Confidence Engineering: Or, Metacognitive Therapy For Social-Romantic Anxiety

"Have you considered just not thinking about this problem?"

[Epistemic status: I’m simultaneously convinced this is life-changing information that also has clinical validation while also suspecting that I might be a crank who should not be trusted. I’m certainly not a therapist. Caveat lector.]

Last November I attended a dating workshop because I got so stressed out around girls I wanted to date. I expected it to be exposure therapy for romantic anxiety specifically: get rejected enough times by paid models until I develop emotional calluses.

What actually happened was far stranger.

Through a series of extremely desperate psychological contortions, I accidentally achieved something like enlightenment. The models loved it. The instructor loved it. A heavily-polished CEO guy (I have no idea why he was there) congratulated me on my apparently-gargantuan balls. After a few months of integrating this experience, I no longer had either social or romantic anxiety. (See below for more detail on this process, it is my finest work.)

Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control

For months, I thought I'd discovered something bizarre and unprecedented. I gave talks. I wrote excessively long blog posts. I developed elaborate theories about approval-seeking and incompatible goal structures and then cornered people at parties to talk about them.

Then, like a week ago, I discovered a book.

Its cover is teal, featuring an abstract image of nothing in particular. It's called "Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression" by Adrian Wells, it costs fifty-five dollars, and it has a grand total of seventy reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Published 2011.

It reads like someone translated cement into prose, then translated it back into cement, then published it with no further edits. Inside this torpor-inducing tome is a therapeutic protocol describing like 70% of the mechanism I applied to myself in that dating workshop which led to me resolving my various social and romantic anxieties with attendant greater levels of romantic success.

So let’s talk about it.

The Cognitive Attentional Syndrome, Or, Your Clinical Addiction To The Illusion Of Control

PATIENT: I’ve made a complete fool of myself.

THERAPIST: How do you know?

PATIENT: I could see everyone looking at me.

THERAPIST: Do you normally check to see if people are looking at you?

PATIENT: No, it’s more like a feeling.

THERAPIST: On this occasion did you check other people or was it a feeling?

PATIENT: Now that you ask, I guess it was more of a feeling.

THERAPIST: What feeling do you use to determine if you’ve made a fool of yourself?

PATIENT: If I feel awkward and rigid, I’m afraid they can see that.

THERAPIST: So the thing you focus on is whether you feel awkward and rigid?

PATIENT: Yes, I don’t want to feel that.

THERAPIST: Are there any advantages to focusing your attention on those feelings?

PATIENT: It stops me from losing control.

THERAPIST: How much do you believe focusing on your feelings stops you from losing control?

PATIENT: If I didn’t do it things would be worse. I’m sure it helps.

Wells PhD, Adrian. Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression . Guilford Publications.

Here's the overarching theory of MCT as applied to social anxiety: when you're anxious around other people, you assume your problem is that people might reject you. But that's not your problem. Your actual problem is that you believe your job is to monitor whether they might reject you and then prevent that from happening.

The structure of social anxiety (according to metacognitive therapy) is nearly identical to obsessive-compulsive disorder:

OCD Brain: Wash hands to remove contamination → Touch the faucet/door to leave → Maybe contaminated again → Wash again → Rougher hands make you feel dirtier → More washing

Social Anxiety Brain: Avoid rejection by staying silent until you have an interesting thing to say → Have a thought → Analyze whether your thought is interesting enough → Perfect the phrasing, wait for your moment → Conversation moves on → Stay silent even harder next time

It's the same thing! You give your brain an impossible-to-verify problem (contamination / coming up with a sufficiently-interesting speech act), you try to solve it through a “safety” behavior (washing your hands / quality-controlling your thoughts), the behavior itself becomes the problem because your “solutions” had no natural stopping point (raw hands that feel dirty / never talking because you’re not sure what you say will land well ), and you still never achieve the outcome you wanted because certainty about (cleanliness / having been interesting) requires (microscopic vision / telepathy).

Wells calls this the Cognitive Attentional Syndrome. It has three parts:

1. Worry (trying to solve problems that haven’t happened yet): Spending hours thinking about things that might go wrong on your upcoming date

2. Threat Monitoring (searching for new problems to solve in the present): Constantly scanning her face on the date to see if she looks bored

3. Rumination (trying to solve problems that happened in the past): Spending hours analyzing your failures on the last date you had

In the metacognitive therapy worldview, these aren't symptoms of your anxiety. These three behaviors ARE the anxiety. Stop doing them, anxiety goes away. It's that simple and that difficult.

