Tom Cruise Shares His Trick for Battling Social Anxiety — and It Helped His M:I Costar Hayley Atwell Find Her Confidence

If you suffer from social anxiety, go on Cruise control — superstar Tom Cruise says it’s not “Mission: Impossible” to overcome your fear of being judged by others in public.

Tom helped his “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” costar Hayley Atwell with some great advice that is simple. She confides, “If you walk into a room and you feel the anxieties coming, and it makes me want to retreat into myself, and I start to overthink and I start to go, ‘Do I look weird? Do I seem awkward? I’m not speaking, I’m just muffling my words.’ We go into ourselves.”

And Tom told her, “Try doing the opposite. Try to look out, look around the room and go ‘Where is it? Where is the thing that I have attached on to my insecurity.’ If you’re scared of something, keep looking at it. Try not to close your eyes or turn away, just keep looking at it. It will often give you information about what to do to overcome it.”

It works! “If I’m scared of something,” says Hayley, “if I keep looking at it long enough, it tends to not sort of be the monster under the bed anymore.”