Social Anxiety

Henry: Ever since joining University, my anxiety has only gotten worse, I haven’t met anyone new in the first few weeks of Uni, meaning that I’m basically a complete loner. I’m also too nervous to be able to contribute during tutorial sessions which is impacting my education.

Isla: I’m a second year Psych student and uni kinda sucks for me at the moment. So far I haven’t been able to connect with anyone. My anxiety stops me from participating in uni clubs and societies and other social events. I feel like I’m missing the last good opportunity to make friends while still a student. I’m just feeling lost.

— Students commenting on their experience with social anxiety

Warning

This chapter provides advice of a general nature. If you are suffering from severe anxiety or other mental health issues, please seek professional assistance.

One of the main reasons given for having trouble making friends is not a lack of opportunities, but rather that these opportunities are avoided due to shyness or social anxiety. Social anxiety can not only make it harder to make friends, but can also make it more difficult to give presentations, ask questions in class, or talk with instructors. After graduation, social anxiety can continue to cause issues by impacting career success. Well-meaning students will often give advice along these lines, "you’ve just got to ignore your social anxiety and get out of your comfort zone". While improving social anxiety is going to require some exposure to anxiety provoking situations, it isn’t as simple as just ignoring the anxiety and diving in at the deep end. People without social anxiety will frequently underestimate the difficulty involved in "getting out of your comfort zone".

Sometimes individuals have struggled with social anxiety at high school and think that it will somehow resolve itself once they are at university. Perhaps due to an expectation that they will grow out of it or that everyone will be more friendly and understanding. Unfortunately, this usually isn’t the case, now they are forced to deal with social anxiety along with the pressures of university. For this reason, it is important to start building skills for dealing with social anxiety as soon as possible.

Social anxiety involves feeling nervous in social situations, this often arises from worries such as:

Not knowing what to say.
Saying or doing something wrong.
Inadvertently offending someone.
Being judged by others.
Making a bad impression.
Receiving unfriendly or negative treatment.

One of the components of social anxiety is the cognitive component which refers to the thoughts the individual has about the situation. Another component is the physical or physiological component like nausea, sweating, racing heart, shortness of breath, blushing or trembling. In order to avoid these thoughts and unpleasant physical symptoms, those with social anxiety resort to a variety of safety behaviours including:

Not answering questions in class.
Not approaching a lecturer with a query.
Putting off making an important phone call.
Declining invitations to a social gathering.
Not joining a university club or society despite wanting to.
Avoiding small talk and fending off attempts at conversation.
Excessive checking and other reassurance behaviours.

In addition, if they do engage in social interactions, they may avoid eye contact, speak quietly and give short responses while avoiding giving an opinion on a topic. This behaviour can lead the other participants to assume that the individual is not interested in interacting when that is not the case. It’s sometimes thought that socially anxious people have poor social skills, but this is not necessarily true. Once they overcome their anxiety, their social skills are actually fine.

Social anxiety can be improved, but probably not completely eliminated. A small amount of anxiety in some situations is normal.

Social anxiety versus shyness

These days it is common for the general public to use the terms social anxiety and shyness interchangeably. Although they both involve feeling uncomfortable in social situations, they are two distinct but overlapping conditions.

Shyness emerges in childhood and involves feeling uncomfortable in social situations. Social anxiety is more severe and can result in people avoiding social situations all together. A shy person may feel a bit nervous about giving a presentation in class. Someone with social anxiety will do everything possible to try to avoid it. If they do give the presentation, they will worry about it for weeks and possibly experience extreme symptoms of anxiety such as sweating, shortness of breath, shaking, and a racing heart.

Social anxiety is a diagnosable mental health condition, and involves feeling fear in most social situations. This can lead to difficulties with a person’s education, even causing them to drop out. If they graduate, it can cause difficulties in pursuing and progressing a career. It also causes them to turn down invitations to social events which impacts their ability to make friends. Social anxiety involves people avoiding choices they really wanted to make. For example, rather than going to a social event to meet new people, they will stay at home due to worries about anxiety. Those with social anxiety often like other people and desire a better social life but are paralysed by anxiety.

Both shyness and social anxiety can make it more difficult to socialise and impact the ability to form friendships.

Note	The advice in this chapter can be useful for tackling both shyness and mild to moderate social anxiety. In the interests of brevity, we typically use the term social anxiety in subsequent sections, even though the strategies can be used with both.

