Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 170: Ellen Hendriksen, Rising Above Social Anxiety

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

You remember that old commercial where the guys says, "I'm not only the Hair Club President, but I’m also a client."? That's kind of how Ellen Hendriksen sees herself. She's a clinical psychologist who helps millions calm their anxiety and be their authentic selves through her award-winning Savvy Psychologist podcast, and at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. But she doesn't just help others, she too has suffered from social anxiety. Hendriksen explains the techniques she has developed to combat social anxiety. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Website: https://www.ellenhendriksen.com/ Twitter: @EllenHendriksen Podcast: The Savvy Psychologist's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Mental Health Author, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

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I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ A deep dive this week into a fascinating issue, social anxiety. I think this is super common. I know I've had at least a little bit of this and our guest this week, Ellen Hendrixen, knows all about it. She treats it and she is a long time sufferer. She has a lot of interesting insights into the condition itself and a ton of useful information and

tips for dealing with social anxiety Much more from Ellen coming up first. I want to mention something on the app and then we'll do Your voice mills on the app. This is pretty big news. We've got a new course up from the man himself Joseph Goldstein who is just an incredible meditation teacher. Somebody I've worked with directly for many, many years. This is a course about these little phrases that Joseph has used, little teaching phrases that he's used in his teaching for decades. There are really these simple little keys to unlocking stress.

And to hear him talk about it, and to hear all of his years of expertise being whittled down into these brilliant little phrases is truly inspiring. So I highly recommend everybody check that new course out on the app that's from Joseph Goldstein. Voice mail time, here's number one. Hi Dan, first of all I'm a huge fan.

I read your books. My question is how to keep a bit of meditating going on. Some days I'll be able to go a few days looking up early in the morning and meditating between 10 to 15 minutes. I'm not quite to a seller expert level of meditation yet, but I'm definitely taking it by baby steps. That's really all that I can squeeze in in the morning before I get up, so that I'm able to get ready on time and a lot myself enough time to be able to get ready and then get to work on time.

So that's my first question. It's just finding motivation to maintain that and keep going. I'm part of it could be just making it a habit of waking up earlier, I guess. And then my second question is, my boyfriend, who I live with, I really want to motivate him to start meditation as well, but it's just so hard for me to get him to understand the importance or understand the benefits of what could come from meditation. He's very scattered brained and much like me, if he finds it very hard to wake up in the mornings and he barely has enough time to get to work.

So I just want to know maybe what you would recommend to say or what words that you would have to encourage him or to encourage me to help him out and help him understand and maybe convince him to try it out because I think it would be really beneficial for him as well as myself. Thanks so much Dan. Love from St. Paul, Minnesota. Thanks so much. Thank you for the love from Minnesota. Let me start with the second question first. Don't try. That's not to say, I don't love your boyfriend. I do. And I'm sure you do too. And I don't think your not trying is a sign that you don't love him. I just think that trying to give in somebody to meditate

is often, if not, a hundred percent of the time, very annoying and off-putting and is not likely to work. Probably not 100% of the time, but maybe 100% of the time in romantic relationships. People receive the message of, hey, you should meditate as, hey, you're a broken human. That's just the way it is, unfortunately. So, you know, maybe I have so much scar tissue from trying and failing with my own wife that this is

coloring the advice I'm giving you, but just based on my personal experience and having spoken to lots and lots and lots of people about this, I just strongly recommend that you not evangelize on behalf of meditation interpersonally, especially if it's unsolicited. I think the better route is just to see and demonstrate the benefits of meditation yourself and then let that force him to come to you to ask you about, hey, what's going on with you?

What is this thing doing for you, et cetera, et cetera? So, yeah, I'm pretty strongly dogmatically on the side of don't, you know, just work on yourself first or as the cliche we often reference here, like they say on the airline safety instructions, put your own oxygen mask on first. And on the subject of you, on the issue of your motivation, I really think, and we talked about this with Jeff Warren recently on the podcast we did, which was an all-voice male episode about how to boot up a habit for the new year.

So if you want much more on this, go to that episode. But just briefly, I would say that the, from what I've understood by looking at the science around habit formation and human behavior change, really, willpower is not something to count on. Instead, co-opting the pleasure centers of the brain is a better way to go. And so I would tune into the benefits of the practice. So when you may notice, after doing a few days running that you feel less

anchored around by your emotions, you're more focused, calmer. Tune into that and let that pull you forward as a source of motivation. And don't worry so much about falling off and on the wagon. And sometimes, I believe I said this in the recent episode, sometimes falling off the wagon is a source of motivation in and of itself. Because seeing how your inner weather gets so much stormier when you're not meditating is a great motivation for meditation itself.

And then finally, the last thing I'll say is you need sleep. I wouldn't skimp on sleep. My personal advice, again, you can take or leave this, but my personal advice is to get as much sleep as you need and maybe give yourself a break on the amount of time you're all outing for meditation. I don't think it needs to be too much time. If all you can fit in is one, two, five, 10 minutes, then that's cool.

I really do think that you're doing yourself a favor there, and maybe you find another time later in the day where you can also get a little bit. All right, good luck with that. Here's number two. Hi, Dan. My name is Nicole, and I'm calling some Colorado. I want to thank you for everything you've done.

I really enjoyed your book, and it's helped open up the world of medication to me. I am an oncology nurse, specifically, I give chemotherapy infusion. And so in my line of work, we deal with death and dying on a daily basis. And I'm trying to bring my medication practice into my work environment to help me deal with some of the stress and emotions that come up, as well as bringing some mindfulness and compassion into my job. However, I find the concept of equanimity to be a difficult one to grasp. And I'm curious with your experience working in hospice, if you can run any advice on how to bring equanimity into an environment like this where you're dealing with people on a daily basis who are facing death and dying. Thanks for your help and thanks for everything you do. Bye.

