Health & Wellness
Social Anxiety at Work Is More Common Than You Think
I built a whole career on Zoom panels and sales calls while my hands shook under the desk. Here's the social-anxiety playbook nobody hands you when you go self-employed.
I throw up before sales calls. Not every call, but enough that I keep a glass of water and a small bin near my desk like other people keep pens.
The first time I admitted this out loud, a freelance friend laughed. Not at me, but in relief. She’d been white-knuckling discovery calls for six years and assumed she was the only one. Turns out half the people I respect in this industry are running the same operation behind the camera. We just don’t talk about it because the self-employed life is supposed to be freedom, and freedom isn’t supposed to feel like dread.
The thing nobody warned me about when I left a salaried job: when you’re employed, social anxiety is something to manage. When you work for yourself, it’s something to bill. Every networking event is a pipeline. Every Zoom panel is a marketing channel. Every sales call is rent.
What I tried that didn’t work
I read the books. I tried the breathwork apps. I rehearsed scripts. I told myself “fake it till you make it,” which is the most cursed phrase in the English language because it implies that everyone around you is faking too, which is somehow more anxiety-inducing, not less.
Beta blockers helped for one specific keynote and then I felt weird about taking them long-term. Therapy helped, but the conversation I needed was less about why I was anxious and more about how to deliver a 90-minute workshop while my heart was doing 140 bpm. There’s surprisingly little written for that exact moment.
I also tried the worst piece of advice in the genre: “just be yourself.” Whoever said that has clearly never been themselves on a Tuesday afternoon discovery call with a procurement lead from a Fortune 500.
What actually moved the needle
The first thing that helped wasn’t a technique. It was changing how I priced. When I was charging $75/hour, every prospect call felt like begging. When I doubled my rates and tightened my niche, calls became filtering conversations instead of auditions. The anxiety didn’t disappear, but it stopped being existential. I wrote more about the pricing side of this in the uncomfortable math of freelance hourly rates, and honestly, the math fix was half the mental fix.
The second thing was admitting that I am not a “natural” anywhere, and designing around that. I stopped accepting back-to-back calls. I built in a 30-minute buffer before any high-stakes conversation. I do a five-minute walk around the block before sales calls, not because some Stanford study told me to, but because the walk gives me somewhere to put the adrenaline.
The third thing was scripting the first 60 seconds of every call. Not the whole call, just the opening. Once I’m past “thanks for jumping on, here’s how I’d like to use our time,” my brain catches up and I’m fine. The anxiety lives in the gap between “joining now…” and the first complete sentence. So I removed the gap.
Networking events are their own beast. I gave up on the room-working approach. Instead, I arrive early (fewer people, less overwhelm), find one person who looks similarly uncomfortable, and have one real conversation. Then I leave. One good 20-minute conversation has outperformed every two-hour mixer I’ve forced myself through. The introvert’s networking playbook covers more of this if it sounds familiar.
Zoom panels broke me for years. The fix wasn’t getting better at speaking. It was a checklist I run 15 minutes before going on: water within reach, phone face-down and silent, dog out of the room, one bullet point per topic on a sticky note on my monitor. The panel still spikes my heart rate. But I’m not also fighting a cat walking across my keyboard at minute 12.
What I still get wrong
I cancel things I shouldn’t. Last quarter I bailed on a podcast that would’ve been good for me because I had a head cold and convinced myself my voice sounded weird. It didn’t. I just used the cold as cover. I’m still working on noticing the difference between “I genuinely shouldn’t do this” and “I’m scared and looking for an exit.”
I also still measure recovery by how I felt during the call instead of what came out of it. A call that ends in a signed contract is a good call, even if I felt like I was going to faint at minute 8. My nervous system doesn’t know that yet, but I’m teaching it.
If you’re self-employed and quietly losing it before client calls, you’re not weak and you’re not in the wrong job. You’re doing a job that was previously distributed across an entire sales team, an HR department, and a marketing function, and you’re doing it alone. Of course it’s a lot.
I don’t have this fixed. I have it functional. Some weeks that’s enough.