’ Mrs Swindles and I exchanged nods and smiles. I took off my coat and hat, and ran my fingers through my hair; and when she saw me do that her brow lifted a little and I hoped that she was thinking, as Annie Page had: Well, Florence has a fancy new uncle, all right! ‘What will you have, Nance?’ Florence asked me then. I said I would have whatever she cared for, and she hesitated, then asked for two rum hots. ‘Let’s take them to a stall.’ We stepped across the room - there was sand upon the floorboards, and our boots crunched upon it as we walked — to a table, set between two benches. We sat, across from one another, and stirred sugar into our glasses. ‘You were a regular here once, then?’ I asked Flo. She nodded. ‘I haven’t been here for an age...’ ‘No?’ ‘Not since Lily died. It’s a bit of a monkey-parade, to tell the truth.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  The signs of love, which for your ancestors were perhaps among the most enticing objects in the landscape, can be so subtle by modern standards that you can miss them completely. If you rush through your morning routine, for instance, inhale breakfast and brush your teeth while driving to work, plow through your in-box and mushrooming to-do list, run to meeting after meeting right up to the end of your workday, race through the grocery store, fix a quick dinner for your kids, send them off to bed, only to collapse in your own bed to fret about the marathon day you face tomorrow, how do you find the time or the energy to kindle those fragile states of positivity resonance? Thinking Nearly sixty years ago, a decade before the counterculture of the 1960s erupted throughout the United States and beyond, Aldous Huxley famously described his first experience with psychedelic drugs, in his controversial 1954 book, The Doors of Perception . The book’s title cast back to the metaphorical language of English poet and printmaker William Blake’s 1790 book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , and inspired the name of the 1960s American rock band the Doors. Blake wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. Building on Blake’s metaphor, Huxley likened the human brain to a reducing valve. It functions to limit your awareness to only those perceptions, ideas, and memories that might be useful for your survival at any given moment, eliminating all else. Although narrowed awareness prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by a flood of images and impressions, to some extent, it can become an overlearned habit, a self-limiting cavern. By comparing—through the use of language—your own reduced experiences of the world to the reduced experiences of others, you can become convinced that your limited awareness represents the reality of the world. Huxley writes: Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Huxley’s hypothesis that the doors of perception can temporarily swing open wider than usual—even seemingly spontaneously—is now confirmed by brain imaging experiments. Importantly, however, you don’t need drugs, hypnosis, or lofty spiritual experiences to open those doors. Sometimes all it takes is a little positivity.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  So get specific. What exactly is the worst that can happen? What particular stupid thing do I expect I will do? Who, precisely, do I expect is going to judge me? As the defense attorney says, name names. Everyone will hate me turns into My boss will hate this particular presentation. Everyone will think I’m a freak turns into The five or six people I talk to at the party might notice my hands shaking and think something is wrong with me. People will think I’m ugly turns into Mackenzie and Carmen will be judgmental of my outfit and hair again. I’ll screw this up turns into The customer service guy won’t understand what I need and we’ll get into a long, awkward misunderstanding. Something bad will happen turns into I’m worried I won’t know where to stand or how to position my body during the meet-and-greet. Sometimes we get lucky and specify, specify, specify is enough to quell the anxiety right away. Once our specific fear is solidified, we recognize it for what it is. When Something embarrassing will happen is specified into I will go fetal and mute in front of the whole staff meeting, we realize it’s about as realistic as Barbie’s high-heeled feet. But more often, specify, specify, specify is the first step. After we’ve pinned down the Inner Critic’s worst-case scenario, we can start to challenge it. So let’s check back in the courtroom and see how our defense attorney does this. THE MAGIC QUESTIONS Next up, a set of magic questions. The defense attorney looks squarely at the Inner Critic and lets loose the first: “How bad would that really be?” The Inner Critic scoffs again. “How bad would that really be? Bad! Really bad! People will reject me! Or ignore me! Or think I’m stupid! You can’t tell me those things aren’t bad. You’ve got nothing.” “Okay, it wouldn’t be pleasant,” allows the defense attorney. “But would any of those truly be a disaster of epic proportions?” “Totally disastrous!” “Would anyone die? Would you be irreversibly broken?” The Critic pauses. “Does dying inside count?” “No.” “But those things would totally suck!” “Yes, they would suck, but would they be disasters? Would they be worth getting really worked up over?” For the first time, the Critic’s voice gets a little softer. “They’d still be bad,” it insists. The defense attorney smiles, clasps her hands behind her back, and rocks on her heels. She may actually be enjoying this. Okay, what’s our defense attorney up to here? She’s doing what’s called decatastrophizing, which is like declawing a lion. It’s bursting the bubble of the worst-case scenario. Don’t get me wrong, the problem is still there—someone out there indeed might momentarily think we’re weird, unattractive, or stupid. But how bad is that really? How bad is a little bit of judgment? Could we handle it? The consequences get put in perspective.