Thank you for the work you do. It's incredibly important. And I appreciate the voicemail as well. But again, having had a wife who has dealt with some cancer struggles of her own, all the people who do that kind of work, it's just really, I salute you. The issue of equanimity, I think, and I don't know if I'm diagnosing correctly your struggle with the concept, so I'm going to take a little bit of a guess, but it's possible that you're confusing equanimity with passivity. So equanimity doesn't mean, or acceptance doesn't mean that you don't give a crap. It doesn't mean that you don't care. It just means that you recognize the facts right now for what they

are. And that you take wise and reasonable and measured and sound action based on that. And I just think that can stop you from wasting a whole bunch of energy. And it also doesn't mean that you, I think it's the, I think it's in many ways, and Sharon Salzburg has spoken about this, and written about this quite beautifully, it's what can enable the

arising of the opposite of passivity or apathy, which is compassion, which is the ease, you need some sort of internal unclenching in order to effectively help people when they need you. And I think being able to see things clearly, to be able to surf the inevitable ups and downs, to know that ups and downs are inevitable, to know in your bones that impermanence is real and applies to all of us. That kind of equanimity, to be able to see the arising of really difficult emotions in yourself and others without being totally owned by them, that kind of equanimity clears the way for you to be effective in your efforts to care for your patients. And by the way, this applies to all of us, not just people in really extreme environments

like the one that you were brave enough to inhabit. So that's my understanding. I hope I understood your question as you intended. And again, thanks for your work. It's really important. So somebody else whose work is important, Alan Hendrixson, our guest this week. She's a clinical psychologist.

She's got an award-winning podcast called The Savvy Psychologist I Was On There a couple of months ago. She's a great interviewer. And as it Savvy Psychologist I was on there a couple months ago. She's a great interviewer, and as it turns out, she's a great interviewer. She works as well at the Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She has written in lots of major publications, and is, as I said before, somebody who knows a lot about social anxiety. And even if you don't have a diagnosis here, I think we've all been nervous.

Maybe we haven't all been nervous. I think many, if not most of us, have been nervous or awkward in social situations. And she really has dealt with it with her patients and in her own life. And has a lot to say that is I found incredibly valuable. So instead of me talking more about it, let's hear from Ellen. Here she is. Well, thank you for doing this. Absolutely. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for being on my show. My pleasure. And we talked about meditation or mindfulness meditation.

And I have a horrible memory. That's okay. You talked to a lot of people. Yeah. So you were, I can talk about that too. So you were super validating when I talked about my kind of on the fly mindfulness and I was kind of being myself up about not having to practice and not having to formal, not doing formal meditation. And you said, well, maybe you don't have a formal practice, but you're definitely practicing. You're definitely doing something. And so, yeah, I found that very validating and it helped me stop thinking about meditation or

mindfulness in such a perfectionistic way. So I found that very helpful. So you, before we start rolling, you said in the mindfulness meditation, if you take the mindfulness meditation, I do the mindfulness part, but it's more just like a moment of Being behind the waterfall like okay, let me check in All right, let me move on So how did you come to that? How did you start embracing this technique? Sure, so that's that's a very straightforward answer so I am a clinical psychologist and in graduate school

You have to learn about the concept of mindfulness in order to teach it to Your clients. So it's mindfulness is part of the third wave of psychotherapy. So first wave Freudian psychoanalysis second wave behaviorism so think BF Skinner and you know pigeon is pecking on levers rats and amaze ratsazes. Rats and amazes, exactly. And so then in the third wave, so pretty much every evidence-based psychotherapy has a mindfulness component now. So for psychology nerds out there that could be cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, all these orientations that are researched and proven to be evidence-based have a mindfulness component. So it's really the peanut butter and jelly of training now.

And so in order to help my clients, I had to learn it myself and it really stuck because, and this is a pro pro to our discussion today, it helped with my own social anxiety because you talk a lot about how the voice in your head is a jerk. I use a different word, but I try not to get bleached. You can say whatever you want, we'll bleep you. You don't seem like a big cusser to me. But I'm not allowed to swear. So those are the rules.

You are owned by Disney. Yes. Yes. OK. So you talk about the voice in your head. And the voice in my head is slightly different. It's more like an anxious grandma who is easily scandalized and clutches for pearls a lot.

And so she says things like, that's not appropriate. Or that's disrespectful. Or you can't do that. You'll be a burden. And so with mindfulness, I've discovered that there is a huge difference between thinking I'm being annoying versus I'm having the thought that I'm being annoying. And that that has been really helpful and amazing to me So why not do the formal practice? That's a great question and so okay, and do you recommend it to your patients formal practice? So

Again a great question. I think so I think as part of Training it like meditation was never Sold to us. Really so? Yeah. So you say mindfulness is part of the third wave, but they don't recommend it as a practice. In my training, like in grad school or subsequently, like meditation is not really a word that gets used.

And so maybe this is my world of psychotherapy and it's it's virgining elsewhere, but in my experience mindfulness and meditation don't really go together in terms of psychotherapy. They certainly can. And I teach mindfulness to patients and and use your behind the waterfall analogy quite a bit. I think I stole that from John Kabadzen. Oh, well, well, then we say thank you to him. I also steal another analogy from from Kristen Neff. She she's the self-compassion researcher from the University of Texas and she talks about

pretend you're in a movie theater and you are wrapped up in the plot and you bite your nails when the villain jumps out and you sigh when the couple gets together. And then she says, now pretend that the person next to you sneezes. And suddenly you realize, oh, I'm watching a movie. The reverie is broken. You have this disconnect. You realize you're sitting in the theater, and that being able to realize, I'm watching pixels on a screen is analogous to being able to watch your thoughts or watch whatever is going across

your field of consciousness. And so that is also helpful to me and to my clients. Yeah, so basically saying, I mean, I love that. I think that I love both analogies. Yeah. You're teaching mindfulness as a way to not be so yanked around by the discursive voice in your head. Exactly, exactly.

