tl;dr: Highly anxious people are too self focused. They recall less about the environment or their partners because they get too caught up in their own heads. Beginners should focus on addressing this first. It works, science says so. Sound too basic? Basic is what beginners need.

Ok, I saw this post. I am no master seducer, but I know science. While what was said in that post is probably true, it's not something you can do while actually in a social situation without getting into endless thought loops.

Here is the strongest correlation between social anxiety (of which approach anxiety etc is just one aspect) and something that mainstream science has found: too much self-focused attention, to the detriment of other-focused attention. This means focusing too much on your own appearance, thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and too little on your partner(s).

I will briefly describe a relevant experiment. You can read the full paper here or the summarizing chart below.

Basically, participants were divided into two groups: those who scored high or low on a measure of anxiety in social situations. Both groups were asked to talk for ten minutes with a different participant of the opposite sex (in reality, this was not a participant but one of the researchers). About hobbies, majors, basic getting to know each other things. Things you'd talk about in the first ten minutes of meeting a girl. Or a potential male friend. Or a new coworker.

Then the participants were judged by impartial observers, and were asked to judge themselves on how anxious they looked, how much attention the paid to themselves compared to their partner, and so on. The next day, they were asked to recall facts about the environment (how many lamps in the room etc) and their partner (what were their hobbies etc), as well as complete some other tests.

Here are the results: imgur

As you can see, highly anxious people reported being much more self-focused than low anxiety people. While both groups reported paying about equal amounts of attention to their partner, the self-focused, high anxiety group recalled significantly less about either the environment or their partner the day after. High anxious people also believed they were exhibiting significantly more anxiety-related behaviors than impartial observers noticed.

What does this tell us? When out in the field, pay attention to anything other than yourself, your thoughts, your behaviors, the way you blush, the way you don't know what to say. How? By retraining your attentional processes to be less introspective while in the field. Nothing wrong with being an introvert, so long as you don't focus excessively on your own worries.

Attention training like meditation can help. The three second rule can help. The "your only goal is to find out her eye color" game can help. Anything that gets you out of your head.

According to this separate study, there "is persuasive evidence that attention processes are indeed related to change in social phobia and may mediate improvement in symptoms during treatment. This evidence is encouraging for treatments that target attention processes in their protocol."

I am only beginning on this journey, like many of you. I have read way too much self-help related material, and done way too little. This is what I believe will most benefit a beginner like myself, based on the available science: practice directing your attention outwards. That's all. Make up games, do whatever it takes, just go out there into the world and while you're at it, don't think about yourself. If you get into a thought loop "don't think about myself, oh god i'm doing it, i'm doing it," just acknowledge the thought loop, take a deep breath and move on.

Feel free to add other tips (relevant to this subreddit) based on mainstream psychology, I think there's too much broscience on here. No offense to everyone who contributes, but broscience never helped me.