Who wouldn’t have felt uncomfortable in some social situation? We all have. But some of us are uncomfortable with most, if not all, situations involving people. So uncomfortable in fact that we hide from others and thus from life itself, drowning in self-loathing, deep loneliness and constantly peaking stress levels. In the worst-case scenario, social isolation feels like a trap with no way out, so much so that living becomes just too hard. In the ‘best case’ scenario, the aversion and fear of social situations gets suppressed and denied and prioritizing hobbies and things that don’t involve people and the discomfort it causes, becomes the norm. In both cases, life is pretty much like one big coping mechanism.
In this article, you will see some ways to take social anxiety apart into smaller, more manageable pieces. My focus here is on giving you practical tips and helping you consider the next steps to take for healing. The example of the type of social event that I put forth is generic and so feel free adjust the advice for all kinds of different scenarios, including public speaking.
There are a thousand different ways to experience social anxiety, so it’s important to get to the bottom of how this problem presents itself to you specifically. What type of situations are the worst, and equally, which are tolerable and WHY? What about a social event is most difficult for you? What happens to your body when you go into those uncomfortable feelings, such as freeze and shame? What thoughts start to crowd the mind, before, during and after? Where is your attention focused? How does it change? How have coped with the triggers thus far? Etc.
Awareness of every tiny detail of how you feel, behave and think in the 3 stages of this experience is crucial:
1. Before the situation that makes you socially anxious
2. During the situation
3. After
So first step is to become a scientist. List everything about your experience of social anxiety, so that you can see it all in front of your eyes in writing. That way it becomes possible to address it in a better, non generalized way.
The second step is to address each aspect of what your experience is: before, during and after an event that caused social anxiety. Not all at once. Here’s some suggestions for what you can do to improve your experience in each stage. It will take time to work through the layers of social anxiety, so allow yourself to go step-by-step, and celebrate each and every tiny success!
Addressing the 1.st stage: what you can do before a social occasion.
Make a conscious decision to either commit to going to a social event or not. To do so, you need to know the reason why you are or aren’t going, and whatever the reason, see that you are making the decision for YOU. Own it! Chances are, you’ve been bulldozing yourself with regards to socializing. Do you actually want to go or do you feel you should or you must go? It’s so important to take the leash off of yourself and allow yourself not to go, if that is what is right for you. Most likely, if you suffer from social anxiety, making your needs a priority does not come naturally and will take some practice. Equally, you may find that you do want to go, be it for a reason that is work-related or people-related, i.e. I want to go because I want to receive the paycheck and that is my priority right now. Either way, make a point not to operate in the social world under the impression of doing social things solely for someone else.
Next: having a plan. Now I realize it is such an inconvenience to take extra time before each social occasion to prepare. But you do want to make it safer to go into social situations, because safety is the KEY in resolving social anxiety. What I mean by a plan, is that you look at the social event, and make it a bit more manageable for yourself. First part is making an agreement with yourself that if need be, and it all got too much, you could leave (and actually would leave). For example, I would not go to a social event without my own transport or a way to leave on my own. That way you don't re-traumatize yourself with being stuck in social situations with no way out.
Then, divide the time you will be there into segments. How many? Depends. For a casual social evening, try with 3: beginning, middle and the last hour. The beginning is probably going to be the most difficult. Choose a point of focus for each segment, so that you have a ’goal’ for each– something to notice or to do that you make a point of remembering after the event. What social anxiety does, is it makes you super aware of how anxious you feel and look, and it quickly snowballs. You need to consciously shift your attention outwardly, and keep practicing that, so that your brain can learn new ways to be in a social situations. It’s the same as coming out of your own bubble and starting to take deeper interest in everything outside it. Say, in the beginning, I’m going to properly scan the room and find a place where it might feel good to sit down (and not just operate on auto-pilot). Examples of points of focus or ’goals’ would be: getting to know at least one new thing about each person I talk to; noticing the colours in the room or what people are wearing in detailed way; noticing what might be important for the organizer and offering help, etc.
Also, when you think about the event ahead of time, make sure you adjust your expectations and standards you have for yourself. Be aware of not setting a standard that is too high, such as staying until the end of the event or being witty in every conversation – even if for others the same things seem easy. Part of this is seeing where you actually are, what your actual capabilities, skills and needs are at this point in time. When you see this, and truly understand yourself, you will realize that you can only take steps from where you are. And those baby steps in the beginning are a necessary part of healing. Putting a very high standard (such as, everything i say will be interesting) for yourself at this stage is only going to lead to massive downward spiral when you experience yourself falling short.
Addressing the 2nd stage: what you can do during a social occasion.
