"The dread is telling me how bad it will be"

By Thursday the dread was strong, and you took its strength as a forecast. If you felt this bad on Thursday, the evening itself was surely going to be dreadful. It seems a fair inference, but the research doesn't support it.

Start with what the dread is made of. Hendrik Hinrichsen and David Clark interviewed people with high and low social anxiety about what goes through their minds before a social event. The anxious group did particular things. In line with Clark's earlier account, these included dwelling on how it might go wrong, recalling past failures, and picturing how they'd look to others. In a second study the researchers asked people to do exactly that kind of thinking before giving a speech, while others did a distracting task. The people who did the anxious kind of thinking stayed more anxious through the wait, and their anxiety peaked higher during the speech. This happened whether they were socially anxious people or not.

So the mental rehearsal you did from Monday to Thursday wasn't a preview of Friday. It was producing the dread. Anyone who spent four days picturing themselves blank and blushing at the edge of a group would feel dreadful by Thursday, whatever the evening was going to be like.

The second piece of evidence is about how well people predict their own enjoyment. John Zelenski and colleagues ran five studies on this. Earlier research had found that people generally enjoy behaving sociably, meaning talking, joining in and being a bit bold, and that this holds for introverts as much as for extraverts. Zelenski's team asked people to predict how they'd feel, then had them do it. Introverts predicted less pleasure and more negative feeling and self-consciousness than extraverts did.

Then both groups went ahead, and the introverts enjoyed it about as much as the extraverts. They'd been wrong about themselves, particularly about how self-conscious and bad they'd feel. The researchers suggest this may be why introverts don't act sociably more often. They overestimate costs that don't materialise.

These were laboratory tasks, and a task in a lab isn't a fortieth birthday party. I wouldn't lean on the detail. But the direction matches what people with this habit report when they do go to something. They'll say it was all right, or that they don't know why they'd got so worked up.

Here's a way to test it on yourself, which will come back in chapter 17. Before an event, write down a number from nought to ten for how bad you expect it to be. The day after, write down how bad it was. Do it five times. I expect the second number to be lower than the first most times, often by a lot. If it is, you'll have your own evidence that the dread isn't a forecast. It tells you how much rehearsing you've done.