Relationships and social standing

Being judged, conflict, whether people are annoyed with you

Moderate evidence

Post-event processing — replaying the conversation afterwards — which is brooding with a social object, plus reassurance-seeking that briefly relieves and durably entrenches.

What is real here

Social standing genuinely matters, misreadings have real consequences, and caring how you affect people is a feature rather than a defect.

The trap

Post-event processing — replaying the conversation afterwards, auditing your own performance — is brooding with a social object, and it is one of the best-documented maintaining factors in social anxiety. Reassurance-seeking ("was that alright?") does the same work as checking a feed: brief relief, longer-term entrenchment.

Where the leverage is

Cut post-event processing (postpone it), cut reassurance-seeking, and run uncertainty experiments: leave the ambiguous message ambiguous, do not send the clarifying follow-up, and find out that it resolves.

Be sceptical of this module: If social fear is your primary difficulty rather than a facet of general worry, dedicated CBT for social anxiety disorder has a stronger and more specific evidence base than this programme.

What to actually do

Stop the post-mortem — Notice the replay starting, name it, and postpone it. It is not learning — a replay that produces no action is brooding.
Go without the reassurance question — Do not ask whether it was fine. Predict the discomfort, sit with it, record how long it actually lasted.
Leave ambiguity alone — A short reply is not evidence. Practise letting an ambiguous message stay ambiguous for a set period before you act on it.

The techniques this module uses

Each one is graded by how good its evidence actually is.

Worry postponement — Capture worries as they arrive, and deal with them only in a fixed daily slot.
Concreteness training — Move from "why is this happening to me" to "what exactly happened, and what is the next step".
Uncertainty experiments — Deliberately leave small things unchecked, and find out that not-knowing is survivable.

The other modules

Same process, different costume.

Anxiety about the state of the world — Climate, conflict, politics, the news
Job and career insecurity — Redundancy, restructuring, automation, performance
Money and financial anxiety — Bills, debt, savings, whether it will be enough
Social media and comparison — Feeds, comparison, being perceived, the urge to check
Health anxiety and body checking — Symptoms, searching, appointments, mortality