Do you have trouble feeling comfortable when socializing? Maybe sometimes you do fine, but other times you feel nervous, shy, and awkward. Or maybe socializing always feels like a struggle. Either way, you know how frustrating and even debilitating social anxiety can be. It cannot only lead to avoiding potentially enriching experiences and a failure to make desired connections, it can sometimes be hard to understand.
So what’s going on when you socially misfire?
Here to unpack that question is Thomas Smithyman, who is a clinical psychologist and the author of Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. Today on the show, we get into the dynamics of social anxiety in both romantic and platonic contexts. Thomas explains what defines social anxiety, how it exists on a spectrum from mild shyness to an outright disorder, and what causes it, from genetics to faulty thinking. We talk about the protection strategies people often use to avoid the pain of social judgement, and why they actually backfire. We then get into what you can do to be more socially comfortable and confident, including a key to effective flirting, why you should try to make a “mediocre first impression,” and how to find your way into what Thomas calls the “warm social world.”
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM series on overcoming shyness
- AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse
- AoM Article: How to Overcome Phone Shyness
- Sunday Firesides: Want to Solve Your Social Problems? Get Over Your Self
Connect With Thomas Smithyman
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Do you have trouble feeling comfortable when socializing? Maybe sometimes you do fine, but other times you feel nervous, shy and awkward. Or maybe socializing always feels like a struggle. Either way, you know how frustrating and even debilitating social anxiety can be. It can not only lead to avoiding potentially enriching experiences and a failure to make desired connections. It can sometimes be hard to understand. So what’s going on when you socially misfire? Here to unpack that question is Thomas Smithyman, who is a clinical psychologist and the author of Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. Today on the show, we get into the dynamics of social anxiety in both romantic and platonic context. Thomas explains what defines social anxiety, how it exists on a spectrum from mild shyness to an outright disorder, and what causes it from genetics to faulty thinking. We talk about the protection strategies people often use to avoid the pain of social judgment and why they actually backfire. We then get into what you can do to be more socially comfortable and confident, including a key to effective flirting, why you should try to make a mediocre first impression, and how to find your way into what Thomas calls the warm social world. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at AOM.IS/social anxiety.
All right, Thomas Smithyman. Welcome to the show.
Thomas Smithyman: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who specializes in helping individuals with social and dating anxiety. How do you end up in this niche?
Thomas Smithyman: It’s, I think like a lot of psychologists, I ended up here because I was trying to figure myself out. Right. Not uncommon at all in my field.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So it was a… Me search, like research is me search.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So I had a, when I was a kid, I was… I was at, like a nerd school basically. I took all the nerds in Sydney, Australia, and I put us all in one place. And I personally didn’t really interact with women. It was so far from my home. I didn’t interact with girls my age or anything. Basically the whole way through Australian High School, which is age, I guess 7th grade through 12th grade. And so then I showed up in the US and I was basically a 12-year-old socially like a, I knew how to interact with guys. But I discovered at that moment, oh, I’m pretty socially anxious when it comes to talking to girls. And I did not know what to do. And so I suffered a bunch. And then over time, I’m very curious and very scientifically minded.
I did wanna understand what was going on. So I couldn’t find much just from therapists. I couldn’t get much from the internet that was of particular help to me. So I went about trying to figure it out for myself by going into research. ‘Cause I like science versus just some random person’s opinion. So I went sort of collecting it and trying to put it together for myself. And yeah, over the course of many, many years, basically it was a big obsession. It still is. I’m 20 something years into obsessing over this. But yeah, this, it became really my focus and I developed a bunch of expertise and helped myself. I was my own Guinea pig. And then I very quickly started helping a lot of other people. ‘Cause it drew me very quickly into studying psychology as a clinician.
Brett McKay: So you are a clinician, you don’t just do research, you actually work with patients.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a clinical psychologist. Yeah. So I’ve been treating people for… Yeah. I guess, 20-ish years. And I treat a lot of people with social anxiety and I have for a long time.
Brett McKay: Are a lot of your clients men? Primarily men?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. They are. Which I think is, it’s partly because I think it’s kind of rare to find psychologists that are relatively young men. And so I’m not excluding women. I do have plenty of women that come through, but guys, I see majority guys.
Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, you talk about your history in the book when you got to the United States and you were, in your 20s trying to figure out how to interact with women because you didn’t have that experience in high school. You fell in at this time. This was like when the pickup artist stuff was really big. Correct? And you kind of got into that stuff, right?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. And I was… That’s what there was, if you looked for information. And obviously it was very appealing, like the promise of it. It was like, really, Hey, here’s these people that have figured it out. They’re gonna tell you the answers. This is how it works. ‘Cause really, that was my, I felt, was my struggle. I didn’t understand, I just didn’t understand how it worked. I didn’t have a model for it. And I was very aware of, I had a lot of anxiety in dating situations. I had some in other situations too. So I was interested in general, but I didn’t understand what was happening. I knew that there were times where I was, what I thought of as just my normal self and I had access to all of my normal traits and I had a great time socializing. And then there were times where I just suddenly did not have the ability to do it, and I didn’t know what was going on. So I was pulled into like, Hey, these guys are promising the answers. And yet when I actually explored it, it just kept not being a good fit for me as a person.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And we will talk about this later on in our conversation. Sometimes if you follow this, the advice of like the pickup artist guys, it can actually backfire and make your social anxiety even worse. We’ll hit talk about that here in a bit.