Tackling social anxiety is going to take effort

Tackling social anxiety is going to require some effort, and there aren’t any quick fixes. Just like learning any skill, such as playing tennis, regular weekly effort is going to be required. Although change won’t always come as quickly as might be desired, the most important thing is to keep practicing and not give up. Also, while social anxiety can be improved, it can’t usually be completely eliminated. If things don’t always go to plan, don’t focus on the real or perceived failure. Failures and setbacks are inevitable when learning any new skill. When learning to play tennis, you aren’t always going to hit the ball the way you want. Being overcritical won’t help you improve.

Part of overcoming social anxiety is going to involve putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. The trick is to take things one step at a time and not overwhelm yourself with any situation that is too tough. Sometimes people worry that they won’t be able to overcome their anxiety because they’ve had it for too long. Yet they will never know until they try. By taking regular small steps, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Tip	Small improvements over time eventually lead to large gains.

Due to the difficulty of making changes, sometimes people will feel ambivalent and wonder if it is worth the effort. If this is the case, it’s helpful to focus on the variety of benefits from overcoming social anxiety.

Benefits of overcoming social anxiety

Making new friends.
Expanding the range of activities that you can do in your free time.
Improving your networking skills leading to better job prospects in the future.
Enjoying life more.
Getting more out of your education.
Feeling less stressed and more relaxed.
Feeling more confident.

Pushing yourself to take action, however small, means taking control. Over time, energy and motivation will flow.

The origins of social anxiety

Being successful in human society involves learning to get along with others and working cooperatively towards goals. Thus, it is normal to experience a small amount of anxiety in some social situations so that we are aware of the need to be cautious and avoid doing things that might offend other people. This is especially the case when dealing with unfamiliar people as we don’t know how they will react. However, when it comes to social anxiety, this small amount of useful anxiety has grown to a dysfunctional level that interferes with achieving our goals.

For many individuals with social anxiety, there are likely some genetic factors that have contributed to the issue. Other contributing factors include the family environment, for instance, your parents might not have been particularly sociable and would not invite guests over to the house. This limited an individual’s exposure to socialising. In addition, your parents might have unintentionally facilitated social anxiety by letting you avoid anxiety producing situations when young. If you had to give a speech at school, they would let you stay home on that day. If you were afraid of participating in sports, they would send your teacher a note saying you couldn’t play sports. Other stressful social situations at school such as experiencing teasing or bullying might also have contributed. An additional causative factor could be overly critical teachers or parents. Yet none of these can be changed now, so spending time over analysing them is of limited value. In addition, the exact combination of factors and what they contributed to the problem can likely never be known for certain.

Anxiety

In some situations, anxiety is useful. Suppose you are walking along a street late at night and encounter a group of drunks yelling and making threatening remarks. You don’t know what they are going to do next, so your body responds with an increased heart rate and rapid breathing in case you need to run away or defend yourself. In the situation where we anticipate a real threat, we might adopt a strategy of avoidance such as by retreating or taking a different route.

In the case of social anxiety, we feel elevated levels of anxiety when there is no physical threat, and may still adopt an avoidance strategy such as not attending an important social event. Since this avoidance provides relief from anxiety, it makes us more likely to want to avoid the situation in the future. By never facing the feared social situation, we start to believe that we are unable to cope with it.

Furthermore, anxiety in turn triggers thoughts about potential dangers and threats. In social situations, this causes us to overestimate the risks that are present.

Note	Anxiety is useful in protecting us from actual threats and dangerous situations, but becomes dysfunctional when it causes us to avoid social situations that we either want to attend or that are potentially beneficial.

Thinking styles of the socially anxious

Those with social anxiety tend to experience certain thinking patterns. They predict that negative events are more likely to happen in social interactions and be more serious. They also tend to be more critical of themselves. This leads to cognitive therapy being one of the key approaches for addressing social anxiety.

Exposure

One way to overcome social anxiety is to gradually expose yourself to the feared situation in a controlled manner. Exposing ourselves to the situation shows us that it is in fact not dangerous in the way that we feared. Moreover, the more exposure experiences we have, the more desensitised we become to the situation.

Plotting the road ahead

One of the most popular techniques for tackling social anxiety is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). In the following chapter, we give an introduction to some tools from CBT that can be put to work in dealing with anxiety.

Summary

Social anxiety causes people to avoid social situation and prevents them achieving their goals. Tackling social anxiety is a step by step process that may take some time. While social anxiety can be improved, it may not be able to be completely eliminated.