In July 2012, years before Overcome Social Anxiety had a single published trial behind it, I made the first video we ever put online explaining what Internet CBT treatment for social phobia actually was. The goal was simple: help people notice the kind of thinking that keeps social anxiety going, because noticing a thought is the first step to being able to change it.
Social phobia, what most people now call social anxiety, involves an inflated sense of threat in social situations, an intense fear of being judged that can spill into work, relationships, and ordinary moments like eating in front of other people. At the time, the program was a 6 month course built from eight parts: cognitive restructuring exercises, mindfulness tasks, exposure exercises, education about anxiety and depression, quizzes to check understanding, motivational emails, assessment tools to track progress, and voice overs from me and my co creator Ross walking through each step.
That structure has grown a lot since then, eight published trials now instead of zero, university licenses, a second and third program. But the core idea in the video hasn't changed: help someone notice their thinking first, then give them tools grounded in decades of clinical research to work with it. This was recorded more than a decade before "AI" became a word people mostly associate with chatbots, which is worth sitting with given everything else on this blog.