In our last blog post we spoke about social anxiety and what it looks like.  In today’s post, we want to continue the conversation and talk about what treatment would look like. We also want to provide some helpful strategies that you can apply in your everyday life.

Overall, treatment is designed to provide individuals with a systematic set of opportunities to learn that social situations are not as threatening as they think, social errors are not the worst thing ever, and social deficits are not as unyielding as anticipated. A therapist acts as a coach to set up opportunities to learn and provide context to individuals to try to find out new alternatives in the most feared social situations. This is done session by session, and the therapist guides clients for accurate interpretations of current performances and encourages individuals to try out new alternatives to the most feared social situations.

Now onto some practical solutions when dealing with social anxiety. The most important things to do when entering a social situation is to clearly define your goals for that situation or realize you may have overly high social standards that you place on yourself.  Let’s just say you have to attend a work luncheon, your belief (or goal) is that it should be perfect and you should not be ‘weird’ or ‘awkward.’  This is too poorly defined, and a big problem for people who experience social anxiety – they set their high social standard for themselves and have a poorly defined goal on how to measure that standard.  

What you want to do is set a concrete goal for the work luncheon. That might be to have a one conversation with a co-worker for 5 minutes and to make eye contact.  This is a concrete goal, in which you can measure your social performance by.  Another helpful tip is thinking about what you believe will happen at the work luncheon. You might think that on one will speak to you and won’t have anything to say.  Look at the evidence for and against this thought, and consider an alternative, realistic outcome.  This may help with the social apprehension you feel at the luncheon.  Reminding yourself of that more balanced alternative is a good coping strategy.

And one final piece of advice, if you believe that others don’t demand perfection from you, or that others make social mistakes as well, you will feel considerably less socially anxious. Major social mishaps are very rare, minor ones are common and happen all the time.  They are not as disastrous as you think.