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Like fossil fuels or political capital, attention is a limited resource. We have only so much we can allocate before it is used up. For Diego, all his attention is focused on himself and the management of his anxiety, a phenomenon aptly called self-focused attention. Self-focused attention eats up our bandwidth by focusing on our bodies (I look weird, don’t I?), emotions (I’m freaking out here), performance (Why did I say that? I sound like an idiot), or management (I should smile at her. But maybe that looks creepy. But not smiling is creepier, isn’t it? Argh, I probably look like I want to stuff her in my car trunk). Thus, we come away from social encounters with very little information about how things actually went. And where do we look to fill in the gaps? Unfortunately, we ask our anxiety, which is about as credible as asking the used-car salesman which model we should buy. Or we ask the Inner Critic, which is even worse. In short, we look inside to see how things outside are going. Whether at a high school dance or our annual performance review we use our discomfort to determine how we are coming off to others. This is called the felt sense. We feel like an idiot, so we must be spouting nonsense. We feel like a loser, so everyone must be secretly signing an L on their foreheads when we turn around. Again, it feels true, so we ask our anxiety, arguably the least credible source of information, for reassurance. No wonder it’s not working. To top it off, this self-absorption reverberates far beyond just our anxious moments. Researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario asked socially anxious undergrads to have a five-minute getting-to-know-you conversation with a lab assistant (as you probably noticed by now, social anxiety researchers love the five-minute getting-to-know-you conversation). In order to induce self-focused attention, half the participants were instructed to pay close attention to their own feelings, thoughts, actions, and body sensations during the conversation. By contrast, the other half were asked to pay close attention to their partners’ words and facial expressions. After the conversation, the researchers let them stew for twenty-four hours. The next day, the self-focused group reported lashing themselves with criticism more harshly and more often than the partner-focused group. Indeed, the first myth of social anxiety—I must always monitor myself and my anxiety—set in motion a twenty-four-hour-long ripple effect of negativity. For Diego, the myth kept him trapped in the closed circuit of social anxiety as well. 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. * * * So if monitoring is getting in our way, what do we do instead? How do we get out of our heads? The answer is your next tool: turn your attention inside out.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  not under obligation to keep the statutes of the law, and though he has not referred specifically to any statute except those that pertain to circumcision, food, and the observance of days and seasons, he has constantly spoken simply of law, or the law, without indicating that his thought was limited to any portion or aspect of it. To men who have been accustomed to think of law as the only obstacle to free self-indulgence, or to those who, on the other hand, have not been accustomed to high ethical standards, such language is (despite the contrary teaching of w.5> 6) easily taken to mean that for the Christian there is nothing to stand in the way of the unrestrained indul- gence of his own impulses. Of this danger Paul is well aware (cf. Rom. 6lff- Phil. 317ff- Col. 3lff-), and beginning with this v. addresses himself vigorously to meeting and averting it. The word vdp^j previously in this epistle a purely physical term, is used here and throughout this chapter (see w. 16> 17» 20' 24) in a definitely ethical sense, "that element of man's nature which is opposed to goodness, and makes for evil," in which it appears also in Rom., chap. 8; see detached note on TLvtvpa and 2ap£ II 7, p. 493, and the discussion following 7. For fuller treat- ment, see Burton, Spirit, Soul, and Flesh, chap. VI, pp. 186, 191 /. Of any physical association with this ethical sense of the term there is no trace in this passage. The article before IXeuSepfav is demonstrative, referring to IXeu0epfce of the preceding clause, and through it to that of 5l and the implication of the whole context. On the omission of the verb with i*4 cf, p,-ft Vofye p.60ou$, Aristoph. Vesp. 1179; ^ TP$&; I-n, Soph. Antig. 575; P.TJ jxoc &jt,upfou£, Dem. 45" (cited by Alf.),* Hartung, Partikeln II 153; Devarius, De Partiadis, Ed. Klotz, II 669; W. LXIV 6; Mk. 14'. Note also the omission of the verb after y,6vov, in 2*°. What verb is to be supplied, whether IXETE, voteta, Tpfexe (cf. Sief, E1L a d,), orp^eTe or y-ETaorp&peTe (Rev. n* Acts 219» «), or some other, is not wholly clear. The thought is probably not "use not this freedom for, in the interest of," but "convert not this freedom into." On the use of efc, cf, Jn. i62°: fj Xu-rc^ 5(ji&v ete y<zp&» Yev^cjeToct, and Acts 2"» *«. ifopjid), properly the place from which an attack is made (Thucydides, Polybius), is used also figuratively by Xenophon, et aL, with the mean- ing, "incentive," "opportunity," "occasion." In N. T. it occurs in the Pauline letters only (Rom. 7f a Cor, $** n» i Tim. 5") always in v, 13-14 293

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  Ln Tres eis KEevov Tpéx@ 7) ESpapov, “lest perchance I should run or had run in vain.” 4) 7@s expresses apprehension (see more fully below). The whole phrase implies that the apostle saw in the existing situation a danger that his work on behalf of the Gentiles, both past and future, might be rendered ineffectual by the opposition of the Jerusalem church, or of certain men in it, and the disapproval of the apostles, and that fearing this, he sought to avert it. The ground of his appre- hension is, of course, not a doubt concerning the truth of the gospel which he preached—it would be an impossible incon- 2 73 gruity on his part to attribute to himself such a doubt in the very midst of his strenuous insistence upon the truth and divine source of that gospel—but rather, no doubt, the conviction that the disapproval of his work by the leading apostles in Jerusalem would seriously interfere with that work and to a serious degree render it ineffectual. The apostle’s conduct