How to Overcome Social Anxiety | Dr. Nick Epley

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Social anxiety is something we really can help people with. Essentially, the strategy is very simple. If you are afraid of talking with a stranger or having a deep conversation, the way to get over that is not to simulate it or to imagine. It’s not like you get up and you you give a pretend speech. That’s what psychologists were doing for years.

It doesn’t work because it’s still pretending. It has to be real. You send people out in the world and to do the thing for real. You’re worried about getting rejected. Go out and start asking people for help and you’ll learn that your fear is misplaced get accepted more often than you might guess.

Exposing people to that thing that they are anxious of, when the belief is misplaced, and with social anxiety it is usually wildly misplaced. That’s what we find over and over again is a mistaken barrier to connecting with other people. That’s how you you ease that social anxiety and get rid of it. Not because you do you dull your anxiety so much. It’s because you change your beliefs about what other people are like.

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based [music] tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Nick Epley. Dr.

Nick Epley is a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago and an expert researcher on the science of social connection. What’s different about today’s conversation in the context of social connection is that it doesn’t just center on improving relationships with friends or family or co-workers. We do talk about that, but we also talk about the smaller everyday conversations that we have with people that we don’t know so well and the positive impact that that can have on mental and physical health. Now, I want to be clear, we’re not talking about engaging in small talk for small talk’s sake. We’re talking about taking opportunities to connect with people once or several times per day and the tremendous benefits that can have for people’s mental and physical health, including yours.

We also talk a lot about the assumptions that we tend to make about other people, both in real life and online, and how those actually match up with reality. We also talk about Nick Epley himself because his life strongly has informed his research. We talk about his biological and his adopted children, raising a child with additional needs, and the incredible joy and growth those choices have brought him and his family by virtue of the sorts of social connections that they’ve brought. I must say today’s conversation went a lot of places that I did not anticipate, and it certainly inspired me to look differently at everyday interactions as far from trivial, and in fact key to the fabric of social connection and our mental and physical health. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Nick Epley. Dr.

Nick Epley, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. We make a lot of assumptions about other people, and in my case, cuz I have a new puppy, about animals. You know, we’re always thinking that we know what other beings are thinking. Yeah.

But as you’ve pointed out, and as a colleague of mine in neurosciences, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, has pointed out, most of the time we don’t even know what we’re thinking. Like there’s stuff going on in there, but like we’re we’re not that good at thinking, “Oh, that last thought was a complete sentence that means blank. ” That’s That’s not how the human mind works. >> Right.

So, usually when we hear the word anthropomorphism, we’re talking about humans making assumptions about other animals. >> Mhm. But humans are animals. We just happen to be the curators of the planet. So, why and how do we anthropomorphize about other people, and how does it hurt us, and how does it help us?

Yeah. So, I think the way to think about anthropomorphism is that what we are doing is we’re trying to understand what’s going on within another agent, essentially. And so, anything that acts independently, right? You got a ball rolling across the table. If something else bumps into it and it moves in perfect, you know, the perfect deflection off of it, you don’t need anything to explain why that ball moved as it did.

But if this ball is coming across the table, another one hits it and it just keeps going or it goes some other direction, well, then it seems like there’s something going inside that thing that might be driving it, right? And that in that thing that’s inside that ball might be a mind, right? Might be a set of thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, some kind of psychology that’s pushing it. At least that’s the way we interpret what an independent agent might be doing. We do this when we think about other people, right?

You’re nodding your head now. I think you’re thinking about something, right? You move this way or that, you wanted to do this thing or that thing. We do that same kind of mind reading, right? With non-human agents, animals, gods sometimes, the planet, even ourselves, right?

We reflect on ourselves. We have experience at least with having certain mental states come to mind and we use that experience as a guide to what’s going on in other people, too. That kind of anthropomorphism, that kind of mind reading, right? Where we infer others’ thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, that’s helpful to us for at least two reasons. One is it gives me some sense of why you’re doing what you’re doing now.

It allows me to understand what you’re doing right now. Are you trying to be kind? Are you trying to be uh aggressive? Are you trying to be friendly? But it also is pretty good at allowing me to predict what you’re likely to do next.

So if I think you feel hungry, well, you’re going to go try to eat something. If I think you don’t like me very well, you’re going to behave a particular way towards me. So this kind of mental state inference, this kind of mind reading, serves us pretty well for getting around in a social world. Don’t always get it right, but in general, it’s better than not doing it at all. So as we make assumptions about others and their intentions and their past >> Mhm.

choices in some cases, right? Like if somebody hits somebody else, we we make an assumption about the certain things might have led up to that. >> Yes, right. Are we mainly paying attention to behavior? Mhm.

And or are we paying attention to what they seem to be paying attention to? So called theory of mind. >> Yeah. So, it depends a lot on what kind of environment we’re in. We think about the minds of others in lots and lots of different context.

My wife right now is back home in Illinois. I can think about what she might want for dinner, right? Or what she’s feeling at any given time. We can think about people when they’re not present. We can think about strangers, people we know nothing about.

I write a book. I’m trying to think about how will people understand this book, right? These are all cases where there’s not somebody in front of us at all, right? And when we’re doing that, particularly with strangers, people we know nothing about, things we know nothing about, then the one thing we have at our disposal is ourselves. We can use our own minds, right?

So, if I walk into a classroom and I think it’s kind of cold in here, well, I can assume that other people will think it’s cold, too. I’m using myself as a guide. Once I know a little more maybe about you, right? I learn that you are, you know, you’re a PhD fro