Social anxiety runs on judgment—yours, theirs, and your inner critic’s. PEP (Practical Empathy Practice) teaches three moves to stop the mental spiral and stay present.
The story
Your brain hits panic, your thoughts all race,
You want calm skills in a crowded space.
You scan for danger on every face,
Then wish you could just slow the pace.
Social anxiety runs on judgment. Your judgment of them, your guess about theirs of you, and the deluxe edition, your own inner critic doing standup comedy in your skull.
For decades I’ve helped people untangle that mess, and my strongest tool is Practical Empathy Practice, PEP, a cognitive empathy system I built to refactor the social-anxiety code.
# Problem: your brain makes up stories
You see a frown and your mind ships the whole movie: “They think I’m stupid.” That is not perception; that is speculative fiction with a terrifying soundtrack.
# Solution: PEP, the anti-spiral protocol
PEP trains three moves:
1] Observe facts without evaluating: “They’re frowning.”
2] Own your inner data: “I’m feeling tense because I need safety.”
3] Guess their feelings and needs with curiosity, not certainty.
Result: less overthinking, more present-moment bandwidth, more self-acceptance. This also plays great at work: meetings, feedback, networking, all the places your nervous system thinks are a gladiator arena.
I’ve been studying, teaching, and writing about empathy for 20 years. EmpathyBot.net is a fun example of AI doing “street empathy,” and Chapter 7 of my book shows humans how to do it on purpose.
If you want the drills, dialogues, and real-world practice, grab Chapter 7 of *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind* on Amazon.
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