"I went last time and it was awful"

Sometimes the case for staying in rests on evidence. You did go to the last one. You said something clumsy to someone's husband, there was a silence, and you went home and lay awake going over it. You've thought about it most days since. So you conclude that evenings like that are awful for you.

Two things are mixed together in that memory. One is the evening, and the other is the going-over, and the going-over has done most of the damage.

Rachman and colleagues collected basic information on this by questionnaire. They found that going over an awkward or embarrassing social event afterwards is common. The more socially anxious people were, the more of it they did. The memories kept coming back uninvited and got in the way of concentrating. And as chapter 4 mentioned, people who did more of it also avoided similar situations more.

Consider what the going-over does to the record. The evening lasted three hours. You had perhaps six conversations, most of them perfectly pleasant. One contained a clumsy remark and a pause of a few seconds.

In the weeks since, you haven't replayed the three hours. You've replayed those few seconds, perhaps a hundred times. Each replay makes them more vivid and crowds out the rest. By now your memory of the evening is the clumsy remark and not much else. If someone had filmed the evening, you wouldn't recognise it from your memory of it.

Then remember chapter 7. The remark was almost certainly less noticeable than you think, and the husband was almost certainly kinder about it than you imagine. He's very unlikely to have thought about it again.

There's a practical fix, and it's about getting in first. On the night, before you go to bed, write down three things that happened at the event. They should be plain facts and not judgements. "Talked to her brother about his allotment. Laughed at the story about the hire car. Left at half nine." Then write your number out of ten. This takes two minutes, and it gives your memory a fuller record before the going-over can edit it down to one moment. When the clumsy remark comes back at two in the morning, you have something to put beside it.

I should be fair about this. Some evenings really are bad. You can be stuck with a bore for an hour, or the friends you expected may not come, or someone may be rude. That happens to everybody, confident people included. A bad evening tells you about that evening. It doesn't tell you about parties in general or about you. If you'd had a disappointing meal at a restaurant, you wouldn't conclude that you're unfit to eat out.