Why staying in seems sensible

I don't want to start by telling you to pull yourself together. People have probably said something like it to you before, and if it worked you wouldn't be reading this. The reasons for staying in are real ones.

The nerves are unpleasant. Nobody who hasn't had them understands how physical they are. There's the weight in the stomach, the dry mouth, the heat in the face, the mind that empties at the moment you need it. Wanting to avoid that is as reasonable as wanting to avoid a headache.

You may be tired. After a week of work, an evening of conversation with people you half know is an effort, and home is restful. Plenty of people without this habit feel the same on a Friday.

Some events are dull. I won't pretend every leaving do is a delight. You can stand in a loud pub for two hours and come home having had four conversations about commuting.

And a single refusal does very little harm. There's good evidence on this. Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk ran a series of studies on declined invitations. They compared what the person declining expected with what the person who'd invited them felt.

People who declined consistently overestimated the damage. They thought the inviter would be more annoyed and more hurt than the inviter was, and less likely to ask again. Inviters, it turned out, give more weight to whatever was going on in the other person's head, and less to the bare fact of the no, than invitees expect. So if you've been tormenting yourself over each excuse you've sent, you can ease off. One no is forgiven easily.

That finding cuts two ways for this book, and I'd rather be open about it. It means you don't need to go to things out of fear of giving offence. That's a different habit, and a different book. It also means the cost of this habit isn't in any one refusal. It's in the pattern, and in what the pattern does to you. That's what the next two chapters are about.

I think staying in is trying to meet four needs, and this list is mine. You want to stop feeling the dread. You want to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of people. You want to rest. And you want to spend your time somewhere you can be yourself.

All four are reasonable. My argument is that the habit doesn't deliver them. The dread stops for one evening and comes back heavier. The embarrassment you fear is mostly invisible to others. You don't get much rest on an evening spent feeling you should be elsewhere. As for being yourself, the person who wanted to say goodbye to a colleague of three years was you as well.