Social Anxiety

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.