Rung 1 · Graded exposure
Pause in the doorway
Before you enter any room tonight, stop for one breath outside the door. Drop your shoulders, lift your eyes, and go in slower than the nerves want.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
Hurrying through the doorway is the smallest version of the thing you do everywhere else: get the frightening moment over with. It works for a second and keeps the fear intact for next time. Slowing down is the whole exercise.
What it buys — This is the cheapest rung on the ladder and it costs you nothing but a breath. It is also the one you will use before every rung above it.
In the cognitive model of social anxiety, rushing through the feared moment is a safety behaviour: it lowers the fear now, keeps it alive for next time, and turns attention inward exactly when it should be on the room.
What it cannot show — A theoretical model rather than an experiment. It organises what clinicians observed and has shaped the treatment of social anxiety ever since, but the individual mechanisms in it are not each tested by this paper — and it was written about diagnosed social phobia, while this academy applies it to ordinary shyness.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under. A doorway should be a doorway before you ask anything harder of yourself.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 2 — Eye contact with three strangersSource
Clark & Wells (1995). A Cognitive Model of Social Phobia. In Heimberg et al. (eds), Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment.
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 01 of that lesson.