The one change that worked: Anxiety had me hiding from the world – then two magic questions set me free

As with a lot of teenagers, social confidence was not my strong suit. Throughout my time at school in the early 2010s, I hated the prospect of new social situations and would often lie awake at night overthinking the day to come.

What I now know to be social anxiety I dismissed as just nerves at that young age. Although I knew something wasn’t quite right, for most of my early teens I managed to disguise my discomfort. Sharing a friendship group with my twin sister meant I could hide behind my sibling.

As we got older, the disparity started to grow and her flourishing social confidence magnified my lack of it. By my late teens, I often found myself building up social situations to an unbearable point. The false narrative I’d created of embarrassing myself socially had begun to completely overshadow my desire to be around other people. So I hid away a lot.

My mum found me a therapist. She was phenomenal and talked me through a lot of emotions that I didn’t really understand. When the end of my therapy sessions neared and we had spoken as much as we could, all that was left to do was for me to go out into the world and put into practice everything we had discussed.

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When I began to spiral over this, as I usually did, and voiced my concern, she asked me: “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” I replied: “Well, I could be embarrassed, I wouldn’t know what to say, I’d make an idiot of myself.” These were all the usual thoughts that plagued me. But then she said: “And then what?”

Not for the first time, she had made me second-guess the anxiety voice in my brain. I stopped and thought about it for a second and said: “Well, then I’d just go home and go to bed.” She replied: “Exactly, and then you’d wake up tomorrow and start the day again, and that would be over.”

In that moment, even my spiralling brain couldn’t catastrophise the situation any further. I realised those two simple questions brought me back down to reality when my mind tried to race ahead and find problems that, more than likely, weren’t going to happen.

Those questions have saved me from my anxiety time and time again. They saved me on my first day of university, when we had to introduce ourselves one by one. Standing up in a room full of strangers and sharing a “fun fact” about myself would have been a nightmare for me previously. But asking myself: “And then what?” made me realise that even if this were the most embarrassing day of my life, I could still just go home at the end and never go back. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the most embarrassing day of my life. I graduated three years later with a first-class degree and never thought twice about that moment till now.

Dates used to be awful. The anxiety they instilled in me often led to me cancelling last minute or getting blackout drunk just to get through them. Shortly after finishing therapy, I went on a date with those two questions swirling around in my brain. That was one of the first dates where I didn’t feel physically sick at the prospect of going – all simply because I reminded myself that even my worst-case scenario meant I could just go home after, put on some pyjamas and watch a film.

Since then, asking myself: “What’s the worst that could happen?” and: “And then what?” has got me through a plethora of anxiety-inducing moments, including job interviews and moving across the world, from the UK to Australia, with my boyfriend. Now, if I find my social anxiety spiking just because I bumped into an old school friend in Tesco, I know what to do. These questions bring me back to reality and calm me down.