Social Anxiety
You walk into a social gathering, a place full of people, some friends, some strangers and sense their eyes. In a flash, your eyes catch someone else’s. You’re seen. You can’t hide now.
You begin to feel exposed, naked and unnerved. You begin to feel that thing you always feel as a wave of disconnection rushes over you, much like if you suddenly stepped outside a TV set and began to watch the same old story unfold.
The ground that was your support now feels like a fragile layer of ice about to crack. Your body is tense, your breath constricted and your throat is tight.
The whole experience feels narrowed, tunnelled and encased by your thoughts, “What do I say? What if I say or do something stupid? What's wrong with me? People must think I’m weird!”.
Every person on the planet is subject to experiencing anxiety in social situations. Even the most confident people can internally experience a storm of anxiety behind what may seem like a cool and calm exterior.
This is a Self-Help Guide for Social Anxiety. It will cover what it is, what causes it, how it feels, what maintains it and provides applicable tools and ideas to help work with and overcome social anxiety.
Disclaimer: Human beings are incredibly resilient and this Self-Help Guide may prove very useful to some. However, this is a self-help guide which cannot replace the experience of working with a qualified professional, nor meet the very unique needs of everyone on the planet. If you are worried about your wellbeing, your safety or someone else's, please contact your GP or attend your local hospital or call the Samaritans on 116 123.
A brief window into my world
Many years ago I was suffering from crippling panic attacks and constant anxiety in social situations unbeknownst to anyone around me because I was extremely good at hiding it. To cope in an authentic and yet, cliché way I travelled the world in search for answers that lay within. I remember being in a van travelling over the Atlas mountains in Morroco and I was reading a book called “The Art of Happiness” by Howard C Cutler and the Dalai Lama and came across a passage, a lesson, a spark of insight that lit a subtle ember inside the smouldering ashes of my lost heart. The Dalai Lama was addressing 6000 people who came to see him at a University in America, a feat by itself that already blew my mind as I thought, “How could anyone cope with that?”. His Holiness opened by saying,
“I think that this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But to me, whether it is an old friend or new friend, there’s not much difference anyway, because I always believe we are the same; we are all human beings. Of course, there may be differences in cultural background or way of life, there may be differences in our faith, or we may be of a different color, but we are human beings, consisting of the human body and the human mind. Our physical structure is the same, and our mind and our emotional nature are also the same. Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself. I find it is much easier to communicate with others on that level. If we emphasize specific characteristics, like I am Tibetan or I am Buddhist, then there are differences. But those things are secondary. If we can leave the differences aside, I think we can easily communicate, exchange ideas, and share experiences.”
I realised there and then that my mind was spending an incredible amount of time thinking about how people might think about me, making constant value-judgments about them and myself as either good, bad, better, worse, ok or not ok, and I knew that somehow somewhere this process of “othering”, of separating myself from the common humanity, the things we all share had something to do with my anxiety. This brief lightning bolt of insight provided me with a moment's relief and yet, I had no clue on where to go from there as my thoughts began to race again. The journey had just begun.
What underpins Social Anxiety?… Anxiety
All anxiety is based around the common idea that we are under threat. When our threat detection system is activated our biology takes the reins and produces hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol to fight, flight, or freeze in any given situation. Whether the situation is to run out of a burning building, fight off an attacker, or an ambiguous text message by a friend; our nervous system acts accordingly. Anxiety itself is not a bad thing. In its own right, it’s been saving your life daily since the day you were born. Our threat system, however, can sometimes become too sensitive and we can experience anxiety in situations where we don’t need to, to the detriment of our happiness. This is what marks a shift from helpful anxiety to unhelpful anxiety.
What is social anxiety?
A fear-based reaction experienced in the moment by you through your thoughts, feelings, emotions and physical sensations in relation to social situations.
For example:
Meeting new people
Talking to people of authority
Being the centre of attention
Public speaking
Parties and social events
What normally accompanies social anxiety are certain thoughts such as being worried about what other people think, if a person likes you or not, or a fear you'll do something to embarrass yourself or make a mistake and therefore lose the respect, love, or attention of a person.
Unfortunately, we can learn unhelpful ways to manage this by spending large amounts of time thinking about what other people might be thinking about or avoiding the situations we find uncomfortable.
In social situations, our internal threat system scans the environment for any signs of danger much like a deer that scans the forest for any sign of a tiger. In the case of social anxiety, it scans for any indication that our fears may be confirmed. So if we are scared that we don't fit in, might make a “mistake” or won’t be liked and accepted, or even scared of becoming anxious, our threat system will be hypervigilant and on the lookout.
This could be almost anything from scanning the looks on a persons face, the level of attention they give you, changes in their body language, speech, and even your own behaviour, speech, thoughts and feelings to check, double-check and recheck if we are ok or not. It’s an exhausting process hence why anxiety can be so tiring.
In addition, the fear that comes with social anxiety lends itself to interpreting what it finds in the environment in an almost seamless and barely recognisable way. That is, it automatically jumps from evidence to interpretation without you being aware e.g. “They just yawned, therefore, [mind interprets] this means I must be boring them”. We very quickly decide that such evidence is proof that our fear was right and dismiss any other evidence to the contrary.
