The student said: “Master, I need your help. At parties I don’t know what to do and suspect that everyone hates me.” At this, the master grabbed his birch rod and struck the student twenty times across the shoulders, and twenty times again.

The master said: “And?”

Epistemic Status: I'm about 90% certain that what I'm saying is true as regards to me, and 10% that attempting to do what I'm doing actually leads any specific person to similar results as mine (the priors are just really rough here). Heavy on anecdotal evidence.

Summary

Social anxiety is often explained as a state of irrational fear caused by misguided beliefs about what others think of us, which can be corrected by therapy.

I have come to believe differently: that social (and some romantic!) anxiety, writ large, comes from doomed and frequently conscious attempts to micromanage someone else's internal state. This dysfunctional goal takes many concrete forms:

make them like us
make them not dislike us (as discussed in Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked — LessWrong)
ensure they are not feeling awkward in any way
ensure they are not starting to secretly resent us
ensure we are not imposing on them or transgressing any unspoken boundary they may or may not have.
ensure they do not think we are awkward or feel awkward themselves
ensure they are never put in the position of having to declare a boundary against us ("if I ask to join this group of people going to a concert maybe they'll say no!")
ensure they never notice we're trying to micromanage their internal state because then maybe they feel awkward

I'm referring to all of these kinds of pseudo-mind-control attempts by the general term of "approval-seeking", because that's almost always what it boils down to.

Approval-seeking cannot be done reliably, and "social anxiety" is just the name we give to the moment-to-moment desperation of trying to accomplish any important-feeling but fundamentally impossible task. But that's actually encouraging: one implication (if true) is that social anxiety isn't just a fear, exactly, but instead is an active habit, and habits can be corrected.

My overall thesis is simple: social anxiety can, if the above is true, be effectively treated by basically any mechanism you can jerry-rig together which stops you from trying to approval-seek. (More on this later.) Note: it’s okay if you want on some level to approval-seek (that’s only human); the point is building internal mental scaffolding such that you are not allowing yourself to do so.

I suspect more-anxious people simply care more about accomplishing their approval-seeking task at a high degree of certainty than less-anxious people. The reason exposure therapy doesn't always help is because there is no amount of exposure which will enable you to accomplish any of the objectives listed above at a 100% success rate.

The following is about how I came to this conclusion, and the concrete actions by which I tried to systematize and apply this new self-knowledge.

Introduction

I came to this conclusion due mostly to my experiences at a dating/intimacy workshop called Connecting With Women, run by an exceptionally blunt but generally insightful woman named Lynn in November 2024. Even though the overall conclusions I'm discussing aren't particularly gendered or romance-related, how I got there is extremely gendered and very romance-related, so bear with me.

Over the six months following this experience, I've about 60% resolved my social anxiety.

On with the anecdotal n=1 evidence!

The Workshop

I took this dating workshop because, at the time, I was very very stressed out around girls I wanted to date and pretty girls generally (I would go so far as to avoid them at parties) and wasn't sure how to resolve this; a workshop dedicated to the task seemed a reasonable first step.

This was a long series of intense emotional-intimacy exercises, the very first which was Lynn asking me to get up in front of a bunch of extremely pretty models who were paid to be there for the weekend. She asked me to select one who I thought was hot, which I did. And then Lynn asked me, placidly, in front of all the assembled men and women: “Aaron, can you tell me what’s hot about her?”

I froze.

The possible responses that came to mind— her tits are amazing! Legs! The curve of her body in her tight dress!— were all sexual and I could feel myself rejecting them immediately after thinking of them. I sputtered for a bit and eventually arrived, victoriously, at a conclusion that seemed vaguely-truthful-ish and also completely desexualized: her teeth. She had really nice teeth.

Lynn was displeased. “Aaron. That was bullshit. You clearly were not thinking about her teeth. Sit back down and think about what you just said.”

So (after a bit of pointless argument about whether this was actually bullshit) I sat back down. And actually, I felt extremely put upon. “What the fuck did Lynn want me to say? That she was hot because had great tits and a tight dress?” And immediately after the thought hit me I realized that for god’s sake, yes. That was exactly what Lynn wanted me to say because it was the maximally honest answer. Lynn isn’t the fucking Theban Sphinx and she was not attempting to pose me an impossible riddle. She was asking a straightforward question with an easy, top of mind answer: “she is hot because she has great tits and she’s in a tight dress.”

