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5 Tips for Managing Social Anxiety
At one point or another, most people will experience embarrassment and fears of acceptance, but for some, this experience is much more acute. If you suspect that you have social anxiety, you do not have to manage it alone. Read on for tips and information about how social anxiety can be treated through mental health therapy.
At one point or another, most people will experience embarrassment and fears of acceptance, but for some, this experience is much more acute. For a person with social anxiety, going to a party, having a one-on-one conversation with a stranger or acquaintance, or joining a new social circle through work or school can induce panic and uncomfortable physical symptoms such as sweating, flushing, increased heart rate, racing thoughts, and more. The acute anxiety and dread may even lead people to avoid certain situations to their own detriment, making life hard to enjoy—limiting their relationships, as well as professional or recreational ambitions. But there is help for people living with social anxiety! If you suspect that you have social anxiety, you do not have to manage it alone. Read on for tips and information about how social anxiety can be treated through mental health therapy.
What is Social Anxiety?
One of the most important things to understand about social anxiety disorder is that it is a mental health issue, not a personality trait such as shyness or introversion. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5, criteria for social anxiety includes:
Persistent, intense fear or anxiety about specific social situations because you believe you may be judged negatively, embarrassed or humiliated
Avoidance of anxiety-producing social situations or enduring them with intense fear or anxiety
Excessive anxiety that's out of proportion to the situation
Anxiety or distress that interferes with your daily living
Fear or anxiety that is not better explained by a medical condition, medication, or substance abuse
Social anxiety is also distinct from conditions like agoraphobia, although they are both anxiety disorders with some overlapping symptoms, like avoidance and staying home. Whereas agoraphobia is a fear of being in a place that will trigger panic (e.g., an elevator), social anxiety is relational–it is a fear of being embarrassed or offending others, or being rejected by others.
When to Seek Professional Help for Social Anxiety
An estimated seven percent of American adults have social anxiety, with 75% experiencing the onset of social anxiety symptoms as teenagers. If you’ve noticed an increase in the volume and intensity of anxious thought patterns in the last few years since the COVID-19 pandemic, you aren’t alone — it’s estimated that social anxiety disorders rose more than 25% globally since 2020.
When your social anxiety begins to interfere with your everyday life, it’s time to seek professional help from a mental health provider. For example:
If you are frequently avoiding social situations at work, school, or with friends and family
If you are unable to participate in activities you enjoy or want to do
If your anxiety is causing you to have trouble sleeping or concentrating
If you are struggling with maladaptive coping behaviors such as alcohol or drug abuse
If you have feelings of self-loathing or even suicidal thoughts because of your anxiety and isolation
If you experience physical distress such as panic attacks, headaches, chronic pain, or digestive issues when you are in a social setting, or anticipating a social event
You do not have to manage this alone. A trusted mental health professional can help you, in person or virtually.
Types of Therapy that Can Help Treat Social Anxiety
There are a few different therapeutic approaches that a therapist may try to help treat your social anxiety:
Mindfulness meditation during therapy sessions can be very helpful when it comes to treating social anxiety because it teaches you how to relax your mind and your body.
Art therapy can also be very beneficial to treating social anxiety because you can learn how to regulate your emotions through art, which can also help relax your mind and body. Art therapy can also be utilized at home in moments when social anxiety is present.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): CBT is a form of talk therapy, and through it your therapist can help you learn to identify specific thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are fueling your distress. From there, you can begin to explore those feelings and reframe them into more helpful beliefs.
A multidisciplinary approach to therapy can combine different approaches like mindfulness and art therapy practices with more traditional forms of treatment like CBT to give clients multiple tools and skills to access in different situations where social anxiety comes into play.
For some people, social anxiety is very acute. In cases where mindfulness, art therapy, or CBT are not enough to effectively manage social anxiety, a therapist will refer the client to a psychiatrist who can prescribe medication.
