This post will be on the lighter side for those who find this sub to be a bit heavy sometimes.

I recently transferred to a new university, so I've been working on being more available to new friendships. I've focused a lot on how I hold myself. I noticed that most people walk around with a scowl on their face, looking "too cool" to be happy. A lot of people bury themselves in their phones. This one day, I saw a guy walking with a gigantic smile on his face. He didn't seem to be laughing or smiling at anything in particular, and it was a cloudy day. He immediately looked a thousand times more friendly than everyone else, so I decided to emulate that.

Today, I was walking back to my apartment with a little smile of my own, and I see a girl ahead walking the opposite direction doing the same thing. (It's a crappy drizzling day, so smiles were few and far between!) As we pass, she smiles at me in a sort of heart-emulsifying way.

And you know what I do reflexively? I give her a little glance, but I don't smile any more or say anything, because I've been conditioned with fear. Not fear of rejection, but fear of being an imposing creep. I know at a cognitive level that I'm a nice guy, but my knee-jerk reaction is to self-regulate and do nothing even remotely close to giving unwanted attention.

And so, for the next ten minutes I mentally kicked myself, still considering turning around and catching up to her as I stepped into my apartment.

Does anyone have advice for overcoming this kind of fear? I emphasize that it's not strictly fear of rejection—there are ten thousand eligible bachelorettes on campus, and I can't possibly blow it with all of them—but rather an ingrained sense of restraint that I can't quite help. I know vaguely why it's there, which is a relevant discussion for this sub, but I'm mainly interested in moving past it personally.