The Lies Your Brain Tells You About Why You Can’t Stop Torturing Yourself

Two types of beliefs are important: (1) positive beliefs about the need to engage in aspects of the [Cognitive Attention Syndrome] (e.g., “If I worry about my symptoms, I won’t miss anything important”) and (2) negative beliefs about the uncontrollability, dangerousness, or importance of thoughts and feelings (e.g., “I have no control over my mind; my anxiety could make me go crazy”).

— Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression

They come in two categories, broadly.

First, reasons that you think it’s actually good that you’re thinking obsessively about peoples’ opinions of you:

• “I need to analyze my dates to improve at them.”

• “If I don’t constantly monitor the apparent reactions of girls around me then maybe I’ll accidentally be creepy.”

• “If I don’t know for certain whether she wants to talk to me at this moment then maybe I’ll be awkward and she’ll hate me.”

• “If I ask someone out and she’s not into it maybe I’ll get cancelled on social media.”

• “If I don’t plan out this conversation then maybe it’ll suck.”

There may also be reasons you think you can’t stop worrying about other peoples’ opinions of you.

• “I can't stop thinking about this. I want to, but I can’t. This is just who I am.”

• “If I don’t chase down this thought to its conclusion then it’ll just keep popping up later. I need to finish the thought.”

• “When she chewed my out I didn’t sleep at all that night. I just couldn’t stop myself from going over it again and again. I need to stop that ever happening again.”

Both are false. You can stop, and you should because it makes you worse, not better.

The Basic Protocol: Total Ban On Reading The Room

Wells' solution is not “think more accurate thoughts” (what CBT tries) or “get rejected until you stop giving a shit” (exposure therapy). The solution is to stop doing threat monitoring, anxiety-driven overplanning, and rumination entirely.

Complete. Fucking. Ban.

Before approaching/texting/asking her out: Zero planning. No rehearsing what you'll say. No imagining her response. Walk up, open your mouth, see what comes out.

During interaction: No monitoring her reactions. No checking if she looks interested. No adjusting based on your perceptions of her comfort. No watching her face for signs of wanting to be elsewhere.

After interaction: No analysis. No reviewing what you should have said. No checking if she watched your Instagram story. That cringe moment? Let it die unremarked upon in your memory.

Now, you don’t exactly control your thoughts. Intrusive thoughts will always crop up unbidden about whatever; that’s fine and unavoidable. You do control whether you engage with those thoughts or simply let them pass unexplored and that’s what I’m talking about, here.

“But wait,” you're thinking, “if I don't monitor how I’m coming across, won't I become awkward or creepy?”

Well, this writ large is probably the toughest pill to swallow in the whole of metacognitive therapy, so bear with me:

You're Desperately Going To Want To Nuance This But You Can't

Right about now, your brain is generating extremely reasonable-sounding objections. "Surely," it's saying, "there's a difference between obsessive monitoring and basic social awareness. Surely some amount of reading the room is necessary. Surely we can find a healthy middle ground. Surely we can preserve our illusion of control over the situation in this specific instance."

Said the alcoholic: “Surely I can just have the one drink if I’ve had a really long day?”

No.

Listen to what your brain is doing right now. It's crafting sophisticated arguments for why you, specifically, need to keep monitoring your environment for threat (where in this case the “threat” is someone else having an undesirable internal experience around you). It sounds so rational! So compassionate! So mature!

This is the voice of your anxiety disorder.

Here are the "reasonable exceptions" your brain is about to propose:

"But surely I need to be sure I’m not making someone uncomfortable?" If someone's genuinely uncomfortable enough to matter, you’ll notice; and if you don’t, they'll tell you or start walking away.

"But surely I need to calibrate to different social contexts?" You already do this automatically. You don't consciously think “I'm in a library, I should whisper.”

"But what about professional situations where stakes are higher?" Your threat-monitoring apparatus makes you perform so much worse in high-stakes situations. An entrepreneur I once met told me about a fancy party where Peter Thiel said hi to her and immediately she told him “Wow, you look like shit.” (I’m told he did, in fact, look like shit; being a billionaire apparently doesn’t stop you from getting food poisoning in Dubai.) And they ended up having a great conversation! A million times better than if she carefully curated her responses to match what she thought he wanted her to say! EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS LIKE THIS.

"But I have a responsibility not to hurt people!" Perhaps, but your anxious monitoring has never prevented you from hurting anyone. It's only prevented you from being present enough to actually connect with them.

