"They'll think I'm boring": what new research says about social anxiety and being known

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from managing how you come across.

It starts before you head out. You work out roughly what you'll say if someone asks what you do. You decide which version of your weekend is interesting enough to mention. At the event itself you are doing two things at once — holding a conversation, and watching yourself hold it, checking the other person's face for the moment their attention drifts. Afterwards, on the way home, you replay the parts that went wrong. You remember the pause that went on too long and cringe. You are fairly sure you talked too much, or not enough.

Underneath all of that effort is usually a single belief, and it is a surprisingly specific one: the more of me people see, the less they will like me. So you stay pleasant and slightly out of focus. It works, in a way. It is also exhausting, and it is lonely, because being liked for a version of yourself you are carefully maintaining doesn't feel much like being liked at all.

A study published on 27 September 2026 in The Journal of Psychology is worth knowing about, because it points gently in the opposite direction.

The research

A team at the University of Bucharest — Gabriela Lavinia Niță and Violeta Ștefania Rotărescu — set out to look at something quite ordinary: how likeable a person seems as they gradually reveal more about themselves.

They recorded four university speakers, two of whom had a diagnosis of social anxiety and two of whom did not. Then 136 people watched and rated them across four stages: first just a photograph, then some general personal information, then a positive memory from school, and finally a negative experience from school. The raters also completed questionnaires about themselves, including measures of their own social anxiety and of how strongly they wanted to connect with others.

It is worth being clear about what this kind of study can and cannot tell us, and the researchers are careful about it themselves. The raters watched pre-recorded video — nobody was in a live conversation, with its interruptions and repairs and the reassurance of somebody's face responding to yours in real time. The authors also note that how physically attractive a speaker seemed may have influenced ratings on its own, that the questionnaires depend on people knowing and reporting themselves accurately, and that a survey taking close to an hour may simply have worn some raters out. The participants were Romanian university students and online raters, not Singaporeans. An interesting signal but not necessarily a settled fact.

The finding that runs against instinct

As the speakers shared more about themselves, they were rated as more likeable. That held for the speakers with social anxiety and for those without it.

And it held even at the fourth stage — the negative school experience. Sharing something that hadn't gone well didn't cost the speakers; it was associated with raters wanting to interact with them more, not less.

If you have spent years assuming that disclosure is a risk to be rationed, that should be an a ha. It suggests that the thing you have been carefully withholding may be closer to the thing that makes you easy to like. There are reasons this might be so. A person who tells you something real has, in a small way, trusted you, and trust tends to be reciprocated. Specific things are also more interesting than polished ones. "It was fine" closes a door. "It was fine, though I got the date wrong and turned up an hour early" opens one.

Even more interesting…

The raters who scored higher on social anxiety themselves gave higher likeability ratings — to every speaker, regardless of whether that speaker was anxious. The same was true of raters who had a strong desire to connect with others. The more socially anxious the judge, the more generous the judgement.

Now, a careful note, because this is where it would be easy to overreach. The study measured how anxious people judged others. It did not measure how they judged themselves. So the next step is an observation from the therapy room rather than a finding from the research — but it is one we see constantly, and this study gives it an interesting shape.

The people who are most afraid of being judged harshly are often the least harsh judges in the room. The severity they expect from others is a severity they mostly apply to themselves. When someone tells us they are certain they came across badly at a work event, the room they are imagining — full of people keeping score — rarely resembles the room that was actually there. Most of the people in it were managing their own version of the same worry.

Why knowing this doesn't fix it

If insight were enough, almost nobody would stay socially anxious, because most people who live with it can already explain it clearly. They know the fear is out of proportion. Being told so again doesn't help much, and can add a layer of feeling foolish on top.

The reason it persists is more practical. Avoidance works — just not in the way we want it to. Leaving early, keeping things light, not asking the question, having the camera off: each of these reliably reduces the discomfort right now. And each of them also removes the chance to find out that the feared thing wouldn't have happened. The prediction is never tested, so it never gets updated. That is not a failure of willpower but rather what happens when a very effective short-term strategy quietly protects a belief from ever meeting the evidence.

This is also why "just put yourself out there" is such poor advice. Exposure without understanding tends to be endured rather than learned from — you get through the event with your jaw clenched and your conclusion unchanged.

Social anxiety therapy

In practice, therapy for social anxiety is less dramatic than people expect. Much of it is ordinary conversation.

It usually starts with getting clear on the pattern: what you predict will happen, what you do to stop it happening, and what that costs you. From there the work is about testing those predictions in real situations small enough to be manageable and real enough to count — and paying attention to what actually happens, rather than to the version your memory assembles on the way home. Alongside that, there is often work on your relationship with the physical side of anxiety, the racing heart and the warm face, which is frequently more about being at war with those sensations than about the sensations themselves.

In our practice, we use approaches like CBT and EMDR, and which of them fits depends on the person and what has shaped the pattern. What we can't tell you is how long it will take or what it will lead to; that varies genuinely, and anyone who promises otherwise is guessing.

But the direction of this study is a reasonable thing to carry around in the meantime. The people you are worried about impressing are, quite often, the ones least inclined to judge you — and the part of yourself you are keeping back may be the part that would make you easier to know.

This post describes general patterns and findings from published research. It is not a substitute for individual advice. If something here sounds familiar, a conversation with a professional is a reasonable next step.

Source: Niță, G. L. & Rotărescu, V. Ș., The Journal of Psychology, reported 27 September 2026 — summary