As a
professional dancer, Seema has performed before audiences of hundreds or even
thousands and never felt self-conscious. But this same woman gets tongue-tied
and shy when it comes to doing something simple like making a telephone call -
that she hovers around the phone for hours trying to work up her nerve to dial.
“I am convinced that the other person may ask me something I don’t know,” she
explains.
Seema suffers
from ‘social anxiety’. It is an extreme form of shyness or self-consciousness,
which is often irrational. Social anxiety can be broadly divided into four
basic categories. Performance anxiety
is one which a person faces while appearing on stage or speaking in public. Status anxiety arises out of shying away
from authority figures, celebrities or people who are especially well dressed
or attractive. Attention anxiety
refers to a situation where a person feels that he or she is getting too much
or too little attention in a particular situation. Crowd anxiety makes a person nervous about ceremonies like
weddings, funerals, formal parties or simply being amidst a certain group of
people.
There is
evidence from studies that shyness may be genetic to some extent. So
psychologists have consequently begun to think in terms of two categories of social
anxiety. The ‘disposition’ or genetic variety, which shows up very early in
life, appears equally in boys and girls. It is likely to manifest itself
physiologically (racing heartbeats, sweating, upset stomach, blushing), and can
also be kept under control with deep-breathing exercises. The ‘cognitive’ variety,
which appears at adolescence, is more common among girls, and usually manifests
itself in thoughts, for example “they must be thinking I’m stupid”.
It is believed
that parents can help by not labelling their children as ‘shy’ (and creating a
self-fulfilling prophecy). Parents should encourage their children to take
interest in performing arts, as it helps to nip the cognitive social anxiety in
the bud - the more drama, dance and movement they do, the less self-conscious
they feel.
The psychiatry
department of the University of Pennsylvania has pioneered the ‘homework’
approach for the socially anxious. The idea is to get the person to pay
attention to the actual situation that they are in, not to their cognitive
distortion of that situation. Clients are given assignments to tackle
potentially upsetting situations, such as striking up a conversation with an
attractive person in a bar. The therapist may even accompany the client to the
bar – and then provide the client with a reality check, forcing him or her to
evaluate whether the person at the bar has really said something to indicate a
lack of interest in the client, or whether the rejection is all in the client’s
head.
Similarly, a
person with anxiety about public speaking might be videotaped and then asked to
watch it. In many cases, the person is in fact more poised than she or he
imagines, and even where they are not, it is important to get them to realise
that one does not have to be totally charismatic and in control of every
situation.
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