If you want to know how to improve self confidence in social situations, you’ll love this article.
You walk into a room. Everyone already seems to be mid-laugh with someone. Your hands don’t know where to go, your brain is drafting an opening line and then deleting it, and part of you is already planning the exit.
That feeling is common. It’s also, in large part, built on predictions that turn out to be wrong. Many of the studies in this list land on the same finding from different angles: we expect social moments to go worse than they actually do. Confidence grows when you collect enough evidence against those predictions, one small interaction at a time.
Below are 22 things you can do to make that evidence pile up faster, each tied to a named study or survey. Some are tiny. A couple are uncomfortable. If you’d like the wider toolkit after this, our guide on how to improve social skills is a good companion.
1. Start with small, low-stakes chats
Don’t begin with the networking gala. Begin with the barista.
Low-stakes chats are practice reps without the pressure. In 2022, Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney published a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that turned talking to strangers into a game. They gave 286 students at universities in the US and the UK a five-day scavenger hunt on a phone app, with 29 tasks such as finding someone drinking coffee. One group had to talk to the person they found. The other group only had to observe them. By the final day, the talkers felt less awkward and more confident, and they expected rejection less. The change held for at least a week afterwards. One honest caveat: the sample was university students, and some outcomes were self-reported.
What’s encouraging is how gradual the shift was. Nobody had a breakthrough. Their beliefs just moved a little each day.
Start small: today, say one sentence more than you need to. Ask the cashier how their shift is going, or tell the person next to you at the bus stop that you like their umbrella. If you want openers that don’t feel forced, here’s how to be good at small talk.
2. Assume people like you more than it feels like they do
After a conversation, most of us run a quiet review. Did I talk too much? Was that joke weird? The verdict is usually harsh.
It’s also usually off. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark called this the “liking gap” in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science. The mechanism goes roughly like this. During a chat, your attention is busy with your own performance: what you just said, what you’ll say next. That leaves little room to notice the other person’s signals of interest, and when the researchers looked at video recordings, those signals were there. People simply missed them. So you finish the conversation with incomplete data, fill the gaps with self-criticism, and conclude you were liked less than you were. Among first-year students sharing dorms, the gap lasted for months. Clark, a psychology professor at Yale, said people seem “too wrapped up in their own worries” to read the room accurately.
The researchers describe this as a systematic misjudgement. The idea that it holds back new friendships is their reasonable hypothesis rather than something they proved directly. A later study by Wolf, Nafe and Tomasello (2021, Psychological Science) found the same gap in children older than five, which suggests it starts early.
Next time you leave a conversation feeling flat, assume your estimate is low and adjust it upwards before you decide anything. If that inner critic is loud in other areas too, read about how to stop underestimating yourself.
3. Remember the spotlight is dimmer than you think
You spilled a drop of wine on your shirt. You said “you too” when the waiter told you to enjoy your meal. It feels like a neon sign.
The numbers say otherwise. In a classic study published in 2000 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky had students put on a T-shirt with a famously uncool face on it (Barry Manilow) and walk into a room of peers. The wearers guessed that about 46% of the room would notice the shirt. The real figure was about 23%. Half of what they feared. Follow-up work by Savitsky, Epley and Gilovich (2001) and by Gilovich, Kruger and Medvec (2002) extended the idea to failures and embarrassing mishaps. These are old studies, flagged as such, but they’re where the “spotlight effect” comes from.
A quick experiment: the next time you make a small slip, write down how many people you think noticed. Then, later, casually ask a friend who was there. Collect a few of those comparisons and the alarm starts to quieten.
4. Drop your safety behaviours
Safety behaviours are the little crutches you lean on when you’re anxious. Gripping a drink so your hands have a job. Rehearsing sentences in your head. Avoiding eye contact. Checking your phone so you look busy. Asking question after question so nobody asks about you.
