Humans are social creatures. Fight against that all you want, but even something as simple as buying food for yourself involves talking to someone else. (Most times. Damn you, self-checkout aisles!) We owe it to ourselves to socialize better.

Despite that, some of us still struggle with the action. We convince ourselves that others are judging us or holding us under the microscope just because we’ve opened our mouths. For some of us, it’s not as bad as that but it’s still uncomfortable. It’s just awkward.

Here are five things that have personally helped me alleviate angst in my own social life. Try them for yourself.

Meditation

I know, I know. Meditation is continuously touted as this mystical cure-all for everything nowadays. That’s why I’m getting it out of the way first. Despite its borderline cliché status, a little quiet time to sit alone with nothing in your head is a surefire way to shake out some bad thoughts.

One of the biggest detriments to self-confidence is that little voice in your head telling you all of the things that could go wrong. It whispers things like, “This person will think you’re weird. You’re not actually confident, stop kidding yourself. You’re too shy to do this.” Talking yourself out of doing things is guaranteed to keep you timid and trapped. You’ll never be able to socialize better. With practice, meditation firmly guides your mind into submission.

I forget who said it, but I once heard someone proclaim, “Meditation doesn’t stop you from feeling the same bad feelings you’ve always felt. Rather, it builds distance between you and those feelings. It gives you time to examine them rather than just react to them.” This is what we’re after. We want to condition our minds to focus on the external stimuli rather than the tumultuous internal ones.

Without all of the chatter swirling in our head, it allows us to focus on the person in front of us. It’s far easier to engage with someone if you’re listening intently. If you’re historically bad at keeping conversations afloat, it’ll allow you to notice your surroundings and use that as topic fodder as well. Above all, you’ll actually be hearing what the other person is saying rather than worrying about what you’re going to say in response. You don’t need to become a yogi for this to be effective.

• Find a quiet place where you can sit with no distractions
• Play some calming, wordless music. Bonus points if you use headphones since it will drown out even more noise.
• Comfortably sit upright. Chair or floor doesn’t matter.
• Close your eyes and try to focus solely on your breathing. As thoughts or worries come through, acknowledge them but let them pass. Return to focusing on your breathing.
• Start with two minutes. Five. Eight. Ten. Work yourself up to a consistent twenty minutes of daily practice and see how you feel.
• This takes time! Give it a month or two and I guarantee you’ll notice a difference.

Visualization

Athletes, executives, creatives, and other people to be have been using this tool for decades. Here are some examples. You mentally prepare a future for yourself, flexing your comfortability in the safety of your head. Picture yourself as the life of the party or achieving whatever it is you set out to do. In your thoughts, convince yourself that it’s already happened; you’ve conquered the thing you were scared of or accomplished the goal you set. Imagining yourself succeeding in any endeavor conditions your mind to truly believe that it can accomplish those things.

This is meditation’s distant cousin. You can practice visualization as part of your meditation practice, but they can also be mutually exclusive. We can’t discount the power of our mind. After all, what was convincing us that we were insecure in the first place?

The best part about visualization is that it can be done anytime, anywhere. Slip five minutes in as you stand in line to get your coffee or take a walk over a break. The key here is to be consistent and be positive. Our subconscious has a way of driving us when we don’t realize that’s what’s happening.

Here’s an example of negative subconscious programming:

• You dread giving presentations at work, but you’ve just been tasked with one.
• The entire week before, you worry about how bad it’ll be and lose sleep over it.
• You get in a little practice the evening before, but it’s choppy and you stumble a lot. This reaffirms your belief that it’s going to go poorly.
• That night, you barely sleep.
• By the time you get to work to give the presentation, you’ve already failed. You’re dead tired and have spent a week telling yourself that it can’t possibly go well, so, naturally, it doesn’t.

Now use positive visualization to flip it on its head:

• You dread giving presentations at work, but you’ve just been tasked with one.
• After the initial shock, you get over yourself and tell yourself that it’s going to be just fine.
• You’re a person who finds a way and just gets things done, so you draw up an outline within an hour of finding out.
• By that same evening, you’ve already put pen to paper and gone through a practice run. It’s naturally choppy as any first draft would be, but you take notes and commit to practicing again the following evening.
• On the way to work the next day, you imagine yourself giving the presentation without so much as a stumble or “umm”. This, along with your notes from the night before, gives you the confidence to practice again that evening.
• This cycle repeats for four days leading up to the presentation. How could you do anything but succeed at this point?
• By the time you get to work to give the presentation, you’ve already succeeded. You’ve already successfully given ten presentations in your head. Naturally, it goes off without a hitch.

This visualization practice can apply to anything. See yourself accomplishing whatever it is you set out to do. A positive feedback loop starts in the brain and you can’t help but continue to win. Success begets success. Eventually, visualization becomes second nature.

Quick Thinking Practice

I love this one. In social situations, we often find ourselves at a loss for words when we hit a topic that we’re less familiar with. Maybe the person in front of you just told you they shaved five seconds off their Mario World 3 speedrun that weekend. As you think about what they just told you, you’re at a loss for words. “Ah, you’re a video game guy. Cool, what does that mean?”

After he’s spent the next two minutes telling you all about the world of competitive video game speedrunning and how his time puts him securely in the top ten percent, you hit another wall. What do you do? This is where quick thinking comes into play. You can use video games, Mario, or any other thing he’s just said as a pivot point to spin off towards a tangential topic that you’re more comfortable with.

To practice, make a game out of coming up with a handful of themes or topics based on a given random word. Do it as quickly as you can. Repeat this once a day and soon you’ll have an entire catalog of mind-mapped topics. Patrick King has a great section about this in his book Better Small Talk. He refers to it as “building associations”.

