19 Best Books for Social Anxiety

If the thought of going to a party or introducing yourself to someone new sounds like a terrible time, you’re not alone. Social anxiety, defined by excessive fear of certain social situations and specific concerns of being negatively judged by others, can be exhausting and crippling.

While professional treatment is the best option, here are a few of the best books on overcoming social anxiety.

The Best Workbooks for Overcoming Social Anxiety

Practical workbooks offer step-by-step instructions and guidance on dealing with social anxiety, making them a great option for those who might already feel overwhelmed by the idea of tackling it. Conversely, many of these can be used alongside therapy as well.

1. The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook

This therapist-recommended book has been a must-have resource for more than 30 years. This evidence-based book can help you work through common phobias as well as deal with relapses, common stressors, and more. This guide includes relaxation techniques, new research, and information on how nutrition and mindfulness can affect someone’s anxiety. Written by a leading expert in cognitive-behavioral therapy, this go-to guide can be done alone or with therapy.

2. The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

If you continuously overthink every situation and expect the worst outcome, this book might help you break free of that cycle. It includes tips on managing your anxiety as well as your symptoms; paralyzing perfection, fear, hesitation, and more. Dr. Boyes uses clinical research and therapy tools to help readers past their “stuck” points and allow them to move beyond their anxiety.

Books for Using Mindfulness to Treat Social Anxiety

Research has shown that mindfulness, the act of being present in the moment and acknowledging your emotions, can be a promising treatment for anxiety. These books encourage using mindful techniques like meditation and guided exercise to treat anxiety.

3. The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety

This book is based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), using mindfulness techniques to help you break free of anxiety spirals and panicked thoughts. It’s not about turning anxiety “off,” rather, this strategy is about giving your emotions the space to exist, recognizing them for what they are, and moving forward with them. You can never truly turn off anxiety, but by spending time with it mindfully, as this book encourages you to do, you can make space to grow past it.

4. The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety: The 8-Week Solution to Help You Manage Anxiety

If you’ve never tried mindfulness before, this is a good place to start. Research shows that mindfulness can combat anxiety and stress, but you don’t need to meditate for 45 minutes every day to get its benefits. This workbook gives manageable, easy-to-implement prompts, guides, and practical application advice to help you with the stresses of daily life.

5. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

If you’re anxious, you’re likely stressed too. In the midst of a panic attack or anxiety spiral, taking a minute to breathe can feel impossible, but using mindfulness to combat anxiety is exactly what this book wants you to do. Originally published in 1990, this book describes Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBRS) and has continued to be a leading practice for dealing with numerous mental health illnesses, including anxiety.

6. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before by Dr. Julie Smith guides readers through ways to strengthen and maintain their mental health with mindfulness. She offers a series of coping mechanisms that promote resilience, confidence, self-forgiveness, and motivation. Whether you want to address social anxiety, tackle depression, or become more aware of the connection between physical and mental health, there will be a bite-sized entry for you.

7. First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety

Author Sarah Wilson was inspired to write this book when she read a Chinese proverb that says before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful. Its message of mindfulness resonated with Wilson and her own personal struggle with chronic anxiety. First, We Make the Beast Beautiful explores different anxiety triggers and treatments, interviewing other people with anxiety, mental health experts, healthcare providers, and philosophers, and filtering their insight through Wilson’s own experiences.

Books for Building Social Skills

If you struggle with speaking to strangers or making new friends, these books on building social skills might help.

8. The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

Contrary to popular belief, charisma isn’t innate—it’s a learned skill that takes time. The Charisma Myth doesn’t just argue that charisma can be learned: using science, research, and personal anecdotes, it gives you the tools you need to use it yourself.

9. How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

Dr. Hendriksen isn’t just an expert in social anxiety; she’s living with it herself. She knows exactly how cruel that inner critic can be, and how to silence it so you can live your fullest life. Dr. Hendriksen has devoted her career to helping anxious people by looking at the science behind anxiety and how it affects our brains in a non-judgmental and even humorous way. How to Be Yourself combines personal stories with practical advice on building confidence and overcoming anxiety by reminding you that you already have everything you need to succeed.

10. The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are

Whether you never know what to say during an awkward conversation or you struggle to make friends in a social setting, this guidebook is here for you. Chris MacLeod, the author behind the site Succeed Socially, has put together tips and tricks like learning body cues during a conversation, learning how to listen appropriately, and increasing your confidence in easy, manageable ways.

