What prevents us overcoming social anxiety?

Fortunately, there are a number of strategies that we can use to reduce our social anxiety. These include:

1.    Learning how to challenge our unhelpful thoughts and see things in a more realistic light.

2.    Reducing our tendency of focusing on ourselves during social interactions.

3.    Removing the use of avoidance and safety behaviours and gradually confronting our fears.

Unhelpful Thoughts:

People's unhelpful thoughts and predictions make it more difficult for them to overcome their social anxiety. As discussed earlier, socially anxious people often hold unhelpful thoughts about themselves and their ability in social situations (e.g. I'm dull; I'm weird). This of course lowers their confidence and makes it harder to become involved in social situations. This, in turn, means they rarely get the chance to test out their social skills and prove they can interact well.

Unhelpful thoughts also typically play a damaging role just prior to people entering social environments as they predict they will perform poorly (e.g. I'll have nothing to say). Similarly, unhelpful thoughts influence people during social situations (e.g. I'm making a fool of myself), as they assume they are not coming across well. To make matters worse, after social situations, people often analyse their performance and assume they have performed poorly. When considering these factors, it is easy to see how unhelpful thoughts stop people overcoming their social anxiety.

Avoidance:

As mentioned earlier, socially anxious people tend avoid social contact whenever possible. If they cannot avoid it, they tend to try and escape it as quickly as possible. Although this is a very understandable way of coping with social anxiety, it is actually one of the main reasons that people find it hard to overcome.

This is because by avoiding social situations, people stop themselves having positive experiences that could disprove some of their unhelpful thoughts. Furthermore, the longer someone avoids a social situation, the more daunting it becomes and it is increasingly difficult to face.

Using 'Safety Behaviours':

Often, the only time that socially anxious people feel comfortable in social settings, is when they use what is known as 'safety behaviour'. Examples of 'safety behaviours' include: trying to stay in the background on social occasions; remaining quiet during group conversations; sticking closely besides those they know well; avoiding eye contact or drinking alcohol for extra courage. Basically, a 'safety behaviour' is anything people do to try and make it easier to cope in social situations.

Using 'Safety Behaviours' cont.:

Although such safety behaviours help people feel slightly better at the time, they are actually unhelpful strategies in the longer term. This is because, like avoidance, 'safety behaviours' stop people from having the opportunity to prove that they can cope well, without putting such precautions into place. Instead 'safety behaviours' allow people to put their successes down to other factors (e.g. I only achieved that because my friend was with me). Similarly, by remaining quiet during conversations, they never have the opportunity to show that they would have coped well had they became more involved. As a result, people's confidence remains low and their social anxiety remains.

A final point worth noting is that 'safety behaviours' can result in what is known as self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, by staying quiet in social situations, people may come across as 'distant' and others may respond by making less of an effort. As a result, their beliefs that they can't mix well remain in place.

Increased Self Focus:

People who are socially anxious often spend a lot of time concentrating on their own bodily sensations during social interactions. Unfortunately, this too plays a part in keeping social anxiety going. For example, people often spend time trying to judge whether they are sweating, stammering, shaking or blushing during social situations. Although they do so in the hope of being reassured that they are not noticeably anxious, this strategy actually just makes things much worse. This is because people tend to overestimate how visible their anxiety is and this of course makes them feel even more self conscious. Also, by focusing on themselves, it means that they are not fully focusing on the conversations going on around them. This makes it more difficult to join in properly and strengthens their beliefs that they are no good in such situations

Part 4:How can i overcome social-anxiety. Listing and Challenging Unhelpful thoughts