Thomas Smithyman: Yes. Very much. Very much.
Brett McKay: But let’s talk about social anxiety in general. What is it, what are the symptoms of social anxiety and how does it differ from just like regular, general anxiety?
Thomas Smithyman: So rather than I guess sort of doing a full DSM diagnosis download, the way I think about it is, diagnostically really, it’s fear of being scrutinized, judged, rejected, and basically the extent which that interferes with your life. My way of looking at it is you have an underlying sense of, in some way, on some level, I am flawed, I’m not good enough. And if I enter a situation, whatever those problems are, are gonna be revealed. Other people are gonna see them and then they are gonna harshly judge me and it’s gonna cause all these problems. And therefore I either will feel a ton of distress about it, or I’m gonna avoid doing important things in my life. So that’s kind of the core of this. And then, it’s almost like there’s a scale for this because these are very human experiences.
Humans, we have this. This is part of the struggle of being human is we worry that we are not good enough. People will find out and they’ll be rejecting consequences. And so I kind of think of it as being on a scale, where some people don’t experience it very often as you move up the scale… It takes special circumstances to some people, they might consider themselves shy, but it’s happening a little more often. You start to move up to having kind of more regular social anxiety. Maybe it’s happening in just one situation or it’s happening across quite a few, but get into disorder territory. It’s really having an impact on your life. And then if it gets extreme enough, there’s avoidant personality disorder, which is sort of the end of that spectrum.
Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So it is a scale…
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.
Brett McKay: It can go from just, I’m really feeling uncomfortable about meeting new people, ’cause I’m afraid of what they’re gonna say about me, but I can still power through it and kind of overcome that and I’ll be fine. And then there’s, it can increase where you, those feelings of… Like those feelings of fear and anxiety, of reject social rejection, get to the point where you try to avoid the situation, any social situation completely. And that’s when it can become a problem.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. And basically the more either like if you’re having enough to stress, hey, then it’s problematic. Or if you are what I see as kind of the bigger problem I’m giving up on things that I care about. I’m avoiding things that I want to do that matter to me. I’m not connecting when I really wanna be connecting.
Brett McKay: Diagnostically. Do you make a distinction between shyness and social anxiety? When someone comes to you like, oh, I’ve got social anxiety. Do you sometimes say, well, maybe you’re just kind of shy and you don’t actually have social anxiety?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I don’t differentiate it that way since there’s a scale, if they’re coming to see me, then I’m trying to figure out what is missing. Like, what’s the problem here, what are you not getting and how do I get you there? A lot of times I’ll find when people come in, if we are thinking really like clinical psychology by the book, someone might come in and be like, okay, you are above the cutoff for social anxiety disorder. And then after a bit of treatment, people will be down below the cutoff. And some people are like, okay, yeah… I’ve moved myself down that scale. This is okay. But most of the time people are like, okay, well I’m down below the cutoff, but there’s a lot more that I still wanna do and the amount that I’m having is getting in the way.
Brett McKay: Okay. Do we have any ideas as to what causes social… Like someone to develop social anxiety, whether like that mild form or extreme form, is it nurture nature? What’s going on there?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it’s gonna be a combo. So I think part of it is, like I mentioned before, this is a human experience. So part of it is that the evolutionary background of we are primed to be this way. There’s certain things that as humans with our preexisting preloaded threat system is designed to protect us from things. And there are certain things that it is very ready to activate and try to protect us from snakes, but also social injuries. So we are already primed to be worried about whether we are acceptable in the group, whether we are performing correctly, whether people approve of us. So we have that kind of background. And then, we all have that, right? But obviously there’s individual differences. And so there are differences in temperament. So some of us are born, like myself, more behaviorally inhibited basically, where our nervous system is more sensitive and we are gonna be more reactive to stimuli.
So that’s one piece of it. But also what happens over our time growing up, it tunes that, it either turns our sensitivity up or it helps it to calm down. And then where I find it gets really interesting is in that nurture piece, in the experience piece, we’re trying to figure out, like someone comes in for treatment, we want to have a model and we want it to be individualized because people will not agree on what situations are threatening. This basically will come out of, we’ll look at the nurture piece. We’ll look at what are you specifically afraid of happening? In what situation, what is it that you’re afraid is gonna be discovered about you? What will you be giving away? And people are judging and we’ll be able to say, this didn’t come from nowhere. If we look for it, we will generally, we’ll be able to find, oh, this has been happening for a while. Where would this idea have come from? Because at some point a part of us, part of our brain learned that a particular situation was threatening and we learned at that time, here’s how I’m gonna cope. I’m gonna come up with a survival method for this. So I do think having that background is really useful for self-compassion to know, oh, there’s not something wrong with me. We have tricky brains as Paul Gilbert says, we set up this way and we’ve been through experiences that have trained us to be afraid of certain circumstances.
Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So we might… You might be born with the more sensitivity to social or status defeats of being socially rejected, and then your upbringing could fine tune that. Or even if you sort of are naturally an extrovert, you enjoy being around people. If you had an upbringing where you didn’t have the opportunity to socialize, you might develop some social anxiety. Like in your case, you grew up… You went to that all boys high school didn’t really interact with women. So when you finally had to, you obviously had some anxiety ’cause you didn’t have any practice with that.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. So that’s definitely would have a piece. If we… It depends, we can go way far back, like early childhood, all we can look at definitely the teen years, right? And the puberty. And then when people start to shift from seeing other people as being like on the same level to suddenly, like I’m friends with that person, not that person. And then that sudden shift to hierarchies that kick in. Once you’re in the teen years and what you’ve learned, all this historical stuff, you are picking up these models. Of like, this is who I am, this is where I fall, this is how loved I am, this is what’s wrong with me. This is what’s good about me, this is how people are gonna respond. This is what the world’s like.
Brett McKay: And going back to personality, a lot of people talk about, well, I’m an introvert, I’m an extrovert. And I think with this idea of social anxiety, introversion, extroversion can be related to it, but I think it’s possible you can be an introvert but not have social anxiety. I think that describes me like I’m an introvert. Introversion is just, you enjoy being by yourself or just smaller groups, like being around lots of people just wears you out. That’s how I feel when I have to go to a party and press flush and hobnob afterwards, I’m like, oh man, that was really tiring. But I like to, like smaller groups, I’m fine, but I’m not shy. I have no problem introducing myself to people. I don’t know going to places, I don’t know, public speaking, calling people on the phone that I don’t know, I don’t have a problem with that. Is it possible for you to be an extrovert but also have social anxiety? So like you enjoy being around lots of people, there’s something in your temperament, but then you also, it makes you anxious. Have you encountered patients like that?
Thomas Smithyman: Oh yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Think of them as being like, it’s easier to think about them as being two separate factors. So yeah, you are right. You can be introverted and just want a smaller group of friends, but you’re not experiencing a fear of being judged, a fear of being seen as deficient and having that get in the way. You just don’t want that level of stimulation all the time. And yeah, you’ll have introverts not socially anxious, not gonna come in and try to get it treated. ‘Cause they’re like, I’m doing fine, I just want a life that’s set up in this particular way. What’s interesting yeah, is you do get obviously introverted, socially anxious people. But yeah, you’re right, you get those extroverted, socially anxious folks. And that’s actually where I see the most pain. Because you are somebody who wants a full social life. You wanna be kind of the life of the party. You wanna be around people all the time. You wanna be thinking out loud, connecting with people, and yet you are being really inhibited by the fear of not being good enough and you’re shutting down even though you wanna be connecting desperately. Those are the ones who suffer the most. And that probably was what I was like when I was younger and going through this.
Brett McKay: And I think I’ve noticed this that people do this because I think one of the downsides of, we say democratizing therapy speak or psychology speak is that people start self diagnosing. And there’s people who they might have like social anxiety because they just don’t have the practice of socializing, but they’re like, well, I’m just an introvert. It’s like, well maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you would actually enjoy being very social, except you just don’t know how. And so it gives you anxiety. And so to avoid the anxiety, you just don’t go out and you’re like, well, I’m an introvert.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I’m with you on that. Honestly, the way I think about it, anybody that comes in to try to treat things, it requires a ton of courage and it requires you facing uncomfortable things. And most people are not gonna do it because it’s really hard and it’s scary. And for a lot of people either it’s like, I don’t realize that’s what’s going on ‘Cause I have this narrative, or it’s easier to say I don’t like something rather than I’m scared of something.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That makes sense. And I think with social anxiety, the thing I’m maybe I’m picking up on is it can be context specific. So you might have social anxiety in certain situations, but not others. So here’s an example, some people do fine in face-to-face conversations, but calling someone on the phone just terrifies them. So they just avoid calling people on the phone, like even calling the restaurant to make an order or something like that. Even though they… Whenever I see people who have that social anxiety of calling people on the phone, it’s like there’s people at that place who are waiting, their job is to take your call.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.
Brett McKay: You don’t need to worry about it. And then there’s also, people could be fine socially with friends, with colleagues, with coworkers, but when it comes to dating and thinking about relationships romantically, that’s when the anxiety appears.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Totally the case. I’ll have these like funny conversations with people because, we each have our theories. Like our implicit ideas of this is how the world works, this is what’s safe, this is what’s not safe. And a lot of change in that is I just identifying it and then trying to challenge it. But I’ll talk to people and somebody will be adamant, put me in a group, it is safe, I can hide. No one’s really paying attention to me. But if you put me one-on-one with somebody, that’s where the real danger is. Because then the person’s gonna look at you and they’re gonna realize, whatever your flaws are. And then I’ll talk to the next person and they’ll be like, Ooh, get me one-on-one. I can read what the person’s thinking, I can adjust myself, it’s fine, but put me in a group, I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna screw that up. And each one will be entirely convinced that one environment’s safe and the other one is very dangerous because we’ve each come to develop our own particular triggers and yeah. And so, like for me dating, but if you have me talk to a guy great.
