Behavioral experiment

In 1932, a painfully shy 19-year-old in New York named Albert Ellis set himself a challenge. For a month, whenever he saw a woman sitting alone on a bench in the Bronx Botanical Garden, he would sit down next to her and start a conversation within a minute.

By his own account, he approached about 130 women. Some got up and left, but around a hundred talked with him. One agreed to a date and then didn't show up. But the disaster he had predicted never came, and his fear faded. Ellis became a psychologist and founded rational emotive behavior therapy, one of the forerunners of CBT.

If you never speak up because "everyone will think I'm stupid", you never find out whether they do. The fear stays exactly as strong as it feels.

A behavioral experiment treats the fear as a prediction. You write down exactly what you expect, try something small and safe, and compare what happened with what you predicted. The aim isn't to prove you're brave. It's to gather evidence.

Two things make an experiment work. The prediction has to be specific enough that you could tell if it was wrong: "people will roll their eyes" can be checked, "it'll be awful" can't. And you have to drop your safety behaviors, the small things you do "just in case", like rehearsing every word or staring at your notes. Otherwise, when nothing bad happens, you will credit the safety behavior instead of learning the fear was wrong.

Rosa hasn't made a phone call in months. She texts or emails instead, even when it takes days. She believes that if she calls anyone she doesn't know well, she will stumble over her words and they will hang up annoyed. When she has to call, she writes out a full script first and reads it word for word. Her dentist's office only books appointments by phone, and she has a toothache.