Anyone else suffers from major social anxiety?
I feel extremely freaked out whenever I have a social situation coming up – business meals, meetings, networking sessions, coffee/meals with my partner’s friends, etc.
As a result, I just clam up and don’t speak at all. Which makes people think I am weird, anti-social, etc. 🙁
When I dig deep, I think it stems from my fear of what people think of me and me caring too much.
I think I am also quite a boring person with nothing interesting to add to the conversation? 🙁 No interest, no passion, no talent. Not particularly pretty, never lived overseas, etc.
Just want to be rid of this social anxiety forever!! As it is killing me on the inside so badly.
Wanted to let this out as I have a big social event coming up and I’m losing so much sleep over it. Can’t even focus on work, as I see the day coming nearer and nearer.
Netizen’s comments
As somebody who also goes through a lot of anxiety, all I can really say is, therapy can help a lot.
I think the keyword when it comes to anxiety is uncertainty. We encounter scenarios in our daily lives that are filled with unknowns – things that we can’t know for sure, things that we think might be able to harm us or damage us, and things that are just ambiguous. This is especially true about social situations, we don’t know how people will react to us, we don’t know what people think of us, and we don’t know how that will affect us going forward. It is this uncertainty that anxiety is ultimately predicated on.
Anxiety, like any other emotion, has an evolutionary purpose. It’s a reaction to a naturally ambiguous situations. It tells us to consider worst case scenarios and consider how we can better prepare for them. It tells us to be wary about certain things that can go wrong and gives us the energy and motivation we need to anticipate problems that arise. But anxiety can also be paralyzing – the overwhelming apprehension of possible bad scenarios can make it feel like the problem is just too large for us to tackle. And that all possible outcomes in this scenario will be bad and remain bad forever. Even if its something that might not be universally bad, it’s quite clear that it is something that deserves to be managed.
People struggling with anxiety, I think, tend to bias certain interpretations of ambiguous situations over others and this can lead to certain distortions in thought patterns that might not be extremely helpful. Let’s use an example to illustrate this: Let’s say you said hi to a colleague, and that colleague didn’t respond and instead looked annoyed. How would you react in this situation? If you’re anything like me you might start to feel worried that something you said or did resulted in your colleague not liking you for some reason. Maybe you might start to think about all the bad things that can happen if this colleague doesn’t like you. All of this reuslts in us becoming worried and developing a fear regarding future social contact. I think it’s worthwhile to stop at this point and to see what biases might have played a role in our thought pattern just now, and how it resulted in that worry that we experienced.
First interpretation biases: anxious people tend to favour negative interpretations of ambiguous scenarios over more positive or neutral ones. Our immediate reaction was to think that our colleague ignored us because we did something to upset them. But is this the only possibility? Perhaps they just didn’t hear us, or perhaps they were having a bad day due to something happening at home. We can’t know for sure of course, but let’s consider that there may be other reasons for why they are acting this way – reasons which may be as likely or even more likely than what we came up with at first. Here it might also be helpful to think about how you are personalizing his/her reaction; your immediate reaction was to think that his/her reaction was because of you, but let’s be clear, it’s very likely that you only form a very small fraction of his/her everyday life, and there are far more things that give that person stress, sadness, joy and excitement besides what you bring to them.
I think being able to stop and think about why you’re thinking about things in a certain way is extremely helpful in helping us to reflect on our emotions. From there we can start to reconsider whether or not these thought patterns are justified. But with anything, learning to overcome that anxiety is a process. It isn’t something that you decide to overcome one day, and become better overnight. There are a lot of exercises, worksheets, practices, that I think can all be extremely helpful along that journey, and a good therapist can really point you in the direction of the path that you need to take.