It’s gonna go fine. Have me talk to my date’s mother. I was wonderful. I was the most charming guy you ever met. But it’s, yeah, the specific… Each person’s very specific. And like when, when you are trying to figure out how to help, it’s why you kind of can’t do just blanket broad things a lot of times. Like you wanna have a sense of like, what is it? What situation triggers me and why? And what do I think it’s bringing? What is it revealing about me? And what am I doing to try to protect myself in those situations?
Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. I think I’m, if I remember correctly, a lot of the pickup artists stuff feels like you got to increase your confidence in general. And probably that’s probably not that useful. Instead, you should focus on like, what is it about interacting with the opposite sex that makes me anxious? And then like, figure that out. ‘Cause I don’t know if you can really just increase general confidence. I think confidence is very context specific. You can be confident in one situation, like we just talked about talking with the boys, but not so much with women. And in certain, and women in certain situations, like you probably be fine talking to the bank teller and just have this great conversation and it’s almost flirty. You don’t realize that. But as soon as you have an interest, like a romantic interest, that’s, that’s when it becomes a problem. So you got to focus on that.
Thomas Smithyman: Exactly. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So social anxiety, like general anxiety is based on faulty thinking. So when you have generalized anxiety, they just, you imagine these things in your head that probably aren’t gonna happen. And you use that fear to make excuses for yourself to just avoid life in extreme cases. What’s some of the faulty thinking patterns that people have about socializing in general that can cause social anxiety?
Thomas Smithyman: There are, there are so many, like you could write a whole book on it, which I did. I mean, I could honestly go on and on. For any kind of anxiety, like this is the simple version, for any kind of anxiety you look for, most likely you are some version of overestimating the likelihood that things will go badly and underestimating your ability to handle it. So that’s kind of the broad version. But once you get deeper into social anxiety, there are like commonalities that come up all the time. And so like I talk in the book about this idea of the, that comes from David Moscovich, but this idea of an audience that people until proven otherwise are hyper focused on you and the hyper focus on looking for flaws and things that are wrong with you.
And when they see them, they are going to be really critical, not kind, not thoughtful, not empathetic, not be able to put it in context. And They’re gonna be judgmental about it. And if that happens, we will be unable to go on. It will just shut us down. Our lives will be ruined. So I think, I think that kind of collection is really important. Like I have a thing, I get into great detail in the book about this thing I call the social anxiety equation, where I sort of point out, here’s a whole series of cognitive biases that socially anxious people have that triggers all of the symptoms in the end to protect you. And it’s kind of those pieces, right? ’cause in reality, we know from research and we go about testing this all the time in, in treatment, but like, we know that the flaws that we feel like we have, they seem much bigger to us than they are to other people. And so we might like, we, we get anxious when we’re gonna enter a situation and we think some imperfection, some problem we have will be revealed. But in reality, one, people are not super attentive and people don’t notice things particularly well.
A lot of what we experience, we notice ’cause it’s maybe internal to us or they don’t notice ’cause they are focused on other things. If they do notice it, but a lot of times they don’t think these things are problems. Like they might even like them. I remember I, in college, like I talked to this, to this woman and like, she had it like an interesting nose and I liked it. And I gave her a compliment on it. And she told me that it was the thing that she was most sensitive of. She saw it as her biggest flaw. And I, in fact, had a different perspective. I liked it. And that comes up again and again, when I work with people, their perceived flaws, there are some people who are into those things, but even if they’re not, people see things in context. Like we fixate on what we see as a problem. But meanwhile, when someone meets us, they are seeing the entire person, especially if someone gets to know us, they get to know us as a full complex human and they see whatever our downsides are in that context.
Brett McKay: And on top of that, people are way more empathetic than we give them credit for. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So to kind of recap there, people who have social anxiety, one of the things that faulty thinking that they have is they think that whenever they’re socializing with somebody, the other person’s just looking for the flaws. Like they’re looking for you to mess up. They’re hyper focused on that. But the research shows, like actually when you’re interacting with someone, they’re not paying that much attention to you. And I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. It’s like the spotlight effect, right? Where you think everyone’s paying attention to you, but actually no one’s paying attention to you. And they’ve done experiments where they’ve had people wear Barry Manilow t-shirts.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, love that.
