How Artificial Intelligence Has Helped Me Overcome Social Anxiety
Many of you can think of a time when you had to stand up to give a presentation and it hits you. Sweaty palms, shaking knees, trembling voice. Your mind goes numb. The world spins. You forget what you want to say.
Now — imagine this reaction happening every single time you have to send an email.
For those of us with social anxiety disorder, this tends to be a frequent occurrence. Social anxiety disorder is an anxiety disorder caused by fear of being negatively assessed and judged by others. It can happen in a wide variety of situations and contexts, but some common places include going to work or school, parties, or interacting with strangers. In my case, one of those scenarios is right in front of the computer — sending emails.
Fear of Sending Emails
When I was in college, I began to experience intense anxiety surrounding sending emails, especially when I had to email a professor, TA, or anybody who could judge my email writing. As a result of this intense anxiety, I began to avoid responding to and writing emails completely. Sometimes, it would take me more than a month before I would gather the courage to send a sentence-long email responding that I had read and received the email. While I knew that this behavior (avoiding responding to emails) was extremely unprofessional, the anxiety I felt in having to write an email was even greater. So, I did what I knew was easiest — avoid this situation at all costs.
To bypass the anxiety, Gmail would do the thinking for me.
Enter, Predictive Text
When Gmail first rolled out its predictive text feature, it made composing emails much easier. No longer did I have to spend hours thinking about the same questions over and over again. Do I address this email to Professor So-and-So? Doctor So-and-So? Do I use their first name? Do I begin with Hello, or Dear, or Hi? Like flipping a coin, I trusted in the all-faithful feature in Gmail to lead the way. If I was unsure of how to continue the email, I would begin writing the first word in the intended sentence, and just like that — I didn’t have to worry about what I wanted to write. To bypass the anxiety, Gmail would do the thinking for me.
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Despite this wonderful feature, doubts and fears still lingered in the back of my mind. What if my professor didn’t understand the message I wanted to get across? What if I misspelled a word? What if my email didn’t make sense? I slowly transitioned from avoiding email writing at all costs to spending hours re-reading the intended message to ensure that it was as professional, clear, and grammatically correct as possible. Still, I struggled to respond to emails, afraid that my writing would be seen as too informal or childish.
Gmail, Meet Grammarly
I jumped on the Grammarly bandwagon relatively late. Many of my friends used the app throughout our grad school years, but I feared that my spelling and/or grammar skills would regress if I relied on grammar correction too frequently (Note: It has not —but I do have (4) premium writing errors staring back at me as I am currently writing this piece).
While most see Grammarly’s usefulness as a grammar correction tool, many more of the Beta and extra features are what has been helpful to me in my email writing. Features such as tone detection (Does this email sound professional? Am I getting to the point in this message? Do I sound overly enthusiastic today?) and clarity detection have helped immensely in my email writing — in addition to the ever-useful grammar correction tool.
An Easy Task, Right?
In a recent business email I wrote, what would’ve previously taken hours to days of anxiety-provoking overthinking, overanalyzing, and re-reading took me at most 5 minutes to write and send out with just a few keystrokes, Tab, and a few clicks of my mouse button. The tone detection on the Grammarly extension also indicated that my email was formal and to the point. There was no room for anxiety or fear to set in.
For the first time, I have discovered a way to use artificial intelligence as a type of “exposure therapy” to decrease and overcome social anxiety. The use of artificial intelligence in writing may help people with social anxiety in certain settings, but I strongly believe the applications of AI are endless. Even if AI does not take away anxiety completely, we’ve already made incredible progress, especially if we can use AI to help individuals get through life just a little bit easier.
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