throughout his career, notably in the matter of the collection for the poor of Jerusalem, and his own last visit to Jerusalem (see x Cor. 1613 2 Cor. chs. 8, 9, esp. 92-5 Rom. 1575-8, esp. v. #1), show clearly that it was to him a matter of the utmost impor- tance, not only to prevent the forcing of the Jewish law upon the Gentiles, but at the same time to maintain the unity of the Christian movement, avoiding any division into a Jewish and a Gentile branch. To this end he was willing to divert energy and time from his work of preaching to the Gentiles in order to raise money for the Jewish Christians, and to delay his journey to the west in order personally to carry this money to Jeru- salem. His unshaken confidence in the divine origin and the truth of his own gospel did not prevent his seeing that the rupture which would result from a refusal of the pillar apostles, the leaders of the Jewish part of the church, to recognise the legitimacy of his mission and gospel and so of Gentile Christian- ity on a non-legal basis, would be disastrous alike to the Jew- ish and the Gentile parties which would thus be created. Eis xevév found also in Lxx (Lev. 262° Job 391 Mic. 1 Isa. 298, etc.); Jos. Ant. 19. 27 (14), 96 (118); Bell. 1. 275 (141); in late Greek writers (Diod. Sic. 19.9%) and in the N.T. by Paul (1 Thes. 35 2 Cor. 6: Phil. 216) is with him always, as usually in the Lxx, a phrase of result meaning “uselessly,” “without effect.” Running, as a figure of speech for ef- fort directed to an end, is not uncommon with Paul (1 Cor. 9% 26 Gal. 57 Phil.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  know what was going on. Especially would this be the case if there was any uncertainty in his mind as to whether the divi- sion of the field agreed to at Jerusalem assigned to him the Jews, or Jewish lands. .See on 2\ Even if he had come ex- pecting to disapprove wfratlie found, it would be by no means uncharacteristic of him that, captivated with the picture of Christian unity which he saw, he should, instead of reproving, have himself adopted the new custom. And if in turn news of this state of affairs, including Peter's unexpected conduct, reached Jerusalem, this would furnish natural occasion for the visit of the representatives of James; for to James as well as to the more extreme legalists such conduct might seem not only to violate the Jerusalem agreement, but to create a most seri- ous obstacle to the development of the Christian faith among the Jews. And this in turn makes clear the important fact that the situation at Antioch was not the result of repudiation of the Jerusalem agreement by any of the parties to it, but was sim- ply the coming to the surface of the contradictory convictions which were only imperfectly harmonised in the compromise in which the Jerusalem conference issued, A new aspect of the question which underlay the discussion at Jerusalem had now come to the front and raised a question concerning which pre- cisely opposite decisions might easily seem to different persons to be, involved in the Jerusalem decision. The brethren at Antioch might naturally seem to themselves to be only follow- ing out what was logically involved in the Jerusalem decision, when they found in the recognition of uncircumcteed Gentile believers as brethren the warrant for full fellowship with them on equal terms, and, in the virtual declaration of the non- essentiality of circumcision, ground for the Inference that the O. T* statute were no longer binding, and ought not to be observed to the detriment of the unity of the Christian com- munity. The Jerusalem brethren^ on the other handj might with equal sincerity maintain that they had never or intimated the belief that the Jews could disregard the statutes of the lawj and that the tadt mderstanding of the Jerusalem II, is 107 decision was that these statutes should be regarded as still in force for the Jews, whatever concessions were made in respect to the Gentiles. It was this derivation of contrary conclusions from the Jerusalem compromise and Peter's wavering between the two interpretations that created the Antioch situation.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again - yet also feared to. She had invited me, but she hadn’t named a time; and I, in those days, was terribly anxious and shy. So though I went as often as I was able to my box at the Palace, and watched and applauded her as she sang, and received those secret looks and tokens, it was a full week before I made my way again back stage, and presented myself, all pale, sweating and uncertain, at her dressing-room door. But when I did so, she received me with such kindness, and chided me so sincerely for having left her unvisited so long; and we fell again to chatting so easily about her life in the theatre, and mine as an oyster-girl in Whitstable, that all my old qualms quite left me. Persuaded at last that she liked me, I visited her again - and then again, and again. I went nowhere else that month but to the Palace; saw no one else - not Freddy, not my cousins, not even Alice, hardly - but her. Mother had begun to frown about it; but when I went home and said that I had gone back stage at Miss Butler’s invitation, and been treated by her like a friend, she was impressed. I worked harder than ever at my kitchen duties; I filleted fish, washed potatoes, chopped parsley, thrust crabs and lobsters into pans of steaming water - and all so briskly I barely had breath for a song to cover their shrieks with. Alice would say rather sullenly that my mania for a certain person at the Palace made me dull; but I didn’t speak to Alice much these days. Now every working day ended, for me, with a lightning change, and a hasty supper, and a run to the station for the Canterbury train; and every trip to Canterbury ended in Kitty Butler’s dressing-room. I spent more time in her company than I did watching her perform upon the stage, and saw her more often without her make-up, and her suit, and her footlight manner, than with them. For the friendlier we grew the freer she became, and the more confiding. ‘You must call me “Kitty”,’ she said early on, ‘and I shall call you - what? Not “Nancy”, for that is what everyone calls you. What do they call you at home? “Nance”, is it?