Brett McKay: Then they asked people, did you notice the guy wearing the Barry Manilow t-shirt? Like, I don’t remember the Barry Manilow t-shirt. So yeah, people aren’t… So that’s one of the cognitive faulty thinking. People aren’t really paying too close attention to what you look like or your flaws. And then the other one, faulty things that people with social anxiety, they catastrophize about if they do have a social misstep, what’s that gonna mean? They typically think, well, if someone’s just gonna hate me and they’re just gonna make fun of me and they’re just not gonna have anything to do with me. And what the research shows is that actually most people are pretty forgiving and empathetic. And they’re probably not even paying attention. If you did have some sort of social faux pas, it went over their head. But because people with social anxiety had that faulty thinking of catastrophizing and thinking everyone’s paying attention to them to avoid the anxiety, they just avoid social situations completely.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. Like all of the things that we do to protect ourselves or avoid, those are the real problems, right? So this belief of, yeah, people are really vicious, they are looking for these things, they’re gonna catch them, they’re gonna judge me, they’re probably mean, makes it feel really risky, makes it feel really threatening. And so the natural response to risk and threat is to avoid those things. Or if you cannot avoid them, to try really hard to hide them. And I guess that’s actually one of the other for social anxiety, one of the really big biases in thinking is that you’ve got to perform. It’s this idea of, I’ve got to perform really, really well in order for people to be accepting of me or like me. And the research from just, I’ve pulled it from all over the place and it keeps coming back to, no, you don’t. Like social performance is not really demanding. It’s generally simple and it’s generally being warm, being curious and being basically authentic to the self or faithful to the self. And people aren’t demanding this incredible level of verbal performance and wittiness and humor. People basically want you to do just straightforward social skills. And if you do that, it goes really well a lot of the time, especially early on.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Those protective behaviors you take part in, when you do have to interact, like someone with social anxiety, they have to like, okay, I got to be social. I don’t want to, but I have to. And like you said, they typically, they’ll fall back to just tactics, techniques to get them through it. And this is like where that pickup artist stuff comes in. That’s what they offer. They go, well, here’s these things you can do when you’re interacting with a woman and you’re feeling nervous. You can do this so you know what to do, even though you feel nervous. But what your research suggests and what you’ve noticed with your clients is when you start performing, you actually become more aware of your social interaction. And that’s like, that’s gonna actually cause your anxiety to go up even more because now you’re just paying close attention. Like, oh my gosh, I said that wrong. I’m an idiot. And this person’s probably thinking I’m an idiot. And so that performative aspect just increases the self-awareness, which increases the social anxiety and it just becomes this death spiral.
Thomas Smithyman: That is, that is exactly it. Exactly it. Like it’s, and you got to think too about the, like what’s the underlying message that we’re kind of implying, right? When we are trying to perform. ‘Cause the underlying message is you as you are is not okay. You are not good enough. Your instincts are wrong. You are wrong. Therefore you need to perform and act in these ways in order to be good enough and acceptable enough, which that is like on a deep level that is really reinforcing shame, right? Which is gonna turn on the threat system and bring down self-confidence. The more you raise that performance standard, I’ve got to perform this. I got to come across this way. I got to make sure I do this and not that. The higher performance demands go, the more anxious we get. And especially as we have, there’s a gap between here’s how well I think I can perform. Like here’s who I can be. And here’s who I’m supposed to be in order to be good enough. That gap is anxiety. So we wanna be really careful about not demanding that we perform like to this really high level, especially that’s beyond our natural process.
Yeah. ‘Cause all that stuff will make us more anxious. And yeah, the more that we have to focus on ourselves to make sure that we’re doing it right, the more anxious we get, the more things we’re trying to remember at once, the more anxious we get. In reality, the good news is we don’t have to do all that. The social skills are simple and we can just focus on the core of like, be warm to people. We have a great response to that. People really like that. Be curious about people. People really like that. And it makes us less anxious and be slightly harder version. Like that self-fidelity, be faithful to the self, which can be a little more intimidating, but is really well liked.
Brett McKay: And you also highlight research in your book about when you do take part in protective behaviors during a social interaction. So that could be just going through the very rote performative things that you read on the internet or in some self-help book. People actually pick up on that. They’re like, well, something’s off about this guy. And so your attempts to protect yourself from social judgment is actually raising more awareness of your issues.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s many downsides to protection. Like honestly, you could say that the protection attempts themselves are the biggest problem out of this whole process because pretty much any protection strategy we use raises anxiety, but it also makes us harder to connect to. And yeah, oftentimes it comes across weird ’cause it’s not natural, but like all of this stuff, like all of those protective behaviors, like it’s protection, like it’s armor. And just from all the years of working with people on this, so much comes down to this. It comes down to like, I am sitting, interacting with people. I’m hearing about belief-wise what’s driving them, but I’m also looking and hearing about how they’re trying to survive those concerns. Like what are these different strategies that they’re doing to try to survive and still connect? And sometimes it’s like the connection is just not happening because there’s so much protection. And other times it’s like, you’re present, but I’m not actually seeing you. No one’s actually getting you. Like you can’t actually connect with someone unless you have access to them.
And so this is like in going out and kind of pushing boundaries and testing out these social theories. So much of it is looking at like, what protections are you using and why are you using those? And what are you predicting would happen if you did not use those? So for example, most people that I’ve worked with, they will either be a, I don’t like asking questions person, or I don’t like self-disclosing person. But the act of expressing social curiosity, asking people about themselves, asking follow-ups, being interested, that piece or self-disclosure, which is this is who I am, this is me. Those two sides, curiosity and self-disclosure, those are the engine of connection. Like that’s how we connect to people. That’s how we start up really shallow and we work our way down to really knowing and being known. And so if you’ve got a, due to fear, you have a protection strategy that is cutting off one or both of those, then you’re literally cutting off the any ability to connect.
