Imagining Shyness

 Imagine this: you are about to deliver a presentation to a classroom full of your fellow school students, watched over by your teacher. Perhaps your palms are sweating, your face slightly flushed. Perhaps your heart rate has increased. Perhaps there is a tremor in your hands as you shuffle the pages of your talk, anxiously checking that they’re in the right order.

Imagine yourself imagining that everyone in the classroom is staring critically at you, waiting for you to stumble over the first paragraph. Imagine yourself standing in front of that critical audience, wishing that you were invisible. Now imagine feeling just like this every time you find yourself in a social situation with people you don’t know intimately, because you are shy.

In June this year I published a memoir called Shy (Text Publishing, Australia) in which I traced the history of my own lifelong battle with shyness. I described the intense distress this common temperament trait can cause for those of us born on the shy end of the spectrum. I spoke with psychologists who are experts in temperament theory and in social anxiety. And I re-visited painful childhood memories of grappling with an irrational fear of other human beings that has dogged me for almost five decades.

Shyness is a state you inhabit physically as well as mentally. Shyness can freeze you over and refuse to let you thaw out until you feel safe. And feeling safe can be the hardest thing, when you’re shy. But what are we shy people afraid of? Why are our autonomic nervous systems telling us there’s a hungry lion about to pounce on us, when in fact we’re just minding our own business in the corner of someone’s balloon-strewn living room?

According to the experts, shyness is just one of many temperament traits we might inherit from our parents. Shyness sits down one end of a spectrum from ‘approach’ to ‘withdrawal’. Picture a bird on an electricity wire. If you’re very shy you’re hanging around on the far left of the wire, staying away from the other birds. Every now and then you might chirp quietly at them, simultaneously hoping that they will ignore you and that they will chirp back. What you really want is to be hanging around with the other birds, but you’re afraid of them. You fear their negative evaluation and the possibility that, if you approach them, they might reject you.

Shyness manifests as social anxiety and at its most extreme, this anxiety can become a form of phobia so severe you cannot leave the house. Social anxiety usually provokes a range of physical symptoms, from blushing, trembling, sweating, hyperventilating and feeling physically stiff. It induces hyper-vigilance, a hyper-awareness of one’s physical presence in social environments, and a mental preoccupation with how one is being perceived; in other words, intense self-consciousness. In social situations, the shy person’s body can easily become caught up in a distressing feedback loop of awkwardness and discomfort.

Over years, even decades, these repeated experiences of anxiety-related distress (and the mere anticipation of these experiences) can become inscribed upon the body. In my memoir I describe shyness as a kind of poison that enters my body, a toxic elixir of anxiety that has eaten away at my digestive system so that now I can only eat what I ate as a baby – comforting, squishy, easy-to-digest foods like potato, pumpkin, rice and porridge. Anything else hurts.

I also describe a lump in my throat that used to appear every time I felt acutely socially anxious, a lump that no amount of swallowing could remove. I later discovered this constriction is aptly called ‘globus hystericus’, but at the time it felt like my own body was trying to strangle me, perhaps to punish me for my foolish fears.

And I describe the sensation of liquefaction that can accompany the experience of social anxiety, when it seems your whole body has turned to water.

My own shyness became most acute when I spent six months in a London comprehensive school as a teenager. Transplanted from my hometown of Melbourne, Australia, I felt like an alien in that environment, and making friends was almost impossible. I simply didn’t have the skills or courage to insert myself into this new school’s social cliques. In the classroom I was reluctant to speak up, even when I knew the answers, for fear of drawing attention to myself. Many long lunch hours were spent hiding out in the school library, reading books, avoiding social interactions, immersed in loneliness.

So is it possible that some of my distress could have been alleviated by my teachers? According to psychologist Barbara Keogh, the author of Temperament in the Classroom (Paul H Brookes Publishing Co, 2003), if teachers have a better awareness of individual temperament styles they can not only help their students but they can also alleviate some of their own classroom stress. Keogh uses the example of a shy teacher who may be especially understanding of a shy and inhibited child, whereas another teacher may be impatient with that child, not understanding why they are so reluctant to participate in class activities. Shy and withdrawing children may have problems, Keogh contends, when they are faced with a program with many demands for quick adaptation to different activities. Re-framing student behaviour in terms of their innate and individual temperament type allows teachers to reframe their ideas about the reasons for student behaviours.

Although I am not a psychologist, my shyness research and my own experience as a teacher of creative writing (and as a shy person) has given me some insights into how to manage shy students. If a shy child is grappling with intense self-consciousness, having to present or perform in front of their classmates may be excruciatingly anxiety inducing for them. Offering those children alternative ways to demonstrate their learning may help them to achieve better outcomes. Shy children often find it very difficult to approach others in social situations, for example in the free-form environment outside the classroom. Offering them structured opportunities in class time to interact in a more relaxed way with their fellow students (group projects for example) could facilitate better social interactions for them outside the classroom.

Teachers should try to avoid making shy students feel even more self-conscious than they already do. Trying to force them to behave like extroverts when they have inherited a shy temperament will only increase their distress. And helping students to better understand their own temperament could help them feel less socially incompetent. Since the publication of my memoir I have been inundated with emails from shy readers, thanking me for explaining their own behaviour for them, and expressing relief at the knowledge that they are not alone with their irrational fears.

Imagine this: you’re standing in front of a classroom full of fellow students who you’ve suddenly realized are not here to judge you. Your hands have stopped trembling, your face is not flushed, you don’t feel ashamed and you don’t want to be invisible. Because now you know that half of these people are probably shy too.

A version of this essay was first published in the TES in 2014.