They feel protective. They aren’t. In a preregistered study published in July 2025 in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, Talia Shechter Strulov and Idan Aderka of the University of Haifa followed 108 single adults aged 18 to 33 for three weeks. Half had social anxiety disorder. Every day, participants logged their dates and other social interactions. Everyone used more safety behaviours on dates than in other situations, but the 2025 Haifa diary study on safety behaviours during dates found the jump was about three times larger for the socially anxious group. Using them was linked to more negative emotion, and that link was roughly twice as strong for those participants. Safety behaviours were not linked to feeling more positive. Because it’s a diary study, it shows an association rather than proof that the behaviours cause the bad feelings.
Your move: pick one crutch you rely on and leave it out at your next event. Put the drink down. Let your arms hang. Some of those defensive postures are covered in our piece on how to improve body language in communication.
5. Point your attention at the room, not at yourself
Anxiety turns your attention inward. You start monitoring your heartbeat, your voice, the heat in your face.
That inward focus does damage in a specific way. A 2025 scoping review in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders by A. J. Flynn and K. L. Yoon pulled together research on “post-event processing”, the habit of replaying a social event afterwards in painful detail. High self-focused attention during a social situation predicted more of that replaying and higher social anxiety. Follow the chain. When you watch yourself, you build an image of how you come across from internal sensations (a racing heart feels like visibly shaking). You leave with that distorted picture. Then you replay it, and the review found that replaying makes anxious memories more negative and more intense. The next invitation looks worse because of a memory that was skewed from the start. Most of the evidence behind this chain is correlational, so treat it as a strong pattern rather than settled cause and effect.
Breaking it at the first link is the practical part. During your next conversation, give your attention a job: notice the colour of the other person’s eyes, the exact words they use, one detail about the room. Every second spent there is a second not spent auditing yourself.
6. Show you’re open to talking
A lot of people at any given event want to talk. They’re just waiting for permission.
One recent field experiment put numbers on this. Ruo-Ning Li, Iris Lok, Säde Stenlund and Elizabeth Dunn, writing in Social Psychological and Personality Science (published online May 2025), had a researcher sit in an outdoor seating area on a university campus with a sign on a plate. Sometimes it said she was happy to chat. Sometimes it said she preferred not to. Sometimes it was blank. Across 563 participants, the 2025 field study on explicit social signals found that 56% made a new connection when the plate invited conversation, compared with 41% with the blank plate and 20% when it signalled solitude. Conversations under the inviting sign were also longer and deeper.
| Signal on the plate | Made a new connection |
|---|---|
| “Happy to chat” | 56% |
| No signal | 41% |
| “Prefer not to talk” | 20% |
There’s a catch worth knowing. The effect came almost entirely from people who already wanted to connect (about three quarters of the sample), and the authors estimate that signals help only when at least half the people around are open to it. You won’t carry a sign, but your face and posture send one. Headphones in and eyes down reads like the “prefer not” plate.
Test it this week: at your next gathering, take your headphones out, keep your phone pocketed and hold eye contact for a beat longer than usual when someone glances over. Our guide on how to make eye contact without staring helps if that part feels awkward.
7. Ask follow-up questions
If you freeze because you don’t know what to say, relax a little. Great lines aren’t required. Decent questions are.
In 2017, Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino published a set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looking at live conversations, online chats and face-to-face speed dates. People who asked more questions were liked more, and follow-up questions (the ones that build on what the other person just said) did the most work. Speed daters who asked more follow-ups were more likely to get a yes for a second date. The reason seems to be responsiveness: a follow-up proves you were listening. Oddly, people didn’t predict that asking questions would make them more likeable. The paper later received a correction after an audit found minor reporting errors, and the authors confirmed the conclusions stood.
Next time, do this: when someone tells you something, ask about the last thing they said. “You moved here for work?” becomes “What surprised you most when you got here?” And let them finish before you jump in; our tips on how to stop interrupting people when they talk are useful here.