"But what if I'm different/special/extra broken?" Congratulations, you've rediscovered the exact thought every anxious person has.

Your very urge to run down these trains of thought represents your addiction to the illusion of control. Your brain can generate an infinite number of “reasonable exceptions” to the ban on rumination and threat-monitoring and worrying. That’s what the Cognitive Attentional Syndrome is. As far as I can tell from the MCT book, probably two-thirds of the therapists’ job in metacognitive therapy is to, for every single patient, via gentle Socratic questioning, help the patient reach the inevitable conclusion that these cognitive behaviors have never actually been useful in attaining their ostensible purposes and they need to knock it off. The anxious patient always believes they have good reasons, which makes sense, because that belief led them to having the anxiety disorder that they’re now seeking treatment for!

But I’m not a therapist, and I can’t lead you through gentle Socratic questioning on this topic. So instead I’ll just suggest that you are King Theodin and maybe, just maybe, you should stop taking advice from Wormtongue. “But maybe Wormtongue has a point in this case—” No! Bad! Taking advice from Wormtongue is never a solid game plan!

This will sound deranged. Like I’m asking you to perform scorched-earth warfare on a permanent and protective part of your psyche, which is understandable as a reaction because that’s exactly what I’m doing. But listen, that’s how metacognitive therapy works. That’s how it always works. And as far as we can tell, it works great.

(On a more meta-level, if you’re someone who is so excessively considerate that he has given himself an anxiety disorder, which you are because you’ve read this far, then you’re not someone who is going to be enacting boundary violations and you should chill the fuck out.)

How To Actually Stop Worrying About This Stuff

Here’s how to establish flexible control over your tendency to ruminate and worry and threat-monitor:

Situational Attentional Refocusing:

This is for when you catch yourself mid-spiral, actively monitoring her face for micro-expressions or analyzing whether a joke landed. You’ll know you’re doing this because you’re nervous as fuck. You need an emergency ejection button.

This is where you refocus your attention on… literally anything else other than threat-monitoring. The wood grain on the table. The specific shade of the wall paint. The bass line in whatever song is playing. The goal here is just to break the attentional lock that anxiety has on your consciousness so you can return to not giving a fuck.

Attention Training:

This is something therapists prescribe in cases where the person claims an inability to control their attention (as opposed to just positive beliefs about the usefulness of rumination/etc); it’s meant to develop the muscle that lets you drop rumination at will. Somewhat simplified, here’s the protocol:

Sit somewhere with multiple sounds (traffic, clock, air conditioner). Focus on ONLY one sound for 30 seconds. Switch to another. Then another. Try to hear ALL sounds simultaneously (which be feel impossible but do it anyway). That’s the whole thing, it takes like twelve minutes.

Postponement:

This is meant to train the habit of not letting yourself get hijacked by rumination/worrying in the moment, but asking you to simply schedule a time of day where you’re going to think about whatever it is.

For instance: when you catch yourself analyzing a girl’s text, say “I'll think about this at 6 PM for exactly 10 minutes.” By 6 PM you likely won't care to perform the analysis. If you do, set a timer and ruminate for that long, then stop.

The Relapse Protocol

You'll fuck this up. You'll catch yourself thirty minutes into how she feels about you as evidenced by her texting habits, or freaking out about being boring during a date. Here's what you do:

Notice you're ruminating or thinking about her opinion of you. Don't analyze why. Don't feel bad about it or create a prevention plan. Just stop. Return to cognitive blackout, and in the moment, make sure to give yourself explicit permission to not be charming or interesting or likeable.

That’s the protocol: notice and stop. Notice and stop. No analysis. No judgment. No meta-rumination. Just the beautiful, simple return to cognitive blackout. It’s okay. Wells said you could. You’re doing therapy.

Here Be Dragons: Where I Try To Write The Missing Manual For Metacognitive Therapy As Applied To Dating

Look, I keep saying I'm not qualified to give this advice, but apparently that's not stopping either of us. Onward!

So: it sounds like MCT works great in general for anxiety disorders, but there’s a lot of complexities around straight male dating anxiety that I feel need addressing to really do MCT in that context.

Approval-Seeking = Threat-Monitoring

Every time you try to get a positive response from someone for something you say, you are scanning for danger.

Think about it: You can't craft the “perfect” message without first imagining all the ways a normal message could go wrong. You literally cannot seek someone’s approval without threat-monitoring for their disapproval. It’s like trying to not think of a pink elephant while you are, at that very second, drawing a pink elephant. The entire idea is absurd. Ridiculous.

