Dealing with Awkwardness
Model and Interventions
Post Summary: Use self-love to break away from awkwardness and social anxiety. Improve your mental health and emotional intelligence by understanding how self-judgement and risk aversion lead to negative feedback loops.
This post introduces my model of awkwardness and the methods I’ve used to overcome it.1
It used to be a big struggle in my life - limiting my agency through excessive risk aversion. I can vividly recall a conversation where I was visibly shaking and stammering throughout - I had let the tension build to unbearable levels.
I hope that the ideas outlined in this post will help you handle awkwardness in your own life with more grace.
A Model of Awkwardness
I think of awkwardness as a feedback loop between exaggerated risk aversion & judgemental self-monitoring. The model has some support in the literature - there’s some evidence that risk aversion and social anxiety are connected. Even better, some mean researchers have shown that social judgements and increased awareness of social dynamics tend to make people feel awkward.2
The core of my model is a feedback loop, shown in this diagram:
Monitoring your actions while also judging them makes small mistakes seem bigger. While performing everyday tasks, it’s standard to make small errors every 5-10 seconds, correcting as you go.3
When you feel awkward, such small slip-ups are exaggerated. You judge yourself for making them, and “tense up” to avoid future mistakes. Going into risk avoidance leads to increased vigilance.
In this vigilant state, you notice even more mistakes - and blow them out of proportion. Your focus turns to your inner turmoil and judgement, leading to a disconnect from the things going on around you. You try to consciously execute actions that normally run on instinct.4
This set of reactions leads to increased fumbling, together with a judgemental exaggeration of any (perceived) mistakes.
Awkward spiral ahead!
The Ugh Field: Self-Judgment and Dissociation
You’re meeting up with a date. As you present yourself, you start stumbling over words, your hands sweating. ‘Why am I nervous? This is silly’, you think to yourself. As the tension increases, you notice your date staring at you, looking puzzled. You clear your throat - does it always sound this loud? - and say…
Getting sucked into a world coloured by your self-judgement is unpleasant.5 Many people respond to awkward experiences by resolving to never put themself in such a situation again - creating an ugh field around awkwardness that blocks them from thinking about it rationally.
With the root causes hidden in an ugh field, it’s easy to blame awkwardness on “the world” rather than your cognition.6 Blaming the world robs you of your power. It’s possible to mitigate and reduce the impact awkwardness has on your life, if you accept the ways your actions lead to the awkwardness feedback loop.
Opening Up and Asking for Help
One way to break out of the awkward spiral is to open up about what’s going on and ask for help. This efficiently stops the loop at the “risk avoidance” step - opening up is the opposite of avoidance.7 Other people can support you with their perspectives - usually better calibrated to reality than your awkwardness-affected one.
This requires you to have someone to open up to. I’ve previously suggested creating an action plan with a list of people you can open up to. Making such a list is a nice way to take care of your future self. You are unlikely to make a good decision when in the grip of awkwardness - risking to either clam up and suffer, or open up to the wrong person.8
Building up a habit of opening up in time prevents the spiralling from dragging you down too far.9 This is similar to conflicts - better to open up early and often rather than having complete meltdowns when things have spiralled too far.
In my last post I wrote about how I sometimes go into awkwardness with people I’m attracted to. Since then, I’ve had a phone call with one of the women that awakens this response, and told her all about it. I shared that I’m attracted to her, felt nervous about it, and went into awkwardness I had to regulate with the help of a friend.10 She enjoyed the call, was impressed with my honesty and told me that she is interested in getting to know me better.
Stop Self-Judgement - Self-Awareness & Self-Love
It’s possible to break the awkwardness spiral at the self-judgement step. Without self-judgement, there is no exaggerated risk avoidance, nor any neurotic self-criticism.
Letting go of self-judgement allows you to be self-aware, without risking awkwardness.
It’s possible to let go of self-judgement in the short term. Practically, this means letting go of counterproductive expectations and instead focusing on calming down and taking care of yourself. People generally do this once things get bad enough - going for a walk or taking a shower as a way to get out of the awkward situation, rather than trying to “fix things” while stuck in the awkwardness spiral.
Permanently letting go of self-judgement is tricky. Many people have an inner critic in their heads, running ongoing commentary and judging their every move. People without inner voices can have a corresponding feeling about themselves - a habitual scepticism and derisiveness.
This self-directed harshness often fades into the background and becomes a fixed point of reality - you can get used to most things given enough time. Many people build self-judgement into the way they operate - with self-coercion being their primary means of motivation. It’s like being codependent with an abusive partner.