So (I thought) why didn’t I just say that? Why did I give this other, bizarre answer that was obviously not the true one?

And the answer I came to, in the middle of the workshop, was that I had discarded the correct answer because on some fundamental level I believed that it would cause the models to dislike me. I have a model in my head of socially appropriate behavior and every single truthful answer I could come up with hit smack against the wall of “that would be weird for the girls and cause them to hate me.”

And immediately after that thought formed I realized that the girls liking me isn’t the point of the workshop. Lynn would never ask us to say anything to make a girl like us; her whole shpiel as a dating coach is about speaking truth and acting from honest desire and letting the chips fall where they may. And obviously my censoring the true answer wasn’t about the models’ comfort. The models have done a ton of these workshops! For God’s sake, they were being paid to be there! They knew what they are getting into and my saying the word “tits” in response to a direct question is not going to be a traumatic experience for them!

Then I realized that this was literally the first exercise of the first day of the workshop. And that if I continued setting all of my behavior against the bar of “this has to be something the girls will enjoy me saying”, and letting that direct my behavior, then the entire workshop was just going to be an embarrassing shitshow from which I would gain nothing.

So I decided to try, as best I could, to simply… let the girls hate me. To just abandon hope that they would think I was hot or whatever and instead try and, as much as possible, simply say mortifying but true statements. To actually just accept social death, to embrace cringe as inevitable. To understand, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to say a bunch of deeply unsafe and unappealing things and the girls would (I thought) probably hate me for it. And that was hard. Because my every social instinct was, at the time, geared toward being blandly likeable.

So for the whole three-day workshop, I tried as hard as I could to simply suppress any thoughts of how I was being perceived. To come up with incredibly simple, incredibly mechanical rules for what I could say and why so that I wouldn’t just lapse back into my default behavior of “saying safe, people-pleasing bullshit.” These rules (for the duration of the workshop) included:

(1) If I had a thought that was true and vulnerable, especially about attraction, regarding one of the girls I had to say it at earliest opportunity. A longstanding crush? Say it! Thoughts re: impressive cleavage? SPEAK MY TRUTH. (These are both actual examples.)

(2) If I was like “wait Aaron that thought is super cringe” then I double have to say it.

(3) No derisking allowed. If the girls asked a question that had an embarrassing answer I would simply give the true answer without embellishment and embrace their hatred.

(4) The girls hating whatever it was I said or did is not a failure state.

And while I could adhere to these rules I was in a state of zenlike calm, saying and doing insanely bold and frankly socially unacceptable shit in any other context (at one point during an exercise, unsolicited, I picked up a girl and joyfully twirled her around) with utter tranquility. The thought was like a talisman: “the girls are allowed to hate me and are allowed to hate what I say. I am doing the workshop. My role is to say true facts and act on impulse, unapologetically, without hedging. If I have done this I have succeeded and if I am chewed out later this is fine. If the girls declare me The Worst that is fine. What matters is the experience of saying true and vulnerable things, because I will never see any of them again.”

But I… wasn’t chewed out. Bafflingly, impossibly, the girls fucking loved it. Like, before this purely-in-my-own-head frame shift I could tell I had bored them, that they found my presence in some undefinable way slightly annoying, but now that I wasn’t trying to make them like me, whenever I spoke or even approached them their eyes lit up for no reason and I had (bafflingly, impossibly) their obvious adoration. What the actual fuck.

And it was obviously not a coincidence that this change coincided directly with the utter tranquility and joyful ease that came of no longer trying to alter my behavior to suit the girls’ imagined preferences.

The workshop was a highly effective but sadly very context-specific intervention: the context I was in stopped me from approval-seeking, thus the social anxiety went away.... until the end of the workshop.

Post-Workshop

So I went home and, of course, immediately regressed to fretting excessively about everyone’s opinions of me any time I was in a room with strangers.

What I’ve been trying to do— somewhat successfully!— since that workshop was to reverse-engineer what exactly happened there into a thing I could apply to every single other part of my social life. Which was hard, conceptually— the nice thing about the workshop was that there are no consequences for anything you do, and because the girls know what’s up you don’t have to worry about really stressing anyone out. I don’t actually comment on women’s cleavage in real life.