5 Tips You Can Try Right Now to Ease Social Anxiety
Social anxiety disorder can leave people feeling helpless, but there are steps you can take to disrupt anxious thought patterns, find confidence, and connect with others. Below are some tips that may be helpful to ease social anxiety:
Challenge your negative thoughts: Sometimes it can feel as if you have no control, but when you challenge negative thoughts, it can disrupt the flow of anxiety and give you time to pause, notice how irrational they are, and dismiss them. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to disrupt negative thought patterns that fuel anxiety:
Is there evidence for my thought?
Is there evidence contrary to my thought?
What would a friend or loved one think about this?
Will this matter in six months? A year? Five years?
Work on your breathing: When you feel anxious, your body can experience an increased heart rate, pounding chest, muscle tension, sweatiness, along with other physical symptoms. By learning how to slow down your breath you can ground yourself to calm your nervous system and your anxious thoughts. For example, box breathing is a simple but powerful technique to help regulate your mind and body when you’re feeling anxious.
Be kind to yourself: Dealing with social anxiety is not easy, and sometimes it can feel frustrating to struggle to interact with others; however, remind yourself that nobody is perfect, and that you should not feel embarrassed. Give yourself the same grace that you would give to others.
Talking to others can be hard when you are dealing with social anxiety; however, by challenging yourself to interact with others you can start to build positive experiences and the emotional resilience to feel comfortable and confident.
Bring awareness to your environment by using your five senses by naming:
5 things you can see
4 things you can feel
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste
Social Anxiety Therapists in Chicago
At ECC Chicago, we’re committed to working with patients to find the right therapeutic method and therapist to suit your needs. Our diverse group of licensed therapists offer a multidisciplinary approach to social anxiety treatment, often combining different mindfulness, art therapy and somatic practices, as well as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to suit our clients’ unique needs. We will also refer you to a psychiatrist for additional support if we think a medication prescription will be beneficial in treating a condition like social anxiety disorder.
If you’re struggling with social anxiety, ECC Chicago is here to help. Reach out to schedule an intake session today. Together we can help you connect meaningfully with your life.
About ECC:
Empowered Connections Counseling is a practice of licensed therapists providing quality, multidisciplinary counseling for adults, children & teens, relationships, and families in Chicago and across Illinois. Whether by in-person session or via telehealth, we work with clients to find the therapist and treatment methods that best suit their needs. Connect meaningfully with your life by booking an appointment today.
5 Quick Ways to Manage Anxiety
Anxiety gets the best of us from time-to-time. In this blog post you will find five quick practical ways to manage anxiety, some takeaways to plan ahead, and other tips you can implement when you feel like the anxiety is building up.
Anxiety gets the best of us from time-to-time. In this blog post you will find five quick practical ways to manage anxiety, some takeaways to plan ahead, and other tips you can implement when you feel like the anxiety is building up.
Engage Your Senses
Often anxiety will build into sweeping thoughts and an intense emotional experience. Using the sense of touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing allows you to escape your internal experience by using your external experience to get lost in the moment.
Breathe with Mantra
If we can remember back to the nightmare that was gym class, telling ourselves as we were running laps, “just one more. I can do this!” while controlling your asthmatic breathing, we can use the same concept with anxiety. When we focus on a concept, we can force it into existence. Calm words, breed calm thoughts. Calm thoughts, breed calm experiences.
Schedule and Follow
A lot of anxiety could be eliminated if we scheduled our day in a predictable way, to understand what emotions we can prepare for. Not just our work obligations and the exciting new restaurant we are going to on the weekend, but the boring things like laundry, and necessities like cooking, grocery shopping, seeing friends, and cleaning your home. This allows us to anticipate the future and be able to plan accordingly.
What You Eat Matters
The old saying is true, when you eat well, you feel well. When we eat healthier foods, we feel better and we can better control our anxiety, instead of our anxiety controlling us. Eating more fruits and vegetables, while lowering our sugar and carbohydrates will help you with anxiety.
