To give a more realistic insights into what shyness really is and the experiences of people who have been in this situation, we'll be using relatable scenarios with names in this article.
The feeling took Tunde straight back to the days he spent volunteering in the flood-hit communities along the Niger Delta. His palms were damp. His throat had gone dry. He was breathing in short, shallow gulps, and his stomach had tied itself into a knot. But Tunde wasn't out in the creeks facing danger. He was standing in the corner of a Saturday night party in Lekki.
"For a genuinely shy person, the physical sensations are just as real as they would be in an actual crisis," explains John Owen, a lecturer at Temple University in Philadelphia. "Tunde came through one of my shyness workshops. He works in hospitality now, surrounded by people every single day, so from the outside it looks as though he's mastered it completely."
Like many mental health practitioners attached to universities and clinics across the world, Owen has noticed that shyness is pushing more and more people to seek professional support. "For some people, the world genuinely feels like a hostile, unpredictable place," he says.
Shyness may well be the most common, yet most overlooked, psychological struggle people face today. It rarely gets the attention it deserves, largely because it hides so well behind polite smiles and quiet excuses.
This kind of shyness leaves many people feeling cut off, lonely, frustrated, powerless, and constantly on edge. Deep down, the quiet cry is always the same: "If only I could connect with the people around me without freezing up."
"But shyness isn't hard to treat," John Owen insists. "It demands serious, sustained effort from the person going through it. Still, the treatment approach itself is fairly straightforward."
Regardless of which school of thought a therapist follows, the general path for treating shyness tends to look the same everywhere: relaxation, desensitisation, and then practice, practice, practice. "If you've never struggled with shyness, it's genuinely hard to grasp how tense a truly shy person can be," Owen says. "The dread. The near-panic."
Over the years, Owen has guided hundreds of shy clients through his programme. In his workshops, the first step is always teaching people how to relax.
Relaxation techniques might involve lying flat, focusing on one muscle group at a time, tensing it deliberately, and then letting it go. Picturing yourself somewhere calm and pleasant, perhaps a quiet beach in Lagos at dawn, or your grandmother's compound in the village during the harmattan season, can work just as well.
Once relaxed, Owen then asks clients to picture a situation that normally triggers their shyness. This is the desensitisation stage. "It works the same way as treating an allergy," he explains. "You introduce a tiny bit of bee venom, then a bit more each week, until eventually the sting doesn't send you into shock anymore. The truth about anxiety is that you simply cannot feel it while your body is relaxed. So once you've mastered relaxation, it becomes your life jacket as you wade further and further into deep water."
After that come simulated real-life scenarios. Clients take turns acting out situations such as making an important phone call, asking a boss for a salary increase, or inviting someone they admire out for lunch. Members of Owen's group take on different roles so everyone gets a taste of the pressure in a safe setting.
Then comes the real test, the outside world itself, though Owen makes that leap gradually. He might take his workshop group along to a church programme or community event with simple tasks like "introduce yourself to five new people" or "hold a five-minute conversation with someone you've just met." From there, participants are ready to put their contact-making skills to use on their own.
Start With a Smile: How To Overcome Shyness
There really is good news for people who struggle with shyness. Much of it can be summed up with a simple acronym, SOFTEN. S stands for smile. O is for open posture, no folding your arms or crossing your legs defensively. F is for forward lean, tilting your body or head slightly toward the person you're speaking with. T is for touch, making brief, appropriate physical contact now and then, such as a handshake held a moment longer. E is for eye contact, actually looking at the person you're addressing. And N is for nodding, showing the speaker you're genuinely following what they're saying.
At the root of most shyness lies a pattern of negative thoughts people quietly hold about themselves. One useful exercise is picturing yourself as the confident person you'd like to become, perhaps modelling that image on someone you genuinely admire. Simply practising this kind of visualisation can shift how you see yourself over time. It also helps to set aside a regular period just to reflect on the small changes you're noticing, becoming a little calmer in situations that once triggered panic.
Most counsellors working in this area encourage shy people to turn their attention outward rather than inward. Researchers have found that shy individuals often become so consumed with how they look, how they're feeling, and what they should say next that they barely notice anything happening around them. Active listening is often recommended as a way of redirecting that focus. It serves two purposes at once: it pulls attention away from self-monitoring, and it draws shy people into genuine engagement with others.
Breaking Out of Isolation
- Tell someone a joke.
- Tell someone that you care about them.
The next stage involves self-disclosure, gradually opening up about things like how you genuinely feel about your job, a memorable trip you once took, or simply sharing a joke with someone.
The obvious pushback here is, "Tell who, exactly? I'm shy. I don't even know people well enough to listen to actively, let alone open up to." Counsellors point out, however, that daily life, whether at the office, on a church committee, in a market, at the canteen, or during a mosque or church gathering, constantly puts shy people in contact with others. The isolation is usually self-imposed, sustained by habitual withdrawal. The social exercises recommended by professionals are designed to build new patterns of behaviour that break that cycle. As people grow steadily more outgoing through this process, they're eventually encouraged to tell someone, in plain words, that they like, respect, or love them.
Learning From Wider Research
Researchers who study shyness closely have found some striking patterns across different societies. One well-known study spanning eight different cultures found that on average, roughly forty percent of most populations, the United States included, describe themselves as shy to some degree.
At one major American university, growing concern about shyness among students led to the creation of a dedicated clinic built entirely around helping people overcome it. Every client who has gone through the programme has reported some form of improvement. At the start, each person lists three things their shyness stops them from doing. By the time the sessions are complete, most have managed to achieve at least one of those three goals.
The approach used mirrors the self-analysis, relaxation, desensitisation, and repeated-practice method already described. Contact-building assignments often start small, such as calling a library and asking the reference desk for a simple piece of public information. From there, clients progress to challenges like seeing how many different stories they can tell different people over the course of a week, since not everyone will find the same story equally interesting.
Freedom From Old Expectations
Shyness is never just about the individual struggling with it. It's also shaped by the people surrounding that person. Whenever someone makes a big move, starting a new school, relocating to a new city like Abuja or Port Harcourt, or beginning a new job, that's actually the ideal moment to shed old shy habits. The people who already know you have fixed expectations, and those are hard to shift. But new people don't carry that baggage. It's much easier to show up differently for someone who has no history with the old you.
One professor of speech and communications who has spent decades working with shy clients puts the success rate at around eighty-five percent. "The person who wants to become less withdrawn identifies a specific goal, and from there, we build a plan around it," he explains.
Some researchers have found that women often face additional layers of difficulty when working through shyness. Girls are sometimes rewarded early on for being shy. Teachers favour the quiet ones. Mothers often praise a soft-spoken daughter. They're told they're being sweet and well-behaved, and that praise quietly reinforces the pattern well into adulthood.
A separate long-term study looking at depression among women who were also unassertive and withdrawn set out to find whether helping them overcome shyness would also ease their depression. Social-skills training, similar to the exercises already outlined, was compared against medication and traditional talk therapy. The results showed that roughly seventy percent of participants improved substantially through social-skills training, compared to around fifty percent with medication, and forty-six percent with short-term psychoanalytic therapy.
What matters most, in the end, is that people genuinely can change. "That's really all I'm aiming for," says Temple University's John Owen. "My clients aren't going to turn into the sort of person who works a room shaking every hand in sight. But with consistent effort, they can make the most of who they naturally are, without letting shyness hold them back."