Brett McKay: So I mean, yeah, another protective behavior you talk about in the book, I think you mentioned is, especially in dating, guys will be like, I’m just going to play hard to get. Like I’m gonna just pretend, I’m gonna act like I don’t, I’m not actually interested in this girl. So that if she does reject me, it’s like, well, you can play it off like, well, I just, I wasn’t really into you anyways.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Like when it comes to dating anxiety, this is the biggest one. Basically not taking the risk of showing any interest. Yeah. And like I’ve, there’s pretty many stories in the book about this because you see it all the time. And it, I mean, that’s exactly what it is. It is vulnerable to show interest in somebody because you are opening yourself up to that interest, not being reciprocated, which it will not be a solid percentage of the time. So that takes courage. That is brave to do. And so, because it’s vulnerable and we don’t like feeling vulnerable. Yeah. The most common thing to do is to feel it, but try really hard not to show it. And if you have a rule of like, oh, I cannot show someone my interest. I’ve got to seem cool and calm, disinterested. I’m gonna wait for them to show it to me. Then the burden’s all on them, which is not very thoughtful to them.
But also that’s asking them to take a massive risk, right? Like they’re not gonna take this massive, and some people will, but not many people are gonna take a massive risk of saying, Hey, this guy’s really communicating. He doesn’t like me, but I’m gonna try to show him how much I like him. That’s a hard ask.
Brett McKay: Right. And it doesn’t work. Like you said, like most, if someone thinks that you don’t like them, they’re not gonna like you. The thing is though, I mean, everyone’s experienced this. As soon as you realize someone’s interested in you, like, oh, they like me or it doesn’t have to be romantic. You just be like, oh, that, that guy thinks I’m cool. All of a sudden you think, well, that guy’s cool. Or that I really like, exactly, I like this girl too, because she’s interested in me. So, I mean, the takeaway there is if you have social anxiety, whether it’s like making friends or dating, express, like show that you’re interested because that will likely cause the other person to be interested in you.
Thomas Smithyman: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. This is reciprocation. Like we know from research, warmth is reflected. If we put out warmth, we get warmth back for the vast majority of people. If we put out being cold, we tend to get cold back from other people. And especially if we’re authentic, right? If we like a person in particular versus we just like everyone, people feel that. And that makes you like even more likely to reflect it back. And like, if you think about it too, the model of flirtation, like flirtation is basically, I’m gonna display, I have all of these psychologically attractive aspects to me. And I am suggesting that maybe I’m interested in investing those in you. Those two things together are flirtation. If we just have, I am so great, look at all these cool things about me, but no indication that we’re interested in investing in a person, it’s not flirtation. Like you’re just existing.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about flirtation, I thought this was interesting. Flirtation, we’re getting more into the dating anxiety stuff here, but flirtation, there’s ambiguity in it. You’re not going out and saying, hey, I really like you. You don’t do that right off the bat.
Thomas Smithyman: No.
Brett McKay: Instead, you’re like, I’ve got these great qualities and maybe I like you. Because I think ambiguity is really underappreciated. People really enjoy the ambiguity in a relationship ’cause it’s interesting, it’s intriguing, it’s exciting. I think people’s brains, they’re really engaged by uncertainty. And They wanna figure out, does this person like me? Do they not like me? You don’t wanna play hard to get, but you wanna make your signals mixed a little bit. And that generates some chemistry. Am I explaining that okay? Yeah.
Thomas Smithyman: No. I say the exact same thing as you. So I think what’s interesting about it too is the reason that what you’re saying feels right is because that’s organically exactly how things work. Not just for dating, but for all relationships, right? When you first meet somebody, you know very little about them. So you are not gonna be super sold on that person because authentically you just know a sliver. It’s thin slice, there’s a little bit of them. And you also probably know from experience that the deeper traits of people don’t come out until you’ve known them for a while. So if it’s friendship, you meet somebody, you’re not gonna be like, oh my God, you’re amazing. You’re my best friend. You’re gonna have probably a initially polite and then maybe more enjoyable of a conversation with them.
And over time, as you get to know more about them, maybe there’s more of a friendship connection, and you become more obvious that you like the person. It’s the same for dating. You meet a person, at first you don’t know them. The stage one of flirtation is you treat someone the same, that you treat any other person, you basically polite to them and you do your basic social skills. You are not, oh my God, you’re amazing. You just met them. You don’t know that. Maybe they’re not amazing. And over time you are gathering information. And as you gather information, that mixed message, which originally was just basically politeness becomes more and more overt as you become more and more sold on them. Does that make sense?
Brett McKay: That makes. That makes perfect sense. So you’re taking your time to reveal your intentions or your actual feelings. That’s what a natural social development looks like.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Like you said, you start off, you’re gonna kind of have these niceties, you engage in polite relying on etiquette and manners and rules. But as you get to know this person, you start revealing a little bit more, a little bit more. And really that’s the best thing about a relationship is getting to know somebody. That’s my favorite part of a relationship, is getting to know the person.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Which by the way, probably makes you a great person to socialize with because that’s people’s favorite thing, is slowly becoming known.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, let’s talk about what we can do to alleviate, if you have social anxiety, or even if you don’t have social anxiety, you just, maybe you have shyness every now and then how maybe don’t want to be as shy. Some things we can do to mitigate that or alleviate that, one piece of advice you give… Well, I think the one thing is just understanding these, this faulty thinking that we often engage in. If you have social anxiety, or even if you’re just shy, again, reminder that people aren’t really paying that much attention to your flaws. Even if they do notice your flaws, they probably don’t care. And then this idea that you have to perform and, you know, socialize in a certain way for you to have a good social interaction, that will actually just make you more anxious because you’re just so focused on yourself. So one bit of advice, and you’ve kind of alluded to this already, is instead of thinking about making a great first impression, so this, let’s say you’re going to a party, a new gym where you can meet some new friends, maybe a potential romantic partner, instead of thinking about how to make a great first impression, you argue you should just make a mediocre first impression.
