on guard and protect yourself from possible danger. For instance, being a bit 
nervous while interacting with an authority ﬁgure (for example, your boss, a 
police ofﬁcer) may protect you from seeming overly conﬁdent, demanding, 
or aggressive. Cognitive therapy focuses on situations where your beliefs, 
predictions, and interpretations are exaggerated when compared with the 
actual level of danger in the situation.
5. People naturally tend to seek out and pay attention to information that con -
ﬁrms their beliefs. In the case of social anxiety, people pay more atten -
tion and give more weight to evidence that others are judging them nega -
tively (such as a history of being teased in high school) than to evidence 
that contradicts the anxious beliefs (for instance, a history of very positive 
performance appraisals at work). Cognitive therapy aims to help people to 
 consider all the evidence before making any assumptions.
TYPES OF ANXIOUS THINKING
Anxious thinking begins and persists when people make incorrect assumptions about 
what is likely to happen in a given situation, about the quality of their own performance,