BY_THE_NUMBERS

The science of social anxiety: why the audience in your head is bigger than the real one

Your brain runs a script: everyone is watching, everyone can see you're nervous, and every awkward moment is being recorded. Thirty years of experiments say the script is wrong on all three counts. Observers notice roughly half of what we assume they do, felt nervousness is mostly invisible, and the things we do to hide the fear — rehearsing lines, avoiding eye contact, gripping the glass — are what keep it alive. Here is what the research actually shows.