8. Put your phone out of sight
Your phone looks like a shield. It works more like a wall.
Think about what happens step by step. Even an idle phone on the table pulls part of your attention. Your partner sees that split attention and reads it as lower interest. They hold back a bit. You notice them holding back and take it as proof that the conversation is going badly. Confidence drops, and the phone becomes even more tempting. Shalini Misra and colleagues tested the first links in this chain in a 2016 study in Environment & Behavior: they observed 100 ten-minute conversations between pairs of strangers in cafés around Washington, D.C. When a phone was on the table or in someone’s hand, people felt less connected and believed their partner was trying less to understand them. A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Nie Ni and colleagues, covering 52 studies and almost 20,000 people, found that “partner phubbing” (snubbing someone for your phone) goes along with lower intimacy, responsiveness and relationship satisfaction. Most of those studies were cross-sectional, so they show a link rather than proof of cause. The café study is closer to an experiment, but it’s older and modest in size.
Leave the phone in your bag, not face down on the table. Face down still counts as present.
9. Give the compliment you’re holding back
You notice a great jacket, a sharp point in a meeting, a nice laugh. Then you swallow the comment because it might be weird.
It probably wouldn’t be. Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns ran five studies, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2021, on what happens when people give compliments. Givers consistently underestimated how good recipients would feel and overestimated how uncomfortable they’d be. The cause of the misprediction was the giver’s own anxiety and worry about saying it well. Neutral observers predicted the reactions accurately. And the givers themselves felt better afterwards than they’d expected to.
That last part matters for confidence. A compliment is one of the easiest ways to start a positive exchange, and it shifts attention from you to the other person.
Give it a go: say one specific, sincere compliment out loud today. “That was a really clear explanation” beats “you’re great”. For more ways to make warmth a habit, see how to be friendly and kind.
10. Go a little deeper than small talk
Small talk has its place. But if every conversation stays at weather-and-commute level, you never get to the part where people actually connect.
Think of a cold swimming pool. Standing on the edge, you dread the plunge far more than you’ll mind the water thirty seconds after you’re in. Deeper conversation works similarly. In 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2021, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that conversations with strangers on meaningful topics were less awkward and more enjoyable than people expected. When participants had both a shallow and a deep conversation, most had predicted they’d prefer the shallow one. Afterwards, most preferred the deep one. People also underestimated how interested strangers would be in going deeper.
Where the analogy breaks: the pool is the same temperature for everyone, while a conversation depends on the other person. Some people won’t want to go there, and that’s fine. The research says the gap between dread and reality is real on average, not that every exchange will click.
Here’s a simple way in: swap one standard question for a slightly bigger one. Instead of “What do you do?” try “What’s the best part of what you do?” More ideas live in our guide on how to have good conversation with anyone.
11. Admit something real
Polished people are impressive. Slightly unpolished people are easier to like.
The data on this is striking. In a 2023 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kardas, Kumar and Epley ran 12 experiments on how people expect others to react when they reveal something negative about themselves. Revealers consistently expected harsher judgement than they got. Recipients rated them as more honest and trustworthy than the revealers predicted, across relationships from strangers to romantic partners. In one experiment, when participants were told they probably wouldn’t be judged harshly, 92% chose to come clean about a lie, compared with 56% of those who weren’t told. Expectation changed behaviour by a wide margin.
That research was about secrets and negative information in general, not specifically about admitting nerves, so take this as a sensible extension. Saying “I’m honestly a bit nervous at things like this” often lowers the tension for both of you. As item 15 shows, you’re rarely the only one.
At your next event, try one small honest admission early on. Watch what the other person does with it.
12. Build a fear ladder
Avoidance is the engine of social anxiety. Every time you skip the party, you feel relief, and your brain learns that skipping was the right call.
