All of us have trouble with social situations some of the time. Anxiety when meeting new people, entering a party full of strangers or trying to get to know a potential partner, all of this is perfectly normal. Other people are a potential source of stress. But when anxiety is overwhelming, it interferes with our everyday living, and it can feel overwhelming.
But it doesn't have to be like this. You can become more yourself in these situations and feel more in control.
The overwhelming feelings can come out of the blue, partly because fear is building up in anticipation of social interaction. Thinking about an event can bring up worries about how things might go wrong. Sometimes they are not even thoughts, flashes of an image of disaster can whizz through your mind without notice, and it seems impossible not to notice the feelings that follow.
So you arrive at the party anxious, blushing, confused and clumsy. You think that everyone will think awful things about you and you just want to crawl into a corner. You become increasingly aware of your trembling hands, your breathlessness and your dry mouth and think that everyone else notices them too. Our thoughts about what other people are thinking are biased by our own thinking. We imagine what they are thinking, but they are very rarely as cruel or unkind as we think. We are mistaking our thoughts for their thoughts. We have started to gather information about what is going on from our own feelings and bodily sensations, rather than what is really going on around us. This "self-focused attention" exacerbates and prolongs our anxiety.
Once we can put a label on something we can deal with it. If self-focused attention is part of the problem, then changing our focus of attention away from ourselves, to our environment, to the other people, will help us to feel better.
But it doesn't have to be like this. You can become more yourself in these situations and feel more in control.
The overwhelming feelings can come out of the blue, partly because fear is building up in anticipation of social interaction. Thinking about an event can bring up worries about how things might go wrong. Sometimes they are not even thoughts, flashes of an image of disaster can whizz through your mind without notice, and it seems impossible not to notice the feelings that follow.
So you arrive at the party anxious, blushing, confused and clumsy. You think that everyone will think awful things about you and you just want to crawl into a corner. You become increasingly aware of your trembling hands, your breathlessness and your dry mouth and think that everyone else notices them too. Our thoughts about what other people are thinking are biased by our own thinking. We imagine what they are thinking, but they are very rarely as cruel or unkind as we think. We are mistaking our thoughts for their thoughts. We have started to gather information about what is going on from our own feelings and bodily sensations, rather than what is really going on around us. This "self-focused attention" exacerbates and prolongs our anxiety.
Once we can put a label on something we can deal with it. If self-focused attention is part of the problem, then changing our focus of attention away from ourselves, to our environment, to the other people, will help us to feel better.
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