As a survey reveals as many as half of people say they are shy, are we losing our ease with face-to-face communication?
The party was packed, and a group of women I knew were in a corner, laughing. Arriving on my own, I wanted to walk over and say hello but a nagging voice in my head stopped me. What if my sudden presence killed the conversation? What if – God forbid – the reason they were laughing in the first place was because they were guffawing about me?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, shyness elicits a "feeling of being nervous or embarrassed about meeting and speaking to other people". But precisely why so many of us are afflicted, and how it manifests, is altogether more complex. Psychologists also believe that the growth of social media could be contributing to a shyness epidemic. Now we're much more likely to communicate online than in person, the confidence we develop through face-to-face interaction is in ever-dwindling supply.
Indeed, while shyness might conjure up a stereotype of someone staring at their feet and blushing, some of the world's most famous personalities, from Nicole Kidman to Johnny Depp and Britney Spears, admit they suffer.
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