Exposure, facing the feared thing in graded steps, is the standard way to reverse that. A meta-analysis by Damla Kuleli and colleagues, published in the Journal of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy in 2025 (accepted February 2025), pooled eight randomised controlled trials with 480 participants across social anxiety and specific phobias. Both virtual reality exposure and real-life exposure produced moderate reductions in symptoms (Hedges’ g of about −0.79 and −0.85), and the two approaches performed about the same. The authors flag real limits: only eight trials, and many with a high risk of bias.
A ladder makes exposure manageable. You don’t jump to the top rung.
Build yours tonight. Write down ten social situations ranked from mildly uncomfortable (asking a shop assistant a question) to genuinely scary (giving a toast). Do the bottom rung this week, and stay in each situation until the anxiety starts to fade on its own, rather than leaving at its peak.
13. Breathe out longer than you breathe in
Sometimes the problem isn’t your thoughts. It’s your body running hot before you’ve said a word.
David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford Medicine, describes anxiety as self-reinforcing: you notice the physical signs of worry, your brain concludes something is seriously wrong, and the worry grows, “like a snowball rolling downhill”, as he told Stanford Medicine magazine in 2023. His view is that controlled breathing can interrupt that loop. He co-led a study with Melis Yilmaz Balban and Andrew Huberman, published in Cell Reports Medicine in January 2023, in which 111 volunteers did five minutes a day of either a breathing exercise or mindfulness meditation for a month. All groups reported less anxiety. “Cyclic sighing”, with its long exhale, produced the biggest daily mood gains. It’s one study, in general volunteers rather than people with social anxiety, so think of it as a useful tool and not a cure.
Practise it now, before you need it. Breathe in through your nose, then take a second, deeper breath to fill your lungs as fully as you can, then let it all out slowly through your mouth. Repeat for a few minutes. Once it’s familiar, a couple of rounds in the bathroom before a party can take the edge off. Our list of ways to calm your nervous system has more quick resets.
14. Relabel your nerves, but keep your expectations honest
You’ve probably heard the trick: instead of telling yourself to calm down, say “I’m excited.” The idea comes from a 2014 study by Alison Wood Brooks that found people who said this before a speech felt and performed better.
A newer replication adds nuance. In June 2025, Michelle Poynter and Marcia Smith Pasqualini published a direct replication in Psychology of Language and Communication. Participants said either “I am excited” or “I am calm” before giving a short, stressful speech. The self-reports matched the original: the “excited” group felt more excited. But independent observers saw no difference in how persuasive, competent or confident the speakers were, and an indirect measure of anxiety showed no change either. So relabelling seems to shift how the moment feels to you. It didn’t make anyone visibly smoother.
That’s still worth having. Feeling like you’re excited rather than scared can make walking in easier. Just don’t expect a single sentence to do the work that practice does.
Use it as a door-opener. Say “I’m excited” on the way in, then rely on items 1, 7 and 12 to do the heavy lifting.
15. Look for the person standing alone
Everyone else at the party looks comfortable. That’s what it feels like, anyway.
It isn’t accurate. In the Gallup World Poll results published in May 2025 (covering 2023 and 2024), 18% of US adults said they had felt lonely for a lot of the previous day. Among US men aged 15 to 34 the figure was 25%, higher than the OECD median of 15% for young men. As a rough illustration only: in a room of 30 adults, that suggests around five people who felt lonely yesterday. Some of them are at your event, wishing someone would come over.
This changes your job. You’re not trying to break into a tight circle of confident people. You’re looking for the person by the snack table who is also checking the door.
Next party you go to, walk up to whoever is on their own and say something simple, like “I don’t know many people here either.” You’ll probably make their evening easier, and theirs will make yours easier. If you want to do that well, read how to show empathy to someone.
16. Join a group built around doing something
Unstructured mingling is the hardest social format there is. A shared activity is much kinder to nervous people.
