Red Face

One man's battle to overcome social anxiety

'Deeply moving and informative' – Lily Bailey, author

Your face turns crimson. Your throat tightens. Your mind races. And suddenly a simple conversation — ordering a coffee, joining a meeting, speaking up in class, or talking to someone you like — feels like standing on a stage. If you live with chronic blushing, facial flushing, or the relentless fear of being seen, Red Face by Russell Norris is the book you’ve been searching for.

Red Face: How I Learnt to Live With Social Anxiety is elegant, unflinching narrative non-fiction: a true story that reads with the momentum of a memoir and the usefulness of a self-help guide. Norris grew up with a tendency to blush, but in adulthood it escalated into idiopathic craniofacial erythema — uncontrollable and often unprovoked facial blushing. What others dismissed as “just blushing” sent out all the wrong signals, invited unwanted comments, and triggered something far more consuming: Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD).

He tried everything people recommend when they don’t understand: quick fixes, distraction, self-medication, avoidance, the forced smile, the laugh-it-off. Some of it dulled the symptoms for a moment. Much of it made the shame louder. Red Face tells the truth about that spiral — how anxiety feeds on anticipation, self-monitoring, embarrassment, and the fear of blushing itself (often called erythrophobia). It also tells the other truth: the cycle can be interrupted, and a rich, connected life is possible.

This is not a glossy “just be confident” pep talk. It’s an honest account of what severe social anxiety can look like from the inside: the private rules, the coping strategies that seem to help in the moment, and the heavy cost they exact over time. And because life doesn’t pause for anxiety, Norris shows how he kept moving forward —building a career as a writer, working in London’s advertising world, and learning how to show up even when his body screamed “danger.”

By turns wry and shocking, dark and optimistic, Norris invites you into the hidden mechanics of social anxiety —avoidance, compensation, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the exhausting effort to appear “normal.” Alongside the story you’ll find stigma-breaking, myth-busting insight into social...