Social anxiety is less a personal failing than an invitation to act

Discomfort is information

by Aota Yu

On the road to making and keeping connections, knowing when a relationship is working is as important as knowing when it isn’t. One reliably useful indicator is your own discomfort.

I want to distinguish between two different types of “social anxiety”—one is a generalized kind, which makes all interactions with people scary regardless of who they are. With this one, the very act of being perceived and possibly judged is stressful and paralyzing. Talking to the cashier is scary, crossing the street in front of a stopped car is scary, ordering at Chipotle is scary, meeting strangers at a party is scary. All interactions are shrouded in a blanket of vigilance. Because the contexts tend to be benign, the anxiety has a quality of the absurd to it—you know the distress is an internal hallucination. This is not The Truman Show; there is no great conspiracy. It’s you.

The second type is caused not by a universal fear of being seen, but rather by a lack of fit. This is most apparent when you notice that being around some people makes you self-conscious, people-pleasing, insecure, or low-grade uncomfortable, but with others you can be unfiltered, spontaneous, and effortlessly relaxed. You aren’t anxious all the time with everyone, just with the people who you feel like you can’t fully be yourself around.

This does not mean other people are necessarily doing anything intentionally to elicit this response. In fact, they might be quite kind and personable. But somehow you’re not feeling it. The bargaining begins: “But they’re so nice, smart, well-liked, graceful, etc.! I don’t know why I feel this way.”

Or, say, the feeling that one “should” be closer friends with someone because you’re both into the same hobby, or share a friend group, or because it would just make so much sense. But things don’t work like that. Connection cannot be approximated. Like in music, no matter how much you enjoy a genre, you still have to listen to each song individually to see if you like it.

Sometimes they are doing something unhealthy or predatory, and your discomfort is the sign of a well-functioning social immune system. Some people are obviously transactional, rude, or committed to misunderstanding you. In these cases, listening to your discomfort can help you dodge bullets.

Sometimes it’s you. Maybe there is a friend you admire and envy, and being around them triggers so much comparison and insecurity that you can’t enjoy your interactions with them. You could consider this “your” fault, and think if you work things out internally it should resolve. This may be true.

But let me propose something: There is a way to interpret discomfort as a sign that something has to change about the relationship instead of as a personal failing. Whose fault it is doesn’t matter as much as answering the question: Given that something about this relationship isn’t enjoyable right now, what can be done about it?

If you follow this line of inquiry, you can discover a series of potential moves you can try. Maybe you need to communicate something, take space, set boundaries, or even leave the relationship. If you have no idea, you can just start trying stuff. The cost of not doing anything is way higher. When people override their own discomfort over long periods, it can turn into pain or resentment, which they also suppress until it eventually blows up. You can lose decades to discontent. People stay in bloodless marriages, friendships tinged with malaise, and crowds that will never know them. They blame themselves, or other people, or hold out for perfect information before they do something about it.

You do not need perfect clarity to act. The discomfort itself is information.

Imagine there is a rose in a garden. You grab it by the thorns and it pierces your skin. I say to you, “Woah, are you okay? You’re bleeding.” You say, “But I’m just bleeding because I’m not wearing any gloves! If I just get some gloves I will be fine.” You turn and grab another by the stem. You are brilliant; you have diagnosed the problem. But there is still blood running down your wrist.

What if you tried meeting yourself where you’re really at? To accept, for example, how immature and petty you are right now instead of comparing yourself to the hypothetically more evolved and virtuous version of yourself. How hurt you are, instead of enlightened and unaffected. How you really feel, instead of how you wish you felt.

This is not to discourage growth. I believe you can keep your eyes on the ways you wish to be better while still being honest and kind to yourself about where you currently are, and adjust relationships to support both who you are and who you wish to become. People can change, especially if they’re making a conscious effort to and have the right resources. But before effort or intention translates into showing up differently, there is the reality of the relationship now. And if reality shows persistent distress, that’s reason enough to change things.

Make the moves and let reality surprise you. Sometimes you discover you actually are compatible with someone but you feel like you weren’t because you had misjudged the amount of closeness you wanted with them, or the role they play in your life. There are some friends I could never discuss philosophy with, but if my life was falling apart I’d go over to their house and cry over a bowl of pasta.

Let it break your heart. There are people I discovered, after trying everything, that I would never be compatible with, no matter how much either of us wanted it. We wanted different things, different lives; we had hungers, for intimacy or ambition; we had fears, primal or imagined. When this happens there is grief. That too is part of living. The cast reshuffles, the scenery changes.

Discomfort is a gift. Not a pleasant one, but if you learn how to listen, it will teach you how to not settle, how to not swallow your pain, how to not run away from your emotional reality. Finding the people who are right for you requires rejecting countless others who aren’t. You don’t have to give up growth or sink into a sad complacency. You just have to be honest about when things don’t feel quite right, and make a move anyway.