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Sure, but I must add a caveat that my approach is controversial, potentially dangerous, and not medical advice. Also, the medical system has not been open/supportive of my approach.
The cornerstone of my approach is to turn off my anxious thoughts with phenibut (an uncontrolled substance in the United States. Some people call it a nootropic, but it is more accurate to think of it an anti-anxiety drug). Then I do something like improv where I design a role that allows me to be confident, weird, and causes some people to be curious enough about what I'm doing to approach me (something like the wizard/magician archetype). When people approach me I can either respond in character as the role I'm pretending to be, or as my authentic self where I talk about experimenting with exposure therapy to help with my social anxiety.
The exposure therapy teaches me that people will accept me if I do odd/creative things without heavy masking if I'm in the right environment and I take a playful approach instead of a logical one. My exposure therapy role communicates a lot through non-verbal presence that I don't normally practice. It also teaches me that it can be fun/useful to play a different role and that I can play a role I want instead of the one society expects.
The exposure therapy experience runs into an issue with state-dependent memory where it is hard to recall the confident behavior when sober due to the altered mental state. Therefore, I do a lot of sober planning, integration, and journaling to integrate the confident behavior into my sober persona. Tapering helps to transfer the learned skills to the sober state. Also, researching cognitive science and psychology helps me come up with new ideas for my exposure therapy experiment.
I also combine phenibut with real nootropics to reach an optimal state for the exposure therapy role. On the phenibut day I might use things that increase energy/motivation (dopamine precursors)/mood. I do get a bit of rebound anxiety about 48 hours after taking phenibut so I experiment with nootropics to manage this too.
Phenibut is not well understood but my personal experience tends to indicate it has 3 primary effects that have different timeframes. GABA-B receptor agonism peaks around 4-5 hours after taking phenibut. There is a slight impact on dopamine the day you take it that increases the motivation to socialize. Finally, the calcium channel blocking mechanism lasts the longest and creates a next day after glow for me - I feel calm and in a good mood all day but I don't have the same motivation to seek out social connections as the dosing day. Also, I found that I should never use phenibut more than once a week, and that I must take longer breaks occasionally.
That's interesting. I'm very timid about anything GABA-based after issues both taking and getting off of gabapentin (for restless legs syndrome) some years ago. I have been experimenting with intranasal oxytocin recently, which I think is good to experiment with, but the juxtaposition between connecting with people more vs less easily is pretty jarring. Honestly I can't tell if it has a slightly addictive or unhealthy quality for me as result. It does have the affect of making me feel suddenly very aware that the unnaturalness and second-guessing that comes from my anxiety is about half of my off-puttingness on its own and people would probably rather me be relaxed and open even if that means some peculiarness showing. Hard to convince myself of that without the oxytocin in my system though, as you said state-dependent memory can be a bitch.
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