3 ways to beat social anxiety
40 million people.
That’s how many people are walking around struggling with some type of an anxiety disorder right now (that we know of). 15 million of those people are struggling with social anxiety, specifically. If you know you have social anxiety, or are wondering if you do – read on. We’re going to cover some simple steps we can take to manage our anxiety.
There are A LOT of ways to work with and manage anxiety, but for right now I’m going to focus on cognitive behavioral interventions (CBT, if you're familiar with the jargon). These are interventions that you’ll really want to focus on with the help of a licensed therapist. If you don’t have a therapist yet, but are interested in finding one, contact me! I’ll do my best to help you get connected to someone appropriate.
First, let’s start with some definitions and common language, because in order to understand and treat social anxiety, we must first understand anxiety a bit better on the whole.
Anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Social anxiety is the same feeling of worry and nervousness, but it’s about being judged negatively in a social situation rather than just worrying about any and/or everything. People that struggle with social anxiety typically have an intense fear of being ‘found out’ that they are hiding something – not being good enough, or smart enough, etc. Panic attacks are common with social anxiety, but not required for the diagnosis.
Anxiety is triggered, created, and maintained by three components that work together – a physiological component, a cognitive component, and a behavioral component. Each of these contribute to our overall experience of anxiety.
Physiological means anything that happens in the body – I find that these symptoms are usually very important in treatment with clients because they’re often the first ones we experience. They can include a pounding heart, flushness, heat, constriction, tightness, tingles in the body, dizziness, upset stomach, lightheadedness, etc.
Physical symptoms being the ‘fire alarm’, or first signal that something is wrong, it is important that we learn how to respond to them.
Question: Could it be possible to effectively stop our anxiety cascade by managing these often first sets of symptoms appropriately?
The answer is, it depends.
It depends on who you are, your past history with anxiety and trauma, the context and event, and what resources you have available to you. Please know, though, that the intention with management is never to completely blot out our experience of anxiety all together. Anxiety can be a useful emotion that should be our friend, rather than foe. (I suppose this is another blog post, hey?) So the fact that you will still experience anxiety doesn’t mean you aren’t doing something correctly. The intention in managing anxiety is to create a life that isn’t disrupted so often by anxiety; not to create a life that is void of emotion.
Cognitive is just a fancy way of saying thoughts. So this means any anxious thoughts we might have. Many of my clients report things like “I’m going to look like an idiot doing that”; or “I can’t do that I’m not smart enough”; or “I hope I didn’t just come across like a bitch saying that”.
Behavior means anything that someone could see us doing, or not doing, because of anxiety. This looks like pacing, walking quickly by, not making eye contact, or stuttering. Or it could look like avoidance – not going to lunch with others, missing appointments, avoiding school when you need to give a presentation.
Most of us with social anxiety don’t just struggle with one of these components of anxiety. If you do, you’re truly lucky! Most of us have two or even all three components which then seem to intensify the anxiety episode. For example, if your boss or teacher says they need to talk to you later in the day you might immediately notice your body tense up, maybe you start tapping your leg or hand a lot, then you start dreading going into the meeting later and wonder what it was you could’ve done wrong, and you even consider not going to the meeting. As you can see, and most likely relate too, all three components show up fairly quickly for most of us.
Because the stress response is often expressed in all three of those components, we need to also learn to manage and respond from all three perspectives. Here we get to the good stuff:
Systemic graduated exposure – This means to slowly expose ourselves to the scary or anxiety provoking thing until it's no longer so scary or anxiety provoking. I like to say this is a way to help your brain be bored with what it previously was anxious about. It's important to engage with this work with a mental health professional. This type of work is powerful and effective because it helps us to live our fear and see that the scary thing is not going to happen, we can get feedback immediately and ask questions as well.
Cognitive restructuring – safely question any beliefs, assumptions, or expectations we may have about ourselves. Learning to healthily question our thoughts is key in learning to manage anxiety. When we can begin to identify our thoughts that are distorted or only causing us more anxiety, we can then begin to see if they actually make sense in our lives. This is done slowly and with care and intentionality.
Practice in real life! Practicing things in therapy is great, but it is most certainly not the whole picture. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes proficient. Another benefit of the practice is that you are then in a better position to bring feedback to your therapist. Therapists need to know what’s working, what’s not working, and how we can tweak things to better help you gain proficiency and mastery over your anxiety.
Social anxiety is no picnic! Just because we can’t always see it doesn’t mean it’s not there and not an important part of our wellness we should be caring for. I hope this begins to give you an idea of things you can try to help yourself manage anxiety. Remember the management of anxiety is about skills, not luck, and skills can be acquired and learned! No matter what age, gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
In good skill,
Cristen