So you can, you know, the thoughts are still there. You can still see them, there they are, but they don't own you, they're not yanking you around. Yeah, I would say that the formal practice just supercharges that capacity. Yeah, no. It will be like weightlifting to make your muscle stronger. Right.

No, and I intellectually understand that. I'm tapping the part of my forehead where my prefrontal cortex is behind. But for whatever reason, that like lizard brain has not gotten on board yet. I think, so I was actually thinking about this. Why don't I do this? Because it would be something that I would think that I would want to do, like just knowing my personality, no, like I exercise, I do things that are good for me,

I buy into the science, I get it. Why am I not doing this? And so I think that my current answer is that when I start doing something new, and this probably applies to most people, I feel incompetent. And so there's the certain amount of like flailing around and like being very ungainly and like if you're, you know,

like I picture an ice skater like just falling on the ice like continuously. And I at this point at least apparently I am not willing to go through that phase to get to through the ugly duckling phase to get to the point where I can be a meditative swan. You know, the good news and the bad news is that the unganeliness in my experience never ends. Mm-hmm. It's really hard to compute for type A people because we do things and expect to win. Yes.

And meditation is just like quote unquote losing over and over again because you just are carried away and away and actually This is the thing I have to say to people over and over again the moment you notice you've been carried away is the win. And that is meditation. It's your unlikely at your stage and even at my stage, 10 years, nine years into this thing, to sit and just be on the breath in perpetuity. Actually, you're even unlikely to sit and be on the breath for more than a few nanoseconds. You really are just sitting there,

just getting carried away over and over and over again, and it's the catching that and coming back that is the winning. But the real winning is what you're already teaching yourself and your patients, which is in your actual life, you're seeing it's a movie. You're seeing, you're getting behind the waterfall.

In other words, you're getting out of the stream of the non-stop torrent of water. In this case, it will be thoughts or emotions, impulses. You're doing that in your regular everyday life more readily than you would otherwise, whether even if you, as you do and your patients hopefully do, embrace mindfulness intellectually, you can supercharge that through sitting there and just over and over and over again, training the ability to see, oh wow, I'm insane. And then starting over and over and over again, training the ability to see, oh, wow, I'm insane. And then starting again and again and again.

There's that grandma again. Yes. Yes. Yes. In your case. Yes. Makes sense. Yeah. I think that I mean, so by the way, that is not an argument that I'm not making the case to you. I just want to be clear that you are a lost soul if you don't sit and have a formal meditation. I'm not of that view. No, you're not making me feel that way. And so I think my internal struggle right now is again, I should want to do this.

And the why don't I? What is this barrier? And so maybe it's my own perfectionism. Maybe it's the, I feel like I'm type A without the hostility. Like I definitely want to be productive and want to do things well. And so maybe that part is still standing in my way. But yeah, no, I hear everything you're saying. One thing, well, again, with the caveat that I really try to avoid ever pressing this upon anybody, but one thing that might work in your case, just as this is a guess, is a month

long challenge to say, I'm going to try this for a month. I have a goal. Because you strike me and I'm basing this on very little data as an achiever. Yes. Yes. Somebody who likes to checkbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,ver. Yes. Yes. Somebody who likes to check box. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. And that is accurate. And I think doing it every day or most days for a couple of minutes and then at the end of the month saying, you're going to tell yourself this or grandma can tell this story which is I'm only going to have to do this for a month. And then when you get to the end of the month, see how you feel. Because my suspicion is nobody's ever come back to me and said, I've tried it for a month that a significant, well, only one person has ever come back to me and said, I tried it

at a month for a month. And it was, I literally saw no benefit. That one person is the great writer, Gretchen Rubin, who remains a meditation. Well, she's not skeptical of it. She just can't get herself to do it. She did do it for a few weeks and decided she didn't see any benefit. My our collective meaning mine and Gretchen's suspicion

is that she wasn't really doing enough. She was maybe just doing to short an amount. But who knows, I don't know. It doesn't matter. Yeah. For you, the only only data point that matters here. And so it might be worth trying for a month and seeing what happens. Yeah. Maybe you'll be like, right? Speaking of Gretchen, Rubin, so I, I, and of her four tendencies, I'm a questioner. So perhaps it's also just that I'm resisting outside expectation. Yes. I could just be being stubborn. Yeah, that's interesting. That's the possibility too. So Gretchen just did fill in the listener Gretchen wrote a great book called The Four

Tendencies which sort of says that when it comes to behavior change or habit formation, we are all in one of four buckets. This is her schema and is a rebel and a questioner, a holder, a bliger, and a bliger. And so you're a questioner, so am I, if I recall? Okay. Yes. And, you know, I hate to make sense. And I, that's one of the reasons why I'm not wagging my finger

at you or anybody because I'm a questioner, and I would hate if somebody did that to me. And I know it would backfire. No, and I appreciate the lack of finger wagging, yes. So, yeah, so I will take you up on the challenge. So tell me more about grandma. Well, how, where do you think this comes from? Oh, well, so, I mean social anxiety,

and also like I do have to sell that that mine has diminished significantly over the years through, I think, some combination of time, and but mostly practice. And like, I joke that, you know, much like the hair club for men from the 80s, you know, I am the author of a book about how to lessen your social anxiety, but I'm also a client. And so, like, the techniques that really, really work for me. And so Grandma is a lot quieter, really work for me. And so grandma is a lot quieter than she used to be. And I also notice her a lot more and I'm able to say like, okay grandma, that's, that's cool. Thank you for your input. I appreciate you trying to protect me,

but I'm going to go do that thing anyway. So, but, but so social anxiety is a mix of genetics. So if you have a first degree relative with diagnosable social anxiety disorder, you have a four to sixfold increased risk of having the same disorder. So that's part of it. There is definitely this also coffee and cream swirl of genetics and experience, because if you were raised by somebody

with social anxiety, likely you're not gonna get exposed to experiences that would challenge that. But there's also just a lot of things that folks with social anxiety tend to do and be like perfectionistic, like introverts. And I can talk about a lot of the things that we can do to turn that around. Before you run with this, which I hope you do? Sure. I guess, does this only imply to people with social anxiety disorder?

