working from home with social anxiety
why my couch is my greatest professional achievement
AI re-creation of my supervisors, Kellie and Kira.
Published on Happily Indoors | happilyindoors.com
Hey Homies!
Let me tell you about the last time I had to go shopping for office clothes.
It was sometime in 2018. I was standing in a dressing room under the most unflattering fluorescent lighting, trying on blouses and blazers I didn’t want, for an office I was exhausted by, sweating slightly because the whole experience of being in a mall around strangers while “shopping for things I need” is somehow more stressful than it sounds? I needed clothes that were professional enough for an office, comfortable enough that I could survive eight+ hours in them, and affordable enough that I didn’t cry at checkout. I needed them to exist. I resented that they needed to exist.
In February of 2020, I started working from home full time, like a lot of people did when offices shut down during the pandemic. I have not bought a pair of slacks since.
If you have social anxiety and you're working from home, you probably already know where this is going. But if you’re still in an office, considering the switch, or just wondering why some of us seem so aggressively unbothered about never leaving the house… this one’s for you.
First, a little context:
I’d actually worked from home once before wayyy back in 2014 to 2015, before remote work was the cultural moment it became during the pandemic. Back then it felt like a weird perk, something slightly unusual that required explaining at dinner parties. (I was at dinner parties then. I was a different person.)
When I went back to an office, I told myself I’d adjusted fine. And I had, mostly. I was functional. I was professional. I showed up, I performed “being a person at work,” I made small talk in the kitchen and survived meetings and did all of the things you do when you work around other humans.
What I didn’t fully realize until February 2020 was how much energy all of that was costing me.
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The thing about performing “on” all day
If you’ve never experienced social anxiety, here’s the part that’s hard to explain: it’s not that I was afraid of my coworkers. It’s that existing around other people required a constant low-grade effort that I wasn’t always aware I was expending.
The mental load of managing how I came across.
The hyperawareness during meetings of whether I was taking up too much space or not enough.
The specific dread of being put on the spot. Called on unexpectedly. Asked to give an opinion before I’d fully formed one. Volunteered for something in front of a room full of people.
By the time I got home from work, I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the actual work I’d done.
Working from home didn’t eliminate meetings. It didn’t eliminate being put on the spot, or the occasional moment of oh no, it’s my turn to talk. But it changed the math significantly. Now when a meeting ends, I’m already home. The decompression happens in real time. There is no commute where I’m stuck replaying the last four hours. There is just… my house. My dogs. My cat, Kellie, who has zero awareness that I just had a stressful call and is currently sitting on my forearms, only allowing my wrists to move to type on my keyboard.
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The wardrobe thing is real and I will not be taking questions
I want to come back to the blazer situation because I don’t think people talk about this enough.
Maintaining a professional wardrobe is a tax that falls differently on different people. For me, it was a source of ongoing stress. The logistics of having enough appropriate options, keeping them clean and presentable, wearing things that felt like costumes for a version of myself I had to perform every day. Getting dressed for an office isn’t just getting dressed. It’s deciding who you’re going to be that day and making sure your clothes agree.
Now I work in whatever I want. My morning routine is shorter. My getting-ready anxiety is functionally zero. I still look “presentable” for video calls, at least from the shoulders up, which is really all anyone needs. But I am doing so from a place of comfort rather than performance.
Kellie, for what it’s worth, has no opinion on what I’m wearing when she joins my video calls. She just walks across my keyboard, sits directly in front of my camera, and stares into the souls of my colleagues. She is unbothered. She is, in many ways, my role model.
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The stuff nobody warns you about
I want to be honest here, because this isn’t a post about how working from home fixed everything. It didn’t. There are real challenges that come with remote work, especially if you’re someone whose anxiety also includes the fun bonus feature of isolation sensitivity.
Some days the quiet is restorative. Some days the quiet is a lot. The social interaction I do have now is more deliberate, which is great when I have the energy to be intentional, and harder on the days I don’t. There’s also the small matter of structure: when your home is your office, the boundaries between work and not-work can get genuinely blurry, and that requires a level of self-management that I’m still, honestly, working on.
What helps me: having a dedicated workspace (even if it’s just a specific chair and a corner). Keeping some version of a routine. Getting outside at least once a day, even if “outside” just means the back patio while Riker and Kira tear around the yard like they’re being chased by nothing. (They are always being chased by nothing. They are fine. They are thriving.)
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What I actually want you to take from this
If you have social anxiety and you’ve been wondering whether working from home would help… for me, genuinely, it did. Not because I stopped being a person who finds certain social situations exhausting, but because I got to stop spending energy on the mandatory low-stakes ones. No more hallway small talk I didn’t initiate. No more being volun-told to present something with four minutes of notice. No more dressing room fluorescent lighting.
The energy I used to spend just existing in an office? I have it back now. I spend some of it on actual work. Some of it on my dogs. Some of it on this blog.
And sometimes I spend it on my couch with my laptop while my dogs nap and my cat walks across my keyboard.
Which might not sound like a career milestone, but compared to business casual dress code and office small talk, it absolutely feels like one.
You’re not broken for finding this easier. You didn’t fail at offices. You just found your environment.
For people with social anxiety, working from home isn’t just convenient. Sometimes it’s the difference between surviving work and actually enjoying your life.
Welcome to Happily Indoors. I’m glad you’re here.
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