Chloé Burban
The article I am going to talk about was written by Juli Fraga for npr and deals with social anxiety by giving in particular some tips to face it.
As the holiday season approaches, between family reunions and New Year parties, there are many opportunities to experience social anxiety. The author explains how anxiety manifests. In particular, she describes symptoms such as heart-thumping, face-flushing flood of fear and a cascade of worries, heart pulse races and mind goes blank. It’s not only a social awkwardness but a real disorder registered in manuals of psychiatrics disorders. It leads to “safety behaviors” that attempts to keep “fatal flaws” hidden. This behaviors can range from avoiding eye contact, to focus on texts or emails, instead of having social direct contact. This creates a real problematic issue of social isolation. The gut-wrenching anxiety and harsh self-criticism of social anxiety disorder are really long to process. The author has collected opinions from several psychologists who agree on a classification of the types of fears experienced in this pathology. To them, social anxiety disorder’s fears fit into four categories: worries about perceived flaws in physical appearance, in social skills and behavior, in personality, and a perceived inability to conceal all that anxiety. There is a criteria for duration : it need to persist for six month at least.
To help people to get better, psychologists propose to find ways to tolerate, rather than flee, the painful emotion. To them, psychotherapy — especially cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, which involve examining one’s self-limiting thoughts, worrisome feelings and how they are connected to avoidance behaviors — can be a good, safe place to practice facing fears.
Some people find that self-help tools, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction and self-compassion exercises, can help quiet their negative internal chatter.
They also list some good ways to face anxiety :
- Have a plan
Get an idea of what we are going to be able to talk about, have some primers of sentences and stories, prepare some topics for conversation and anticipate the themes of the speech. Referred to as “problem-focused coping” by social scientists, this strategy reduces anxiety by directly addressing the immediate problem: conversational uncertainty. - Do a kind deed
Performing acts of kindness can also ease social anxiety : kind gestures often elicit praise and appreciation from others, which can counteract the fear of rejection. - Talk to yourself, friend to friend
It helps to provide psychological distance from an unwanted upwelling of emotion. - Recite a soothing mantra
Self-directed kindness can be an effective treatment. - More ways friends can help
It is better to validate as legitimate the fears of our friends rather than to comfort them by telling them that everything will be fine, that worries them more.
Even better, invite your friend to share the advice they would offer to someone facing similar struggles. That can broaden perspective and may even help them accept their own advice.