This is why “just be confident” advice is useless. You can't be confident while your entire behavioral repertoire is built around managing her reactions; it’s a contradiction in terms. Every joke you've mentally rehearsed, every “interesting” story you've prepared, every smooth opening you’ve developed, these can never be confident because they’re literally the means by which your anxiety disorder puppets your vocal cords.

People who seem effortlessly magnetic are not aggressively modeling and adjusting for possible reactions. They’re just talking.

That means you have to do some goal realignment for yourself. This, to be clear, is not specifically advocated by Metacognitive Therapy (as I understand it) since it bills itself as totally goal-agnostic and for academic reasons I don’t 100% understand academic therapists want their therapies to be theoretically “pure.” This part is actually much closer to an Acceptance And Commitment (ACT) therapy technique, where you consciously evaluate whether the implicit and explicit goals you’ve taken on are actually serving you.

Luckily, I am not an academic and I don’t care about purity; I’m just some guy with too much free time and a possibly-unhealthy obsession with this topic.

Anyway, what I’m saying is this: if you continue clinging to “this specific person must like me” as your explicit or implicit objective for the interaction then you will not be able to stop freaking out and will not be able to perform authentic confidence. The goal itself is anxiogenic— like, yes, obviously the goal of being-liked-by-this-person is impossible to perform reliably! This cannot be fixed! It can only be purged wholesale from your psyche with some new goal slotted in to take its place!

What kind of goal, you ask?

Addressing The Goal Vacuum

Well, let’s talk about the characteristics of a good, prosocial goal that will be useful to you. It should be something where you know 100% if you have done it or not. It also must be guaranteed-achievable— setting yourself impossible goals like “I must be liked” is what got you into being an anxious mess in the first place. That means we are looking for process goals, goals that are specifically about what you are doing rather than how it is being received by some other person. It should, finally, be a kind of process goal that will result in you being socially functional when executed— “always talk about the Golden Gate Bridge” would work for mitigating your anxiety but then you’ll have become Golden Gate Claude and who wants that, really.

I expect many possible goal structures would fit these criteria; what I’m found to work for myself is to execute on three priorities, in this order:

Vulnerable honesty means saying the thing you're actually thinking instead of the thing you think is safe. Not “crazy weather lately” when you're thinking “why is there a bunch of dirty clothes on your kitchen counter?” Not “oh yeah I like rom-coms” when you're thinking “Every second I’m watching a rom-com is a second I would rather be doomscrolling Twitter.” The thing that feels too unpalatable and real is the thing to say. (Scanning for this I suspect actually works for Situational Attentional Refocusing, which is sorta nifty; “scanning for whatever is true about your internal state” isn’t threat monitoring and so would breaks the attentional lock that anxiety has in the moment over your consciousness. Maybe. It feels true to me.)

Kindness is “respecting stated boundaries and not intentionally being a dick.”

Selfish impulse means when you want to ask for her number, you ask for her number. When you want to kiss her, you lean in and see if she leans back. When you're bored of the conversation topic, you change it. You act on your actual desires instead of whatever you imagine she wants you to do.

This is, in my estimation, quite close to just operationalizing “be yourself” and it works shockingly well for almost all social interactions. Because you know what's exhausting? Trying to be funny. You know what's not? Saying whatever’s top-of-mind for you and letting her decide what she thinks of it. Maybe she’ll hate it! Luckily, you’re not obligated to make her not hate it.

Problem solved!

You Can Just Replace Fretful, Anxious Thinking About Being A Creep With Simple Bright-Line Rules

I added this section because I know a lot of guys are terrified that if they stop continuously monitoring a woman’s reactions for approval then she will be uncomfortable and think he’s a creep. And, like, I get it. I, also, would like to be a positive influence on the lives of people around me.

So here’s one possible solution: four bright-line, totally unambiguous behavioral rules:

1. If she asks you to stop, stop

2. If she says she wants to leave (or starts walking away), let her

3. If she looks uncomfortable, say neutrally “You seem uncomfortable.” Then let her respond however she responds

4. Otherwise, godspeed

That's it. No mindreading required. No rumination needed.

Notice what Rule 3 does - instead of spending hours analyzing whether she's uncomfortable based on a three-minute interaction (anxiety), you just ask her (communication). This is simultaneously more respectful and less anxious. You're getting real information instead of morbid fantasies generated by your rumination machine.