The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection released its report in June 2025. It estimates that loneliness affects 1 in 6 people worldwide and is linked to more than 871,000 deaths a year. Among the steps it recommends for individuals: join a local group, volunteer, greet your neighbours and put your phone away during conversations. Groups built around an activity (a running club, a choir, a pottery class, a pub quiz team) solve the “what do I say?” problem for you. The task gives you something to talk about, and silence is normal because everyone is busy with the thing.
Pick something you’d enjoy even if you talked to nobody. That takes the pressure off the social part.
This week: find one recurring group near you and sign up for a single session. Recurring matters, and the next item explains why.
17. Keep showing up to the same places
Confidence with strangers is one thing. Confidence with familiar faces is easier, and familiarity takes hours.
Jeffrey Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas, put numbers on that in a 2018 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. In a sample of 355 adults who had recently moved and were looking for friends, it took around 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close friend. A second study following 112 first-year students pointed the same way. Time spent hanging out counted for much more than time spent working side by side.
The lesson for nervous people is kind of comforting. You don’t need to be dazzling in one evening. You need repetition. The fifth time you see someone at the climbing gym, the conversation is easier than the first, and it’s easier because of the hours, not because you suddenly became more charming.
Choose one place you’ll return to weekly for the next two months, and treat the early awkward visits as an investment.
18. Volunteer
Volunteering gives you a role, a reason to be there and a built-in script. For people who feel exposed in open-ended socialising, that structure helps a lot.
A randomised controlled trial in Hong Kong tested this directly. Dannii Yeung and colleagues, publishing in The Lancet Healthy Longevity in early 2025, recruited 375 lonely adults aged 50 to 70. Those assigned to volunteer were trained for six weeks, then spent six months making supportive phone calls to isolated older people, at least two hours a week. Compared with a control group, the volunteers reported clearly lower loneliness at six months, with moderate effect sizes. Most of the benefit had faded by 12 months, except among those who kept volunteering more than two hours a week. That last finding is an association, since people who stayed may differ from those who stopped. The sample was mostly women, and older, so younger readers should treat it as suggestive.
The fade-out is the real message. Volunteering helps while you’re doing it.
One step: look up a volunteering role that repeats weekly, ideally one involving contact with people, and commit to a trial month.
19. Host something small
It sounds backwards. If you’re nervous socially, why take on the job of host?
Because the host controls the variables: the place, the size, the guest list, the activity. And because other people are more ready to say yes than you’d think. The American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2025 survey, conducted by The Harris Poll in August 2025 with 3,199 US adults and released in November 2025, found widespread disconnection:
| Felt this at least some of the time | Share of US adults |
|---|---|
| Isolated | 54% |
| Left out | 50% |
| Lacking companionship | 50% |
| Needed more emotional support in the past year than they got | 69% (up from 65% in 2024) |
Your invitation lands in that context. Jeffrey Hall’s practical suggestion, from the University of Kansas coverage of his 2018 friendship study, fits well: invite people you already know a little to do something outside the setting where you usually see them, like lunch or a drink after working together.
Your move: invite two or three people to something with a built-in activity, such as a board game night or a walk followed by coffee. Keep it small and on your turf. Being a good host is half of being charming, and most of that is just paying attention to your guests.
20. Have one quality conversation a day
You don’t learn a language by having one big conversation a year. You learn it by speaking a little every day.
Social confidence seems to work on a similar schedule. Jeffrey Hall, Amanda Holmstrom, Natalie Pennington, Evan Perrault and Daniel Totzkay ran three experiments (with 347, 310 and 250 participants) in which people were randomly assigned to one of seven kinds of quality conversation with a friend that day, or to a control group. Their paper appeared in the April 2025 issue of Communication Research (it was first published online in 2023). Those who had the conversation reported higher well-being at the end of the day, and more of these conversations went with more well-being. The average effect was small (d = 0.255), which is honest: one chat won’t transform your week. The language analogy holds on the point that frequency matters more than intensity. It breaks down in that a language doesn’t have moods, whereas your friend might be tired or distracted, so some days the rep won’t feel like progress.
