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

As others have said, its a grab back of things, with various types of success. Of course no one true silver bullet. The common things of good sleep and excerise always a good idea, regardless. Perhaps even team sports, but personal interests will vary this.

I would say feeling ok with a certain level of personal experimentation, but don't let it neurotically consume you. You have already managed to navigate life to this point. Not everything needs to be changed and not everything needs to be queried.

Trying to dramatically change things can perhaps backfire. Fitting in something related to your existing interests, but with an extroverted forcing function aspect can help.

If you know a technical topic pretty well already, seek to present on it, or teach some intro workshops. Generally, seek to find things that would exercise certain anti shyness muscles.

One thing I found personally helpful was learning a language via immediate focus even at the beginner stages with talking, there are numerous online language learning sites with lessons delivered via video chat. Would say 30 minute lessons initial are ideal.

For me shyness feels like a certain analytical process turned inwards, like I'm DDOS my own brain. The excessive nature is the issue, not necessasrily the mere act of self analysis. Finding activities where I had to moderate that excessive tendency helped for me to recognise the difference

Therapy is always an additional option, but dependent on the person and the needs of course.

Yep, I was talking about social confidence and not necessarily making friends. You might very well make friends at a martial arts class, or just learn to deal with people you don't actually like, but have to fight with in a friendly way. I've had really good mates break my ribs, and people I don't actually like hug me at the end of a bout. It all helps.

I had a similar situation. The only time I took half a pill out of curiosity, and I suddenly opened up with everyone around. It was during a time that I was quite grumpy and would often drink heavily, and didn't know how to deal with my feelings.

I felt this odd urge to express myself towards everyone around me and was being very wholesome about it. I was aware that this was odd behavior for me, but I liked it and it felt like I was "letting go".

I noticed what I was feeling and how I was expressing myself and that it was ok. That was enough validation for me to keep on without taking mdma.

This happened just the once. I haven't felt the need to try it out more since then.

One thing that helped me was analyzing things in terms of what I think of as "anxiety loops".

First, think about how anxiety happens. Imagine you're about to cross the street at a quiet intersection. A car rounds the corner going way too fast and zooms right at you. You jump out of the way and are fine. Next time you get to that corner you will experience anxiety based on the association between a scary experience and what you were perceiving at the time. It will likely change your behavior a bit. Maybe you'll look around more, maybe you'll hesitate before crossing, maybe you'll cross somewhere else. With enough positive experiences, the anxiety will fade and it's back to normal.

But imagine that the anxiety and resulting behavior change actually makes things worse? That's not true about the street-crossing example. [1] But it can be true for other things. E.g., for years my anxiety around taxes would make doing taxes more painful, making me more anxious the next time. It's also true for many social things, just as you describe. You can end up in a positive feedback loop where things keep getting worse.

What helped me was a few years of a good therapist and anti-anxiety medication. It got me to recognize the systemic component to the problem and to start dealing with it. In particular, I had to let go of what I thought I should be experiencing ("It's safe! I should be fine!) and accept what I was experiencing (anxiety, awkwardness, etc). From there it was sort of like training a dog in that I had to make sure I was creating actually positive experiences for myself.

I think you're on to something with exercise, and I encourage all sorts of self-experimentation here. For me, long-duration cardio helps a lot. So does a regular sleep cycle, a diet low in refined carbs, and things that relax the body (yoga, steam, hot tubs, etc). I also manage my consumption of things that are intense (games, movies, TV), as that can increase my baseline anxiety. The lower baseline means that things like talking with strangers is less likely to trigger the formation of an anxiety loop.

I hope that helps! If you're looking for a book, "The Body Keeps The Score" was hugely useful to me in seeing the big picture. And if you think social stuff is harder for you than most, talk with your therapist about that too. It's a sad truth that many non-neurotypical people are justifiably anxious about neurotypical social situations because those situations are a long-term source of low-grade trauma.

I hope that helps, and you should feel free to contact me off-site if you want to follow up without the eyes of the whole world upon you.

[1] Unless it was so severe that you developed PTSD, in which case you may end up with a self-reinforcing trauma loop.

An also-effective approach is just to take the improv classes without ever performing on stage. That's all I did, but the lessons have stuck with me.

These days there seem to be more improv classes that are friendly to that, just people who like playing with one another. So if people are scared even by the classes, I'd suggest asking the instructor for something that's very beginner-friendly and not totally oriented on performance.