Using CBT Skills to Manage Social Anxiety
Social anxiety is a common mental health condition that many people struggle with worldwide. This type of anxiety is characterized by a fear of being viewed negatively by people in social situations. These fears can be so debilitating that they make it difficult for people to engage in social situations. This can lead people struggling with social anxiety to avoid social interaction, which can in turn affect a person’s overall mental health. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of therapy that helps people understand how their emotions, actions, and thoughts are related to one another. CBT teaches a variety of skills that can be used to help people improve symptoms of anxiety and other mental health conditions.
What Is Social Anxiety?
Social anxiety is a type of anxiety that focuses on an intense fear of social situations. The main fear associated with social anxiety is the fear of people negatively viewing them. Social anxiety includes the fear of before, during, and after a stressful social event. Negative thinking distortions are also common when a person is thinking about or experiencing a stressful event. In some situations, people can become so preoccupied with their own self-reflection that it will increase physical symptoms of anxiety as well. Many of the behavioral symptoms of social anxiety center around avoidance and preparation. Avoidant behaviors can include skipping or canceling social events. Other avoidance behaviors can involve withdrawing during social events. People who struggle with social anxiety also sometimes find it helpful to prepare for social situations. This might mean they rehearse what they will say or avoid pauses in conversations. These behaviors can subconsciously signal to the person struggling that social situations and the anxiety that comes with it are dangerous. When a person struggles with social anxiety, they often structure their lives around avoiding social situations. This can lead to fewer opportunities and growth professionally and personally due to how limiting avoidance can be.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of therapy that teaches people how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected. CBT teaches patients that there are unhelpful thinking patterns called cognitive distortions that make life more difficult. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on teaching patients to change their thinking patterns by recognizing distortions in their thinking. CBT also helps patients rewrite their negative thoughts to be more accurate and based in reality. Cognitive behavioral therapy also helps patients work through behavioral issues that might be holding them back in life. CBT can be used to treat social anxiety in that it can help patients face their fears and move past them.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Social Anxiety
CBT is a great approach for targeting social anxiety and its symptoms. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a great form of therapy to treat social anxiety because it targets negative thoughts and avoidance behaviors. CBT teaches that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all rely on one another. This type of therapy offers a variety of skills that can be used to help with social anxiety.
Why CBT Works
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a great way to treat social anxiety because it can help teach people how to rewrite their thoughts to be more accurate. CBT also helps people target their avoidance behaviors towards social situations and manage their anxiety before or after the event. CBT is also a goal-oriented type of therapy that can help people stay on track with their progress.
CBT Skills
Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches many skills that can help people improve their anxiety management. There are many CBT skills that people can try to see what works best for them. The two skills that can be most helpful for treating social anxiety are cognitive restructuring and exposure therapy.
Cognitive restructuring is the practice of identifying and changing unhelpful thinking patterns. CBT teaches that there are common cognitive distortions that people typically struggle with. Many times, when someone is working on reframing their thoughts, they will target their automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts are thoughts that come into our minds without significant thought and come up almost effortlessly. These thoughts can be more difficult to reframe because if they are automatic, they have likely been present for a long time. Some examples of these distortions are black and white thinking or mind-reading. Black and white thinking is a type of thinking distortion that is marked by all-or-nothing thinking. On the other hand, the cognitive distortion of mind-reading is when a person assumes what a person is thinking or feeling. Cognitive restructuring helps people struggling with social anxiety change how they view social situations. They can begin to see social situations as manageable instead of dangerous.
On the other hand, exposure therapy is another CBT skill that can be used to treat social anxiety. Exposure therapy is a type of therapy that can help people face their fears and face the anxiety that they have toward the fear. Over time, the person struggling is exposed to the fearful situation (and anxiety) repetitively until they are no longer afraid or avoidant. For obvious reasons, exposure therapy can be scary for people, but it can also be incredibly effective. Exposure therapy is usually done with a therapist in a safe environment to ensure the safety of the patient.
Social anxiety is a common form of anxiety that affects people in many different ways. While everyone who struggles with their mental health in any way is different, there are some similarities in people who struggle. These similarities can help people find treatment that will be helpful for them and can help them live fuller lives. Social anxiety symptoms are marked by a person negatively evaluating themselves and their behaviors in social situations. This anxiety is paired with fear and can lead to people avoiding social situations, and thus the anxiety that comes along with it. CBT is a powerful form of treatment used to treat social anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy skills directly target the negative thought distortions that people hold towards themselves and social situations. CBT teaches people how to reframe their thoughts to be grounded in reality, rather than their fears. Cognitive behavioral therapy also helps people expose themselves gradually to their fears in a safe environment with their therapist. This unique environment helps people engage with their fears and prove to themselves that they are strong enough to survive them. Exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring can take time, but it is worth the time and effort it takes. Living a life with social anxiety running the show is not really like living at all. The fears and negative thinking that come with social anxiety can debilitate people and negatively affect their mental health. If you are reading this and you are struggling with social anxiety, we want you to remember you are not alone. Hope and recovery are always possible for those who are willing to work toward them.
If you or someone you love is interested in working with us, we are here for you! Reach out to us today if you are ready to start.
References
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.focus.20200045
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC181152/
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10440210/
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exposure-therapy
Keywords: social anxiety, cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, anxiety management