Exercise
When we move during exercise serotonin is increased, which is a natural anti-anxiety neuro-chemical. Taking a morning walk and talking to a friend can help make exercise more enjoyable than a dreaded activity.
Further Resources:
Podcast – Huberman Lab: How Food and Nutrient Control Our Moods. Dr. Andrew Huberman is an associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Neurobiology.
Blog – Men’s Health: Eat These Food to Beat Anxiety
Drew Ramsey, MD gives several food that can help reduce anxiety.
Book – Chatter: The Voice in Our head, Why It Matters, and Hot to Harness It
National Bestseller and Conscious mind expert Dr. Ethan Kross’ book on helping calm the inner voice.
The 3-minute exercise to manage anxiety while under quarantine
Anxiety has the capacity to be both incredibly helpful and harmful. In the event of finding yourself face to face with a cougar, down to the wire on a final project, or gearing up for a big race, anxiety gives us the "juice" to dig deep, focus, and function at a high level. There are consequences of course to these bouts with anxiety, including adrenaline and its counterpart cortisol - which, studies have shown, can be very harmful in high doses. Similarly prolonged states of anxiety can lead to fatigue, GI issues, heart problems, and memory problems. For brief periods of time, this anxiety can be functional and help us overcome challenges.
Anxiety has the capacity to be both incredibly helpful and harmful. In the event of finding yourself face to face with a cougar, down to the wire on a final project, or gearing up for a big race, anxiety gives us the "juice" to dig deep, focus, and function at a high level. There are consequences of course to these bouts with anxiety, including adrenaline and its counterpart cortisol - which, studies have shown, can be very harmful in high doses. Similarly prolonged states of anxiety can lead to fatigue, GI issues, heart problems, and memory problems. For brief periods of time, this anxiety can be functional and help us overcome challenges.
Unfortunately, anxiety isn't always helpful. Often the evolutionary anxiety that would help us in the event of a battle against a wild animal is constantly "ON" as we fight internal fears surrounding things that haven't actually happened yet. In fact, I often find that when anxiety is over functioning it leads us to look to the future and build dozens of different possible outcomes, then mount problem solving against them all. This is overwhelming, often unhelpful, and multiplies distress by focusing on situations that do not yet exist!
The beauty of practicing mindfulness as an anxiety management technique is that it helps us to stay focused on the present moment. Much of our psychological distress exists when we ruminate about the past or catastrophize the future - both are out of our control and are not happening in the present moment. You do not have to hold the distress of the past, present, and future simultaneously - it is too much!
My favorite quick trick to bring anxiety down to a more manageable level is a grounding technique that engages your senses. This helps take you out of your mind and into the physical space around you. Here you can remind yourself of what is actually happening - relieving your mind of the burden of holding so many possible realities at once. This has been increasingly helpful to folks as they are stuck in self-isolation due to the growing impact of COVID-19 on our world (a veritable powder keg for anxiety and catastrophic thought).
Before starting, I encourage you to take a few deep, full breaths - holding at the top of the inhale briefly and slowly exhaling. Then I invite you to turn to your senses and work through the following list. Repeat at least once (more if needed):
*Name 5 things that you see
*Name 4 things that you physically feel
*Name 3 things that you hear
*Name 2 things that you smell
*Name 1 thing that you taste
*REPEAT*
Extra notes: it is normal to still feel your mind racing and to experience internal dialogue (even critiquing the exercise). Allow those thoughts to come and go and continue to focus in on the exercise - the anxious voice will start to subside as you draw more and more attention to the world around you. Also, I encourage you to try to slow down with each item you name, trying to avoid rattling things off as quickly as possible "PILLOW - COUCH - LAMP - CHAIR"; instead try to also include one detail or adjective along with the item "the faded chair" or the "patterned rug".
If you are interested in more mindfulness activities, I highly recommend checking out meditation apps such as Calm, Simple Habit, and more. If you prefer a hands-on resource I encourage you to check out A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook by Stahl & Goldstein.