Manage Your Social Anxiety with Stefan Hofmann

0:00Are you working to pay off a debt? Let Monarch help. Monarch's Debt Pay Down Simulator and Visualizer helps you track your progress and plan. Write your own money story. Use code ACHIEVER at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core at half off, just 50 bucks. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code ACHIEVER. Mark is offering our readers two books for the price of one. Go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And that's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious. It's just$16 a book for you and a friend to get the book that Y Combinator's Gary Tan says will quote, change your odds of success because it teaches you how to kill your losing ideas.

0:43Or as my editor is always telling me, you gotta kill your darlings. Hi, I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes. And honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time. but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know.

1:31I'd love to air it again, or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

1:41If we humans are such social creatures, then why do we make each other so anxious? Joining me now is Stefan Hoffman, a clinical psychologist at Boston University and one of the foremost experts on cognitive behavior therapy and treating social anxiety. so social anxiety is um an eternally popular topic at least among my listeners i i don't know if you find that in your daily life when people learn um that one of your areas of expertise is social anxiety if their their eyes light up or if they kind of get nervous about it what's the reaction uh well certainly a social anxiety is something that everybody can relate to and uh If people ask me what I do, I typically do not get into the specifics because otherwise it would be a pretty lengthy discussion that I'm trying to avoid.

2:39They'd want free therapy. Exactly. How do you define social anxiety? Well, social anxiety is just generally defined as anxiety around other people. has to do with fear of negative evaluation by others. That is sort of at the core of social anxiety. It is a very normal experience. We all need to feel socially anxious at some points in our lives. And in our development, this is a very normal process where children go through stranger anxiety, through separation anxiety, which is obviously related to social anxiety. They sometimes feel timid in new situations. And if children do not experience that, this is a sign of problems, typically.

3:32And so pediatricians look at this as a possible red flag if children do not experience any social anxiety. And as we grow older, as we go through the various life transitions, social anxiety fluctuates, comes and goes. You know, teenage years is more challenging period where we try to, you know, to make sense of our own self, of trying to figure out who we are and who we like, who likes us and how we how we fit in, how we kind of figuring out the social norms that are around us. And as we move through life, this happens again during new role transitions, such as finding a job, finding a life partner, having children and the like.

4:30So social anxiety is with us and it goes up and down. But if some people experience very severe social anxiety and to a level that they can interfere with one's life. And in this case, we often talk about social anxiety disorder if you meet certain criteria. Well, I'll actually throw in a listener question here from Tom, who asked, at what point does what's perceived as regular shyness qualify as full on social anxiety? He says, I sometimes used to walk around the block a few times before finally plucking up the courage to go into a party. But I always just thought of myself as shy. And Tom, I got to tell you, I hear you.

5:16I've never been on time for anything social because I have to also sort of drive around or hide for a little bit before I can get the courage to walk in. Yeah. So again, shyness is a, we psychologists call it a personality characteristic, a trait. Some people are more timid, more shy than others. Some are more outgoing. And this is a very normal trait that people vary on. Shyness per se, we would not think it's a serious, is a problem unless this is related to extreme fear of social anxiety, of negative evaluation by others. Shyness and social anxiety are two overlapping features. They are distinct.

6:03There are some interesting differences also culturally. There are certain cultures that value shyness more than others. American culture is a very individualistic culture that is very focused on the individual versus such as an Asian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese culture are more collectivistic. These are often the two cultures that we compare people in, especially traits such as social anxiety and shyness. So in collectivistic cultures, shyness is often more greatly valued because it has to do with the collective importance outweighs the individualistic needs and wishes. There are gender differences too, obviously.

6:55There are absolutely gender differences where women tend to score more highly on measures of shyness than males. In a Western and male-dominated society, the person who is sort of the typical male stereotype is the non-shy, go-getter, aggressive, outspoken, and loud. And so those are the typical stereotypes that we're dealing with. Can we talk about evaluation? That's a clinical word, but I've heard you mention it a lot. What is the role? I mean, are we as humans sort of always evaluating each other under the surface? And is that something that can get more heightened in social anxiety? What is the role of evaluating others in our social reactions?

