The 5 Mind Shifts That Helped Me Overcome Social Anxiety

For most of my life, social anxiety controlled everything.

It was hard for me to have small conversations. It was hard for me to simply order a sandwich at a deli.
I struggled doing basic things that many people take for granted.

If you struggle with social anxiety, you know how severe it can be. How overwhelmed you can feel not just in big moments, but in day-to-day life. It quietly, or loudly, shapes what you do, what don’t do, and how you see yourself.

In this post, I want to share five ideas or five mental shifts that helped me overcome social anxiety.

I can’t guarantee they’ll all click for you. I can’t guarantee they’ll “cure” anything.

But they helped me a great deal, and I hope at least one of them helps you too.

1. Judging Is Wrong, So Why Should I Value People Who Judge?

This was the first major shift for me.

I realized that a huge part of my anxiety came from my fear of being judged. But when I really sat with that fear, i noticed something:

I don’t respect people who judge others.

In fact, when I catch myself judging someon, especially for things outside their control, I feel bad about it. It feels mean and honestly I lose a little respect for myself.

So I asked myself a hard question:

Why am I so concerned about the opinions of people whose values I don’t even respect?

Most of the things we’re judged on are superficial:
How we look, how we talk, what we wear, what we gravitate towards. So in a sense not only did it feel mean, it felt irrational. How could I judge someone for something they can’t control?

And more importantll, I don’t actually believe those things determine someone’s worth.

So if someone judges me for them… why should I care?

I realized that when someone judges me, they are the one in the wrong, not me. That means I don’t have to fix anything. I don’t have to prove anything. I don’t have to carry the burden of their judgment behavior.

The anxiety I felt wasn’t my responsibility to solve for other people. It wasn’t my job to earn basic respect from those who were unwilling to give it.

2. Seeking Validation Is a Never-Ending Cycle

For most of my early life, I believed I needed other people’s approval to feel good about myself.

If people liked me, I felt okay. If they didn’t, I felt terrible.

So I spent years trying to be likable.

The problem? It never ends.

If you adjust yourself to make one person like you, you’ll have to change again for the next person. And the next. And the next. Every interaction becomes a performance, because you never know who you’re “supposed” to be.

It’s exhausting and it goes nowhere.

You might feel good for a moment after a positive interaction, but the next awkward moment wipes it all out. Your self-worth rises and falls based on who you talked to that day.

I started to realize there is no way I will gain confidence this way, so I had to throw the whole idea out.

Here’s the truth I had to accept:

You cannot get value from other people. You can only get value from yourself.

It stopped being my job to make people like me. My job was to learn how to like myself first and then find people who I liked spending time with.

3. Respect Is Not Earned — It Is Assumed

This idea goes against a lot of self-help advice, but it changed everything for me.

When I meet someone new, I don’t make them “earn” my respect. I start with respect, because they’re a person. If they do something that violates that, respect can be lost. But it doesn’t need to be earned upfront.

When you’re socially anxious, you often feel like you don’t deserve respect. So you walk into interactions trying to earn it; by impressing, pleasing, or changing yourself.

That puts you in a powerless position.

The truth is you deserve respect simply because you exist. You don’t need to prove that to anyone. And people who make you feel like you must prove it are not worth your time.

Trust me, I’ve tried those relationships, and they are exhausting.

This matters deeply if you’re working on exposure therapy or putting yourself into uncomfortable situations. You will make mistakes. You will have awkward moments. That’s part of learning.

But if you don’t assume basic self-respect, every misstep turns into an identity crisis.

Self-respect has to come first before anything else can grow.

4. You’re Not Awkward, You’re Anxious

For years, I thought I was awkward as a person, but I eventually realized something crucial:

The anxiety was causing the awkwardness, not the other way around.

When you’re anxious, you overthink. You monitor yourself. You get stuck in your head. That’s what makes conversations feel stiff and choppy.

It’s not a personality flaw.

Think about how you act around people you’re comfortable with; close friends, family, familiar environments. Conversations usually flow naturally. You don’t analyze every word.

The difference isn’t who you are, it’s how anxious you feel.

That means you don’t need to “fix” yourself. You don’t need to rebuild your personality from scratch. You just need to understand that anxiety interferes with how naturally you express yourself. That leads to the final shift.

5. Do Less, Not More

When you’re socially anxious, you feel pressure to perform.

Say the right thing.
Be funny.
Be interesting.
Be smooth.

That pressure is exactly what keeps you anxious.

Once you accept that you’re not inherently awkward, the goal becomes simpler:

Do less.

Drop the expectations.
Let go of the internal script.
Stop trying to manage how you’re coming across.

Learn to sit in silence.
Learn to listen.
Learn to be present.

When you stop forcing responses, your mind naturally generates them. You don’t have to “try” to be yourself, you already are yourself by definition.

If you feel quiet one night, be quiet. If you feel talkative another night, talk.

Confidence isn’t about how much you speak. It’s about how aligned you are with how you feel in that moment.

Some quiet people are deeply confident while some talkative people are deeply insecure. Talking less or more means nothing by itself.

So the next time you are in a social situation and you notice you are monitoring yourself and what you “should say,” take a pause. What if i just listened to what was around me?

What if I just took a minute to take in the sights and sounds around me? What would my mind produce? Maybe I’d notice a beautiful painting or a nailbiting sports game on TV.

Now instead of trying to “find something to say,” I simply have to listen to mind mind and express what comes to it. This is what it means to just BE yourself.

Final Thoughts

These five ideas helped me tremendously, but they may not resonate with everyone, and they’re not a guaranteed cure.

But if even one of them shifts how you see yourself, or how you relate to others, it can open the door to real change.

Social anxiety looks different for everyone, but just know you’re not alone in it.