You have almost certainly been given advice. Be yourself. Just relax. Do not overthink it. Nobody is even looking at you. Confidence is a choice. Notice how none of it helped. There is a good reason for that, and understanding it is the difference between years of frustration and actual progress.
Feelings do not respond to argument
Most of this advice asks you to argue with your feelings, and feelings do not respond to argument. Telling an anxious person to relax is like telling someone who is cold to simply be warm. The instruction is not wrong exactly; it is just useless, because it skips every step that would actually get you there. Worse, when you try to force relaxation and fail, you add a second layer of distress: anxiety about your anxiety.
The white bear problem
There is also a trap in trying to suppress anxious thoughts. Try not to think about a white bear for the next minute, and the bear shows up constantly. Thought suppression tends to backfire, making the very thoughts you are pushing away more insistent. This is why willpower alone rarely quiets social fear. The way out is not to win a wrestling match with your thoughts, but to change your relationship to them, letting a harsh thought be just a thought passing through rather than a command you must obey. The American Psychological Association describes this shift, at the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), as changing how you relate to thoughts rather than forcing them away.
Confidence comes after, not before
The deepest reason "just be confident" fails is that it has the order backward. Confidence is not the thing you summon before you act. It is the residue of having acted, survived, and learned. It comes after. So the real method is not to feel brave and then act, but to act while afraid, in small graded steps, and let the confidence accumulate from the evidence you gather. The National Health Service points to exactly this kind of gradual, structured approach, rather than willpower, as what actually helps social anxiety.
What to do instead
So put down the impossible instruction to relax on command. Instead, work with your body directly through slow breathing, change your relationship to anxious thoughts rather than fighting them, and build confidence through small, repeated, forgiving practice. Be kind to yourself when it is hard, because shame builds avoidance while kindness builds courage. None of this is as fast as a magic phrase, and all of it actually works.
The kinder, slower method that works
If the fast fixes never worked, it was not because you lacked willpower. It was because they asked the impossible. The method that actually works is slower and gentler, and it has three moving parts. You calm the body directly through slow breathing, because a settled body lets the thinking brain come back online. You change your relationship to anxious thoughts, holding them as passing suggestions rather than commands, instead of trying to win an argument with them. And you build confidence through small, repeated, forgiving action, letting the evidence of having survived accumulate into a genuine, earned steadiness. None of these is a magic phrase, and all of them respect how a nervous system actually learns. The trade is real: you give up the fantasy of instant confidence, and in return you get the thing itself, built from the inside out, that no amount of pretending could ever have supplied. Be patient with the pace. You did not learn to fear people overnight, and you will not unlearn it overnight either, but you will unlearn it.
If you have spent years being told to relax and wondering why you could not, the problem was never you; it was the instruction. A method that respects how change actually happens is laid out in Unjudged, and a good next read is how to calm your nervous system in the moment.