7:52So, you know, humans are social creatures. This is the very reason why COVID-19 was able to spread so much as it did, because we're social creatures. is we want to be around others. We form groups, teams, the desirable places to live, all the metropolitan areas where people cluster and we form, you know, structures, social structures. And we value more than anything this social connectedness. We punish people. We punish ourselves through social isolation. We give children timeouts when they don't, when they misbehave. This is sort of the go-to punishment these days, right? Well, and we make adults feel bad when they want to be alone.

8:51I speak from personal experience. Yeah, that's why the pandemic was also so distressing because of the social mitigation, social isolation strategies. And when we punish people in a serious way, we send them to prison. We cut them off from others. And if people misbehave within the prison system, this is what we take away, social contact, no visitation, even further social isolation, such as solitary confinement. So we value social contact more than anything. The social value is sort of a guiding principle in what makes us human. And for that reason, social anxiety can be so debilitating, for this very reason.

9:47For that very reason, also, it's so highly commode with depression. If you're socially isolated and alone, loneliness, being not around other people is in fact the most toxic trait one can experience, one most toxic experience. Being lonely predicts all sorts of problems in your life. Also physical, biological problems are associated with loneliness, with being socially isolated. We know that also through experiments with animals, even, that even they require the social connectedness. And if you isolate them, you can kill animals, quite simply. But what about the role of evaluating others? I mean, I understand that we're social and that we we want to be with our pack.

10:41But yes, it seems to me that social anxiety pops up when it's a new experience and you fear that you may be being judged. Yeah. So this has to do with with with a hierarchy we're building with with we we value ourselves not as an absolute person, but as a person in relation to others. You know, the more we are admired by others, the more we value ourselves. And it is really absolutely. Absolutely. So can I ask a question then? So why are people always telling us to find strength within and have our own self-esteem if it's just a fact that we draw value from how others perceive us? But because it is a necessity to value yourself before you can go out and ask others to.

11:41So first love yourself before you can love others and before you can expect others to love you. Yeah. Yeah, so but the social hierarchy they were building is the very reason why it's so desirable to be in these so-called leadership positions where a lot of people know you, but you don't know all these other people who know you. And, you know, that's why we create these massive political structures. It's why the president of the United States is one of the most powerful men on earth. And because for no other reason, because of the social structure that we're building and then giving them all this power as a result of that.

12:24Money is sort of a proxy of this. Money in a way is an indicator of your power. But in fact, social power is considerably, it supersedes that. Many people can be very poor, but still socially powerful. But obviously, you can easily get money through the social power. So the influencers on the internet, they are not people who make per se financially rich, but rather they convert this social power into, they monetize it, they turn it into money as a result of that. It all starts out with a social influence. Once you have the social influence, you have the power, and that translates into money. So do people with social anxiety mostly feel it when they're meeting someone who is higher up in the hierarchy?

13:18Or can you feel it with anyone? Yes. Yes. Well, so social anxiety is, and there are interesting evolutionary theories suggesting that why there is social anxiety in the first place, has to do, in fact, with this social hierarchy that one perceives, you perceive yourself to be lower in hierarchy, desire to be higher in the hierarchy. And this tension that results from that causes this distress. And everybody wants to move up in this hierarchy. There's no single hierarchy, social hierarchy. There are many, many hierarchies, depending on the context you're in. In a family, there's a social hierarchy.

14:01In a work environment, there's a different hierarchy. In your golf club, there's a different hierarchy. At school pickup, there's definitely a hierarchy of parents. So that's interesting. So is that really our brain sort of doing some calculation, saying this person, your boss, say, is higher up in the hierarchy than you are, and you want them to like you, you want them to bring you into the in-group So you're nervous about your impression? Yes. So this is very much a biological issue. And depending on where you're standing in the hierarchy, you will have a very different response to stress. So, for example, you can observe this in our most species related to us, in monkeys, in chimpanzees and orangutans.

14:57When you examine there, they also form a structure, a social hierarchy structure. And depending on where you're standing in the social hierarchy, the monkey will have a very different biological response to the same stressor. So if you were in the lower hierarchy, this has a stressor imposed on you will have a more quicker and a more disastrous consequence on your body. If you're higher in hierarchy, you can tolerate the same stressor in a much better way. And you can even act out to your aggression and frustration and monkeys lower in hierarchy. I love talking to people who want to start their own business.

