Social anxiety can be debilitating. People with this type of anxiety fear being negatively evaluated or judged by others in social situations. The anticipation of this outcome overwhelms them. As a result, they often avoid these situations, which can lead to isolation and loneliness. But if you are reading this, I am sure I don’t need to tell you how much it sucks. So, what’s going on here? In this post, I am going to describe what the research says about the key ingredients involved in social anxiety.
(1) Anticipatory processing and assumptions about oneself and the social world. People with social anxiety often ruminate over past social events in which they believe they performed poorly. They then anticipate that they will also perform poorly in future situations and, thus, envision disastrous scenarios with dire consequences. All of these thoughts are based on negative assumptions and core beliefs they have about themselves (e.g., being a failure, incompetent, inferior, different).
(2) Self-focused attention while constructing an impression of oneself as a social object. When in these dreaded social situations, some people with this type of anxiety tend to hyper focus on themselves because they think this will help them “perform” better. In other words, they are more internally than externally focused. And because they put all their energy into analyzing their own behavior and presentation, they tend to not notice the behavior of those around them. As a result, they don’t get to see that people are not judging them or giving them dirty looks as they expected them to do.
(3) Safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are strategies that people use to try and prevent the feared outcome from happening and to reduce anxiety. In the case of social anxiety, the feared outcome is often related to humiliating oneself in social situations and being judged by others. For example, someone with social anxiety might refrain from talking for fear of sounding stupid. The problem with the use of safety behaviors is that they prevent someone from testing their predictions and seeing that their feared outcome rarely happens (if ever). In the above example, the person who refrains from talking never gets to test their theory of people thinking they sound stupid. They never get to see that when they speak up, others might not think they sound stupid at all and might not actually enjoy talking to them.
(4). Anxiety-induced skill deficits. Many people with social anxiety actually DO have social skills. But when the anxiety kicks in, it just appears that they don’t. In other words, they are not talking because they are nervous- not because they don’t know how to engage in a conversation. However, others with social anxiety actually have both social anxiety AND social skills deficits. There are ways to assess whether one or both of these issues are present.
In CBT, we help clients with social anxiety understand more about how this process plays a role in their lives. Then we use cognitive and behavioral interventions to help them improve maladaptive behavioral and cognitive habits.