"I'll go when I feel more confident"

This is the most reasonable-sounding form the habit takes. You're not refusing for ever. You're waiting until you feel up to it. You'll go to things again after some more rest, or some more reading, or some work on yourself. It seems sensible to get the confidence first and go to the party afterwards.

I think that's the wrong way round, and I'd like to explain why as carefully as I can, because a great deal depends on it.

Ask where confidence comes from. For any activity, it comes from having done the thing and found that you could. People who are confident drivers have driven a lot, and it went all right. They didn't feel confident on their first morning with L-plates. They felt frightened, drove anyway with someone beside them, and the confidence built up behind them as the miles did. It didn't come from reading about driving or from waiting at home until they felt ready.

Social confidence is no different. The person who walks into a room easily has walked into a great many rooms. Their ease doesn't come from a personality that they were given and you weren't. It comes from a stock of evenings that went fine, and the stock is large enough that the next evening carries no threat.

Chapter 4 described what waiting does to that stock. While you wait, the imagined bad evenings pile up and the actual good ones don't. You get out of practice, and the group moves on without you. So the confidence you're waiting for can't arrive while you wait. Each month of waiting leaves you with less of it, and you take that as a sign that you need to wait longer.

The NHS makes a related point about social anxiety in general. For some people it gets better as they get older, it says, but for many people it doesn't go away on its own without treatment. Treatment, as chapter 19 will describe, consists largely of doing the feared things in a planned way.

There's a fair objection here. It sounds as if I'm saying you have to do the hard thing while feeling unready, which is exactly what you can't face. In a way I am. But two things make it less bleak than it sounds.

The first is that you don't have to start with the hard thing. You can start with something small enough to manage while nervous. A coffee with one friend is an event, and it counts, and it adds to the stock.

The second is that you don't need confidence in order to go. You only need a willingness to feel nervous for an hour. You already have that, and you've shown it many times at the dentist, in job interviews and on first days at work. You went to all of those frightened. The rule in chapter 18 asks for the same thing and no more. The confidence will come later, after you've been to enough evenings, and you may not notice it arriving.