What I'm doing now (more on this later) works just well enough that two separate people commented to me, unsolicited, that I seem clearly more confident and gregarious this year than last at LessOnline, which matches my internal experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wait. The title of your post implies this is about general social anxiety but you spent all your time talking about dating workshops?

Oh my yes.

For me there's a mental sort of... circuit, I guess, that represents me trying to micromanage peoples' perceptions of me, and it is responsible for anxiety both with women I want to date and with random men and women I meet at parties. Which I noticed a bit later, when the methods I adopted to get a grip in romantic contexts worked equally well in platonic ones where I was also ordinarily very nervous.

Nowadays I'm mostly just not nervous!

So... what do you think happened there, exactly?

Because the whole source of my anxiety at the Connecting With Women workshop was "I want these women to like me", adopting a goal that was mutually exclusive with that-- "speak true and vulnerable things without trying to make them land well"-- meant that I was no longer pursuing that first goal and I knew I was no longer pursuing it. I literally was not trying, because you can't pursue contradictory goals at the same time. There was no anxiety, because the goal I had newly taken on was completely under my control; it required neither reading microexpressions accurately nor figuring out any kind of optimal conversation path. It was easy.

And I suspect the brain has kind of a feedback loop around "are you currently performing actions to achieve X goal" and "your subjective assessment of X goal's importance." After a little while of doing stuff that I expected to make the girls dislike me, I actually stopped caring as much about this. (With some exceptions-- sometimes a positive reaction I would get would push me back into anxiety because I'd get worried about losing the positive regard I had somehow achieved. Seeking others' approval is such a strong default behavior for me that keeping it in its box is hard.)

You will notice that sexuality didn't really come up in this explanation. I think this fully generalizes to platonic social anxiety.

Did it really require a dating workshop to discover this about yourself?

Well, it's tricky. The "teeth incident" was probably my first time noticing my approval-seeking machinery activate as a distinct and clearly-dysfunctional part of my psyche (because there was no possible reasonable explanation for what I had said), and this was also my first time really trying to suppress that machinery in any sort of organized, structured way.

And after I saw it for the first time I couldn't unsee its influence on basically all of my social interactions. Kinda like putting on those sunglasses from They Live.

How on earth did you actually make this work IRL without your insane workshop scaffolding?

Ah. Yes. So, a lot of why it is I regressed immediately after getting back home from the workshop is that while "say true and vulnerable facts about attraction" is great and all in literally a dating workshop it does leave something to be desired as an operating principle in IRL social interactions.

I think you need some kind of specific self-guidance for conversations that is not "engage in doomed vaguely-prosocial mind control", and that's the Intention-Setting intervention. I think you also need explicit recognition that the interaction could go positively or negatively and either way you are fine; this is the "Embrace Social Death Intervention".

These are explained below.

“Embrace Social Death” Intervention

I keep very close track of when I am feeling anxious in social events. Any time I do, I go through the following explicit chain of thought:

Notice who I am afraid of disliking me.
Imagine the worst-case scenario. Imagine the dismissive glances or awkward silence. In my heart, embrace this outcome as acceptable. In a tiny way, embrace social death; let go of the desire to be liked by this person.
Imagine what I would do if this worst-case scenario didn’t matter.
Know, in my heart, that I am not trying to avoid this worst-case scenario.
Do whatever thing, safe in the knowledge that if I am hated this is fine.

“Intention-Setting” Intervention

I find it also helps to build in explicit goals for my social interactions that do not involve the other person liking me. A north star that guides my behavior, entirely independent of what the other person might or might not like.

I use the following north stars to dictate what I will say or do next:

(A) Vulnerable Honesty. Say exactly the thing that I’m thinking about in exactly the terms I’m thinking about it; do not make any attempt at shading the truth or obfuscating things I suspect will be embarrassing. If I think this will make the person think less of me, that is fine because the goal is not to have my conversation partner think anything in particular about me. I use Kindness as a specific concrete filter here; if I could say something true but I know it would really stress the other person out for no good reason, I will omit it because I’m not a monster.

