It's the early hours of the morning, and your brain has decided that now is the time to relive that joke you told last night that nobody laughed at. Was it too much? Was it too rude? And why did Milo pull that face? You know you'll get no more sleep tonight as you spiral your way down what some people call "social hangxiety."
According to the philosopher Krista Thomason, this worried overthinking is caused by a conflict between two versions of ourselves. The first self is the one that you have carefully curated. It's the considered one, the edited one, the one who would never say that. Thomason calls this your self-conception, and it's how you want to be perceived. It might even be how you want to be.
And then there is a second self, a wider self, which includes everything else. It's the louder you, the looser you, the one who makes risqué jokes at 1:00 in the morning. Thomason calls this your identity, and social hangxiety is caused when your identity barges past this carefully manicured self-conception to make itself known.
Overthinking social interactions is painful for two reasons. The first is that it cracks something that we have spent a long time trying to build. We've invested so much time in creating and projecting this self, and your identity is coming along to ruin it.
And second, Thomason argues, there is a degree of shame to social hangxiety because we are aware that we are repressing and keeping away a part of our being that is perhaps more important and even more authentic. Social hangxiety is not strange, and it is not uncommon. A lot of people do it. It's when our true and more important self bubbles up and makes a mockery of this carefully curated projection we want people to see.