Start by spending time in a coffee shop or practicing your conversation skills with family members. Then you can ease into larger social settings. Before you know it, you'll be making new friends at your next social gathering.
10 Ways to Overcome Awkwardness in a Social Setting
Social anxiety is more than shyness, it is experiencing fear during social settings and interactions with others that is so intense it begins to make life unmanageable. People with social anxiety are so afraid that they begin avoiding interactions altogether, causing them to miss out on what should be positive life experiences.
There are many effective strategies to decrease unwanted symptoms of social anxiety including regular self-care routines, talk therapy to heal from painful past experiences and change negative though narratives, and talking to supportive people about your struggles. Aspects of Exposure therapy also helps to teach people how to confront and overcome challenges.
In many cases, social awkwardness comes from extreme anxiety. Social anxiety is more than just feeling shy. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 12.1% of U.S. adults experience a social anxiety disorder at some time in their lives.
Because extreme shyness can interfere with socializing, it can also affect a person's self-confidence and self-esteem. And it can prevent someone from taking advantage of opportunities or trying new things. Extreme feelings of shyness are often a sign of an anxiety condition called social phobia. People with social phobia often need the help of a therapist to overcome extreme shyness.
One of the most helpful things you can do to overcome social anxiety is to face the social situations you fear rather than avoid them. Avoidance keeps social anxiety disorder going. While avoiding nerve-wracking situations may help you feel better in the short term, it prevents you from becoming more comfortable in social situations and learning how to cope in the long term. In fact, the more you avoid a feared social situation, the more frightening it becomes.
Actively seeking out supportive social environments is another effective way of challenging your fears and overcoming social anxiety. The following suggestions are good ways to start interacting with others in positive ways:
While lifestyle changes alone aren't enough to overcome social phobia or social anxiety disorder, they can support your overall treatment progress. The following lifestyle tips will help you reduce your overall anxiety levels and set the stage for successful treatment.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a research-supported type of psychotherapy, is commonly used to treat social anxiety disorder. CBT teaches you different ways of thinking, behaving, and reacting to situations to help you feel less anxious and fearful. CBT also can help you learn and practice social skills, which is very important for treating social anxiety disorder. CBT has been well studied and is the gold standard for psychotherapy.
Another treatment option for social anxiety disorder is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). ACT takes a different approach than CBT to negative thoughts and uses strategies such as mindfulness and goal setting to reduce your discomfort and anxiety. Compared to CBT, ACT is a newer form of psychotherapy treatment, so less data are available on its effectiveness. However, different therapies work for different types of people, so it can be helpful to discuss what form of therapy may be right for you with a mental health professional.
Many people with social anxiety find support groups helpful. In a group of people who all have social anxiety disorder, you can receive unbiased, honest feedback about how others in the group see you. This way, you can learn that your thoughts about judgment and rejection are not true or are distorted. You also can learn how others with social anxiety disorder approach and overcome the fear of social situations.
Learning how to overcome social anxiety can be grueling. Social anxiety can be so powerful that it can cause physical reactions that leave you shaking, dizzy, and terrified of being rejected. People who experience severe social anxiety know that sometimes even just thinking about being in a social setting can be overwhelming and excruciatingly painful.
Any type of anxiety can be difficult to work through on your own. Remember that social anxiety disorder is a mental health condition, and sometimes professional help is a necessary and very beneficial part of knowing how to overcome it. This can be especially true if your anxiety has become debilitating and is seriously interfering with your life.
During therapy, other challenging areas will be identified such as starting or maintaining a conversation or asking questions. Each session will focus on different activities that typically involve role-play and sometimes will take place in a group setting to simulate different social experiences.
This podcast provides tips and advice on challenging social situations including navigating difficult conversations, giving and receiving feedback in a professional setting, and negotiating your salary.
To make the most of treatment, keep your medical or therapy appointments, challenge yourself by setting goals to approach social situations that cause you anxiety, take medications as directed, and talk to your health care provider about any changes in your condition.
Social anxiety disorder typically starts in childhood or adolescence. Among individuals who seek treatment as adults the median age of onset is in the early to mid-teens with most people having developed the condition before they reach their 20s. However, there is a small subgroup of people who develop the condition in later life. Some people can identify a particular time when their social anxiety disorder started and may associate it with a particular event (for example, moving to a new school or being bullied or teased). Others may describe themselves as having always been shy and seeing their social anxiety disorder as a gradual, but marked, exacerbation of their apprehension when approaching or being approached by other people. Others may never be able to recall a time when they were free from social anxiety.
There is also a significant degree of comorbidity between social anxiety disorder and some personality disorders. The most common is avoidant personality disorder (APD), with as much as 61% of adults who seek treatment for social anxiety also meeting criteria for a personality disorder (Sanderson et al., 1994). However, there is some controversy about the significance of this finding. There is a marked overlap between the criteria for social anxiety disorder and APD, and some experts consider APD a severe variant of social anxiety disorder. As many people develop their social anxiety disorder in childhood, some researchers have argued that much of the association with APD is simply due to the chronicity of the anxiety disorder. However, research studies have succeeded in identifying a few characteristics that tend to distinguish people with social anxiety disorder alone from those with social anxiety disorder plus APD. These include interpersonal problems, in particular problems with intimacy, increased functional impairment and lower levels of social support (Marques et al., 2012), although the differences have not always been replicated. Whatever the relationship between social anxiety disorder and APD, there is some evidence that successful psychological treatment of social anxiety also reduces the incidence of APD (Clark et al., 2006; McManus et al., 2009a). Similarly, Fahlen (1995) reported that abnormal personality traits wane with successful pharmacological treatment. Besides APD, comorbidity rates with other personality disorders are low and not higher than with other anxiety disorders or depression.
Recognition of social anxiety disorder in adults, children and young people by general practitioners (GPs) is often poor. The problem of under-recognition for anxiety disorders in general has recently been highlighted by evidence that the prevalence of PTSD is significantly under-recognised in primary care (Ehlers et al., 2009). In part this may stem from GPs not identifying the disorder, a general lack of understanding about its severity and complexity, and a lack of clearly defined care pathways. But it may also stem from service users' lack of knowledge of its existence, their avoidance of talking about the problem and stigma.
The early age of onset and effects on educational achievement mean that recognition of social anxiety disorders in educational settings is also an issue. As well as underachieving, children with social anxiety disorder may be particularly likely to be the targets of bullying and teasing. Teachers and other educational professionals may have limited knowledge of how to recognise and oversee the management of the condition.
How does one determine whether a psychological intervention has a specific effect? Essentially one needs to demonstrate that the treatment is superior to an alternative treatment that includes most of the features that are common to various psychological interventions (such as seeing a warm and empathic therapist on a regular basis, having an opportunity to talk about one's problems, receiving encouragement to overcome the problems, receiving a treatment that seems to be based on a sensible rationale and having one's symptoms measured regularly). RCTs approach this requirement in one of three ways, each of which has strengths and weaknesses. In the first approach the alternative/control condition is a treatment that was specifically designed for the study and is intended to include non-specific features only, a good example of which is the education-support condition used by Heimberg and colleagues (1990; 1998). In the second approach, the alternative treatment might be something that is used routinely in clinical practice and is considered by some to be an active intervention but it turns out to be less effective than the psychological intervention under investigation, despite involving a similar amount of therapist contact. In the third approach, the psychological intervention is compared with pill placebo, which controls the many non-specific factors but often fails to fully control for therapist contact time because this is usually less in a medication-based treatment. 2ff7e9595c
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