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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I needed to visit the privy again, rather badly; I knew that it was dreadfully rude to lie abed like this, in a stranger’s parlour. Yet I felt as if I had been visited in the night by a surgeon, who had taken all my bones away and replaced them with bars of lead. I could no nothing at all - except lie ...Florence brought me my tea, and I drank it - then lay back again. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, washing the baby; then she returned and pulled the curtains open, meaningfully.‘It’s a quarter to eight, Miss Astley,’ she said. ‘I have to take Cyril across the street. You will be up and dressed, now, won’t you, when I come back? You really will?’‘Oh, certainly,’ I said; yet when she reappeared, five minutes later, I had not budged an inch. She gazed at me, and shook her head. I gazed back at her.‘You know, don’t you, that you cannot stay here. I must go to work, and I must go now. If you keep me any longer, I shall be late.’ With that, she caught hold of the bottom of the blanket. But I caught hold of the top.‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘I must be sick, after all.’‘If you’re sick, you must go to a place where they will care for you properly!’‘I’m not that sick!’ I cried then. ‘But if I might only lie a little and get my strength... Go on to work, and I’ll let myself out, and be long gone by the time you get home. You may trust me in your house, you know. I shan’t take anything.’‘There’s little enough to take!’ she cried. Then she threw her end of the blanket at me, and put a hand to her brow. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how my head aches!’ I looked at her, saying nothing. At last she seemed to force herself into a kind of calmness, and her voice grew stiff: ‘You must do as you said, I suppose, and let yourself out.’ She caught up her coat from the back of the door, and pulled it on. Then she took up her satchel, reached into it, and brought out a piece of paper and a coin. ‘I’ve made you a list,’ she said, ‘of hostels and houses you might try to find a bed in. The money’- it was a half-crown - ‘is from my brother. He asked me to tell you good-bye and good luck.’‘He’s a very kind man,’ I said.She shrugged, then buttoned up her coat, put her hat upon her head, and thrust a pin through it. The coat and the hat were the colour of mud.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  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. There was a little girl nearby, carrying a great tray about her neck, filled with bundles of watercresses. I went up to her, and asked how far it was to Quilter Street; and then, because she looked so sad and cold and damp - and also because I had a confused idea that I must not turn up on Florence’s doorstep entirely empty-handed - I bought the biggest of her cress bouquets. It cost a ha’penny.With this cradled awkwardly in the crook of my stiff arm I began the short walk to the street I wanted; soon I found myself at the end of a wide terrace of low, flat houses - not a squalid terrace, by any means, but not a very smart one either, for the glass in some of the street-lamps was cracked, or missing entirely, and the pavement was blocked, here and there, by piles of broken furniture, and by heaps of what the novels politely term ashes. I looked at the number of the nearest door: number 1. I started slowly down the street. Number 5 ... number 9 ... number 11 ... I felt weaker than ever... 15 ... 17...19...Here I stopped, for now I could see the house I sought quite clearly. Its drapes were drawn against the dark, and luminous with lamplight; and seeing them, I felt suddenly quite sick with apprehension. I placed a hand against the wall, and tried to steady myself; a boy walked by me, whistling, and gave me a wink - I suppose he thought I had been drinking. When he had passed I looked about me at the unfamiliar houses in a kind of panic: I could remember the sense of purpose that had visited me in Green Street, but it seemed a piece of wildness, now, a piece of comedy - I would tell it to Florence, and she would laugh in my face.But I had come so far; and there was nowhere to turn back to. So I crept to the rosy window, and then to the door; and then I knocked, and waited. I seemed to have presented myself at a thousand thresholds that day, and been cruelly disappointed or repulsed, at all of them. If there was no word of kindness for me here, I thought, I would die.At last there came a murmur and a step, and the door was opened; and it was Florence herself who stood there - looking remarkably as she had when I had seen her first, peering into the darkness, framed against the light and with the same glorious halo of burning hair.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It cost a ha’penny. With this cradled awkwardly in the crook of my stiff arm I began the short walk to the street I wanted; soon I found myself at the end of a wide terrace of low, flat houses - not a squalid terrace, by any means, but not a very smart one either, for the glass in some of the street-lamps was cracked, or missing entirely, and the pavement was blocked, here and there, by piles of broken furniture, and by heaps of what the novels politely term ashes. I looked at the number of the nearest door: number 1. I started slowly down the street. Number 5 ... number 9 ... number 11 ... I felt weaker than ever... 15 ... 17...19... Here I stopped, for now I could see the house I sought quite clearly. Its drapes were drawn against the dark, and luminous with lamplight; and seeing them, I felt suddenly quite sick with apprehension. I placed a hand against the wall, and tried to steady myself; a boy walked by me, whistling, and gave me a wink - I suppose he thought I had been drinking. When he had passed I looked about me at the unfamiliar houses in a kind of panic: I could remember the sense of purpose that had visited me in Green Street, but it seemed a piece of wildness, now, a piece of comedy - I would tell it to Florence, and she would laugh in my face. But I had come so far; and there was nowhere to turn back to. So I crept to the rosy window, and then to the door; and then I knocked, and waited. I seemed to have presented myself at a thousand thresholds that day, and been cruelly disappointed or repulsed, at all of them. If there was no word of kindness for me here, I thought, I would die. At last there came a murmur and a step, and the door was opened; and it was Florence herself who stood there - looking remarkably as she had when I had seen her first, peering into the darkness, framed against the light and with the same glorious halo of burning hair. I gave a sigh that was also a shudder - then I saw a movement at her hip, and saw what she carried there. It was a baby. I looked from the baby to the room behind, and here there was another figure: a man, seated in his shirt-sleeves before a blazing fire, his eyes raised from the paper at his knee to gaze at me in mild enquiry. I looked from him back to Florence. ‘Yes?’ she said. I saw that she didn’t remember me at all. She didn’t remember me and - worse - she had a husband, and a child. I did not think that I could bear it.