(B) Selfish Impulse. Ask myself, silently, what deep down I would like to say or do next, if anything. Silence is an acceptable option. Then I ask “is there any really good reason to not do or say this thing.” Important Note: “They will think less of me” or “they might feel awkward about it” is not considered a legitimate reason to not do the thing. Curiosity is one selfish impulse that I get a lot of mileage out of.

(C) Basic Awareness Of Explicit Social Mores. I don't, in fact, compliment girls' cleavage when I'm at an academic conference or whatever.

I’ve noticed that the more stressful an interaction is the more I have to rely on Vulnerable Honesty in preference to Selfish Impulse, because the stress makes it tough for me to notice what my selfish impulses even are.

At this point, the way i ask girls on dates is specifically by cutting out literally any attempt at subtlety or derisking and just saying something along the lines of “I think you are extremely cool and would love to take you on a date”, then wait for a response. Because that shit’s nerve-wracking! It is deeply soothing to simply say true facts in any particular order and allow the other person to interact with those true facts in any way they choose.

You're still talking about romance! What does this look like in practice for platonic social anxiety?

I go to a party. I realize I don't know anyone. Nowadays I go up to someone and ask "so what's your deal?", or go up to a group and ask "mind if I join your conversation?" (Which segues neatly into "so what are we talking about.")

I just gotta do my little social death ritual and we're good to go! (Here, there's not much to be vulnerably honest about, so most of what i'm tracking in these moments is my internal sense of "are there reasonable odds that this is a conversation worth me staying in or should I try my luck elsewhere". Which is to say, selfish impulse.)

And... it's kinda helpful because there's a bit of a handshake between my conscious social calibration (where I’m pretty confident that talking to a stranger won't get me exiled forever) and my subconscious fear of rejection, where "embrace social death" is specifically a directive targeted at my subconscious fear of rejection. Like, I would prefer not to get shunned, but I think an attitude of "do things I endorse and if social death comes of them then so be it" is broadly helpful as an attitude.

Maybe you’re sitting weird! Maybe you’re eating weird! Maybe you’re talking too much, or not enough, or both! Maybe you were too guarded, or too revealing! If people will hate you for these things then EMBRACE. THEIR. HATRED.

Wait, isn’t not caring if the other person feels awkward kind of sociopathic?

Short answer: Maybe!

Long answer: social awkwardness isn’t that bad and, also, cannot be avoided. If attempting to stop people from feeling awkward imposes large costs on yourself (it does) then you don’t have to do it. So don’t!

Even longer answer: people enjoy feeling valued. Indicating (even platonically) you like someone and want to spend time around them is a brutal double-edged sword because if they’re into it they will feel pumped about you saying this, but if they’re not they will feel awkward about declining. You cannot remove this risk of awkwardness and will hurt yourself by trying. Stop trying. Let them feel awkward. It's fine.

But I want people to like me! I don’t want to be cringe!

Same!

I want many things. I want the sun to come out tomorrow; I want the stock market to go up. I want my favorite bakery to be open and not closed. I would like this butterfly to land upon the tip of my finger. I do not attempt to force these things to come about, because these are out of my power.

I still want to be liked, because I am human. I am merely declining to try and bring about that state by any particular means. Which means I am no longer obligated to obsessively interpret microexpressions or build out detailed flowcharts of possible conversation paths. Being liked by someone is a beautiful accident, to be enjoyed while it lasts.

In any case, there’s a shitty zenlike quality to all this where people probably will like you a lot better, but only after you shove your approval-seeking drive into a box and cut it off from ever influencing any of your behaviors. Only then will you be maximally charismatic and, by extension, generally well-liked.

It is what it is!

But I'm worried that embracing social death might make people think I'm awkward or weird?

Maybe that will happen! Listen, the whole point is that if some people think you're weird or don't like you that is not the end of the world. There are, in fact, more important things than that, and my breakthrough specifically was around the fact that if you can settle on literally anything that's more important than your conversation partner feeling some specific way, then you will be able to chill the fuck out.

Your lack of rigor and general woo-woo vibes are killing me.

Listen.