A daily habit to try: call or message one friend and talk properly for ten minutes. Ask how something they mentioned last time turned out.
21. Move your body regularly
This one is less direct. Exercise won’t teach you what to say. But it can lower your baseline anxiety, which makes everything else on this list easier to attempt.
In March 2025, Peng Chen and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology pooling 10 randomised controlled trials with 514 college students. Exercise interventions reduced anxiety with a large overall effect (d = −0.83). Mind-body exercise such as tai chi showed the strongest results, and programmes of about three 50-minute sessions a week for eight weeks did best. The limits are significant. The trials measured general anxiety, not social anxiety, most participants were female, follow-ups were short and the studies varied a lot. So this is supportive evidence, not a direct fix.
There’s a bonus if you pick a group class: you get the exercise and a low-pressure social setting in one go, which combines this item with item 16. Book one class this week.
22. Keep a “went better than expected” log
Your memory of social events is biased. Not slightly. Systematically.
Flynn and Yoon’s 2025 review, the same one from item 5, describes how this works. Discounting your own performance is linked to more post-event replaying, while seeing your performance in a balanced light reduces the urge to go over it again. And the replaying itself tends to make your later judgement of the event more negative. So the sequence runs: you dismiss what went well, replay what went badly, store a darker memory and then predict worse next time. Writing down what actually went fine interrupts the first step. To be clear, the review doesn’t test a log specifically. This is a practical application of the pattern it describes, and the links involved are mostly correlational.
Before bed after any social event, write three lines: one thing that went fine, one thing the other person seemed to enjoy and one thing you’d try differently. Keep the third line practical, not cruel. If self-criticism tends to spiral for you, our article on how to stop hating yourself may help.
What to do when you slip
You will have nights that go badly. You’ll freeze, skip the party, or replay a clumsy comment for days. That’s part of the process, not a sign it isn’t working.
Three findings are worth holding onto here. First, in the Sandstrom, Boothby and Cooney scavenger-hunt study from item 1, confidence grew gradually through repetition, day by day. One bad day doesn’t erase that. Second, in the Hong Kong volunteering trial from item 18, the benefits faded when people stopped and held among those who kept going. Stopping is the real risk, more than slipping.
Third, be kind to yourself, but don’t expect kindness alone to do the job. In a randomised trial published in Internet Interventions in September 2025, Kira Borgdorf, Corina Aguilar-Raab and Daniel Holt gave 200 adults a six-session online self-compassion course. It didn’t reduce social anxiety. The comparison group, who did a generic stress-reduction course, improved slightly more, although the difference between the groups wasn’t statistically significant. The authors suggested that thinking patterns such as post-event replaying might respond better than general self-kindness. The sample was mostly young, well-educated women and the follow-up was short, but the takeaway seems fair: go easy on yourself, by all means, and then go back out, because the going back is what this list depends on.
So after a bad night:
- Write the “went better than expected” log anyway. There’s almost always one line.
- Pick the easiest rung on your fear ladder and do it within the next couple of days, before avoidance hardens.
- Don’t treat one rough event as proof about who you are. It’s one data point.
A bad social day can bleed into everything else, so if you need a reset, our guide on how to get over a bad day has practical steps. And if social anxiety is stopping you from working, studying or seeing people at all, talk to a doctor or a therapist. Structured treatment, including the kind of exposure work in item 12, has good evidence behind it.
Conclusion
Much of social confidence comes down to your predictions about how people will react to you, and the studies above keep finding those predictions too gloomy. People like you more than you think, notice your slips less than you fear and enjoy deeper conversation more than you’d guess.
You don’t need all 22 ideas at once. Pick two: one small daily habit (a low-stakes chat, a follow-up question, a compliment) and one bigger step (a recurring group, a fear-ladder rung, a small gathering). Do them for a month and see what your log says.
If you want to keep building, explore more practical guides in our Self Improvement section.