The more you practice this, the easier it will be to grab a random topic in the moment. Go back to our example above with the video game speedrunner. You don’t know anything about Mario World 3, but you did go see the animated Mario movie that came out in the last three years.

“Nice, you a big fan of Mario? I recently saw the movie in theaters and thought it was pretty good.”

“No, I mainly just play for the speedrunning aspect. That’s cool that you saw it though. I think the last time I was in a movie theater was years ago.”

“Yeah, theaters have become just crazy expensive and almost inconvenient with streaming and everything. I love their popcorn though.”

“The popcorn is definitely great. Speaking of streaming, have you seen…?”

So on and so on. You get my point. Notice here that you were able to leap two whole topics away from video game speedrunning. You were able to socialize effectively in unknown territory. The best part is you could’ve gone anywhere with it. Maybe the other person is a surround sound fanatic, so he then pulls that thread at the mention of movie theaters. Maybe you’re talking to the world’s foremost expert in popcorn, so you’ve just ingratiated yourself with them. The ability to think on your feet is key to keeping the conversation flowing.

Reading

“Knowledge is power!” or some such cliché. Man, I’m good with those today ha. Seriously though, you can’t deny the benefits of reading. Books, articles, or any other form of print (especially nonfiction) allow you to wander from corner to corner, across the globe, all without leaving the comfort of your living room chair.

People who know more have more to talk about. That’s a fact. It doesn’t mean that living life as an egghead is going to solve all of your social problems; far from it. It does mean that you’ll have more information, ideas, history, and patterns to draw from though. You can build as wide of a topic pool as possible. Shooting for genius status isn’t necessary.

• Get yourself a library card at your local library. It’s free.
• Aim to read at least two books a month. That’s only half a book a week. Cheat if you have to; small books are just as valuable as tomes.
• Find a little time every day to read. Even five minutes is enough if you’re slammed.
• Be a generalist here. Explore as many topics as you can, you may even find some interests you didn’t know you had.

As an added benefit, reading will actually enhance your ability to focus¹ as well. The longer you can sit with a book, the more you’ll train your brain to stay centered on the task at hand. Once you get started, it’s also a good momentary distraction away from other things going on in your life.

There are no rules here. Pick books up that look interesting. Choose books just because they have funny titles or author names. If you get twenty pages in and it sucks, put it back. This shouldn’t be a high school reading assignment, it should be a fun daily part of your life.

I’ll even suggest the first book for you! A. J. Jacob’s The Know-It-All is a lighthearted read about a man on a mission to cement his place in the world as book-thumping, brain-stretching intellectual. Autobiographical in nature, he sets out to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z in a quest to make himself more knowledgeable during conversations with his in-laws and those around him. This isn’t entirely unlike what we’re doing here to work on our own socialization skills so we can socialize better. I’ll reiterate, people who know more have more to talk about.

Consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

This is sort of a Hail Mary topic as the umbrella of what cognitive behavioral therapy covers is huge. Summarized, it’s really a catalog of actions and processes that you can try to redirect negative thoughts if you have trouble with anxiety, lack of self-confidence, or other undesirable mental tendencies. The Mayo Clinic² has a nice summary of it:

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a common type of talk therapy (psychotherapy). You work with a mental health counselor (psychotherapist or therapist) in a structured way, attending a limited number of sessions. CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.

Don’t let that scare you away. The true, nitty-gritty CBT may involve seeking out a legitimate therapist and going the whole nine yards. However, there are things you can try first at home without any sort of commitment. Things as simple as deep breathing or thought examination can be a good start. Here’s a helpful article that outlines some high-level techniques with a low barrier of entry. Give the whole article a read, definitely worth your time. It contains an overview of CBT, some common mental traps we fall into, and a slew of exercises complete with worksheets if you like.

Calling back to the sections about meditation and visualization, our thoughts can heavily affect the outcomes in our life. For some of us, socialization is a daunting task that requires mental preparation and recovery once it’s done. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Explore your thoughts. Why do you dread social situations?

Think back to your past. Are there specific events that your anxiety stems from?

Challenge your mental hang-ups. Will somebody actually judge you or think you’re weird in the course of normal conversation? And if they do, what does it matter?

Imagine the worst case scenario. Will you be sentenced to death if a conversation goes poorly or will the other person merely move on?

We can trick ourselves so easily into thinking that the world is out to get us. Shadows hold unknown evils that are just waiting to grab us as we navigate the curves of everyday life. It doesn’t have to be that way. Social anxiety is a true mental health issue if it’s bad enough, and it deserves attention and remediation just like any other. Examining what makes you tick can only benefit you. Sit long enough and you may even unravel some things you’ve never consciously realized before.

Try some of this stuff out on your own, but also be honest with yourself. There’s no shame in seeking professional help if your mental struggles go deeper than something like relaxed breathing can help. You wouldn’t put a band-aid on a broken leg.

Wrapping Up

We’ve covered a lot here. Try some, try all of these things. Mix it up. Some people will find meditation absolutely soul crushing and refuse to do it past the first session. That’s fine!

You owe it to yourself to at least try. Socialization doesn’t have to be this scary monster or Herculean effort we make it out to be. It should be treated as a game. And like any good game, there are different strategies and techniques you can employ to make the game easier for you. These are just some strategies for you to test. Who knows? Trying some of these may even help you discover other tricks not mentioned here that work even better.

Humans are social creatures. We sometimes forget that our entire existence is basically comprised of interactions with those around us. Sanding the rough edges off of these interactions makes a world of difference.

1. National University, Reading Improves Memory, Concentration, and Stress ↩︎
2. Mayo Clinic, Cognitive behavioral therapy ↩︎