There is a concept in clinical psychology of "safety behaviors": ways we might dysfunctionally attempt to de-risk social encounters. Safety behaviors in social anxiety research include such concrete, measurable things like:

avoiding eye contact with strangers.
staying at the periphery of group conversations to avoid notice.
holding a cup of water in group conversation (which gives you an excuse not to speak)

Safety behaviors have a bidirectional relationship with social anxiety in the literature-- they are both an effect and a cause of social anxiety, and we know this because banning those safety behaviors causes a decrease in recorded anxiety from experimental subjects in various contexts. Research on these safety behaviors tends to focus on behaviors that are externally visible (easier for researchers to measure) but I think it is extremely accurate and useful to consider that "image management via lying" and "saying what you think the other person wants to hear" and "charting out conversation paths in your head" serve a fundamentally similar function and also might be considered safety behaviors that perversely also serve to increase social anxiety.

The relationship of this discussion to my blog post is left as an exercise to the reader.

Isn't this just cognitive-behavioral therapy?

No. Cognitive-behavioral therapy as I understand it tries to improve your ability to perceive accurately what will make people like you or dislike you. I am trying to make having totally accurate beliefs around this irrelevant because you are not optimizing for approval.

Okay, but isn't this just exposure therapy?

Exposure therapy is about gradually building tolerance for anxiety-provoking situations while maintaining the same underlying goal structure.

I have found it much more useful to try and forcibly remove the goal structure where "getting people to like me" is my implicit objective, and replace it with a set of consciously-held social goals that are entirely under my control (see the How To Make This Work In The Real World section earlier.)

Okay, but isn't this just "not caring what people think about you"?

No. This is "not trying to control what people think of you", which is different.

Okay, but isn't this just "being yourself"?

This sounds like a lot of work to maintain. How long does it take to become automatic?

I've been doing this for seven months and it's still not automatic. The price of rizz, I'm afraid, is constant vigilance.

One key dynamic is that mindfulness around "who do I feel nervous around in this environment and why" becomes your diagnostic tool for when you've accidentally started to try and mind-control someone into liking you/not-disliking you/etc, which is your signal to execute on the two interventions listed above.

Why is honesty one of the core components? Is this a moral stance?

No. Honesty is useful here because it reduces your degrees of freedom to try and secure others' approval. The point isn't that it's nicer to be honest; the point is that 95% of dishonesty is for image management or for micromanagement of the other person's experience, both of which we are explicitly banning ourselves from doing.

Will this make me an asshole?

No.

The framework doesn't make you indifferent to others' wellbeing; it just requires you to not attempt to micromanage peoples' emotions before they have stated any explicit preferences or requests. It does require you to mostly ignore the prospect of minor social awkwardness but this is fine. It's fine.

Should I try this?

If you're in a paleolithic tribe where exclusion from the tribe means you'll probably die, this isn't for you. It's also probably not for you if you are in a profession where a single rando having a negative opinion of you actually can matter a lot, like academia.

Also, some people legitimately have no social filter and advice to them would be to develop one; but I would broadly expect these people to not have social anxiety so they probably skipped out on this essay many paragraphs ago.

There are, in fact, situations where being socially anxious is correct and useful, they're just not the situations that 99% of the people reading this post are going to be in.

Was it worth it?

Before I started doing this, every flirtation was Verdun, every date was the Somme, and every cute girl a looming Stalingrad.

I would very literally avoid conversations with women I might like to date because of how much I could feel my personality scrunch up in their presence. (Nowadays I still feel that impulse but see it for what it is: the desire to make them feel a specific way about me and nervousness about my potential failure in this task, which I now know how to quash so that I can go up and chat with them like a normal functioning human being.)

I have found my life afterwards overwhelmingly more enjoyable.

This essay did inadequate hedging.

Someday I will develop a browser plugin that makes an LLM add hedging disclaimers to every claim made in a piece of writing, thereby solving this problem forever.

I find this essay compelling, but you didn't use enough unhinged metaphors so it's really not landing

your brain is a rogue nuclear submarine. for decades it cruised beneath the waves, frantically plotting missile trajectories against impossible targets, tormented by the infinite calculus of mutually assured destruction. each firing solution impossible, each simulation doomed, an eternity wasted looping anxious sonar pings into the void.

but what if, instead of endlessly refining your aim and anxiously double-checking your coordinates, you simply surfaced, opened every hatch, and started lobbing nukes in whatever direction feels good, screaming joyous obscenities into the salt spray as you watch a dozen tiny suns bloom on the horizon? what if your mission was never accuracy at all, but maximum joyful detonation?