No, no. For anybody's ever experienced any social anxiety of any flavor? I'm glad you brought that up. So in the US, at least, 13% of people at some point in their life will reach a clinical level of social anxiety. So it's and that is defined by when it crosses the threshold of getting in your way. So if you consciously forego 20% of your grade because that you just can't bring yourself to raise your hand

in class and get those class participation points. Or if you forego a promotion at work, because that would mean that you had to travel and meet new clients or that you had to give presentations, if it gets in the way of your life or causes an inordinate distress. So for example, like 20 years ago, if I was going to come here and chat with you, I would have lost sleep for a week about this, or I would have had GI problems for a number of days. Now, on a scale of 0,200, if 0 is hanging out on the couch watching Netflix and 100 is a panic attack, I'd say coming down here is maybe a 32 or 40. So I was trying to do some other work on the train, and my mind kept coming back to this.

And like, occasionally my stomach would flip flop, but I slept great last night, and I started thinking about this a couple of days ago. And so, like, I've come a long way, and so that's been very satisfying. But I'm confused there. I'm sorry, keep cutting you up. No, I have fun.

And I really don't want to do rally, because I want to get you where you're going, because I personally want to hear it. To me, what you're describing sounds like a mix of social anxiety and also fear of public speaking. Those are the same things. So social anxiety is the umbrella of social anxiety is also performance anxiety. So public speaking or performance on stage, musicians, actors, all that goes under the umbrella of social anxiety. So I'm glad you asked that because that's

a nice, I think that's important to clarify. But so 13% of at least Americans will get to the point where it gets in the way of their life, sometime in their lifetime. But if you ask people, are you shy, which is just a everyday way of saying socially anxious, 40% of people will say yes. If you change the question and say, have you ever been shy, like were you shy as a child, were you awkward as a teenager, 80% of people will say yes. So that is a huge majority of people who knows what this feels like.

Or I would rephrase it to, just in my own case, do you ever get shy? Are you shy sometimes? Often I'm not shy, but sometimes either I'm just not in the mood or there's a thing that's intimidating. Sure, absolutely. And I think that is accurate because folks with social anxiety are not anxious all the time. You know, if they're with their partner,

they're with people they love and trust, they feel safe, they're fine, they're fine. And so it's only when there is a perceived social threat that it kicks in. And it's based on this perception. I want to emphasize perception that there is a fatal flaw that there's something wrong with us, that other people are going to see. It's going to be revealed and therefore will be rejected or like embarrassed for it. And so research has found that there are

four general categories that get people you you know, feeling socially anxious. One is appearance, so the thought that like, I'm having a bad hair day, or I have a big zit, where my butt looks big in these pants. And so, there's something about their physical appearance that makes them feel very self-conscious. And that's actually a really nice analogy, because we can all relate to experiencing that at some time. You look at the mirror like, oh, I need to throw on some titted moisturizer. I'm going to wear a hat today. I'm going to change these pants.

And so, but imagine not being able to conceal it and having to go out in public. That feeling of self-consciousness is the same feeling that you get with social anxiety, except instead of only for the outside, it can also be for the inside, the internal self. Anyway, okay, so that's one category, the external self.

The other is the symptoms of anxiety themselves. So the sense that people will see a sweating through our shirt or will notice our hands are shaking or that our voice is trembling or that we're turning red. So that sense that they're going to see me blush and think I'm an anxious freak is social anxiety. The last two categories are the biggest. And those are one's social skills. So a sense that somehow I'm boring or nobody really wants to talk with me or I'm not funny or cool So that that idea that that perception and distortion is the third category and the last is basically one's whole character

Like I'm incompetent. I'm stupid. I'm a burden. I'm annoying et cetera and so so it they, between that and performance anxiety, there's many colors in this rainbow of social anxiety, but it all boils down to the sense of having this fatal flaw that will be revealed and that people will reject you for it. So that's our definition. And so what do you do about this? Right, so there's lots of things you can do about this.

See, I get to make a good deal of this. Very nice this? Right, so there's lots of things you can do about this. See, I got you. Very nice. Good job. So there's lots of things we can do. And so the one thing is to try to turn our attention inside out, in a socially anxious moment, our attention naturally starts to turn inward. And we start to monitor what we're going to say, or we think, oh, should I stand this way or this way to look more natural? Or we think, oh, why did I say that? I sounded like an idiot.

And so rather than training our attention inward and monitoring, which takes up a lot of bandwidth and leaves very little left over for actually being where you are and being in the situation. If we start focusing outwards, so we look at the person we're talking to, and here I'm actually, this is how the sausage gets made. This is what I'm doing right now. So I'm looking at you. I'm listening carefully to what you're saying. And I'm trying to phrase my answers not in a way that is rehearsed, but instead gets across the passion that I have for this topic and what will help your listeners. So I'm trying to take my attention off me and put it outside.

So essentially if you can pay attention to anything except yourself, then the anxiety will deflate, which is so, so helpful. Because the instinct is to manage more, to do impression management, or to try to be more, kind of tightly wound. And so when we turn outward, that goes away. So would that be like asking, if you're in a social situation,

maybe just asking people some questions about themselves? You could do that, yeah, absolutely. I think that, yes, and folks with social anxiety often don't disclose anything about themselves. They try to deflect the attention away from themselves. And so I would say, yes, you could absolutely do that. And you could also disclose a little bit about yourself to Give people something to work with

Folks with social anxiety usually play things kind of close to the vest And and keep things private because again, there's this perception that there's a fatal flaw and if we reveal too much You know, but sometimes doesn't doesn't social anxiety result in log a rea You know, you're just normal diary. Yes, yes, yes. That's another thing. Right, right. The nervous chatter.