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But Derrick blamed himself for the sparse attendance at the new place. “My dad knows everyone who’s anyone. He can talk to anybody. Legend has it a local Mob boss came into the gym when Dad was first starting out, tried to shake him down, and Dad sweet-talked him into a workout.” Derrick laughs. “The man’s social skills are second to none. He makes Bill Clinton look like a wallflower.” But then Derrick’s smile fades. “I didn’t inherit that. Don’t get me wrong, I love being at the gym—there’s an energy. It’s in the air. It’s just when my mind starts going that everything goes wrong.” Derrick explains: “Put me in front of a class and I’m good. I can teach Fighter Basics and Fighter Circuit no problem. I can give a tour to a prospective new member—that’s fine. It’s when things are unstructured that I get all weird.” He drummed his fingers on the table, giving me an eyeful of tattooed forearms the width of my leg. “I want people to have the best workout experience of their lives at our gym. I want them to walk away saying, ‘Wow, that place is amazing.’ So I try to talk to people after class, to turn on the charm like I see my dad do all the time, but it never comes out right. I either come on too strong or my mind goes blank. Something is wrong with me. I don’t have the right social skills,” he concluded. “I have the best mentor in the world, but I just can’t seem to make it click. If I could do what my dad does, the new gym would be crawling with people.” It only gets worse when he’s out with friends, Derrick adds. His friends will egg him on, tell him to go talk to a girl at a bar. “So I’ll go try to introduce myself,” he said, “but then I’ll second-guess what I wanted to say and back off.” He’d try again, but then his mind would go blank. All the indecisive hovering made him worry he looked creepy, which made him question himself even more. “These girls probably think I’m coming over to apologize rather than hit on them.” He sighs. “I’m not a huge Tinder fan, but it’s better than the bar. I mean, at least you know it’s a match.” But the gym was his primary concern. It’s his family’s legacy; according to Derrick, their reputation is on the line. “I need you to beef up my social skills,” he said. “I need a social skills boot camp so I can get some customers. I’m not like my dad. I don’t have it in me.”

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But I digress. The point: your goal is to get accustomed to the hijinks of your own body, whether it sweats, trembles, quavers, blushes, or what have you. Remember exposure from chapter 10? This is the same thing. “Exposure” is simply the word for going through your fear, not around it, and realizing not only is it not so bad, after some practice, it’s boring. After a few treadmill sessions, Jake felt ready to try out the next step. He powered down the treadmill and headed to the locker room, where he took a hot shower for good measure and, as soon as he could throw on his clothes, strode out of the gym and across the parking lot to the electronics store. It was working—he felt hot and flushed, which, for the first time ever, was exactly what he wanted. The automatic doors whooshed open as he entered the store for his grand showdown with his fear of judgment. He walked down the aisles, through the home theater section, through the video games where, on slow days like that one, many of his colleagues hung out. As he walked, he greeted people, trying to catch their eye. A few said hi. One of his co-workers commented on the latest Red Sox loss but didn’t say a thing about Jake’s face. Jake actually felt a little miffed. All this work to make himself red—he could tell his legs would be sore tomorrow—and no one even cared. * * * I once worked with a client, Leslie, who was worried about people noticing her pauses in conversation. So we said “bring it on” to awkward pauses and staged an experiment where she had a conversation in session with one of my colleagues. Unbeknownst to my colleague, Leslie deliberately trailed off mid-sentence and left the conversation hanging while she silently counted off five seconds, then started talking again. In the debriefing afterwards, we asked my colleague her reaction. “It was a little odd, but I figured you just lost your train of thought,” she said. “To be honest,” she admitted sheepishly, “while we were sitting there not talking, I just started thinking about the things I had to do today. I didn’t really think about you.” This is typical. Think of the last time you noticed someone who paused, said, “Um,” had a strange expression, or an unusual appearance. Were you evil and judgy about it? Probably not. More likely, you just noticed and then moved on. For Jake, even if someone had asked, with a puzzled look, “Are you okay?” Jake could have simply said, “Yeah, I’m good.” Not so bad. No judgment, just curiosity.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Twenty years later, when the media caught wind of the questions, it treated them like they were a secret recipe for love. But the specific questions aren’t magic; instead, according to the researchers, it’s the act of “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, and personalistic” disclosure that sparks liking the other person and, indeed, sparks them to like us. The thirty-six questions lead to closeness through disclosure in fast-forward. Usually what we do when we meet someone new is small talk. Small talk is important—it’s the social niceties test-track of conversation—but by definition, it stays on the surface. It’s not about you; it’s about other things—traffic, the weather, that your co-worker Darren is out sick and there must be Something Going Around. Disclosure, however, is about you. Again, it