How To Face Your Social Fears (Gradually)

You can probably read through this article just as quickly as all the other ones on this site. But it's one of the most important and useful ones here, because it will provide a framework for how you can work through your social fears in the most manageable way possible. The principles here can also be used to work on other types of fears.

Sometimes our fears are more minor and once we put our minds to facing them, we can deal with them pretty quickly. Most of the time it's not that simple and we need to more slowly wade into things. The ideas here are basically my summary of well supported exposure therapy concepts that counselors have been recommending for decades. They're considered the gold standard for treating phobias.

While this article will mainly use social fears as examples, the ideas below can also be used to help you ease into doing behaviours that you want to do, but which you're feeling a little lazy about getting started on. Of course, when someone is feeling unmotivated about doing something, sometimes that's because some anxiety is at the heart of it.

The key is to face your bigger fears gradually

In an ideal world we'd all be super courageous warriors with a bottomless supply of grit and willpower and tolerance for pain. In real life it's not so easy. If someone's fear brings up enough anxiety in them, it may more than they can push through to 'just do it already'. Or even if they can manage to suck it up and force past their nerves once or twice, it's not something they'll be able to do consistently. In that case the right way to go is with an approach that's more systematic and is designed to help smoothly guide you along as much as possible. It's not about relying on a finite supply of willpower.

The proper Exposure Therapy way to face your fears is to treat it like you're building up your courage 'muscles'. If you're out of shape you can't just go to the gym, throw some plates on a bar and bench press your body weight. You have to work up to it. Here's a general structure for facing your fears slowly:

Break your fears down into a hierarchy from Least Scary to Most Scary

For the rest of this article we'll use the example of someone who is very nervous about talking to people they don't know at parties. To gradually tackle this fear the person will need a hierarchy of easier tasks they can work their way up. There are different progressions that may work, and they'll be different for every person, but one could be:

You then start with the least scary items and only move up the ladder once you're fully used to the less anxiety-inducing things first. As people tackle their lesser fears they also build up the momentum and confidence to keep going.

There are several ways to practice less scary variations of your fear

When coming up with a hierarchy there are lots of ways you can come up with easier variations on the situation you're ultimately afraid of:

It can also help to just start dealing with your other fears in general, to build up your sense of self-efficacy towards overcoming your anxieties (e.g., someone working on their social fears is also learning to drive at the same time, which previously scared them. The boost they get from this may give them a push in tackling their interpersonal difficulties).

Ideally you should practice facing your fear quite often

It helps to map out a schedule for how you'll work through each sub-fear. Someone may not be able to do things like go to party seven days a week, but they may pledge to go to the mall and try and make friendly chit chat with three strangers a day.

The more often someone works on exposing themselves to their fears the better, as it keeps the momentum going. Going back to that exercise analogy, you'll also tend to lose your courage 'gains' if you leave too much space between exposure sessions. Maybe not completely, but enough that you'll have to take some extra time to regain the few steps you lost.

Different fears need to be approached differently

This article talks about various factors that influence how a social fear may need to be approached, e.g., situations where social skills are involved vs. ones where you more just have to show up:

Factors That Impact How Certain Fears Need To Be Tackled

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

When you're arrived at the situation where your fear is, you then have to take the final step of actually confronting it. It's totally common for someone to get there and then hesitate for a good while before taking the plunge. This article covers some ways to get started:

Coping With Nervousness Before Optional Social Behaviors

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

This overall approach works by someone staying in a scary situation long enough that they calm down, and start to overwrite their association between it and danger. To some degree this will happen automatically. Say someone is afraid of snakes. If you threw them in an empty room with a bunch of harmless grass snakes they'd freak out at first. But eventually they'd see that the snakes weren't going to do anything and they'd start to relax, maybe even get bored. If nothing else, your body won't keep strong emotions going forever.

When therapists help their clients go through this process they'll also teach them ways to relax themselves. One way people can do this is to learn soothing deep breathing techniques. They practice them at home at first. After a while they can work up to using the techniques while they're nervous in real world situations to quickly calm themselves.

Another strategy is for people to use coping statements, such as emphasizing to themselves how there's nothing to be scared of, and they can manage, and it will all feel better soon. They can also try challenging some of their more unrealistic worries, if that will help them move forward (e.g., "No one is going laugh and yell to the entire party about what a dork I am for wanting to join their conversation."

If you haven't seen them, here are some articles on coping with anxiety:

Overall Attitudes For Handling Anxiety
Coping With Anxiety In The Moment
Coping With Nervousness Before An Unavoidable Social Situation

The relevant thing is trying, not the outcome

When someone is exposing themselves to a fear, their goal is just to put themselves in a certain situation and get used to it. Some situations, particularly social ones, can have different outcomes. Talking to someone at work may lead to all kinds of different results, good and bad. How things turn out isn't important when the goal is just to get over a fear. If someone wants to get more comfortable asking people to hang out, it doesn't matter if they say yes or no, as long as the person who's doing the inviting is getting used to doing it.