15:40You have an idea. You have a plan. And how do you jump off? I have a great book for you, and it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in, whether you're working at a company or you really want to start that business. It was an instant national bestseller. And the thing that I love about it is it has a battle-tested, easy-to-follow framework to rapidly test and assess new ideas, right? So you can separate the great ones from the bad ones.

16:18Mark is offering our readers two books for the price of one. Go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And that's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious. It's just$16 a book for you and a friend to get the book that Y Combinator's Gary Tan says will quote, change your odds of success because it teaches you how to kill your losing ideas. Or as my editor is always telling me, you got to kill your darlings. That's a pretty big endorsement from the head of the number one startup accelerator. That's twice as hard to get into as Harvard. Once again, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, Mark will send you a second copy for free that he's paying for.

16:58Just go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. Do you remember a day when you had finished paying off a debt? But I remember the day that I finished paying off my graduate school education loan. I felt so free. I feel like I had been paying off student loans for decades, and I probably had because I was 41 when I paid that last loan payment. It's an incredible feeling. And even better is when you can see the finish line and you know that you have a plan. That's why Monarch's Debt Pay Down Simulator and Visualizer helps you track your progress and really feel meaningful accomplishment. It shows your exact debt-free date based on your real balances and payments, and you can watch the timeline move.

17:45Monarch helps you plan out your options and pick the fastest one. You can even run different scenarios side by side and instantly see how much sooner each one will get you to paying off your debt and also the other factors that paying off that debt will do to your finances. Monarch breaks the debt cycle, and it takes the burdens of tracking it off your plate. I've talked about Monarch before, and the thing that I love about Monarch is it helps you adjust in real time, and it doesn't just look back with what you've already spent. It helps you look forward. Write your own money story with Monarch.

18:17Use code Achiever at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off, just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever. I'm going to throw in another question from a listener who, this is Leslie Carr. She asks, to what extent is social anxiety a result of relational trauma? Do we carry past traumas of being shamed, etc., into our grown-up lives as social anxiety? It can be. There's no single reason why people are more socially anxious than others. There is a, certainly the history that a person experiences has an effect on your current state. There's no doubt about that.

19:06The question is, though, has to do with nature versus nurture, to what extent it's the environment, to what extent is actually something that you bring into genes and through your biological makeup. We do know that social anxiety is quite heritable. That means that it is, shyness is a very heritable trait. That means that genetic contribution is actually quite high. There's a concept called behavioral inhibition. This is a early childhood shyness that we know is evident very early on. Right. The famous example of the baby crawling over the glass floor in a lab away from its mother. Right. Or being willing to leave its mother.

19:51Sure. A psychologist at Harvard University, Jerome Kagan, has been studying children very early on in life and has been following them up over the years as they now became, he started when they were toddlers and they're now in their 30s, I believe. He's been able to identify fairly accurately two types of responses to novel and potentially threatening environments. One, early on children, they either approach a novel situation in a curious way and don't start crying easily, are not overly timid. And there's another group of people who are very timid, cry easily, have a low pain threshold and so forth.

20:44This is a remarkably consistent trait that continues to exist even as they grow older. And the more timid ones, what we call behavioral inhibited children, turn more often into the socially anxious individual and who also tend to have more psychological problems in other ways. They might be more depressed, might have other forms of anxiety, panic attacks and the like. And interestingly, he also studied them not only behaviorally, but also he looked at their brains and their biological response to stressors. And he found that one particular area in the brain is quite important. It is called the amygdala.

21:26The amygdala is often referred to as the threat center. That is a very small almond-shaped structure in the middle of the brain. that responds to novel and potentially threatening cues. If something is new in your environment, your amygdala lights up, so to speak. And those people, those children, also those adults later on, seem to have an overly active amygdala. They respond much more so to novel cues with an activation of the amygdala. And they're also looking at a person's eyes in a magnet or faces. This leads to a greater activation of the amygdala. But what are some examples? You know, it's interesting because I understand a little bit of the science behind it.

22:09But I also know that when you when you are that inhibited child, and you grow up certainly in American society and Western society, and you are shy, you're constantly getting messages that you need to speak up. Right. And so can we just talk a little bit about the role of your conditioning in schools in early leadership on sports teams in your family, that might create sort of trauma? That breeds social anxiety as an adult. It's quite important for society in general to find ways to accommodate differences in people. Because a society thrives if we let the variety bloom, let all the flowers bloom.