• From Less (2017)

  “And a note arrived for you.” An envelope on the miniature desk, below the image of Judas. Less opens it and reads: Arthur, contact me once you arrive, I’ll be at the resort, I hope you arrived in one piece. It is on business stationery, signed: Your friend, Carlos. After Rupali leaves, Less takes out his famous rubber bands. “Have you noticed,” Rupali asks him a few mornings later, at breakfast, in the low brick main building, a kind of fortress above the ocean, “how the morning sounds so much sweeter than the evening?” She is talking about the birds, awakening in harmony and bedding down in discord. But Less can think only of that racket particular to India: the spiritual battle of the bands. It seems to begin before dawn with the Muslims, when a mosque at the edge of the mangrove forest softly announces, in a lullaby voice, the morning call to prayer. Not to be outdone, the local Christians soon crank up pop-sounding hymns that last anywhere from one to three hours. This is followed by a cheerful, though overamplified, kazoo-like refrain from the Hindu temple that reminds Less of the ice cream truck from his childhood. Then comes a later call to prayer. Then the Christians decide to ring some bronze bells. And so on. There are sermons and live singers and thunderous drum performances. In this way, the faiths alternate throughout the day, as at a music festival, growing louder and louder until, during the outright cacophony of sunset, the Muslims, who began the whole thing, declare victory by projecting not only the evening call to prayer but the prayer itself in its entirety. After that, the jungle falls to silence. Perhaps this is the Buddhists’ sole contribution. Every morning, it starts again. “You must let me know,” Rupali says, “what we can do to help with your writing. You are our first writer.” “I could use a freestanding desk,” Less suggests, hoping to liberate himself from writing in the heart of his nautilus. “And a tailor. I tore my suit in Morocco, and I seem to have lost my sewing needle.” “We will take care of these. The pastor will know a good tailor.” The pastor. “And peace and quiet. I need that above all.” “Of course of course of course,” she insists, shaking her head, and her gold earrings sway from side to side.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  The cabal knew the king would be more difficult. “A brisk and lively disposition could only captivate him,” wrote his biographer, “and this was the chief quality Madame Denhoff was deficient in, who with a dull, heavy air affected the modesty of a virgin, which was directly opposite to the character the King required of his mistresses.” The advisers “were sensible that she would not suit their monarch’s fancy, but knew no lady at Court more proper to propose to him.”39 Augustus expressed a hearty interest at seeing the beauty so lauded by his friends but was predictably disappointed at their first meeting. He “liked not her dancing” and “his heart could not yet be affected by her beauty.” By this time he had figured out that his ministers wanted him to take a new mistress. He told one, “I am to be forced to love but till they find me a better than Madame Denhoff, I doubt whether I shall be unfaithful to Madame Cosel.”40 Undaunted, the king’s advisers threw him so often into the company of Madame Denhoff—who cast him “tender and languishing looks”—that slowly his heart became “enslaved.”41 But back in Dresden, Madame Cosel’s spies informed her of her rival. No sooner had she dropped a son than she got in a carriage to Warsaw to confront her faithless lover. Madame Denhoff’s supporters, hearing that the imperious mistress was on her way to foil their carefully laid plans, decided her arrival in Warsaw must be prevented at all costs. They quickly advised Madame Denhoff to create a scene that evening, pretending to be afraid for her life if Madame Cosel arrived in Warsaw. Shedding a great many crocodile tears, Madame Denhoff told Augustus she would leave town rather than face her violent rival. Accordingly, the king gave orders to prevent Madame Cosel from entering the town. True to her reputation, when Madame Cosel was approaching Warsaw and given the message that she must turn back on the king’s orders, she took out a pistol and threatened to shoot the messenger if he tried to prevent her from going ahead. She was finally persuaded to go home rather than risk the royal displeasure, and instead seek to win back the king’s love upon his return to Dresden. But the political cabal made sure that reconciliation was impossible. The king allowed his former mistress to live in luxurious retirement, giving her Pillnitz Palace. But Madame Cosel was not one to live peacefully. After political intrigues against Augustus, she fled to Berlin, where the king of Prussia seized her and returned her to Saxony. Augustus, finally realizing she would always stir up trouble, locked her in a fortress despite her shrill cries for clemency. There she remained even after his death in 1733, until her own death in 1765, after forty-nine years of genteel imprisonment.