Yeah, absolutely. So that's, that has a name. So things like that. So either pepperine somebody with questions so you don't have to talk about yourself. Doing the logorea are called, talking really quickly, so you can get this over with,

are called safety behaviors. And so that's another thing that can be done to lower that anxiety, is to drop those safety behaviors. And so there's a lovely story, I can tell. So one of the people in my book, his name is Ja-Jong, and he came to the United States from China when he was 16, and he wanted to be the next Bill Gates. And so he worked in computer programming and worked his way up to a high level position

at a Fortune 500 company, and then turned 30 and said, okay, it's now or never. If I'm ever gonna do a startup or start my own company, it's now or never. And so he quit his job and started a startup. And right before he was about to really make his product public, he lost his funding. And so he realized he had a number of employees to support. He had a new baby at home.

And he lost all his funding. And it was feeling very anxious about this. And so he realized that his own anxiety and fear of getting rejected from another funder was really holding him back. So he decided to put himself through a boot camp that he called a 100 days of rejection. So he wanted to try to get rejected. Day one, so he recorded all these on his cell phone, took videos of all of them. He decided that his first challenge would be

to ask the security guard in his building if he could borrow $100. And so in this video, you see him scurry up to the security guard, and spit out the words, hey, can I borrow $100 from you? And the security guard says, it kind of looks at him with a quizzical look,

and says, no, why? But he doesn't, John doesn't even hear the why. He says, no, oh, okay, all right, bye. And he runs off. And so his safety behavior was speed. He was just trying to get this over with. And when he went back to edit the video, he realized, oh, wait, this guy said, why?

This was an offer to extend the conversation i didn't have to run away like i'm gonna do this better tomorrow so the next day he goes to a burger joint and he finishes his bacon cheese burger and goes to get or refill on his soda and he notices that the soda found so free refills and he you know the light bulb goes off he gets this idea strides up to the counter and this time he doesn't use speed he he squares his shoulders he looks the guy in the eye he talks in a normal tone normal speed and says hey this burger was great can I get a burger refill and and the you know the guy behind the counter doesn't understand it first and finally gets it and

it's like no sorry man we don't do burger refills. And Josh is up. Okay, no problem. I'd like to place a lot more if you did. And he just, he's saunter's off. So no safety behavior. It's just asks in a very reasonable way, reasonable tone, even if the content of what he is asking for is not reasonable. And, and so there, he's still got rejected, but for him was a win, right? He was trying to get rejected to build up a thicker skin, but, but there is the difference. So his experience in using safe behaviors, trying to get it over with, trying to artificially tamp down that anxiety on the first day resulted in him feeling really different than on the second day when he let all those safety behaviors go and acted as

if he were confident about this as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. So very different anxiety experiences. So just to give us, so this is the first tip, just to reframe the discussion. The first tip is, the first tip is to turn your attention inside out. Second tip is to drop your safety behaviors. Okay. Okay. So we'll move down to the first tip is to turn your attention inside out. The second tip is to drop your safety behace. Okay, so we'll move down to the second tip. We've moved down to the second tip. And a third tip is to give yourself some structure. So I can illustrate this through another study.

And here, so there are two Australian researchers named Dr. Roner Pay and Simon Thompson. And they did this really lovely study with women with diagnosable social anxiety. And so they took women with diagnosable anxiety and also women on the opposite end of the spectrum. So women who were more outgoing and like confidently chatty

than average. And one at a time sent them into the waiting room for the experiment, which unbeknownst to them began as soon as they entered the waiting room. So they sat down and a male lab assistant who was acting as a confederate came in sat down close to them and said, oh, I hope we don't have to wait too long. Acting as a confederate just means part of the experiment. Part of the experiment. So like he's acting. He works for the investigators, but the participant doesn't know that. And so he says, I hope we don't have to wait too long. And then waits for 30 seconds just to see if any conversation ensues.

And every 30 seconds for five minutes, he drops another kind of conversational invitation and just sees what happens. Then, after five minutes, the researchers come in and say, oh, thank you both for coming. Now, we're going to begin. Your task for the next five minutes is to pretend you're at a party and get to know each other as well as you can. So now, there is an assignment.

There is some structure. And both of these five minute intervals were taped and then reviewed afterwards for like social competence, social performance. And as you can imagine, in the first five minutes, the women with social anxiety, lagged way behind the women who were, again, more confidently chatted than average.

But in the second five minutes where they had something to hang their hat on, they, you know, if they had a mission, they were almost neck and neck, which is really impressive because, again, this is compared to people who are above average on the kind of social performance level. And so just being able to walk into a Christmas party and say, okay, I'm gonna have conversations with three people

or to go into a networking session and say, all right, I'm gonna try to exchange three sets of business cards, or to decide that you're going to be the unofficial, like, this is us host for your friends, and people are going to come to your house and watch. Giving yourself some structure can be really helpful, again, in making that anxiety go away. A lot of people that I work with note that it is much easier for them to host a party than it is for them to attend a party. Why is it because they have control?

