You have called it shyness for years, and that one word has never told you what is actually happening in those moments. This video goes through what researchers mean by shy, what two psychologists filmed in a room in 1981, and the one question that tells a preference for less contact apart from social anxiety.
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Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
You are standing in a group with a finished sentence in your head,
waiting for a gap in the conversation. The gap comes and you say nothing.
On the way home you have the conversation again, and this time your sentence is in it.
You have always called that shyness. What if you are not shy at all? What if you are an extrovert who never got out?
In nineteen eighty-one, two researchers put people like you in a room and filmed what happened.
What came out of that room goes against almost everything you have assumed about yourself.
By the end of this you will have one question, and it will tell you more about yourself than the word shy has told you in all the years you have been using it.
Here is the problem with that word. In a survey of more than ten thousand American teenagers, researchers took everyone who described themselves as shy and put them through a diagnostic interview.
About twelve percent of them met the full criteria for a social anxiety disorder. Shy was the word those people were using for it.
Twelve out of every hundred were carrying something that has a name, a set of criteria and a treatment,
and they were describing it with the same easy word that people use for going quiet at a party.
Shyness sounds harmless, so nobody around them had a reason to look further, and they had no reason to look either.
The other eighty-eight percent are not the group where everything is fine.
They did not meet the criteria for a diagnosis, and that is all the number says about them. It does not say that nothing was going on.
Social anxiety sits on a scale rather than in two separate groups, so not meeting the criteria tells you nothing about how much of your life the fear is already taking.
All of that sits inside one word. The person who simply prefers a quiet evening calls himself shy,
and the person who needs treatment calls himself shy, and the word gives you no way of telling the two apart.
The word is just as vague on the research side. Researchers still have no agreed definition of shyness.
There is no single scale and no single line where it starts. Different questionnaires measure different things, and all of them get the same name.
So the word puts you in a group and tells you nothing about what is actually happening inside you.
All the years you have called yourself shy have not given you one piece of information you could use.
You need a different question. That question is coming in a few minutes, and before it can do anything for you, you need to know what actually sits behind the word shy.
Before that, there is a group of people this video is not for.
Some people genuinely want less contact. They have two or three close friends and that is enough for them.
They leave the party after an hour because they have had enough, and the evening was still good.
On the way home they are not going over anything, because nothing was missing. That is a preference, and a preference is not a problem.
Researchers keep two things apart here. The first one is how much contact a person actually wants. The second one is how tense that person gets while the contact is happening.
Introversion mostly belongs to the first one, to wanting less of it,
and the people who want less of it and feel good that way are not the subject of this video.
If that is you, then nothing about you needs fixing, and you can spend the next ten minutes on something better.
Now to the word itself. Shyness does have a definition in research, and almost nobody outside of research has ever read it.
In nineteen eighty-one, two psychologists named Cheek and Buss wrote the questionnaire that is still used to measure it today.
They described shyness as tension and inhibition in the presence of other people.
Read that again slowly. Tension and inhibition in the presence of other people. That is a description of fear with a friendlier word on it.
The questionnaires show the same thing. Some of the items on shyness scales and some of the items on social anxiety scales ask about the same experiences in almost the same words.
Part of the separation between the two exists only in the label at the top of the page, because the same experiences are being counted twice under two names.
And the friendlier word does something to you. When you call it shyness, it sounds like a part of your character, something you were born with,
something that was always going to be there, and there is nothing in that word you can do anything with.
When you call it fear, it sounds like something that is happening to you, and something that has a history and a cause.
Shy is the word we use for fear when we do not want to call it fear.
Cheek and Buss did more than write down a definition. In the same year, they ran two studies to find out whether being shy and liking people are actually the same thing.
They started with more than nine hundred students and two separate questionnaires.
One asked how much a person likes being around others. The other asked how tense a person feels while being around others.
If those two were the same thing, the answers would have moved together. They barely did.
