Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?

I can echo your positive experience but the effect this has on people around you should also be taken into account. On MDMA you're going to want to talk to everybody about everything and that can lead to awkward situations once you've come down. Not only that but upon noticing your gigantic pupils some people might be a bit freaked out or feel like they're trapped in a conversation with you.

TLDR do it around people who aren't going to mind that you're obviously on MDMA

Give the man a break. He’s displaying his social skills by calling attention to his physical and stylistic transformation in a way that nods at plausible deniability. This is how you do this. Get hot and wear clothes that show you care about clothes is part of self-presentation. Becoming more attractive leads to better social skills almost automatically. People treat you better and you become more confident and both feed on each other.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional in the field of medicine, psychology, psychiatry or similar. I am just a guy, an older guy, who was socially awkward/shy for decades on end and I have things somewhat under control now.

Being shy, being socially awkward, having low-self esteeem and similar are all manifestations and symptoms of a root cause: Anxiety.

And while one might be able to alleviates the symptoms and manifestations here and there, the one and only cure is to address the root cause: the Anxiety.

And that's easier said than done.

To top it all, I also carried with me, for decades, undiagnosed severe clinical depression. So many times in my life I have reached bottom only to "settle" there fore a while and - later on in life -r each new bottom(s), over and over again, And then over.

Things that I have tried:

- hitting the gym till I was ripped. It helped with the ladies, which then helped overall, but... not really

- meditation: I have meditated thousand of hours, it actually didn't do anything for me

- I have read hundreds of books on depression, anxiety, happiness, confidence, relationships.. you name it, I have read them. The classic, the famous and the not so famous.

- I tried to get married, twice. And twice got divorced. I also tried heterosexual relationships of any type: affairs, FWB, just friends, just hooking up.... Nothing worked (now I say: of course, but that's for another day)

- talk therapy. 18 months of that and got me to a professional diagnosis of being "Depression free'. The anxiety and associated crap was still there.

- I even walked on coals!

What I did not try: meds, drugs (legal or illegal)

What has helped:

- time, yeah, age brings interesting perspective

- reading as much as possible science-based books and articles (and not new age crap. Honorable mentions are "Feeling Good", all the Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) books on Amazon, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", "12 Rules for Life", "Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself ", "No More Mr Nice Guy" and "The War of Art"

- my therapist helped too. I had a GREAT therapist. Bu she helped up to a point.

- writing helped. Writing almost every day, writing the dark crap that came to mind, anonymous writing on my own blog(s) and on Reddit too.

- REBT (mentioned above) helped me immensely

- I left the best for last: looking at my misadventures in life from the point of view that I am both accountable and WRONG for how I react/respond to life, and how I act in it, and writing about it daily has helped me the most. It has helped me unpack that a lot of my worldviews, presuppositions, what I though was "normal", my cause->effect expectations were, and to some degree still are, utterly wrong. And there's a LOT that I can do to chance things around, to tweak my behavior, to become a better person because, unbeknown to me for decades, my Anxiety had me angry inside and often I was a complete self righteous A-hole

I wrote about being wrong on HN a while back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30656873

Every day I realize how wrong I have been in certain aspects of my life, and I struggle to remedy and rectify things.

I look back and I an see the same wrong patterns of behavior in my parents, their parents, my sister, her kids.... And in quite a few people around me.

OP: that is how I improved, from a shy awkward kid I am now living a good life, and still improving. It never ends, keep on searching and improving and trying trying trying. Find a way.

Yeah. It's small on that level.

But it's not small if that is the conversation that allows someone you both haven't yet met to feel at ease in joining in to chat with you. That makes it powerful, because it leads on to people introducing themselves, more common ground being found, etc.

Also, it might be the only kind of talk that can "break the ice" in the general case. I mean -- imagine replacing small talk with a deep question about politics or science or music theory. It couldn't work so well in general.

That is what I mean about its significance. Almost all of us exist solely because of small talk between our until-then-unknown-to-each-other parents, for example.

"Small" talk is the beginning of almost everything.

For the first 20 years of my life I was extremely introvert, while at the same time very curious.

This curiosity later in life led me to become basically the opposite of how I was back then. Today I run several successful ompanies with dozens of employees,