22:55So there's nothing inherently wrong with being shy. There is nothing. In fact, shyness is also we know is very closely associated with not only introversion, but also with people who have deep, meaningful lives, who think hard and deep about the subject matter. Some of the greatest genius in the world that we know of have been shy, awkward individuals who are not socially, overly socially skilled. And so we need to not to conceive it as a weakness, but as a strength in given situations. That's the important thing. And so I wouldn't, as you raise your child, I think it's important to make sure that you highlight what actually they bring into this world as a value.

23:49And no matter what that is, you don't have to be better than somebody else, but rather you show traits that makes this person a unique person. And in a way, you know, life is in a way figuring out what it is that makes you unique. So what you're saying is that it's possible to be shy or introverted, but not be socially anxious to sort of understand your preferences and not turn that into anxiety. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I'm saying that the social anxiety that you experience or shyness you experience shouldn't hold you back. Once it holds you back, that's a problem. But social anxiety per se, shyness per se, is not the problem.

24:41But once you start avoiding, once this thing is starting to interfere with your life, then it becomes a problem. And fortunately, there are effective ways to deal with this. I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea, you have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you, and it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in, whether you're working at a company or you really wanna start that business.

25:20It was an instant national bestseller. And the thing that I love about it is it has a battle-tested, easy-to-follow framework to rapidly test and assess new ideas, right? So you can separate the great ones from the bad ones. Mark is offering our readers two books for the price of one. Go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And that's Mark with a K, getmarksbook.com slash anxious. It's just$16 a book for you and a friend to get the book that Y Combinator's Gary Tan says will, quote, change your odds of success because it teaches you how to kill your losing ideas. Or as my editor is always telling me, you gotta kill your darlings.

26:00That's a pretty big endorsement from the head of the number one startup accelerator that's twice as hard to get into as Harvard. Once again, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, Mark will send you a second copy for free that he's paying for. Just go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. Do you remember a day when you had finished paying off? a debt. I remember the day that I finished paying off my graduate school education loan. I felt so free. I feel like I had been paying off student loans for decades and I probably had because I was 41 when I paid that last loan payment. It's an incredible feeling and even better is when you can see the finish line and you know that you have a plan.

26:46That's why Monarch's Debt Pay Down simulator and visualizer helps you track your progress and really feel meaningful accomplishment. It shows your exact debt-free date based on your real balances and payments, and you can watch the timeline move. Monarch helps you plan out your options and pick the fastest one. You can even run different scenarios side by side and instantly see how much sooner each one will get you to paying off your debt and also the other factors that paying off that debt will do to your finances. Monarch breaks the debt cycle and it takes the burdens of tracking it off your plate.

27:21I've talked about Monarch before and the thing that I love about Monarch is it helps you adjust in real time and it doesn't just look back with what you've already spent, it helps you look forward. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code achiever at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off, just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. This episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app. You know, I love clothes. And I love when the seasons change to spend a good amount of time, you know, moving out, reviewing my summer stuff, bringing in my fall stuff.

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29:18Well, CBT is a very broad term. So we focus on improving people's lives, re-examining and perhaps modifying maladaptive cognitive processes and behavioral processes that seem to maintain the problem. and social anxiety disorder. So not social anxiety, but social anxiety disorder. People who show that their social anxiety is interfering with their lives and causing them a lot of distress. We would examine what it is that maintains this problem. Why is it causing distress and interference? And then we target this through specific cognitive and behavioral interventions. And we find that to be very, very effective.

30:02So we find effectiveness rates of some 75 plus percent of people who respond really quite well to cognitive behavioral therapy. At this point, I don't think actually you need to live with social anxiety disorder. You need to live with social anxiety, but you don't need to live with social anxiety disorder. You can treat that very effectively. So can you give us an example from your work of a treatment that was successful? You know, it's not, there's no single intervention, but so, you know, you really do focus on the individual in great detail. But what we do know is that avoidance strategies are really one of the big reasons why people continue to have the problem.

30:47So this is, you know, so anxiety is not a desirable state, obviously. And so as you're trying to sort of avoid it, you can only endure it if you carry your favorite whatever around. And so that maintains this vicious cycle of avoidance and anxiety. We break this vicious cycle through, it sounds pretty harsh, but we know this works very well, through exposure techniques. Exposure means that you find ways to expose yourself to whatever you're most fearful of. In fact, we create situations where the person can experience the worst case scenario in social situations. Do you create a party if that's someone's worst case scenario, walking into a party or a crowded room?