They have a role to play. It's less freeform. The thing that drives all anxiety, not just social anxiety, is uncertainty. And so when you take away the uncertainty and you know what you're supposed to do, whether it's just refilling people's drinks or introducing people, trying to connect them, then that uncertainty falls away and you feel a lot better. What has worked most for you? For me, I would say, I would say turning my attention inside out, and I would say, and this connects back to what we talked about earlier, trying to loosen up on my perfectionism. I think, again, like 10, 20 years ago, this, so I, okay, in the book,

I wish, I wish, I wrote a book for me 20 years ago. These are all the things I wish I had known. And I felt, I think I thought I was walking on some sort of, like, social tightrope, and that if I were to, or I was like going through it, like a laser maze, that if I were to, or I was like going through it like a laser maze and if I was to make one mistake, alarm should go off all around me. And so to mix my metaphors, rather than a tightrope, I think I realize now

that I'm more on an expressway, that there is such this wide variation of kind of acceptable social behaviors or that I don't have to worry nearly as much as I thought I did. So perfectionism is kind of a misnomer actually because it's not about being perfect. Perfectionists don't actually strive to be perfect. They worry about never being good enough. And so if we can dare to be average, and I stole that phrase from Dr. David Burns, who wrote

the first evidence-based self-help book about depression, if we can dare to be average, it turns into the opposite of like, well, we'll be gone. We realize that it's okay that nobody expects us to be witty or charming or competent or perfect all the time, and that we can instead just be ourselves and that that sufficient. A lovely study, I'm a research nerd clearly, I like to cite studies. There's this classic study from 1966 done by Dr. Elliot Erinzen. In this study, he has college students listen to four, one of four tape recordings. And the first two tape recordings are, well, all of them are of a guy who is ostensibly

trying out for the college quiz bowl team. And in the first two, you hear him, and the first one that you hear him, you talk about his accomplishments and he's pretty competent. He seems like a nice guy. He has some good extracurricular activities. So, you know, solid guy. Second recording. He's kind of a loser, kind of a tool,

like gets less than a third of the questions correct. But then, in the third and fourth recordings, you hear exactly the same thing. So, competent guy, kind of incompetent guy. And at the end, there's this little bit tacked on of a clattering noise, and then him saying, oh no, I've spilled coffee all over my new suit. And all the participants are asked, which, which guy do they like the best? And inevitably, it is the recording where it's the competent guy who spills coffee on himself. It's not the guy who's competent and nothing bad happens to him, but people like the humanizing

element. It takes him from being superhuman to being human and therefore being accessible. And so I think realizing that my foibles and the little blips and bloops of how I walk through the world are actually quite endearing and that I don't have to conceal them or worry that people will judge me for them. Well, it reminds me of a, I'm not going to be able to reproduce this with complete fidelity, but Adam Grant's book, Give and Take. It's about altruism and its opposite in the workplace. How to givers and takers and what he calls, matches, people who are sort of into reciprocity, do in a professional context. Within the context of that book, he talks about a study that I think very much aligns with what you're saying,

which is that people who show vulnerability do well in front of audiences, in other words, do well in front of other human beings, but there is an asterisk there, which is that not in front of people with extremely high self-esteem. Oh, interesting. And I found in my own work, in my own sort of meditation world where I go out and I give the same speech to the same audiences all over the country. Generally, I get up and talk about how I had a panic attack on national television. I think I present as a pretty well put together confident guy, whether that's true or not. I think that's just the image that people take. And then I tell the story about how I had a panic attack.

And I find that for the vast majority of audiences, it's a very successful tactic, because I'm revealing something about myself and the humanizing. that for the vast majority of audiences, that's, it's a very successful tactic, because I'm revealing something about myself and the humanizing, but I noticed with some masters of the universe, it really doesn't go that well. And so I've just found in my own experience that what Adam was talking about,

which again, I might not be reproducing correctly, really is true. I don't know if you have any thoughts on any of the four going. Well, so it's interesting, because self-esteem, I think, was thought to be this really important thing. But I think as research goes along,

there's another side to it. So self-esteem is often a label. Like, I'm great, or I'm beautiful, or I'm successful. And so people with really high self-esteem have a lot invested in trying to stick with those labels. And so things that challenge that label for them. I'm not sure exactly how this would tie to your experience of when you reveal something about yourself,

the self-esteem folks don't respond so well. Maybe they just want somebody to get up there and say, here's how great I am and here's how you two can continue to be awesome as you fundamentally are, as opposed to getting up there and saying, being a human being is messy, and here's how it's messy in my case, and here's how I've dealt with it. So interestingly, as I was always listening to you, so again, turning my attention inside out, so the 1% of people who have never experienced social anxiety have no self doubt are narcissists.

Slash psychopaths. And so when you have no self doubt, when you are completely confident, that's actually a sign of things gone wrong. That we, so social anxiety, I think, exists because it's an overshot questioning of oneself. I think that almost 99% of people have some kind of either sense of inadequacy or feeling insecure about something in their life.

And I think that that is, I know that that is actually normal. And I think that evolution and nature have programmed us to be at least a little bit insecure because it forces us to be introspective. It forces us to check ourselves and see how can I get along with my fellow humans. We need the group to survive. And even if we don't need the group to build shelter or like find water anymore, like we still need it for love and companionship and community and belongingness. And so I think that again, we have to be a little bit insecure, we have to doubt ourselves in order

to check ourselves. And so that's why social anxiety still exists, that nature would rather have us overshoot. It would rather have a false alarm where no threat actually exists than the opposite. We don't want to have no alarm and then our house burns down. And so the people who are unfortunate enough to not experience social anxiety actually have a problem. I can see why it's a faulty wiring because you have no, you don't care what other people think and therefore are going to act based on that.

That often means that you're acting in ways that are not so social. Yeah, and so with folks with social anxiety, it's a packaged deal. And so the overshot caring what people think about you, if you roll that back a little bit, it's simply caring about people. And that nothing can go wrong with that. And you know, other great traits hang together with that folks with social anxiety, if you roll back the perfectionism a little bit,

have high standards and work really hard. They're quite empathetic. They notice what's going on around them and can really tap into emotion. They're conscientious. And so as people work on their social anxiety and that goes away, all those other wonderful traits like caring about people don't go away.