Knowing how much a person liked being around others told you almost nothing about how tense that person was while it happened.
Wanting company and being comfortable in company turned out to be two different measurements. Then came the second study, and this is the one that matters for you.
They took forty students and sorted them into four groups. People who want a lot of contact and stay relaxed. People who want a lot of contact and get tense.
People who want little contact and stay relaxed. People who want little contact and get tense.
Two people from the same group were put in a room together. Five minutes of conversation, a camera running, nothing else to do.
The people who later watched the recordings did not know which group anyone came from, so their ratings could not be shaped by what they expected to find.
Now the finding. The group that spoke the least was not the group that wanted to be left alone.
The quietest people in that room were the ones who wanted company and were afraid of it. They spoke less than everyone else, they looked away more often, and they touched their own face more often.
From the outside, that looked like someone who would rather be somewhere else.
In that room, it was the person who most wanted to be part of it.
So here is the question I promised you. Do you actually want more than you dare?
And if your answer to that is yes, a second question follows immediately. Can any of this still change?
That study describes a room in nineteen eighty-one. Here is what the same thing looks like in your own life.
You come home from an evening with other people and you have the conversation again in your head, this time with the thing you wanted to say in it.
Somebody who wanted less contact has nothing to replay, because nothing was missing.
Somebody cancels on you and your first reaction is relief.
An hour later the relief is gone and you feel flat instead, and you cannot explain that to yourself, because you did not even want to go.
You like people once you know them. The way in is the problem,
and once you are past it you are fine, and sometimes you are the last one to leave.
You are talkative in one setting and silent in another,
even though you are the same person in both rooms, with the same opinions and the same sense of humor.
And when you look back at the things you did not do, you can tell the difference.
You did not stay away from them because they did not interest you. You stayed away because they cost you something.
Here is the dividing line between the two, and it is simple. With a preference, nothing is missing afterwards.
With fear, something is missing, and you notice it later, when you are alone, and it is usually the part where you wanted to say something.
There is a reason this is so hard to see in yourself.
With me it was like this. It came on so gradually that I never recognized it as social anxiety.
Every year a little more was avoided and a little less was said,
and none of it ever felt like a change. I just thought that was the way I was.
There is nothing careless about missing that. When something grows that slowly, there is no moment where you could have caught it.
And that one sentence is what keeps everything as it is. That is the way I am. Personality does not change, so there is nothing to be done about it.
That has actually been measured. A small study followed twenty-four adults with social anxiety through nine weeks of group therapy aimed at the anxiety itself.
Before and after, they filled in a standard personality questionnaire. Their extraversion scores had gone up significantly by the end.
It was a small group and there was no comparison group, so the study cannot prove that the therapy caused it.
What it does show is that the score moved at all. The number that is supposed to describe who you are moved in nine weeks.
The belief itself also has a price. Ninety-three students starting university were followed for seven months.
The ones who were convinced that their shyness was fixed reported more fear of speaking in front of others at the end than at the start.
The ones who believed it could change reported less.
So the word you have been using about yourself is part of what keeps the whole thing in place.
What you have taken for your character has measurably moved in other people. The fear does not sit in your personality.
It sits in old experiences that still carry a charge, and a charge can be released.
Back to the group you were standing in at the beginning. The same conversation, the same gap, the same sentence in your head.
The difference now is that you know what is happening in that moment.
If you truly want less contact, everything is fine and nothing here needs fixing.
If you want more than you dare, then that is not your personality, that is fear, and fear moves.
People who find out after many years what they are like without it are often surprised. Some of them get calmer.
Some of them get more talkative than they have ever known themselves to be.
If you want to know what moves it,
I have a longer video where I explain how the method behind this channel works and why it goes after what sits underneath the fear instead of the fear itself.
It is built around the four points where people stop believing that any of this can change,
and the last of those four is the question this video ends on, whether this is simply who you are. It is right here.