means sharing bits of what you think and do and feel. Any topic is game. Even banal small talk can be tweaked to become a disclosure. For example, talking about the weather can be a disclosure—you’re happy that it’s getting cooler because fall is your favorite season. Or when you were younger you used to love summer, but now you don’t deal with the heat as well. Or when you were a kid, every time it rained, you and your brother would “rescue” all the worms that came out on the sidewalk and bring them home in a jar, much to the chagrin of your mother. There. You’re still talking about the weather, but you’re also offering up a little tidbit about yourself, which can serve as the launchpad of conversation. When I work with the Maddys and Noras of the world about disclosure, the next question is, inevitably, “But what do I talk about?” But that’s not actually their question. Just like Maddy doesn’t want to be told to volunteer, she doesn’t need a list of possible topics. The real question is, “How do I think through the paralyzing anxiety and come up with something that doesn’t sound totally stupid?” The answer is, yet again, to lower the bar. We think we have to be interesting, entertaining, or effortless. But that’s too much pressure. Indeed, if you tell yourself you are not allowed to say anything totally stupid you won’t say anything. So start with what you’re doing or thinking. Say hi, ask how they are, and share some tidbit about what you’re doing, what you just did, what you’re planning, or what you’ve been thinking about recently. It doesn’t have to be smart, insightful, or articulate—it just has to be about you.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Did you immediately assume your boss was going to ream you out about something? Or could it have been that he wanted to compliment you or simply assign you a new project? Were the people laughing because you said something embarrassing? Or funny? Was the non-texting friend mad? Or distracted? And was your old friend throwing some shade your way? Or implying that you looked good? This is what’s happening when Jake senses people looking at him. He assumes the worst—that they see his blushing and think he has some serious problems. So what’s the solution? When Jake confided in his friend Charles, his advice wasn’t what Jake was hoping for. “I’ve got one for the ladies,” said Charles. “How about this: ‘I’m not blushing—you’re just so hot I got sunburned.’” Jake rolled his eyes. Being a smart person, Jake’s not about to try that one. Like, ever. Here’s where we circle back to Jake on the treadmill. Rather than provide him with one-liners, our goal is to make blushing less of a big deal. Notice I didn’t say our goal was to stop the blushing. Instead of being afraid to turn red, Jake said to his blushing, “Bring it on.” It was time to bust the myth and discover not only do most people not notice, but also noticing doesn’t necessarily equal judging. Over his sessions on the treadmill, Jake became an expert at flushing red. Exercise feels a lot like the pesky sensations of anxiety: a pounding heart, sweating, shortness of breath, and, of course, turning red.2 Push-ups or a good weight-lifting session can make you shake. Run up and down stairs or knock out some burpees to make your heart pound. Even a good session with a stress ball can make your hands a little trembly, if that’s what you’re trying to get bored with. You can get creative, too: breathe through a coffee stirrer to feel light-headed, sit with your head between your knees for a minute and then quickly sit up to feel faint, or spin around in a swivel chair like a five-year-old let loose at Mom’s office to get dizzy, all in the service of getting bored with those sensations. I once had a client who, terrified of the tight space and restriction involved in getting a head-and-neck MRI, readied himself by lying on the floor with his head under his bed. When that got boring, he upped the ante by lying under the bed with his head duct-taped to the floor. The only problem was that he neglected to warn his wife about his practice and when she found him taped to the floor she had to be coaxed out of calling 911.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  In the show, there were Broadway-style productions with big groups of student dancers, multicouple performances where five or six couples danced simultaneously, and a few, select performances with one couple alone onstage. There was an audience of perhaps a hundred or so, plus an actual judge who gave written feedback on each dancer’s performance. Jim assumed Mayumi would recommend he join a Broadway-style group, but she didn’t give him a choice. “It’s you and me, Jim,” she said. Jim’s eyes widened. “I just got over pneumonia and now you want to give me a heart attack?” he asked, half-joking. But as the snow melted and the weather warmed, Jim practiced. And practiced. Before he knew it, it was June and he found himself backstage, his heart pounding beneath his tuxedo. He pulled at his collar. It was stifling backstage and he needed air. But when he peeked out from behind the curtain, he inadvertently caught the eye of the judge, who peered coolly over his glasses. Jim snapped his head back behind the curtain as if he had seen a sharpshooter. Maybe he’d have a heart attack after all. Then he wouldn’t have to do this. But then it was time. His name was announced. As if in a trance, Jim turned and walked onstage, forgetting he was supposed to make an entrance with Mayumi through the curtain. Mayumi trotted after him; after hundreds of students, she could roll with anything. And after four years of teaching Jim, she knew him well. He had told her all about his battles with social anxiety, his weekends hiding in the house, how