31:40Yeah, if that's what it takes. One reporter who asked me about what she should do with her own social anxiety, she, for example, thought that she's afraid of appearing stupid, of appearing not knowledgeable. And she lived in London. And so we figured what a possible exposure situation. And she decided to, or we decided, that it might be a good idea to examine the feared consequences of what it would be like to appear stupid by going into the London subway station and asking a random group of five plus people the following question. Number one, does England have a queen? And then number two, what is the name of her?

32:33And so she did this and felt very silly. And she thought that people would laugh at her. That they would just stare at her. That there would be groups of people forming around her. She had all these absurd ideas what would happen. Most people were obviously in a rush. And they said, yeah, of course we have a queen. And the second question, what's her name? She got the first two answers. Oh, I don't know. Queen Victoria, I think. There was the first two answers, and it turned into a fairly funny experience for her because she was terrified initially. And then here she is experiencing how other people really make a fool of themselves by not knowing who the Queen of England was in the London subway station.

33:22So this is an example. Nobody was standing around her. Nobody was laughing at her. people just answered a question they got in and she would never see these people again in her life. So, but that's my question, though, because there's no hierarchy implication there, right? I mean, what if she had done that with a coworker, with a colleague at her newspaper? Yeah. So you have to judge that. This is a clinical judgment, obviously. So you don't want to, I would refrain from doing exposures that where people could actually experience long-lasting negative consequences. That's not a good exposure. But rather, in most cases, these kind of social situations come and go.

34:03And it's no big deal if somebody evaluates you negatively. Obviously, if your boss thinks that you're incompetent or dangerous and you will lose your job or your husband thinks that you're cheating on him or whatever, then that's not an exposure. That is actually not a desirable situation. We don't want to create this. But in most cases, you drop a piece of pastry on the floor in a restaurant. You spill water over yourself. You laugh too loud, whatever that might be. People are forgiving. There's not a big deal. There's not a catastrophe. But see, the problem is that many people with social anxiety don't see this distinction That anything that violates the social norm is perceived as a catastrophe that they need to avoid it at any cost.

34:53And that is the problem. Not all situations are alike. Yes. I was thinking about the relationship also. I think in a career context, in a work context, a lot of people that I've observed who have social anxiety is that they just please people, right? They're afraid of conflict. And so they're overly people pleasing. Appeasing. That's right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly right. And this is part of you wanting to be liked at all costs. You do not need to be liked at all costs. The fact is that there are plenty of people around that don't like you. But so be it. You don't need to like everybody.

35:35And not everybody needs to like you. You just need to create a life that works for you and that you need to surround yourself with people who you like and who like you. But there are plenty of people in this world who will never like you. And it's just not a big deal. I love that. Well, speaking of, my last question is a sort of pandemic emergence question I'm sure you're getting a lot, which is that, you know, I think a lot of us this year, whether or not we have social anxiety disorder, are coming out of a lot of alone time and less social interaction thinking, God, this felt kind of good. Maybe we want to pair back.

36:09And if you tend towards being socially anxious, what's a good framework as we approach going back to a life where we might have social invitations, we might have to get out and start networking again. How do we think about adjusting our behavior towards maybe doing less socializing, but not feeling guilty about it? You know, we're not feeling like we're doing something wrong. Well, I think it's sort of a way to reset the situation. And whatever has bothered you in the past, there's a good way of figuring out what it was and to make it right this time or correcting it. There's no right answer for everybody.

36:52Everybody needs to figure it out for himself. It is easy to get back into the old mode of having just as many social contact as possible and meeting with as many people as possible. And perhaps if that has been your mode and this has been stressing you out too much, perhaps this might be a time to focus on having fewer but deeper relationships with people. And we know that this is actually also the more important aspect of social connectedness. It is not the number of people that we surround ourselves, but it's having few deep connections. So this might be for people who have been timid and have been restrained in social situations, this might now also be a time to go out and expose yourself more and to reset your individual approach as well.

37:50And so whoever, whatever your past is, you don't have to relive it again in the future, but you can now find a different way of dealing with the social. I love that. Whatever your past is, you don't have to relive it in the future. Thank you very much, Dr. Stefan Hoffman. My pleasure.

38:17That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

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