• From Less (2017)

  The instructions for getting to the restaurant are as mysterious as a love note or an exchange of spies— Meet at the Moon Crossing Bridge —but his faith is fast; he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto, toward the hill country. Less is grateful the signs are clear because the GPS, after giving crisp, stern directions to the highway, becomes drunk on its own power outside the city limits, then gives out completely and places Arthur Less in the Sea of Japan. Also unnerving is a mysterious windshield box, which reveals its purpose when the Toaster approaches a tollbooth: it produces a high-pitched reproving female shriek not unlike his grandmother’s when she came upon a piece of broken china. He dutifully pays the toll man, thinking he has done what the machine wants, and passes into a green countryside where a river has magically appeared. But the pastoral scene does not last long—at the next tollbooth, the lady shrieks again. Surely she is berating him for not possessing an electronic pass. But could she also have discovered his other crimes and inadequacies? How he made up ceremonies for a fifth-grade report on the religions of Iceland? How he shoplifted acne cream in high school? How he cheated on Robert so terribly? How he is a “bad gay”? And a bad writer? How he let Freddy Pelu walk out of his life? Shriek, shriek, shriek; it is almost Greek in its fury. A harpy sent down to punish Less at last. “Take the next exit.” The GPS, that rum-drunk snoozing captain, has awakened and is back in command. Mist is rising as steam rises from damp clothing set beside a fire; here, it is from the pine-dark, folded wool of the mountains. A leaden river is coiling along a bank of reeds. The Toaster passes a sake factory, or so he assumes, because here is a cheerful white barrel sitting as advertisement on the road. Some farm or other has a sign out, in English: SUSTAINABLE HARVEST . Less rolls down the window, and there is the salt-green smell of grass and rain and dirt. He rounds a corner and sees white tourist buses parked all in a row along the river, their great side mirrors like the horns of caterpillars; before them, in a military line, stand elderly people in clear raincoats, taking photographs. Scattered below the steaming mountains are perhaps fifteen thatched-roof houses furred with moss. Across from them: a bridge over the river, a wood-stone trestlework, and Less steers the car to cross it, passing tourists huddled against the rain. He imagines a boat is meant to take him upriver to the restaurant, and as he reaches the other bank and parks the Toaster (from the dashboard comes the harpy’s shrill reminder), he sees a few people waiting on the dock, and among them—he recognizes her through her clear umbrella—is his mother.

• From Less (2017)

  As Less lies sleepless in bed, his novel appears in his mind. Swift. What a title. What a mess. Swift. Where is his editor when he needs her? His editrix, as he used to call her: Leona Flowers. Traded years ago in the card game of publishing to some other house, but Less recalls how she took his first novels, shaggy with magniloquent prose, and made them into books. So clever, so artful, so good at persuading him of what to cut. “This paragraph is so beautiful, so special,” she might say, pressing her French-manicured hands to her chest, “that I’m keeping it all to myself! ” Where is Leona now? High in some tower with some new favorite author, trying her same old lines: “I think the chapter’s absence will echo throughout the novel.” What would she tell him? More likable, make Swift more likable. That’s what everyone’s saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It’s like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get. The sandstorm. So many months of planning, so much travel, so much expense, and here they are: trapped inside as the wind whips their tents like a man with a mule. They are gathered, the three of them (Zohra, Lewis, Less) in the large dining tent, hot as a camel ride and just as smelly, with its heavy horsehair sand door that has not been washed and three visitors who have not been, either. Only Mohammed seems fresh and cheerful, though he tells Less he was awakened at dawn by the sandstorm and had to run for shelter (for he has, indeed, slept out of doors). “Well”—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—“we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.” Zohra greets this with a raised butter knife; tomorrow is her birthday. But they must submit to the sand. They spend the rest of the day drinking beer and playing cards, and Zohra fleeces them both.