Thomas Smithyman: Yes.
Brett McKay: So what does a mediocre first impression and mediocre social interaction look like?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I’m being deliberately a little bit kind of tongue in cheek about it.
Brett McKay: Sure.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. But the idea is that, the reason I mention that is ’cause people, whenever they are coming in and talking to me about this, they do tend to have these elevated demands. I must perform this well, I must seem witty and I must seem this, and I must seem that with all these rules. And having those high demands, makes us more anxious. But it also very much makes us less likely to actually talk to people because it’s hard to be super witty and cool and intelligent and whatever else. So part of it is that it reduces our anxiety if we can find a way to lower the demands and it makes us more likely to act and it’s likable. So my argument of what a mediocre first impression means is you are going back to that simplicity principle of social skills, which is be warm, be curious, and be authentic to who you are.
And that is doable for us. So this means just those basic social skills of smile make some eye contact. Ask whatever natural easy curiosity questions you have. Try to understand the person a bit, try to get to know a little bit about who they are, what makes them interesting, what might you like about them. ‘Cause that’s really positive surveillance. And then reveal some about who you are, but you are not trying… I think the important thing is a lot of people I talk to feel like when they first meet someone, whether it is social or dating or whatever, that you are trying to make some great leap in your relationship with that person when you first meet them. That’s really demanding. Instead, my model is your goal is to take somebody from being a stranger to being a non-stranger, not being a friend, not even being an acquaintance.
Just like it’s a person that you have interacted with on some level. So you are no longer absolute strangers. What it means is, people really connect through repeated contact. That’s just how we are sort of, we naturally form connections. So we’re just trying to… The next time you show up in some social event, you’ve actually met some people. And hey, if you go beyond a simple introduction to have a bit of a conversation, great. So this is what kinda what I mean by a mediocre self impression, allow things to happen over time through repeated investment.
Brett McKay: And then another bit of advice that you give is just to quit thinking about yourself so much. Because as we talked about self-consciousness is what is getting in the way of you having a good social interaction. So just put the focus on the other person, be interested in the other person, ask them lots of questions. I think the trick is though, is you don’t want the question asking to become a protective behavior, right?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, exactly.
Brett McKay: Where you’re not revealing things about yourself, there’s none of that give and take. But if you’re feeling just really shy and just really self-conscious in a social interaction, just shifting the focus away from yourself by asking the person lots of questions, that can be a great way to get over that initial hump.
Thomas Smithyman: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. And people generally, we do want to over time have a 50/50-ish balance of how much is curiosity about the other person and how much is self-disclosure about ourselves because we have to self-disclose for them to connect to us. But both sides of that are important and they don’t have to happen one-to-one. One question, one statement. It can be like at sometimes it’s we have a chunk of time that’s all about the other person. And then that brings up, if we are externalized really interested in them really wanting to understand what are they feeling, why are they feeling that, why is this important? We’ll probably find at some point we have these light bulbs go off that it really reminds us of like our own story or we, we see some similarity like, “Oh, I also have that and that will naturally lead us to self-disclose as well. Or the other person will often ask us questions too.
Brett McKay: One of the treatments for just general anxiety is exposure therapy. This is where you are actually, you have to face your fear. So if you have a fear of spiders, you have to like look at a spider, you might have to hold a tarantula. And the idea is by experiencing that fear response, but seeing that you’re actually not harmed, there’s no danger. You can reduce your anxiety about that particular thing. It could be heights, dogs, animal, whatever. How do you use exposure therapy in your work? Treating people with social anxiety?
Thomas Smithyman: Oh, it is fundamental. It is fundamental. As much as we would love to sit around just talking about cognitions and changing thoughts and thinking more realistically, honestly, all of that thought stuff is very, very important. But a lot of it is important because it sets us up to do the right kind of exposures. So our emotional brain, it will be a bit influenced by a shift in perspective, but it really learns through experience. So exposure is really just getting new experiences that give us a different understanding of the situation. We’re trying to teach our anxious brain that socializing is safe. And so what that looks like is you are trying to identify, “Which situations am I avoiding? How am I trying to protect myself in different social settings? Why am I doing those things? What am I afraid is gonna happen?” And then the exposure in… When I do it, I use the model of behavioral experiments, which I think makes sense where we’re experimenting with behavior to try to get new information.
We’re testing out the beliefs that are making us anxious. And so in social things that’ll mean, Oh, I am constantly hiding my hands when I talk to people because they shake and I think they’re gonna think I’m weak and reject me if they see it. Well, then an exposure or a behavioral experiment would be, “I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna try talking to people with my hands out and see do they notice? Do they care? Do they reject me? How bad is it?” So it’s finding whatever we believe is wrong with us and whatever protections we think we have to do and testing those out and then coming back and discovering, well, things actually went fine, or if I struggled a bit, it wasn’t that bad. Does that make sense?
