Your brain can treat an awkward moment like an emergency. Compare the size of the alarm to the size of the actual risk.

Your body runs one alarm and it does not distinguish danger from embarrassment. Saying the wrong thing in class can produce a heart rate designed for genuine threat, so the feeling insists something terrible happened when the real cost was about four seconds of other people’s attention. The alarm is honest about itself and useless as a measurement.

When a social moment sets you off, write the actual consequence in one sentence and compare it with how the alarm felt. Do that a few times and the gap gets obvious. The feeling still arrives, but you stop believing its estimate.