During the event you are going to apply everything that you planned for yourself in the first phase. However, the symptoms that go with social anxiety are not going to disappear overnight and it takes steps to re-route yourself and to set in new neuropathways. So even though you can have more control by things I suggested above, you will most likely still experience some level of intensity in terms of felt sense while there. That is because your body perceives threat in social situations to a degree that it automatically goes into flight, fight or freeze response - a survival mechanism that has become chronic in social anxiety. For example, it could be when you have just expressed something and it wasn’t received well, or when hours have passed, and you haven’t connected to anyone and see everyone else chatting away. Whenever this more intense feeling comes up, you need to find a way to be okay with having that feeling and not try to escape it. You’re in that situation and it happens: you start to feel painfully inferior, tense, nauseas, shaking, embarrassed, anxious, frozen etc – and you really just feel it, without escaping, which means you’re there with and for yourself. Put simply, you turn towards your vulnerability with the attitude of wanting to caretake it.
Then, after you’ve offered yourself the safety of your own presence, you can ask yourself: what do I need right now? And act on it. Just know that this is the hardest part of all and any small step is good enough to start with. For example for me, starting with allowing myself to take a deep breath and close my eyes when I would freeze in panic, was the first step. I would switch from the room I was in to being with myself completely. The second step could be to allow yourself to sit down somewhere, even if it looked weird to others; or to go out of the room to sit down and self soothe. When you practice this part, it can be useful to learn techniques to calm down your nervous system, such as patterned breathing, containment practices, self-talk, inner child work etc, so that you can come out of that intense somatic reactivity. Find out what works for you. That way you move towards what would support your state of being, instead of how to escape from it. The point of all this is that when you go through the most difficult experiences with social anxiety without escaping immediately, your brain will learn that it was not totally unsafe, you had some level of choice, and the feelings will become less (in time).
Addressing the 3rd stage: what you can do after a social occasion.
After the event, you will most likely experience the inner critic coming up. You need to catch and challenge any automatic negative thought you have. These make up your belief system. And if you have social anxiety, you also have strong negative feelings about yourself. Make it a task to spot when you do the kind of thinking that is black-or-white (the whole evening was a total disaster), overgeneralizing (I will never fit in anywhere), all-or-nothing (everything is lost now), catastrophizing (this proves that I really am incapable), mind-reading (she definitely didn’t like me), personalizing (everyone was trying to avoid talking to me).. and start to challenge it. Eventually you will want to REPLACE any thought that rides on fear and stress, but first begin by challenging the thoughts. You can do this by actively looking for evidence against it. For example: I’m the weirdest person and noone wants to be my friend – wait, I’ve seen others who are way out of mainstream and I definitely know some of them have friends. Remember, negative bias is all about believing that negative aspects are fixed and positive aspects are fragile and not lasting. So you need to expand the context of the thought and see those times or those reasons why the thought isn’t always true. Do this anytime you have a thought that is putting you down and making it so that everything about you or your life is a complete disaster or out of your control.
In this stage, it is also good if you can involve other people. Maybe you can share your innermost dark thoughts about yourself with someone who will listen in a non-judgemental and validating way? It can seem scary, but if you openly share about social anxiety, this can help lift the heaviness and stigma off of it. I mean really share, not just mentioning it in passing by. You can also do this in therapy. If sharing with another person seems too much, journaling is also very helpful.
So many socially anxious people fall in the trap of thinking it’s just who they are. It’s not true! When we are babies, we make sounds and move in a totally spontaneous and carefree ways. It’s only when we get older and social conditioning and negative experiences pile up, that we become anxious and therefore inhibited. If you are a grown-up reading this, you absolutely have the power to change your social circumstances to suit your needs. If you feel extra vulnerable with others, you need to take extra care of yourself and make it safe(r) to socialize. This will help you build the connections that will eventually lift you out of the FEAR that is creating the social anxiety. It’s not about meeting some social standard you have for yourself by pushing yourself into situations that are too much for you, by pretending it’s okay. It’s also not about avoiding socializing, which cuts you off from the fabric of life. There is a middle way, a soft way, an authentic and brave way and that is to not escape your true feelings that occasionally do and will come up, and to take care of your needs in any way that you can in any moment to the best of your ability.
Starting with what I’ve set out in here, you can begin addressing social anxiety on your own. But if you are looking for a fast-track solution, then specialized group therapies have been proven to work really well for social anxiety.
To summarize the steps that I outlined: 1.building detailed awareness of your thoughts, behaviors and feelings around the experience of social anxiety 2.making conscious choices about social activities and preparing for any social event so that you have a plan 3.allowing the feelings/symptoms and care-taking them directly, as and when they come up 4.catching and challenging negative thinking, and sharing about your experience with others.
Lastly, I want to remind you that like with any intense fears, social or otherwise, the roots run deep. So in addition to looking at this in a practical way (how to deal with where you are now), it is also helpful to build awareness around where and why this set in for you. What kind of attention did you receive in your childhood and in school? You will see that so many factors played in to this. It is not your fault. There is always an explanation for why we develop behaviors that run on fear. You have every reason to be softer towards yourself with regard to this aspect of you that cannot deal with social situations.
- Maarja Lall