In such a heightened state our threat system which we spoke about earlier triggers and releases hormones and we may experience certain physical reactions on top of our thoughts. Much like the sweaty palms you get by just looking at this person sitting on the edge of a cliff, the same chemical reaction is happening in social situations and causes:
Sweating
Feeling hot
Blushing
Shaking
Shortness of breath
Light-headedness
Palpitations
Tightness in your chest
Nausea
And now with our mind made up, our body feeling like shite we conclude that our fears were right after all. We believe that now we feel so bad our thoughts have to be true because “why else would I feel this way?”. Underneath it all, we begin to feel a wealth of additional difficult feelings:
Sadness
Guilt
Shame
Blame
Worthlessness
Broken
Bad
This whole process happens very quickly. So quick most of the time we don’t catch it. Our only insight is often the fallout from it i.e. the feeling of being a failure, not being accepted in society and the decisions we then make such as deciding to cancel on friends which again, only confirms how much of a failure we feel we are and thus the cycle continues.
Social anxiety is not a disease, its the unfolding of an ingrained and learnt response programmed in our brains. So it’s not your fault. You are not bad, broken or stupid for feeling anxious - you are human.
Learning to slow the unfolding process of anxiety as it unfurls and work directly with it will be key to overcome it. The good news is our brains are incredibly adaptable and we are not stuck or destined for complete failure which is contrary to one of anxiety’s greatest tricks, the thoughts…
“What if I never get better?” or “What if this never changes”
Being scared about never being able to change scares us sometimes from opening to the possibility of change. Remembering that this is just a thought, a manifestation of fear and is not necessarily fact or true will be a step closer to overcoming social anxiety. In it’s truest form, it’s your biology encouraging you to try to change much like the anxiety that you get for an exam that motivates you to study, this thought is your biology giving you a gentle, albeit uncomfortable nudge saying, “Come on my friend, let’s make some changes”.
Key Tip: Check your expectations at the door
Before we move on to how to work with social anxiety the first thing to do is check your expectations at the door. This involves having an honest conversation with yourself, for example, are you secretly hoping to never experience anxiety again? Are you looking for a tip or trick to get rid of the discomfort that social situations can arise and somehow bypass the very fact that you are human and you have a nervous system?
Whilst these intentions are innocent and in themselves can be helpful to motivate us to seek new ways of coping, they can work counterproductively. Why? Because we are setting ourselves up to fail. Expecting not to have difficult experiences of anxiety is, in essence, denying ourself the very real truth that we are Human. It's the desperate belief that one day we’ll be able to control anxiety unequivocally and therefore, never have to feel it.
Wouldn't that be nice hey? To have the security of feeling completely fine all the time. Unfortunately, we are not robots, we are human beings with nervous systems. These best intentions often come from the incorrect belief that there are people out there who simply don't experience anxiety, who simply have it all sorted out.
This belief is not only false but holding it without challenging it paralyses us from accessing our own human potential in the face of anxiety, as we are essentially ostracising ourselves to the box of the broken and the land of the exiled and lost causes and I’m sorry, but it's just not the case.
There is a difference between “experiencing anxiety” verses “suffering from anxiety” and it lies with how we frame and decide to work with it. That’s not by any means to invalidate how distressful anxiety can be. The experience of anxiety is enwrought with tremendous suffering but, it is an experience nonetheless, not a solid, permanent entity, not who you are as a person, not how things will always be and it can be ameliorated and navigated skillfully.
Some of the world’s greatest performers have performed in front of millions of people for many years, having done 1000’s of shows and still have times of anxiety, panic and absolute terror amongst people and yet, the show must go on.
““One show in Amsterdam, I was so nervous I escaped out the fire exit... I just got to bear it. But I don’t like touring. I have anxiety attacks a lot.” ”
— ADELE
Aligning your beliefs with how things actually are in itself will reduce anxiety and fear. If we have the belief that we “shouldn't experience anxiety” when we do experience anxiety, this is what's known as an incongruence i.e. a misalignment. This causes anxiety to skyrocket and also causes us to identify with the whole process… “Ah ok… reality is not aligning with my beliefs, so there must be something up with me then?”.
This I am happy to say does not have to be the case. What if you weren't your anxiety? What if you weren't your thoughts? This is where mindfulness will come in later on how to recognise, discern and fully understand that...
“ “You are not your thoughts and feelings””
— JAMES B. R. HARTLEY
I’m sorry my friends no matter how important they feel and how much we believe them, believe me I know as I have them shitty thoughts and feelings too, the truth is thoughts, feelings, emotions and physical sensations are experiences, to be felt, heard, and honoured, to be held with care and compassion, to be used as tools to inform what we do but, that's where the book stops. They are so transient, fleeting and changeable, they could never do justice to the magnificence and ineffability of what you are and to believe otherwise, to believe these transient things are you and all of you is to shoot yourself in the foot and wonder why you are limping. It blinds you from seeing your incredible living and breathing uniqueness and the hidden depths of your potential. So its time to step outside of thoughts and begin to entertain the idea of “I am not my thoughts” and undermining their importance.