How do you deal with “social interactions are a lot of info to process and a lot of stress?”
Increase your raw cognitive processing power. I’m not sure if this is possible in general—can one increase working memory, sensory processing abilities, verbal fluency, ability to multitask, etc? If so, I would expect solutions to either be basically “practice more” or “take nootropic/stimulant drugs.” (As well as “heal from any treatable physical/mental illnesses.”)
Cut down on unnecessary effort. Skip social gatherings you don’t value very much, engineer your environment to reduce sensory pain/stress. Deliberately allocate recovery time around social events.
Do as much thinking as you can ahead of time. Find good social scripts and habits that won’t take much mental effort in the moment.
Increase the reward of social interactions by focusing on people whom you like more, topics you’re interested in, etc.
Reducing anxiety (in my experience) can promote more “peripheral vision”/”situational awareness”. Relaxation lets your area of attention widen, which means you can take in more social stuff. If it usually feels like there’s a tradeoff where “over-noticing” makes you anxious but “under-noticing” makes you clueless, you can cut the knot by just directly addressing the anxiety. (Drugs are good for this; what you want is something that’s calming but not sedative. Alcohol makes you relaxed-but-clueless; you’re looking for something more like “relaxed awareness.”)
Social interactions are a lot of info to process, but I at least generally don’t find that processing stressful or even effortful, so it seems worth separating those two points.
Great list, I’d add one “dark side” tip: reduce your own anxiety by noticing and focusing on other people’s vulnerabilities, and learning how to exploit them (and then NOT DOING THAT, of course, the point is simply to know you can). Figure out the common verbal and body language signs of stress and anxiety and you start noticing them in almost everyone.
The best list I can think of is the section on playing low status in Impro—in general these correlate with social anxiety. A handful off the top of my head that I notice regularly:
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you miss the most obvious way to improve your social skills: practice! Receiving positive social feedback is a skill and like all skills can be improved.
While there is a wide distribution in natural social competence, a large portion of the variance in social skills is attributable to how much time you spent interacting with other people during your formative years. The more time you spend with people, the less you have to think in social situations. You will have the experience to know what are the typical things to do and say, how people tend to react in certain situations, how to read various subtle micro facial expressions and shifts in body language, etc.
Of course, if you are in actively toxic environments, then I would not recommend recklessly “putting yourself out there”. If you are still shy or lacking in confidence in your social skills, it is wise to limit yourself to social settings that you are comfortable, at least in the beginning.
It’s not clear what the performance metric is here or which things to focus on for practice. For instance, learning to read microexpressions in more detail can help reduce the long-run amount of social work required to manage an interaction, but at the cost of additional short-run cognitive load, and it has the risk of exacerbating problems instead.
How do you deal with “social interactions are a lot of info to process and a lot of stress?”
Increase your raw cognitive processing power. I’m not sure if this is possible in general—can one increase working memory, sensory processing abilities, verbal fluency, ability to multitask, etc? If so, I would expect solutions to either be basically “practice more” or “take nootropic/stimulant drugs.” (As well as “heal from any treatable physical/mental illnesses.”)
Cut down on unnecessary effort. Skip social gatherings you don’t value very much, engineer your environment to reduce sensory pain/stress. Deliberately allocate recovery time around social events.
Do as much thinking as you can ahead of time. Find good social scripts and habits that won’t take much mental effort in the moment.
Increase the reward of social interactions by focusing on people whom you like more, topics you’re interested in, etc.
Reducing anxiety (in my experience) can promote more “peripheral vision”/”situational awareness”. Relaxation lets your area of attention widen, which means you can take in more social stuff. If it usually feels like there’s a tradeoff where “over-noticing” makes you anxious but “under-noticing” makes you clueless, you can cut the knot by just directly addressing the anxiety. (Drugs are good for this; what you want is something that’s calming but not sedative. Alcohol makes you relaxed-but-clueless; you’re looking for something more like “relaxed awareness.”)
Resolving internal conflicts that are aggravated by social interactions seems like a very important leverage point for some people.
Seconded.
Social interactions are a lot of info to process, but I at least generally don’t find that processing stressful or even effortful, so it seems worth separating those two points.
Great list, I’d add one “dark side” tip: reduce your own anxiety by noticing and focusing on other people’s vulnerabilities, and learning how to exploit them (and then NOT DOING THAT, of course, the point is simply to know you can). Figure out the common verbal and body language signs of stress and anxiety and you start noticing them in almost everyone.
What are the most common verbal and body language signs of stress?
The best list I can think of is the section on playing low status in Impro—in general these correlate with social anxiety. A handful off the top of my head that I notice regularly:
Breaking eye contact while speaking.
Jittery movements and speech patterns.
Shrinking body language to take up less space.
Smiling too much.
Okay, that was strikingly perceptive, I need to read that book.
Seconded. I really can’t recommend Impro enough. I think more about the material in that book than almost any other book, I think.
I strongly endorse reading Impro. It’s short, well-written, and packs a very high insight-to-text ratio.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you miss the most obvious way to improve your social skills: practice! Receiving positive social feedback is a skill and like all skills can be improved.
While there is a wide distribution in natural social competence, a large portion of the variance in social skills is attributable to how much time you spent interacting with other people during your formative years. The more time you spend with people, the less you have to think in social situations. You will have the experience to know what are the typical things to do and say, how people tend to react in certain situations, how to read various subtle micro facial expressions and shifts in body language, etc.
Of course, if you are in actively toxic environments, then I would not recommend recklessly “putting yourself out there”. If you are still shy or lacking in confidence in your social skills, it is wise to limit yourself to social settings that you are comfortable, at least in the beginning.
It’s not clear what the performance metric is here or which things to focus on for practice. For instance, learning to read microexpressions in more detail can help reduce the long-run amount of social work required to manage an interaction, but at the cost of additional short-run cognitive load, and it has the risk of exacerbating problems instead.