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

  All this social-media-induced social anxiety has less to do with the specific platform—indeed, the MySpace and chat rooms of yesteryear inspired the same anxiety as the apps du jour. But no matter the platform, social media is a performance. And performance pulls for perfectionistic self-presentation. To be sure, individuals have cultivated a public image since the dawn of time (Ponytailed or curly powdered wig? Fedora or derby?), but now, armed with smartphone cameras and filters, we can manage others’ impressions as never before. In addition, the depth and breadth of access social media allows into one’s life is unprecedented. Some choose to present their messy, imperfect lives with more honesty than others, but with a combination of scrutiny and an ability to control our impression management, the pull to present ourselves in just the right light is strong. Indeed, approval is quantitative—your Likes, friends, and followers are enumerated. How-to sites warn: “One photo that doesn’t fit with your Instagram feed is all it takes to lose followers forever.” It’s hard to resist the pull of perfectionism, which beats at the heart of social anxiety. Remember Rosie’s internal rules? Everyone has to like me has morphed into Everyone has to Like me. Or follow me. Or retweet me. Perfectionism also lies at the heart of another social-media phenomenon so pervasive it was added to The Oxford English Dictionary in 2013: fear of missing out, or FOMO. FOMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent,” which may not, at first glance, look particularly perfectionistic. But the result? We feel inadequate, rejected, or that something is wrong with us. And those black-or-white conclusions lie at the heart of perfectionism. For Vivian, scrolling through Instagram late at night, seeing pictures of gatherings she missed—yesterday’s homebrew-tasting party, a night out at the hot new bistro downtown—any merry-making felt like an indictment of social failure. As the concept of FOMO has evolved over the years, it’s become apparent that it comes in different flavors. To find yours, ask yourself, “If I did miss out, what would that mean about me?” The first is I made the wrong decision. This links right back to perfectionism. The decision in question might be as small as the last restaurant you tried or as big as what career you’ve chosen, but whatever the decision, it undermines confidence in your judgment. It wasn’t the right choice. It wasn’t good enough. This type of FOMO feeds the unanswerable, anxiety-provoking phrases of “if only” and “what if?” Indeed, a 2013 study showed that those who experience higher levels of FOMO also reported lower levels of overall life satisfaction.

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

  Like Jia, what I learned is this: you get to set the tone. The guy at my door made his request with an air of confidence, and I followed suit. Now, you may ask, what if he was faking it? What if he psyched himself up beforehand with an internal chant of, Act casual. Act casual? Quite honestly, it doesn’t matter. Either way, my roll-with-it response underscored that if you approach something as if it’s totally reasonable, it will be. Or you can just pretend you’re Beyoncé. Or, in this guy’s case, Trojan Man. To this day, I’m indebted to that guy, who inadvertently taught me one of my earliest lessons about social anxiety. For everyone’s sake, I really hope he found a condom. * * * Despite the lesson of Trojan Man, I hung on to some of my own safety behaviors for years. Whenever my words went out to an audience of strangers—as a guest on a podcast or during a radio interview—the old anxiety would come rolling back. So for a long time, safety equaled having scripted responses in front of me—sometimes, I admit, word for word. I knew I’d be more natural and give a better interview if I wasn’t clinging to my life preserver of pre-prepared answers, but with lots of people watching and listening, letting go and loosening up didn’t feel like an option. Unfortunately, that meant that’s exactly what I had to do. If I wanted to graduate from social anxiety school, I had to do interviews with no notes. I’d still give the interview the respect and preparation it deserved, but I needed to trust myself to remember the points I wanted to make. So when the opportunity to do a live radio interview came along, I let myself cringe for a minute (or an hour), then said to myself, “Do it before you feel confident and the confidence will catch up.” (Thanks, chapter 7!) This was the next phase of my Challenge List, sans safety behaviors: 5. Smile and start conversation with people I think don’t like me (several grumpy moms, one grumpy teacher, several grumpy co-workers). Do this repeatedly. 6. Be a guest on a pre-recorded podcast where mistakes can be edited out, but without my usual notes. Do this as often as is offered. 7. Do a live radio interview (ack, no do-overs!) without my usual notes (but whew, no camera!). Over time, I did all of these and they turned out just fine. I was anxious for each of them, but I went over the mountain. That’s important: I was anxious. You will be, too. You won’t stop feeling anxious. You’ll feel anxious, square your shoulders, and do it anyway.

