What Social Anxiety Is – and What It’s Not
You’ve always been kind of a shy, reserved person. Despite having a number of friends, you may prefer to not socialize within large groups, and worry about being the center of attention. When you start to feel embarrassed or self conscious, you may begin to feel flushed, or anxious that you are sweating or shaking. You may worry about how you look, sound or act in front of other people.
It might be something that you’ve always dealt with; you’ve been told you were also a “shy kid.” But could this “shyness” actually be a sign of social anxiety?
If you (or a loved one) are experiencing social anxiety, know that you’re not alone. Millions of people across the globe live with social anxiety; in fact, it’s one of the most common mental health conditions in the world.
Social anxiety can be debilitating, it can affect your daily activities, your career and your relationships - however, it is treatable. Many people who have experienced social anxiety thrive in their lives, building deeply satisfying personal relationships whilst living with social anxiety. This is where therapy options such as the Alena CBT app can help.
In order to start facing social anxiety, we must first understand what it is. So if you’re dealing with social anxiety, here’s a quick, in-depth guide to what social anxiety is and how we understand it at Alena, along with an explanation on the differences between social anxiety and shyness.
What is social anxiety?
Social anxiety is a very common mental health condition that affects millions of people around the world. It’s also sometimes called social phobia, because people who experience social anxiety have an intense fear of social situations.
Social anxiety doesn’t necessarily mean that you will feel fearful in every social situation. For example, you could feel calm around close family members, or work colleagues whilst in the office, but extremely anxious when you get introduced to someone new, or when your colleagues want to socialize out of the work context.
Some common situations that could cause feelings of fear and distress for you, if you live with social anxiety include:
Going to parties
Meeting someone new
Public speaking
Job interviews
Walking into a room where people are already seated
Eating or drinking in public
Speaking on the phone
Often, social anxiety is enhanced when we are in a situation where we are being observed by others. You might be afraid that you’re going to embarrass or draw attention to yourself by feeling flushed, sweating, stumbling over your words, tripping in front of everyone, or saying something wrong.
Social anxiety can often create physical symptoms like shaking, sweating, and feeling flushed. These symptoms can contribute towards making you feel even more anxious – for example, worrying that everyone can see that you’re shaking whilst holding your glass.
Social anxiety vs. shyness
It’s also important to understand that social anxiety is not the same thing as having a shy personality – although there is a lot of overlap between the two. So what, exactly, is the difference between shyness and social anxiety?
The main difference between social anxiety and shyness is that social anxiety is when the anxiety is starting to have an impact on how you live your life.
Shyness can often be confused with social anxiety. You might have heightened anxiety around strangers, or be uncomfortable whilst in a large group gathering. However, with social anxiety, these concerns then lead to avoidance behaviors such as not attending social gatherings, keeping yourself distanced from the group whilst at a gathering, in the hope that no-one will notice you, or sitting on your hands to stop yourself from shaking.
Social anxiety can lead to further behaviors such as rumination - thinking about the social situation repeatedly both before and after the event, over-analyzing how it went and how you might have been perceived by the others. You may be focusing your attention on your safety behaviors so much that you aren’t able to contribute or focus on the social situation, whereas if you are shy then you will usually be able to focus on, and contribute to the event.
A good example is a job interview. If you are shy, you may worry about the first few minutes, introducing yourself and meeting someone new - but eventually get into the swing of answering the questions. Whereas with social anxiety, you may be overly focusing on keeping your voice calm and worrying about feeling flushed, so much so that you aren’t able to focus on your answers and the discussion at hand - it’s having a knock-on effect on your attention.
Once your shyness or social anxiety is starting to impact on your life and how you can handle situations, that is when treatment would be beneficial - and treatment is often very successful with social anxiety.
There are science-backed interventions, such as CBT that have been proven to help. There is a happy and fulfilling life on the other side of treatment.
Clark & Wells’ cognitive model of social anxiety
At Alena, we look at social anxiety through the lens of an evidence-based model originally published by researchers David Clark & Adrian Wells in 1995.
Our Advisor at Alena, Clinical Psychology and Researcher, Dr Stuart Linke explains. “Clark’s big [discovery] was that people’s main fear with social anxiety is that they’ll be judged negatively by other people. And the result of that was that because of that anxiety, people would do all sorts of things that make their anxiety worse.”
This is the key difference between social anxiety and generalized anxiety. Social anxiety is not the same as generalized anxiety disorder (although you can have both). Social anxiety is when you are only afraid of being evaluated negatively by other people. When the “other people” are removed, you won’t feel anxious at all.
Another important component of the Clark & Wells model of social anxiety is the idea that experiencing social anxiety means that you develop certain assumptions about yourself and the world (often based on early life experiences). If you live with social anxiety, these assumptions make you interpret social situations as dangerous, which makes your anxiety symptoms (physical, cognitive, and behavioral) kick into high gear.
For example, one assumption that social anxiety can cause you to have about yourself is that you must perform extremely well – nearly perfectly – in social situations. In other words, your standards for yourself are excessively high.
If you experience social anxiety, you might have had a thought like, “I always need to be the one responsible for keeping the conversation going.” In reality, all participants in a conversation are equally responsible for keeping things flowing – but social anxiety might make you feel like 100% of the responsibility is on you, alone.
These assumptions make you feel anxious, which then makes you start focusing too much on yourself. “You start thinking a lot about how you’re doing, how you're feeling, how you’re acting. You might start asking yourself, ‘Am I doing okay? Do I look stupid? Do I look embarrassed? Am I sweating?’,” explains Dr. Linke. In other words, you become hyper aware of yourself in the social situation. And that makes everything feel even scarier.
This extreme level of self-consciousness is, in many ways, what defines social anxiety.
Takeaway: Sign up for Alena, an app for social anxiety
To recap, social anxiety is an incredibly common mental health challenge that causes people to become hyper-conscious of how they’re performing in social situations, which leads to a lot of fear and anxiety. It is not generalized anxiety, and it isn’t shyness – although there is overlap between social anxiety and these things.
Social anxiety is not your fault. But it is treatable, and it is in your hands to take steps to overcome it.
Alena is an evidence-based therapy app, which provides neuroscience-based assessments alongside CBT modules to help you take control of your social anxiety. The app is available 24/7, in the comfort of your own home.
Join the waitlist to download the Alena app and start understanding – and tackling – what drives your social anxiety.
References
A cognitive model of social phobia. (APA PsycInfo) : https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-98887-004
What is CBT, and how can it help you take control of your social anxiety? The Alena Blog: https://alena.com/blog/what-is-cbt-and-how-can-it-help-your-social-anxiety
Alena - our team: https://alena.com/our-team