Being Anxious: Help for Social Anxiety

You walk into a room and every head seems to turn. Your heart picks up, your face warms, and a voice in your mind announces that they are all looking, all judging, all finding you wanting. So you leave early, or you do not go at all, and the next invitation is a little harder to accept than the last.

If that is familiar, Being Anxious: Help for Social Anxiety was written for you. It opens with an idea that is a relief in itself. You are not defective. The wariness you feel around strangers is an old survival instinct, one that served our ancestors well when they lived in small bands and an unfamiliar face could mean real danger. That instinct has not caught up with a world in which most of us live among millions of people we will never meet. Social anxiety, David Tuffley argues, is a sound instinct turned up too loud. What has been turned up can be turned down.

The rest of this plain-spoken guide shows how. It introduces the methods of cognitive behaviour therapy, one of the best studied treatments for anxiety, and strips them of jargon. You will meet the four habits of thought that feed the fear: assuming you can read other people's minds, predicting the future, expecting catastrophe, and taking everything personally. For each there is a rational reply to practise. You will learn a three-step routine for catching an anxious thought before it hardens into dread, questioning it as a scientist would test a doubtful hypothesis, and putting something truer in its place. Is everyone really staring at you? Look around the room and count.

Then comes the part that takes courage. Avoidance is what keeps social anxiety alive, and the book explains how to dismantle it by degrees. You build your own ladder of ten to twenty situations, from the barely uncomfortable to the one you dread most, and climb it one rung at a time with a breathing and visualisation technique to steady you. The first rung might be saying hello to a neighbour. A later one might be starting a conversation with the stranger beside you on a train, and the book has a shrewd tip about when in the journey to try it.

Further chapters look at the company you keep, at the everyday habits that raise or lower anxiety, including caffeine, alcohol, sleep and exercise, and at the kinds of medication a doctor may discuss with you. A closing chapter turns to generalised anxiety, the free-floating worry that attaches itself to everything, and shows how the same tools apply.

Tuffley does not pretend that any of this is quick. Changing a habit of mind takes patience and repetition. What he offers is a clear account of why you feel as you do and a set of practical steps you can begin today, in a book short enough to read in a single sitting and return to whenever you need it. It is no substitute for professional care where that is needed. It is a first step, and for many people the first step is the hardest one to find.

The fear has had the run of your life for long enough. Find out how it works, and you can start taking the ground back.