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‘Anxious’ Is the New ‘Shy’
Introversion is a personality trait, not a disorder
A thirtysomething couple named Toni and Adam were visiting my psychology practice to discuss their daughter’s upcoming transition to the fifth grade. When making the appointment over the phone, Toni explained that 9-year-old Alina had always felt uneasy in social settings. Even as a baby, she’d been “fussy and tense.”
“Her social anxiety started very early,” Adam said urgently at our first in-person meeting. He and Toni went on to express concern over Alina’s reluctance to have her two close friends over on weekends. They explained that when they worked with their daughter to build confidence and talked to her about “being brave” in social situations, her nervousness seemed to only get worse.
The worried parents painted a familiar picture. Long-established research (and the conventional wisdom of most parents) tells us that newborns come preprogrammed with dispositions. We can even predict which young children will be shy based on brain wave patterns measured during infancy. Yet in the past 10 years, there’s been a shift toward using the term anxious to characterize people, both children and adults, who we might have once said were “slow to warm up” or shy.
Meanwhile, I have spent more time than I care to admit trying to help people…