it took him half an hour to dial the phone to schedule his first dance lesson, his hands had been shaking so badly. She knew he was nervous about this performance, but she also knew deep in her heart that he could do this, and do it well. They had practiced for months. It wasn’t about the dance steps anymore. It was about being onstage, being seen, being ready for the literal spotlight. She knew he was ready. The announcer continued, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jim’s first performance.” The applause came long and loud. “The only thing I could hear was the applause,” Jim remembered. “I thought to myself, ‘Is this really happening?’” The music started. A waltz, just like his surprise birthday dance. All at once, Jim felt focused. His anxiety evaporated. His body felt sharp and alert. His feet knew the steps—he didn’t have to think about it. What he did think about was that his backstage panic, to his astonishment, had morphed almost imperceptibly into a very different emotion: excitement. When the music ended and their feet slowed, Jim and Mayumi took their bows and ran backstage. Mayumi gave him a hug. “I have to go on again with another student now, but how do you feel? Would you come back and do it again next year?” Jim looked her in the eye. “Absolutely.”

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Let’s revisit you at the house party and offer some motivation and encouragement for the future. As you grip your glass, it’s no wonder you’re feeling anxious—you’re surrounded by strangers, your amygdala is freaking out, and your prefrontal cortex is taking its sweet time to help. You promise yourself never to do this again. But this time you make yourself a new promise. Rather than avoiding the next party, you vow to make some changes. Things can be different. Here’s why: A socially anxious brain, physiologically, is exactly the same as a non-socially anxious brain. The architecture is all there. You have the capacity; it just takes some practice to strengthen the ability that’s already innately there. CBT activates brain networks that are already present. And just like a commitment to working out strengthens the body, a commitment to practicing thinking and acting differently strengthens the brain. What’s more, other studies have concluded that CBT leads to visible brain changes—Goldin’s results aren’t just a happy fluke. The conclusion? When we challenge our socially anxious habits, over time we can break free of our well-worn neural pathways. By the time the next party rolls around, you and your brain can be ready. Pass the seven-layer dip. * * * It’s tempting for those of us punished by social anxiety to think we need a drastic change—to turn our personalities inside out like a tube sock or to shake our brains clean, Etch A Sketch style. But it turns out the drastic opposite end of the spectrum isn’t the goal, either. What’s the opposite of social anxiety, anyway? Fearlessness? At first, total lack of behavioral inhibition sounds great—no more dread, no more getting stuck in our own heads. But wait. Be careful what you wish for. While you might guess the opposite of social anxiety is confidence, that’s not quite right. The only people who have attained the dubious achievement of a total lack of social anxiety are the approximately 1 percent of the population who are psychopaths. But just like a tendency toward social anxiety is a package deal, so is psychopathy. You are indeed confident, but you’re also irresponsible, grandiose, impulsive, shallow, remorseless, and deceitful. Psychopaths may make compelling fictional characters, from Hannibal Lecter to Cartman from South Park (chili made from Scott Tenorman’s parents, anyone?), but in real life their existence, to steal from Thomas Hobbes, is nasty, brutish, and (often) short. Not exactly what we’re going for.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  What do the K and Y stand for? According to Johnson & Johnson, which has been manufacturing the jelly since 1910—their service reps were very friendly on the phone—they don’t stand for anything, just arbitrary letters assigned by the original research scientists. But they have come to mean plenty. TRACELESS Now that I have fallen into both sin and love, my scribbled daily testimonies serve to keep my anxiety of loss just barely at bay. With him I live on the ledge of the abyss. The terror that this experience might end competes with the even worse terror that it might be lost forever. Because he and I are not fused, except during sexual contact, I must constantly confront the spaces between us. He never overstays his welcome, and thus cultivates an air of scarcity, an erotic component of powerful and paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, the element of instability is clearly an essential factor, perhaps the central factor, in generating the total thrill of each and every encounter. The lost heat that monogamous couples constantly mourn is always there for us. And yet this unpredictability also leaves me with ample time and space for the insecurities of love to blossom. Thus I doubt, I question, I worry and heap indignities upon myself for which there is neither evidence nor refutation. The lingering voice of convention is always attempting to diminish and deride my own transcendent experience. And yet I have never tried to control him in order to avoid this anxiety; I have always known that he is not an extension of me but a clearly separate human being. Besides, I am well aware by now that if a man exhibits too many signs of attachment I lose interest and the sex becomes laden with obligation. Desire is sexy, a show of free will; attachment is the enemy of free will. A-Man, with his scarcity, has become the first man to keep me poised at that delectable point where I both thrive and suffer: always-in-desire, never-having-enough. It is easier to want something than to have it—and so often when you do get the thing you’ve wanted so long, you’re busy with numerous substitutes. With him somehow the wanting and the having combine, simultaneously. He is my very real yet eternally impossible fantasy: a man I can respect. Living entirely in the moment, he leaves no traces. He is here when he is here. He is gone when he is gone. Others linger when they are gone, like a bad smell, even when they were never really here in the first place. He is the most present, and as a result, the most emphatically, painfully absent.