Since social anxiety disorder is usually misunderstood, many people may be living in misery. It is more than just being timid and not wanting to speak up in front of a large gathering. It can affect your profession, friendships, dating life, and even family bonds in subtle ways. Even though it is challenging, it is necessary to manage your social anxiety since it can have a significant influence on your life.
What is Social Anxiety?
Social anxiety is a chronic mental health condition or a disorder in which the person feels uncomfortable or anxious while making social interactions with another person. The suffering person has an intense fear of being judged, scrutinized, or evaluated by others. Every day social encounters are hard for them especially with the new people as they feel irrational worry, dread, self-consciousness, and shame.
Occasionally feeling overwhelmed, feeling out of the crowd, anxious, or just not in the mood to socialize is not social anxiety. If you experience anxiety that causes you to stress or prevents you from doing things you wish to do in social circumstances, then you should think of it as a problem. Social anxiety disorder occurs when the feeling of nervousness or shyness continues and causes you any sort of mental suffering.
Although overcoming social anxiety is rarely as straightforward as throwing yourself into a crowd, it is still a goal that can be accomplished.
How to overcome social anxiety?
Social anxiety is treatable and the treatment depends on the personality of the person and also on the effect of the disorder on day-to-day life. Some of the ways you can manage your social anxiety disorder are as follows:
- Be confident: The 1st step towards overcoming your social anxiety is to present yourself with confidence in front of people. If you feel confident about yourself rather than self-conscious, things could turn the other way. If you are confident, you would not feel shy or uncomfortable in front of people. You just have to believe in yourself and feel good about yourself to stay confident.
- Check-in with yourself: Whenever you feel you can’t talk to certain people, or feel awkward or shy, ask yourself “What worst will happen if you try and talk?” Then remind yourself, “This is probably anxiety and I do not know what they are thinking about me”. Distract yourself from negative thoughts and try to focus on the present moment. Concentrate on what you can feel, what you can hear, and what is going on in your surroundings.
- Be kind to yourself: Mental condition takes as much time to heal as any physical disease. So your social anxiety will take time to go away, you just have to focus on step by step process and have to stay kind and easy on yourself. Whenever you are having anxiety or panic attacks in public due to social anxiety disorder, just try to calm yourself and get out of the crowd. After relaxing, think back and analyze the situation. Ask yourself, what went wrong? How can you not repeat that the next time? Next time you can take a seat close to the exit to prevent panic attacks.
- Get the help or support of your loved one: When people are in a social environment with someone they know, they are more likely to feel at ease. The person with social anxiety symptoms can rely on their loved ones for support and encouragement when it comes to socializing. If a friend or a family member has a social anxiety disorder, you can help them by including them in conversations and overcoming their fear or shyness.
- Cognitive behavior therapy: CBT can change the way you think and feel about any situation. It can change your behavior and help you with positive self-talk rather than negative. Cognitive behavior therapy can surely become an effective social anxiety treatment as it will make you think positively about yourself.
Other things you can try to avoid social anxiety:
There are many other effective ways to control your social anxiety:
- Take small steps.
- Practice public speaking.
- Familiarize yourself with anxiety-tempting situations and slowly try to change or avoid them.
- Challenge your negative and anxious thoughts and think realistically.
- Try various relaxation techniques like breathing, muscle relaxation, etc.
- Lead a healthy lifestyle, eat healthily and limit alcohol consumption.
- Be mindful.
- Create an exposure hierarchy.
- Stop focusing on yourself and try to focus on other people
- Face your fears and try to talk
- At last, seeing a therapist as a trained professional will help you differentiate between social anxiety and shyness, identify your triggers, teach you several coping techniques, and can provide expert social anxiety treatment.
Bottom line:
We often put too much emphasis on ourselves and overthink what the other half might analyze of us. But, on a more serious note, no one has time to care about you, your speech, or your appearance. Because worry intensifies the bad and diminishes the positive, the aspects of yourself that you are vividly aware of may go unnoticed by others. Try to achieve complete self-confidence and you will succeed.
Remember, social anxiety is treatable; you can overcome it and act normal just like other people.