“This protocol doesn’t feel like enough. Doing this still feels like it might make women uncomfortable in some instances.”

I know. You’re a deeply moral person, and this feels like moral negligence. Sacrificing womens’ comfort on the altar of, what, you being able to talk to someone you don’t know? That’s so selfish! Have we learned nothing from #MeToo?

But listen.

Any way you try and connect with others necessarily entails a risk that you will cause them to feel some kind of negative emotion. This cannot be de-risked— if you show enthusiasm of any type about someone, they'll either be extremely pleased (if they wanted that connection) or feel awkward (if they didn't).

This is the fundamental nature of human connection and the only way to avoid it is by sacrificing connection entirely. You are taking a future filled with genuinely positive connections that other people have made with you, combined with genuinely awkward and unpleasant situations, and are attempting to cull it down into a future with neither. That is the choice in front of you; there is no secret third option where you get all the wonderful relationships but none of the awkward moments.

That’s why, in spite of how it feels, you aren't actually being prosocial by constraining yourself to only situations where you are guaranteed to not make things awkward for someone; you're just pushing the emotional labor of building human connections onto others. Someone has to take the risk of reaching out, being vulnerable, and possibly misreading the situation.

When you refuse to take that risk, you're literally saying “let them do it.”

That is, in fact, deeply inconsiderate.

The Visceral Acceptance Gap

At some level, stopping yourself from threat-monitoring in the moment is going to have to involve accepting that any specific person might end up not liking you. You not being able to accept this fact sustains the CAS, and you should be able to accept it with bland equanimity.

You've been treating potential rejection like it’s death. Your brain is running the same program it would run if a tiger was stalking you. But rejection isn't death. It's someone thinking you suck. People are allowed to think you suck. You probably think lots of people suck. Statistically, it’s almost certain that at least one person in this world thinks you suck. (DO NOT START RUMINATING ABOUT THIS, EXCUSE ME, YOU ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF READING MY ESSAY, THAT IS VERY RUDE.)

When you genuinely accept — not intellectually, but in your bones — that she might hate you and you have no control over that and that's completely fine, the whole monitoring apparatus becomes pointless. Why scan for signs of rejection when you've already accepted the worst case? Why analyze her texts when you’re genuinely okay with her thinking you're a loser?

You're not hoping she hates you, obviously. You're just becoming genuinely, viscerally okay with that possibility. And paradoxically, this is when you become most attractive, because someone who's truly okay with rejection doesn’t give off the scent of neediness that girls can detect at parts-per-billion.

The True Name Of Confidence

“Confidence” is literally just default human behavior in the absence of anxious rumination and in-the-moment threat-monitoring. It’s not something you have to build up over time. If you successfully ban yourself from all the behaviors constituting the Cognitive Attention Syndrome as relates to social anxiety— if you ban yourself from thinking consciously about peoples’ perceptions of your behavior in the moment, in the future, or in retrospect, and replace your in-conversation goals with process goals totally under your control— you have now speedrun social confidence. There is no second step. This first step is, alas, somewhat difficult, thus the rest of the MCT therapeutic modality.

(This is obvious when you think about it. Alcohol makes people more extroverted and confident because it temporarily damages your brain’s ability to perform ruminative loops and monitor for threat. Alcohol is literally low-grade poison, and that’s why we drink it. Really I’m just saying that you can accomplish the same ends directly without the hangover and liver damage.)

Anyway, Adrian Wells buried the lede: what he truly did with MCT was build a therapeutic methodology that (perhaps after bolting on one or two warranty-voiding aftermarket modifications) can make you genuinely confident and genuinely self-possessed.

Fifty five bucks on amazon, you’re fucking welcome.

Summary Diagram Because Why Not

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FAQ

Q: What if I'm a special, extra kind of broken where I can't function without rumination and explicitly planning out social encounters?

First, you're probably not, and second, even if you were those behaviors weren’t helping you. You’re equally nonfunctional as you would be otherwise, except with more stress.

Q: Should I see a therapist about this?

Probably. Make sure they’re trained in MCT.

Q: Wait, are you actually advocating metacognitive therapy as a galaxy-brain strategic move to become attractive to girls via the mechanistic generation of authentic confidence?

Yes.

Q: Isn't that technically inauthentic?

Listen, I'm not a philosopher.

Q: Oh ho, but isn't banning approval-seeking to get girls’ approval itself an instance of--

OH MY GOD I DON'T CARE