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It had grown darker during my time in the office, and wet and foggy. The street-lamps had all been lit, and every carriage had a lantern swinging from it; City Road was not, however, like Soho, where light streamed upon the pavements from a thousand flares and windows. For every ten paces of my journey that were illuminated by a pool of gas-light, there were a further twenty that were cast in gloom. The gloom lifted a little at Old Street itself, for here there were offices, and crowded bus stops and shops. As I walked towards the Hackney Road, however, it seemed only to deepen, and my surroundings to grow shabbier. The crossings at the Angel had been decent enough; here the roads were so clogged with manure that, every time a vehicle rumbled by, I was showered with filth. My fellow pedestrians, too - who, so far, had all been honest working-people, men and women in coats and hats as faded as my own - grew poorer. Their suits were not just dingy, but ragged. They had boots, but no stockings. The men wore scarves instead of collars, and caps rather than bowlers; the women wore shawls; the girls wore dirty aprons, or no apron at all. Everyone seemed to have some kind of burden - a basket, or a bundle, or a child upon their hip. The rain fell harder. I had been told by the tea-girl at the Angel to head for Columbia Market; now, a little way along the Hackney Road, I found myself suddenly on the edge of its great, shadowy courtyard. I shivered. The huge granite hall, its towers and tracery as elaborate as those on a gothic cathedral, was quite dark and still. A few rough-looking fellows with cigarettes and bottles slouched in its arches, blowing on their hands to keep the cold off. A sudden clamour in the clock tower made me start. Some complicated pealing of bells - as fussy and useless as the great abandoned market hall itself - was chiming out the hour: it was a quarter-past four. This was far too early to visit Florence’s house, if Florence herself was at work all day: so I stood for another hour in one of the arches of the market where the wind was not so cutting and the rain was not so hard. Only when the bells had rung half-past five did I step again into the courtyard, and look about me: I was now almost numb.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But the speech didn’t happen right away. After being scared—or not—by the prospect of giving a speech, everyone was asked how many of the positive and negative characteristics they could remember. Tellingly, the anxiety-prone folks who were stressed about the speech recalled fewer positive words. They simply could not bring to mind words like “articulate,” “thoughtful,” and “dynamic.” However, they could remember negative words like “stupid,” “ridiculous,” and “failure” as if they were written on the back of their hand. Something about the imminence of The Reveal had flattened their ability to access positive qualities but did nothing to slow their access to negative qualities. In short, the Inner Critic pulled out the megaphone, driving away their best selves. This explains a lot. When it comes to social anxiety, bad is stronger than good. This makes sense: preparing for good stuff isn’t crucial to survival, but anticipating bad stuff is. We orient toward threat because not doing so could cost us dearly. But unfortunately, this means we enter situations—the reception, the crowded room, the negotiation—already distressed. Our Inner Critic is whispering in our head, telling us things will go badly and everyone will see. That we need to do well, but we don’t have what it takes. That we must either find a way to hide or face The Reveal. Whatever your fear, it boils down to one thing: I am not good enough. And furthermore, everyone will see. Many people know precisely what they’re afraid will be revealed. But for others it’s not as clear—there’s just a vague sense of feeling out of place, of feeling the heat begin to rise. If you’re not sure exactly what you fear or what will be exposed once your cover is blown, try this: Remember the old fill-in-the-blank game of Mad Libs? Social anxiety works the same way. Each one of us has the same basic story but fills it in differently. To use an example from Dr. David Moscovitch, if I’m concerned about my appearance, sitting alone in my car stuck in traffic might make me feel like I’m trapped in a Toyota-sized fishbowl. But if I’m concerned about my social skills, sitting alone in traffic might be one of the few places I find peace. Try it for yourself. Think of a scenario that gives you the social heebie-jeebies. Then let Social Anxiety Mad Libs help you fill it in: When _____________________________________, (SOCIAL SITUATION WHERE I FEEL ANXIOUS) it will become obvious that I am ______________________________________ (WHAT MY INNER CRITIC SAYS IS WRONG WITH ME). Jim’s might have gone something like this: When I get in a relationship with Deena (SOCIAL SITUATION WHERE I FEEL ANXIOUS), it will become obvious that I am a total loser in way over my head (WHAT MY INNER CRITIC SAYS IS WRONG WITH ME). In the grocery store, mine went this way, which shows the Inner Critic doesn’t always have to strike to the soul, nor does it have to make rational sense:

