Cancelling plans at the last moment, putting off phone calls, staying quiet in a group or waiting it out in the bathroom can feel like strange habits of your own. In this video, I walk you through eight signs of social anxiety in everyday life and show you how they belong to one pattern. If you recognize yourself in several of them, what you have been living with has a name.
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Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
You told your friends that you would come to the party tonight. Now you are sitting in your car outside the house,
and you watch the other guests walk through the front door. After a while, you start the engine and drive back home.
If you have ever done something like this, there is nothing wrong with you.
You probably saw it as a strange habit of yours.
This habit has a name, and it shows up in more parts of your life than you might expect.
I did this, and almost everything else in this video, for many years, and I did not know that all of it belonged together. Over the next few minutes, I will walk you through eight signs.
One of these signs is so central that the official description of social anxiety names it almost word for word, and I will show you which one it is.
The first sign is cancelling plans at the last moment. You said yes to a dinner with friends,
and at the time you may even have been looking forward to it.
As the day comes closer, your chest feels tighter every time you think about it.
Shortly before you are supposed to leave, you write the message that something came up.
Right after you send it, you feel relief, because the pressure in your chest goes down.
A little later the guilt arrives, because you know that nothing came up and that your friends were counting on you.
I have sent that kind of message more times than I can count.
Staying away from a situation because of fear is called avoidance, and avoidance is at the center of every description of social anxiety.
The fear often builds up long before the situation itself, while you play it through in your head.
Because the fear drops so quickly after you cancel, you become more likely to cancel the next time as well.
The second sign is avoidance that nobody else gets to see, and it takes us back to the car.
You drive to the party, you park in front of the house, and you watch the others go inside. After a while, you start the engine and drive home again.
The next day, someone asks how your evening was, and you might even say that it was nice.
This is how far my own avoidance went. For a long time, I made sure that nobody could tell that I had stayed away.
If you have done something similar, you know how much effort it takes to keep this up, and how lonely it can feel afterwards.
The third sign is having difficulty with phone calls. You need to make an appointment, so you have to call the office.
You work out your first sentence in your head. Then you put the call off again and again,
until the office has closed for the day. You feel relieved, and you decide that you will write an email instead.
A phone call happens in real time, which means that you have to answer right away.
You cannot rewrite your answer before you send it, and you cannot see the face of the other person to check how they are reacting.
What makes the call so hard for most people with social anxiety is the feeling that the other person is judging every word while the conversation is happening.
Avoidance is hard to recognize as a sign when you are the one who is doing it.
Every time you cancel, stay in the car or write an email instead of calling, the fear goes down right away,
and so it feels as if you have solved a problem.
Because the relief comes so quickly, the next situation feels a little harder to face, and the next way out feels a little more necessary.
The fourth sign is that your mind goes blank in a conversation. Someone asks you a simple question, for example how your week has been,
and suddenly your head is empty. You know that you should say something, and you cannot find a single sentence.
In social anxiety, part of your attention moves inward during a conversation, and you check how your voice sounds, whether you look nervous and what you should say next.
Part of your mind is busy watching you, so less of it is left for the person in front of you.
In experiments, people who watched themselves in this way during a conversation felt more anxious, and their conversations went less well.
When this happened to me, the fear was so strong that I could not think clearly anymore.
My thoughts became slow and unclear, which some people call brain fog, and the fear left me almost unable to speak.
The fifth sign is being the quietest person in a group. Everyone is talking, and you prepare a sentence in your head.
You wait for a good moment to say it. By the time you feel ready, the group has moved on to another topic, and once again you have said nothing.
You stay quiet because you are afraid that people will laugh at you or think that you are stupid.
Researchers who study social anxiety describe this exact behavior, staying quiet so that you do not say anything embarrassing, as one of the ways in which people try to protect themselves.
When you say less, there are fewer chances to say something wrong. At the same time, you never find out what would have happened if you had spoken.
After evenings like this, I often blamed myself for staying so quiet.
I did not want people to see me as the withdrawn one, and I wished I could be like the people everyone listens to because they are so interesting.
The sixth sign is hiding in the bathroom. You are at a party or at a work event,
and at some point you go to the bathroom even though you do not need to.
You sit in the stall, you look at your phone, and you wait until enough time has passed that it will not seem strange when you come back.
I spent a lot of time in bathrooms like that. For those few minutes, nobody can look at you, and nobody expects you to say anything.
The fear goes down right away, and this relief makes it more likely that you will go there again the next time.
Research describes many open and hidden ways in which people step out of a situation where they feel watched, and for me the bathroom was a common one.
Most people see these signs as separate habits of their own. They think that they are bad on the phone,
that they are not much of a talker, or that they are a little unreliable.
When you place the signs next to each other, you can see that they follow one pattern.
In each of these situations, you leave, stay silent or wait, so that other people have less chance to see you in a moment where you feel uncomfortable.
What exactly you do not want them to see leads to the next sign.
The seventh sign is the fear that other people can see your anxiety. Your face gets hot, and your voice shakes a little.
Then a thought comes up that says that they can see it and that everyone now thinks that you are a loser.
This is the sign I told you about at the beginning. The official description of social anxiety names this fear almost word for word,
as the fear that other people will notice your anxiety and judge you negatively because of it.
This fear also explains many of the earlier signs. You go to the bathroom so that nobody sees your face turn red. You stay quiet so that nobody hears your voice shake.
You even hide the avoidance itself, as you may have done in the car, so that nobody finds out how strong the fear has become.
In experiments where people had to speak in front of others, they believed that their nervousness was much easier to see than it actually was.
Other people do notice some of it, and they notice less than it feels like from the inside.
The eighth sign is the feeling that you are worth less than the people around you.
You walk into a room, and you feel that everyone else is more interesting, more confident and has more right to be there than you.
In studies, people with social anxiety more often see themselves as lower in social rank than other people.
They feel inferior more often, and they give in to others more quickly.
After many years of feeling this way, it is easy to arrive at one conclusion, and I arrived at it too, which was the thought that this is just how I am.
If you recognized yourself in several of these signs, you probably have social anxiety.
For many people this is also a relief, because it means that what they have been living with has a name.
A large survey in the United States interviewed a representative group of adults about anxiety and about whether they had ever looked for professional help.
Among the people with social anxiety who did look for help at some point,
half had lived with their anxiety for sixteen years or longer before they spoke to a professional about it for the first time.
This means that many people carry social anxiety for a large part of their lives before they talk about it with someone who can help.
Think back to the car outside the party from the beginning. You now know that what happened in that car has a name,
and that the same pattern shows up on the phone, in the bathroom and in a quiet group.
There is still the thought from the last sign, the thought that this is just how you are.
Why social anxiety feels so much like a part of who you are needs a longer answer than this video can give.
You can work on social anxiety from home, without forcing yourself into difficult situations,
by preparing your nervous system first so that those situations become easier and easier.
In this video here, I explain why social anxiety feels this way and how you can work through it.