Partial progress towards a goal is an accomplishment too

It's also important to give yourself credit even for partial progress towards a goal. Someone may go out to a party and not be able to talk to anyone for three outings in a row. However, on the first night they were only 40% of the way there. On the second night they were 70% close to doing it. And on the final evening they were 90% of the way there. Maybe on the fourth night they can finally do it, and it wouldn't have been possible without those other three parties they attended, which may have appeared to be failures if you only looked at them in more simplistic "Either I talked to someone or I didn't" terms.

Reward and congratulate yourself every step of the way

It can take time to work through a hierarchy of scary situations. Every time you accomplish something you couldn't do before you should pat yourself on the back. More than that, you should also treat yourself somehow. It doesn't have to be anything big, just something that adds a little oomph to your day and caps off the sense of accomplishment you probably already feel. This is just another effective Behavioral Psychology principle that makes the process easier to go through. It's sometimes surprising how less scary something can seem if you know that on the other side there's a treat and sense of satisfaction waiting for you. It frames the whole thing differently.

You can also use rewards in a different way to motivate yourself. You could specify something you like doing (e.g., checking your favorite websites), and then tell yourself you can't do that until you meet your fear-facing goals that day. This approach can be extremely effective if you pick the right carrot for yourself. You'll find yourself sitting around at home thinking, "Man, I really want to check that news site. I guess I better get out there and try talking to people." Then when you meet your daily objective, you're just happy and proud of yourself and looking forward to the fun thing you've earned for yourself.

You will hit snags as you apply this approach

It's rare for someone to plan out a fear hierarchy and effortlessly move their way up it. Usually you have to be flexible and make adjustments along the way. Someone may find they've got the order of things wrong. They could complete one goal and find their next step is too challenging, and needs to be broken down further, or have some intermediate task put before it.

It's also pretty common for people to choose a first step that they find is too hard for them to do once they're out in the world, even if it seemed simple to do on paper. They'll need to add something even more basic ahead of that. The main thing is not to get discouraged when these things happen and just keep making changes so the overall project is doable.

Another issue is that your progress may seem to slip at times. You may go out one day and face your fears easily, feel on top of the world, then try it again tomorrow and find you're totally nervous again. The key thing is to keep moving forward and think of your overall progress. When people start lifting weights it's not unusual for them to have the odd bad workout, even though they're getting stronger on the whole.

Experiment with dropping safety behaviors

A safety behavior is anything someone uses to partially shield themselves from the consequences of their fear. Someone who's terrified of giving presentations may always have some anti-anxiety medication on hand, just in case they need to take a pill or two before speaking. They may never actually use them, but just knowing they're available is reassuring.

Safety behaviors get in the way of overcoming fears because even if you successfully face a situation, in the back of your mind you can always reason, "Well that thing is still dangerous. It was just the safety behavior that got me through it." You're not fully experiencing that your fear is truly manageable, and that you can handle it without any precautions or backup plans.

If you use any safety behaviors and they seem to help you at first, by all means stick with them. But as you get more advanced in facing your fears, try to drop the safety stuff and go it alone. An example I used in another article is someone using their drinking to give them some courage, and as a handy excuse for any social gaffes they make. They eventually need to drop that crutch and see that they can socialize when they're totally sober.

These principles can be used in the shorter term to build courage as well

This article is mainly talking about how to gradually face your fears over a period of weeks or months. The same ideas of momentum and gradually working your way up from easy to hard tasks can help you bolster your courage in a shorter time frame.

If someone has to face a scary task in the evening they can start doing simpler things earlier in the day. Say someone has to meet their friend and five of their buddies who they haven't met before. Going from nothing right into that would be scary. However if they start doing some other social things in the morning and afternoon, by the time they get to the evening they may be feeling much more 'warmed up' and confident.

Applying these principles is trickier for social situations

This approach still works very well for social fears. It's not as smooth or as easy to apply though, compared to using the same strategy to phobias of more inanimate or predictable things. Like if someone has a fear of heights, they can gradually face that fear by finding a public building with balconies at different floors and literally working their way up. The heights are just there. They don't do anything.

Real world social situations aren't as cooperative or predictable. You can't go out and automatically find the exact type of situation you want to expose yourself to. Say someone is at a party and there's a specific social scenario they want to get used to. That situation may only pop up a handful of times. Basically, you've got to take what you can get. You've also got to be a bit creative about finding situations to practice with. They may not be exactly what you're looking for, but they'll do.

Some situations may not come up enough either. Say someone wants to get used to staff parties. In a perfect universe they could go to some sort of holodeck and run the staff party program every day. In real life something like that may only come up a few times a year. In this case people need to rely on situations that aren't exactly the same, but have that similar essence.

Another problem is that you can't just hang out in many social situations while you try to calm yourself down and wait for your anxiety to dissipate. You've got to actually talk in them and try to keep the interaction going. The workaround for this is to treat different interactions as parts of one larger exposure session. It's not about how well things go with any one person or group, but with generally exposing yourself to a certain situation. Say someone is nervous about chatting to strangers in a pub. Any one interaction may be too short, but over the course of an evening they may rack up enough time speaking to people that the idea of doing it doesn't seem as scary as before.