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Then he called. Prayer answered. All’s well, he says, except one thing. His cock won’t reach across four states into my ass. Things are funny and good again, for a few hours. And I don’t tell him just how difficult things are for me. Never told him. Ever. Why would I? Reality was oozing in anyway, but why open the door wide? Another time I consulted with a friend, afraid that after his three-month absence he wouldn’t return to me as before. My friend laughed: “Two-hundred and sixty-something ass-fucks and you need more evidence?” The only one that counts, I explain, is the next one. And I am dead serious. I then explored a sex and love addiction twelve-step program, went to a few meetings, and read the textbook. From its point of view—which I tried adopting for a week or so—he is my drug, I am an addict, and abstinence is the beginning of recovery. This information was horrifying—my situation was an illness! And comforting—I could follow their plan to heal from this illness, in the company of similarly sick people, and get all the support I wanted. But I was assailed by doubts. When is it love and when is it addiction? Did I, once again, want to pathologize myself, especially after my hard-won sexual liberation? Did I wish to regard the great opening of my heart and ass as a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be honored? Did I wish to view this flawed, flesh-and-blood man as nothing but a projection of my own illusions, obsessions, conflicts, and screaming sexual desires? This felt like a limited perspective. Besides, the first thing a sex addict must do is to stop having sex. I’d suffered celibacy in my ten-year marriage; was I now going to choose it voluntarily? The textbook had a whole chapter on just what hell to expect from withdrawal—I found little solace in it. It would be hell indeed to withdraw from loving whom I loved. Perhaps this was not the pain of an addict in the grip of disease but simply the pain of a woman in love confronted with the loss of her beloved. (When I told A-Man, much later, after #270, that I was “addicted” to him, he looked highly amused and responded without missing a beat, “You damn well better be.”) There were other disincentives to “recovery.” The meetings were mostly attended by men with a lot of compulsive-masturbation and Internet-porn obsessions. I imagined their computer monitors stained with crusty semen drips and their sexual fantasies running wild as they shared their distraught and ambivalent hopes of abstinence. It felt dangerous to be an attractive woman in their presence. Then, at the end of one meeting, a reforming addict held my hand with just a little too much sympathy and I never went back. My problem was love; his was lechery.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Once we feel threatened, we lock in and see threat everywhere. It makes sense—the rabbit keeps an eye out for the fox at all times. But it costs us. To illustrate, look around you and scan for things that are blue. The blue sky, your blue jeans, perhaps a bluebird outside or a blue book on your shelf. Done? Okay, now try to recall what you saw that was red. Exactly. When our attention is directed elsewhere, we miss out. There are probably plenty of red things around you, but since you weren’t attending to them, you didn’t see them. So it is with threat. When we selectively zoom in on turned backs and grumpy scowls, we miss the nodding heads and smiling faces surrounding them. Ah, faces. We particularly find threat in faces. Pictures of angry and disgusted faces have been used in innumerable social anxiety studies to send participants’ threat-o-meters spinning. Even smiling faces get interpreted as a threat to a socially anxious brain. And while it might make sense to avoid angry faces, avoiding smiling faces doesn’t seem useful to anyone. But a research group in the Netherlands led by Dr. Mike Rinck of Radboud University Nijmegen created an ingenious method of training a socially anxious brain to feel comfortable with smiling faces. In the study, Rinck and his colleagues showed participants pictures of faces on a computer screen and equipped them with a joystick. Pulling on the joystick zoomed in on the face, making it grow until it abstracted and disappeared, while pushing on the joystick zoomed out on the face, shrinking it until it vanished. Enlarging the face mimicked approach, while pushing away mimicked avoidant retreat. Over hundreds of trials, half the participants were instructed to pull a crowd’s worth of smiling pictures toward them, while the other half pushed the pictures away, shrinking them until they disappeared into blackness on the screen. Joystick pull by joystick pull, the participants who pulled the smiles toward them, the researchers hoped, would rewire their brains to see smiling faces as just that—friendly faces safe to approach. To test whether the training spilled over into real life, the team asked each participant to give a one-minute speech on camera, plus they were told their video would be evaluated on attractiveness, friendliness, competence, and more. In the face (pun intended) of impending judgment, the group who had practiced approaching smiling faces was less anxious (not to mention happier) after the speech than the group who pushed smiling faces away. In short, it worked. Of course, we don’t travel the world armed with a joystick that allows us to push unwanted sights away and pull others close (though someone should totally invent that). So how to adapt the findings of the lab to the real world?