• 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 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)

  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?

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

  In the early days of humanity, banishment meant certain death. The Bible, for example, is filled with stories that end in the punishment of exile, of a wrongdoer being “cut off from his people.” Being left alone to fight off the jackals was the ultimate punishment. Therefore, what could be more useful than a cognitive system that keeps us from being thrown out in the cold? These days, it’s easiest to see the function of exclusion in circumscribed, tightly knit communities where there is a clear distinction between “us” and “out there.” The Amish, for example, call it shunning. If you have transgressed and are shunned, all social contact with you is ceased until you confess your error. Others will neither eat with you nor speak with you. As an Amish leader in the PBS documentary Shunned neatly sums up, “If we lose obedience, we lose the church.” But modern exile is not exclusive to traditionalist religions. It happens officially in sports: Pete Rose, Donald Sterling. It happens unofficially in politics: Anthony Weiner, John Edwards. It is litigated in business: Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff. And even today, despite on-demand potable water and online grocery delivery, we all still need the group to provide the necessary intangibles of community and love. Speaking of love, a little bit of social anxiety makes us a better mate: more aware, more thoughtful, more cognizant. Now, you might be thinking, Wait a minute. Social anxiety makes me act all weird and awkward. It’s basically a mate repellent. I hear you. Social anxiety doesn’t feel useful when you’re making awkward small talk on a first date, but in Darwinian terms it’s the cat’s meow. Social awareness and behavioral inhibition are such useful traits in maintaining harmony and security that to Mama Nature it’s worth the risk of sometimes going overboard. After all, this is Darwinism, and reproduction always wins out. The awkwardness of social anxiety may be uncomfortable, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a small price to pay. Our genes have a greater chance of getting passed on if we have a highly sensitive social smoke detector. A false alarm—detecting social threat when there is none—doesn’t cost us anything genetically, whereas missing a true social threat means we get thrown to the wolves and our genetic lineage meets its lip-smacking end. In other words, social anxiety triumphs as an evolutionary advantage because the costs are low and the benefits are high. To sum it all up, social anxiety has stuck around through the millennia because evolutionarily it buys us more than it costs us. It keeps social groups running smoothly. It ensures we remain part of a group, which, even in the age of Seamless and Amazon Prime Now, is necessary for companionship and belonging. And the self-awareness, empathy, and consideration it confers make us a solid long-term partner, which ensures our genes are passed on.

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

  Whether we’re feeling social judgment online or in the real world, we find ourselves doing one of two things: avoiding or enduring. Unlike most psychological jargon, both these terms mean exactly what you think. Avoidance is the equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears and singsonging, “I can’t heeeeear you!” Avoidance can be a lot of work—faking an illness means remembering to have a lingering cough the next day, walking the long but less crowded way around wastes time, and showing up to a meeting at the moment it begins so you don’t have to make small talk takes exhausting precision. Avoidance can be overt: not showing up at the party, letting our calls go to voicemail. But avoidance can be covert, too—we may not even realize we’re doing it. Not making eye contact is the classic. Or we may go to the party but spend most of our time petting the host’s cat or checking text messages on the balcony before sneaking home to watch Netflix and eat a bowl of cereal. But while avoidance offers immediate relief, it’s almost always followed by a bitter aftertaste of guilt, shame, disappointment, or frustration. [image file=image_rsrc2GA.jpg] Enduring, however, is white-knuckling it through an office team-building event, presentation, or wedding reception. God help the well-meaning bridesmaid who tries to pull us onto the dance floor—we would rather stab her with a dessert fork than have to YMCA. Those of us who endure usually get home with jangled nerves, a mysterious stomachache, and sore cheek muscles from continuous smiling. Or we get drunk, but more on that later. Most of us have felt this way for a long time. For 75 percent of people who experience social anxiety, this long, awkward trip all started somewhere between the ages of eight and fifteen, allowing us many future decades to scroll through our phone rather than make conversation. For many of us, it’s as much a part of us as our brown eyes or curly hair. It’s what we remember from Day One. * * * By now, you may have noticed that I say “we.” In academia there’s a saying: “research is me-search.” Many scientists choose their field because their subject matter rings true to them and their lives. The grit researcher bounces back after any setback. The trauma expert survived a life-threatening experience. The ADHD researcher works surrounded by teetering stacks of paper. For me, it is telling that I work at Boston University’s storied Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, or CARD. If anxiety were a religion, CARD would be the mother church and I would be a lifelong congregant.