Finding an empathetic stance towards yourself is a powerful way to reduce inner judgment. This is the core of self-love and non-coercive motivational systems. I first came across this idea when I read this post, and I’ve written on similar topics before:
Self-Love and Biased Thinking
At this point, you might ask yourself whether it’s a good idea to get rid of self-judgement. Maybe it serves a purpose? It could be the one thing helping you avoid confirmation bias, keeping you grounded in reality, etc.
This is some distance from the scope of this post, so I’ll quote from the less wrong post that initially motivated me to work on self-love.
I’m confident that more self-love does not necessitate less caring, because I and many others have experienced that more self-love leads to more caring. Nick Cammarata says that he has never seen people turn into jello, and that, “In fact, it usually pushes [people] far in the other direction”. This accords with the behaviourism literature (at least as summarized in "Don't Shoot the Dog"), which claims that both animals and humans are best trained by only giving them rewards and no punishments. This probably generalizes to internal rewards and punishments, which are largely learned and internalized based on how people have treated us in the past.
I’m reminded of Nate Soares’ writings on Replacing Guilt. He writes that it's you that cares about your goals, that wants to become stronger or save the world. Those things that you actually care about won’t go away with more self-love; what changes is your strategy for pursuing them. You no longer pursue things in order to feel worthwhile, but simply because you want to. Indeed, it is not self-loving to shut down those parts of you that care about things. An essential component of self-love, as I see it, is being there with and feeling fully whatever is happening for me, especially when I want things to be different.
Ending Notes & Recap
It’s possible to mitigate awkwardness by opening up and stopping self-judgement. Besides being unpleasant, awkwardness makes it hard to reason properly.
It biases your sense of risk, creating ever more exaggerated false positives the further you spiral. It creates an ugh field around itself, stopping you from thinking about situations that bring on awkwardness.
Furthermore, awkwardness makes it harder to connect with others, with risk aversion feeding into social anxiety and withdrawal. Not having a supportive social context is a mental health risk, and robs you of vital feedback.
I’m curious about your relationship with awkwardness! What strategies have you found effective in overcoming awkwardness? What do you think of my model?
Please leave a comment!
P.S: In my philosophy practice, I hold space for individuals regarding their most pressing concerns. You can schedule a session through the link below. You can read more about my practice here.
The situation described in my last post is an exception, and even then it’s far from the crippling monster it was in its heyday. It all turned out well in the end…
I learned to operate socially through psychological self-study, using theoretical knowledge to function. When I got in touch with my emotions, my social awareness made it hard to avoid anxiety and awkwardness.
Leave System 2 alone!
Your perception of the world is not neutral - your state of mind can shift your lived experience a lot.
As a stoic, I prefer to look at the things that are up to me - the inner workings of my mind:
I picked up this approach from Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly”
Right people are capable of handling emotions, have good intentions, and don’t gossip afterwards.
It is possible to handle it yourself, but this requires more skill, in my experience.
Protip: don’t expect people you are interested in to regulate your emotions.
Loved reading this, your description of the cerebral experience of social awkwardness is spot on and almost a total overlap with my own. Also appreciated all the links to further readings.
It seems like awkwardness is a form of social hyper vigilance. I think that this vigilance comes from when we don’t know what is expected of us by the other party. Those who don't experience awkwardness are those who either know or are unconcerned with not knowing what is expected of them. Thus, this understanding is mediated by our fear of rejection. You could cast this in the form of an equation: Awkwardness = Uncertainty about expectations × Fear of rejection.
When we are risk avoidant, the “threat” is not an objective reality, it is our own subjective perception of reality. In the context of the awkwardness cycle, the threat we are trying to avoid through hyper-vigilance is behavior that will negatively impact how we are perceived. Notably, we are subjectively making this distinction among the set of all behaviors that are possible to us at that moment in the social setting. That bout of stuttering, or slouched posture, or shiftiness in our gaze is not inherently a fault, flaw, or crime to ourselves. We can strive to change these things while accepting them rather than flinching from them. As discussed in the article you linked, the mental flinching is an impediment to change, not a catalyst. In the moment, while we are assessing our behavior and flinching from the ones we see negatively, we get mired in uncertainty about the self-imposed expectations on our behavior. Conversely, if we are able to accept that these behaviors are all features of our authentic self, then I believe that the threat perception and risk avoidance will too also fade. What do you think?