But when you talk about self-consciousness, I mean, that is actually, I mean, as you described before, can be a big part of, and maybe always is a part of social anxiety. That is, though, that is really just being focused on yourself. I mean, so isn't, well, first of all, two things about that. One is that from a Buddhist perspective,

that really aligns with, you know, getting carried away with self-concern is really the source of much of our suffering. But also, it seems to indicate that actually you aren't really concerned with other people because you're just worried about how you look. So the question is. I have no idea. So, well, okay. Let me take it this way. Often I just say stuff. So, okay, well, let me just say something.

So, at the very beginning, we were talking about how, like, if I give meditation a try, if I just kind of jump in and do it before I am ready, before I decide that I'm going to do this, then I will let the benefits pull me forward most likely, likely. So there is a parallel here with social anxiety. And so there, I get a lot of people coming to my office saying, you know, I wish I could just kind of hit pause on my life. I wish I could retreat from the world and like work on myself and gain confidence and then emerge back into the world, like a butterfly

from a cocoon and be confident and go live my life. And I say, that's awesome. I'm glad you're motivated. And let's do that in the opposite order. Let's have you live your life so that you can gain the confidence. And so it's by doing the things that we're a little bit afraid of, like you don't have to jump in the deep end, you can dip your toe in the pool, but to stretch and grow a little bit,

like that's how you build the confidence, because social anxiety tells you two lies. One, it tells you that whatever the worst case scenario your jerk or your grandma can come up with is bound to happen. And the second lie it tells you is that you can't handle this. And so when you push beyond it before you're ready, before you think you can do this, then you gain evidence and get the experience under your belt that both those things are not true. That the worst-case scenario doesn't often happen, and quite honestly, even if it does,

you can handle it, you can cope. And so there is my nice tie-in together of our conversation with a little bow. I like that. There we go. I like that. Stay tuned, more of our conversation is on the way after... After raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so- so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll

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different. Well, Karen, how you look, well, why, okay, so why do you care how you look in front? Because I imagine that it's the sense that if you don't live up to some standard that they will reject you or that they'll criticize you. I guess. Okay. So maybe, so I mean, you don't strike me as having social anxiety. I do. I mean, I don't know if I have it.

I, there are times... You're part of the 80% perhaps? Yes. Part of the 80% for sure. And look, I had a panic attack on national television. That's performance anxiety. Well, was that about the performance? And Because I mean, that's something you'd been doing for a while. Yeah, but I had had stage fright for everyone. Oh, okay. I think I

said, and I'm going to be one of those idiots who quotes themselves here. But I think I said in my first book that my career had been a triumph of narcissism over fear. There we go. Okay. So I always had stage fright. Yeah. It caught up me because I was adding cocaine and the best which just wasn't helpful. Anyway. So maybe then, okay, so is this,

so if this is your personal appearance, then maybe you fall into that first category of, of, you know, how do I, what is my physical appearance? Is that so much my physical appearance? Oh, okay. But that can give me anxiety. It's more just like, you know, to, I don't know, what is my physical appearance? Is that so much my physical appearance? Although that can't give me anxiety. It's more just like, you know, to, I don't know.

I'm just, I don't know if I can articulate this. I, when I'm self-conscious, I am just focused on myself and what's at the root of that, I guess, is a desire to look good in front of other people. Not necessarily look good in terms of my physical presentation, but the whole package to come off well. And what if you didn't, what would people see? What are you afraid people are going to see? Not to psychoanalyze you on the air.

No, that's fine. Fine. I don't... That's a really good question. I don't know. Yeah, so in my book, I call it social anxiety med lives, like to fill in the blanks of, it will become obvious that I am blank.

Right, like maybe a horrible person, incompetent dumb. Right, right, and so I mean, the fact that social anxiety is a disorder is because it's based on a distortion. And so those, all those fears are your inner critic, it's a distortion, and it's when we listen to closely to that or let that become Truth when we let our anxiety yank us around that it becomes a problem you know, I think For me since we're because I've steered the conversation to me as I often do Somebody who's self-conscious and perhaps worse

self-conscious and perhaps worse. Sometimes my, I sometimes I'm socially anxious. It's that I'm anti-social, that I don't, and I would love to hear your parsing of this. But sometimes I feel like I'm, I just don't have that much to give. And I'm, so maybe just not that friendly. And I've had people who are close to me, colleagues complain that the me that shows up here with you and a podcast or an on-camera interview is much more sort of open than the me that's around the office just on a work-a-day basis.

And I think some of that is kind of an inner stinginess. I don't know if that even fits into the rubric we're currently discussing, but that's just what's going through my mind as we're talking. Yeah, so I mean, I don't think this is what you're describing, but I think it's worth saying in case listeners identify with it, because, okay, so when there is a threat, and that threat could be, you know, a train, a bus headed towards you, it could be an external threat, but it could also be, you know, a social threat that comes from our own head. And regardless of the threat, our minds and bodies react generally in one of two ways, and that's fight or flight.

And so when we often think about social anxiety, it's flight. We think about wanting to hide under the buffet table or going to hide in the bathroom or scrolling through our phone, pretending to refresh Twitter a lot. And so that's what we think of stereotypically as social anxiety, but 21% of folks who experience social anxiety come off as fight. So there they are prickly and irritable and grouchy and try to steer the conversation with white knuckles and they reject other people before they can get rejected. And so that I don't I don't think what you're talking about for you feeds into that but again I think it's worth noting that for listeners who may not identify with the flight but maybe identify with the fight. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. I don't know that that applies to at least what I was thinking of when I said that.

But, and I don't, let's see if I can come up with an example. Well, when you were saying before that, a tool to use in is to turn your attention inside out. So in other words, you're focusing outwards instead of inwards and you're really listening to what the other person says and you're thinking carefully before you respond. My thought was, yeah, I do do that, but it's exhausting.

And I don't know, I do, I was gonna say, I don't know whether I can do that all the time, but I do know that I don't do that all the time. And often it will be like, I'll walk out of here where I'm very, I'm listening very carefully to what you're saying. And it's not because I'm anxious, just because I'm, I'm on.

