It's also kind of good training for my sometimes social anxiety; For some weird reason strangers don't bother me that much compared to people I have some actual relation with.
Less is at stake usually.
It's a hard mental paradox to fix though, even though we logically understand that people like confident worry-free people more than people who worry about how they are liked, we still often worry about how we are liked anyway.
> It's a hard mental paradox to fix though,
One of the things I've learned in the past year of therapy is that if a mental problem is hard to fix at one level, it's usually because that problem is just an emergent symptom of a different deeper level issue.
Also, you never really "fix" psychological problems, so much as grow forward into a slightly different person that both combines that problematic history and adaptations to deal with it. It's like we're weird amphibians that can't regrow lost limb, but can grow an unrelated new limb at a different location that lets us walk again.
(even for strangers, I stated that less is at stake, but it is actually still quite hard for me to speak to them! I'm way more at ease with people I know. I am very much aware that it goes very well every single time though. It's so dumb! Practice helps though.)
The sad part is you come to realize there are actually some people out there who feel severely threatened by authenticity, and will actively try to tear you down; make you less. That can really hurt when you're not prepared for it. People are really odd sometimes.
One thing though, I've recently started taking my fitness seriously and I've noticed a borderline magical improvement in my confidence and social energy without actively focusing on it at all. Worth trying.
It's easy to overthink this stuff, but that might just be another way of staying in our head. I don't what it is, testosterone maybe, but we shouldn't forget that our head is just as much a part of our body as our arms and legs, and if we take care of our body our thoughts tend to also be taken care of.
The better the stranger.