Loading practices
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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
Someone who has spent years talking mainly through a screen may genuinely be out of practice at the ordinary business of face to face talk, and that is a skill you can rebuild. Someone else has the skills and is still certain that every pause is being scored. Most people carry a bit of both, and it is worth knowing your mix, because practice helps one and testing the belief helps the other.
and I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too (Quran 26:13). Moses names the bodily symptom and the practical need separately, which is the same sorting being asked of you here.
الشعراء
وَيَضِيقُ صَدۡرِي وَلَا يَنطَلِقُ لِسَانِي فَأَرۡسِلۡ إِلَىٰ هَٰرُونَ
and I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too
Qur’an 26:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Reviews of the cognitive behavioural literature on social anxiety describe a loop that keeps it going: attention swings onto signs of threat, ambiguous social signals get read as bad news, and a distorted picture of how you come across fills in the rest. That is a description of the belief side, and it is what the cognitive work targets. It does not say practice is useless, only that practice alone will not shift a conviction that was never about competence.
Morrison AS, Heimberg RG. (2013). Social anxiety and social anxiety disorder.. Annual review of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Knowing which part is driving the fear tells you what to work on instead of working on everything at once.
Next rung: remark on something in the room. The plant, the noise outside, the length of the queue. Nothing about the person yet, just something out loud about where you both are.
Friends who know what this feels like are worth a great deal. Leaning on them as your therapy is a different thing, and it tends to go badly for everyone.
Pick something ordinary you want to be able to do on your own, book your own appointment, buy your own shopping, and aim at that. It pulls harder than the goal of feeling less anxious.