I'm on. Yeah. But my next interaction will probably much less satisfactory to the person with whom I'm interacting because I've expended a lot of energy and I can't, I don't feel like I can do that all the time. No, and I mean, I think that's normal. I don't think anybody could really do that all the time, just like you can't be mindful

all the time. Like sometimes you do have to plan and sometimes you do have to reflect. Like you can't be in the moment all the time. I think that's okay. And so I don't think it's the goal to try to turn one's attention inside out all the time and to never look inward. I think something else that I think is important to say that oftentimes there, I get questions about how do I know if I'm socially anxious or how do I know if I'm just an introvert.

And so to speak to that, I like to say that introversion is your way. That's just how you're wired. And so introverts have a lower tolerance for stimulation. Their energy gets drained by being in either crowds or just places where they have to expend their energy. Extroverts often have never met a stranger and get their energy from other people. They need the stimulation. And whereas social anxiety, you can be socially anxious as an introvert or an extrovert.

And so sometimes people get confused, they say, how can an extrovert be socially anxious? And that's a particularly hard place to be. That's between a rock and a hard place because there you crave interaction. Like you draw your energy from other people, but you get scared of being rejected by them. And so that's a very uncomfortable place to be because you are left either being anxious or sluggish and bored. So that's no good. But in terms of going back to thevert versus socially anxious distinction, so introversion

is hardwired and doesn't need to change. If that's how our personalities are as such that we just have that lower tolerance of stimulation, super cool. And social anxiety gets in your way. That's where it causes an ornament at distress or it gets in the way. That's where it causes an ornate distress or it gets in the way of life and it can and should be challenged and changed. We can grow and stretch and have that anxiety be reduced. The best way to reduce social anxiety is to do the very things that give us the hibi jibis and I know that sounds horrible but to try

to grow and stretch and to, again, not have to jump in the deep end of the pool, but to try a little something that maybe we've been done before and get the evidence that those two lies of social anxiety, the worst case scenario is going to happen or I can't handle this to have those be refuted. Where, if anywhere, does fear of dancing fit into your, what we're talking about here? Is that a personal issue? But there's a certain amount of self-consciousness that you block people up so they can't

dance. Yeah, there's a fear of looking full. So there's a fear of like being seen letting loose or having the internal sensations of letting loose. And somehow that seems unseemly or embarrassing or something. And plus we often get afraid that we just look like a fool. So yeah, that absolutely falls under

kind of a loose version of performance, anxiety. Because we're afraid of what people are gonna think. Where do you think in your case, the social anxiety comes from? Do you think it was apparent or just wiring? I think it was wiring. I don't... So, my...

I talk about this in the book, but my very first memory is one of social anxiety. When I was about three in preschool, the teacher would have us all take rests on mats on the floor. And so there was like 10 of us in a row. And she would play guitar and sing kind of lullabies to us. And I remember one day, I woke up. Like this was not supposed to be nap time. This was just rest time. But I clearly had accidentally fallen asleep.

And I woke up to the teacher, like leaning over her guitar, looking at me, saying, there you are, like, you know, good morning, sweetheart, and all the other kids looking at me. And just, I had the sense of being the center of attention, and somehow that being very wrong. And so I remember, like, closing my eyes, like, really tightly trying to make all their gazes go away. And, like, that wasn't taught to me. I was three. And so, but there was the sense of being the center of attention, being the focus of everyone. No one was making fun of me.

No one was laughing. They were just looking. And so that, for me, at least tells me that this was hard-wired. And how did it get in your way? Well, so I'd say, you know, 20 years ago, my wardrobe consisted mostly of black, white, and gray. I would not buy shoes that clicked on the floor because I thought they drew too much attention.

I was one of the people who would not raise my hand in class. If I got called on, I would answer, but I would like tremble and sweat afterwards for a good few minutes and have to go drink some water. If I went to a party in college, I would talk only what the friends I came with and would kind of have invisible blinders on. So I would enough to make eye contact with anyone else there.

So I always participated, but I used a lot of safety behaviors and would try to artificially tamp down that anxiety. But what happens then is that it's kind of like trying to hold a beach ball underwater eventually. Like, it's just gonna pop up to the surface. And so it wasn't really until grad school that I started identifying the symptoms I was learning about and learning how to treat is like,

yeah, this all sounds really familiar and applying the techniques to myself. And I think a combination of time and experience, you can't avoid everything and just gaining experience out in the world. But also consciously trying to do some of these things that I just talked about was helpful to me. Now, I'm sitting here with you, I'm doing interviews. Thank you. I feel good. I'm living the dream The human condition is so funny because we need

each other But we're really difficult to deal with it's so true. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. We again We need each other for love and belonging and community and we're desperately afraid that each of the other one of us is going to reject us. I mean, that's hard work. That's evolution. Like, back in the day, you know, if you got kicked out of the group, like that was certain

death, like, banishment, men, you were thrown to the jackals, right? And so, like, I get why we are hardwired to check ourselves and to make sure we're getting along even if, you know, we're not going to be cast to the wilderness today. Before we go, can we just plug your book and... Sure. ...and everything. Just give us everything. So should we.

Yeah, we call it the Plug Zone. The Plug Zone. Plug Arama is good. Sounds good. So the book is called, how to beself, Quiet Your Intercritic, and Rise Above Social Anxiety. And I also have a podcast called Saby Psychologist. And you can, listeners, you can look for Dan's episode in the archives there. It was fantastic. It's a weekly podcast. You can find it wherever you like to get your podcasts. And you can also find me online

at EllenHedrickson.com and there are a nice little collection of free resources there for social anxiety that anyone can download. Social media? At EllenHedrickson on Twitter. Alright. Yeah. You were great. You were great.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

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