Brett McKay: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And then you talk about in the book, to get over your dating anxiety, you did just, you were brutal with it, with yourself. You just…
Brett McKay: Oh my God, yes.
Asked random women for dates and phone numbers, and just get it… Your goal is to get rejected as frequently…
Thomas Smithyman: Correct.
Brett McKay: As you can. Which, it works like that. That can work. But maybe if you don’t want to do that, I mean, you can gradually do some exposure therapy by, if you’re have a general fear of socializing, try practicing your social skills in everyday non-threatening situations. So talking to the store clerk, when you’re checking out talking to the post office clerk. ‘Cause you can have a social interaction. There’s no threat going on there. You can kind of just have, just some banter back and forth to practice that. And you’re like, oh, that actually wasn’t that bad. I can take this to the next level with another social engagement that gives me a little bit more anxiety.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great way to do it. Yeah. Just if you can find, how can I be this little bit more social than I normally would be? Yeah. Try to find where are those small opportunities for social snacks? I’ll just talk to this person a little bit and say more, where you might normally say less than you have an idea of like, I’m gonna practice saying more than next time, or I’m gonna focus on asking more questions this week. I’m gonna try to ask a question to each person I come across. Finding any little opportunities to just do more socializing. But also it’s like, with any of the protections, just really focusing on those where can I be less protected? So how can I undo that as well? And then on a deeper level, at the deepest level, is this belief of I’m not acceptable as I am. And so finding also, rather than just strangers, like people that you do know, the ones who seem the most accepting, starting to show maybe the parts of yourself that you hide not immediately and not a ton and don’t go super deep, but starting to reveal maybe some of the things that you struggle with to someone who’s safe. Because where you’d love to get to at the end of this whole process is where there are people that know who you actually are and they accept and love you anyway. That’s what we’re going for.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about the goal with your treatment with the people you work with is to get to this what you call the warm social world.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Where instead of seeing the social world as this scary place, you actually, it’s a place like, “Oh, these people are potential friends or potential romantic partners or a potential business partner.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. That’s where we want to get to. And I feel like most people, they probably know this because I think everybody probably has times where they feel just like really socially comfortable where they are around the right people or things have gone a certain way and they’re just like, “Oh, I just feel like just connected and I’m talking easily to people. I met people that wasn’t that difficult.” We’ve probably had that. And there’s times where it’s the opposite. You might give us the same situation, but we’re really shut down. We feel really anxious. It’s hard to connect. And when we’re in these different states, the world looks completely different. And it essentially is because, our perceptions shape the world that we live in. And where we’re trying to get to, at the end of the whole process is we don’t want to be in a situation where our anxiety turns on, our threat system turns on, and we are fighting against it as we socialize. Where we wanna get to is where it just doesn’t turn on. So we have our natural social approach system is turned on, and that’s a system where we like, “Yeah, we see, people seem lack potential friends and allies where making sort of small comments to the people that we come across in our day, we are connecting. And it just, socializing feels easy. Dating feels easy, it all feels easy.
Brett McKay: And then if you get rejected, you’re like, well, not a big deal. That’s not a problem. They’re not for me. You tell, you learn. You’re like, oh, I don’t like everybody. That’s okay. If they don’t like me, that’s fine too.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. You, you don’t need… And you’ve got… You wanna be at the point where you’ve got enough people that already know you and like you, where everything’s not riding upon what some particular person thinks or responds. You already feel good about yourself because you have a community, you have friends.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s a good point. A lot of guys who might be struggling with dating, one thing you talk about in the book in the beginning, instead of being so hyper-focused on meeting a romantic partner. Just focus on making friends. It could be, if you’re we’re talking about a guy here, like same sex friends, other dude friends because first, you learn some social skills in that process, but then you develop that social capital so that when you go out and you start approaching women, if you get rejected, well you have these guys you can go back to who can help you out. Like, Hey, you’re all right. Get back out there. So that’s some dating advice there I think you have in the book I thought was really useful.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. People don’t, I think appreciate a lot of times how, just how much the friendship world and the dating world overlap. The same traits basically are attractive in both settings. What makes someone a great friend makes them a great dating partner and the skills, the social skills, you need of, they overlap a lot. So yeah, work on talking to everybody. Talk to people that are less intimidating if you’re intimidated by a certain sort of person, practice on people that are less intimidating at first. And yeah. And the bigger you build up that community, you build your own warm social world too, that you live in where you have your confidants and you have your friends. And that is such a big antidote to the anxiety as well.
Brett McKay: Well, Thomas, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. Been great for me too. You can find my book Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. It’s on Amazon. There’s an, the audio book on Audibles my personal favorite, but there’s a soft cover book and a Kindle. But I also have a YouTube channel, just my name Dr. Thomas Smithyman. And I’m trying to put things out there pretty regularly, really, on all these social world and anxiety topics.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Thomas Smithyman, thanks for your time. It has been a pleasure.
Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Thanks a lot. I appreciate talking.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Thomas Smithyman. He’s the author of the book, Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, thomassmithyman.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS/social anxiety, where you can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our [email protected]. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciative if take one minute to give View Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think we something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to The AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