11. Screw Being Shy: Learn How to Manage Social Anxiety and Be Yourself in Front of Anyone

If you overthink social interactions and find yourself becoming shy and nervous around new people, you might have social anxiety. Screw Being Shy says there is nothing wrong with being an introvert, but society has started conflating introversion with social anxiety – and there’s a difference. Author Mark Metry crafted this step-by-step guide to show readers how to conceptualize their shyness as what it actually is – a “glitchy nervous system run by ancestral neurochemistry and other biological functions.” This guide includes over 50 scientific references and exercises at the end of every chapter that can help readers take action and build better social skills.

12. The Social Anxiety Cure: 7 Steps to Freedom from Social Anxiety 

Author Gerald Confienza says that his social anxiety followed him all throughout high school and college. He tried to trick his mind into thinking he was fine, but he was actually suffering a great deal. Then in 2010, he decided to make some personal changes on a psychological, emotional, and spiritual level. This book, The Social Anxiety Cure, is the result of that journey. Confienza invites readers into his process and evolution, teaching ways to find purpose and motivation, address past conditioning, connect with others, and find inner stillness.

Books on the Science Behind Social Anxiety

For analytical anxiety thinkers, knowing how and why our brains give us anxiety can be helpful in overcoming it. These books talk about the science behind anxiety, stress, and more.

13. Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You Into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It

Brains are a lot like frightened animals. If they perceive a threat, they will trigger a fight, flight, or freeze response. Even when there is no perceivable threat, our brains can trick us into believing there is one, and this leaves us with all the anxiety and none of the danger it’s supposed to precede. Carbonell isn’t trying to get you to stop being anxious; he just wants to help you look at why your brain is tricking you, and how you can course-correct it.

14. Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry

The brain’s actions are rooted in science. Anxiety, fear, and stress are all scientific reactions of your brain to perceived threats and distress. Psychologist Catherine M. Pittman and author Elizabeth Karle take a dive into what exactly happens to the brain when anxiety attacks so that you can actively train your brain to reconsider.

Books That Aren’t Exactly About Anxiety (But Might Make You Feel Better Anyway)

Anxiety is so tightly woven into other issues it can be hard to talk about it singularly. Hearing from others who have dealt with it, and everything it entails, can feel empowering and hopeful. If you’re feeling isolated by your anxiety, these books are for you.

15. Untamed

Glennon Doyle, for most of her life, denied that she wanted more out of life. She should be grateful, she thought, for what she had. She worked hard to be a good partner, a good mother, hoping that by being good for others she would find peace. But a chance encounter with another woman forced her to reconcile everything she had thought about living life to please others. While not directly about anxiety, Doyle’s memoir on breaking free from others’ expectations and living a life that is truly hers provides a valuable lesson on what it means to live a full life.

16. Anxiety Insights: What Gets to Us and What Gets Us Through

This book is a series of mini-memoirs about dealing with anxiety and the spectrum of mental illness it encompasses, from PTSD to depression to trauma. But most of all, it’s about understanding others’ struggles in hopes of surviving your own. If you’re feeling isolated by your anxiety, Anxiety Insights reminds you that you are not alone.

17. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

We do it without thinking. We need it to survive. Yet breathing properly, for those with anxiety, can be surprisingly difficult. While not directly about anxiety or stress, James Nestor’s research into the life-sustaining practice of breathing may be enlightening to those curious about why breathing techniques are recommended by so many therapists. By sifting through centuries of medical texts, history, psychology, and pulmonology studies, Nestor asks what does it mean to breathe properly.

18. Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety

Anxious people prepare for the worst—literally. Things Might Go Terribly, Horrible Wrong agrees. While anxiety may convince you that something will go wrong when nothing will, there is still a chance something will actually go wrong. This isn’t meant to disparage; rather, this book is about sitting with those fears, accepting them for what they are, and helping you understand that even if the worst does happen, not only will you overcome it, but you’ll likely be just fine in the process. Though this isn’t a workbook like others on this list, it is rooted in cognitive-behavioral therapy and maybe a good accompaniment to professional treatment.

19. The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

One review from HelloGiggles calls The Courage to Be Disliked, “Marie Kondo, but for your brain.” With more than 3.5 million copies sold, it artfully demonstrates the power that already exists in all of us to be who we want to be – all we need is some mind decluttering. Implementing theories from nineteenth century philosopher Alfred Adler, authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga demonstrate wisdom through five conversations, helping readers define and determine their life’s direction, freeing them from expectations, social anxiety, and past trauma.

Finding a Therapist Who Can Help You With Your Social Anxiety

Books are a great way to work on your mental health, but they aren’t meant to be a replacement for a licensed mental health professional. If your social anxiety is keeping you from seeing friends, affecting your work, or prohibiting you from enjoying life, it may be time to see a therapist.