Social anxiety is driven by safety behaviors that people do to try to make themselves feel better or to reduce the likelihood of negative outcomes in social situations. Safety behaviors in social anxiety are anything a person does before or during the social situation makes them feel safer or that tries to prevent feared outcomes from happening. The problem is safety behaviors often do not help the situation and tend to make a person’s anxiety a lot worse. Therefore, if you are experiencing social anxiety, there is likely a very good chance that you are using a number of safety behaviors that, unknowingly, are making your anxiety worse.
There are a number of examples of safety behaviors and social anxiety, including:
1) Things you do to make sure you are coming across well to other people.
2) Things you do to disappear and become almost “invisible” in social situations.
3) Trying to keep tight control of your behavior.
4) Limiting the content of what you talk about in social situations.
5) Limiting how much you say in social interactions.
6) Talking a lot in social interactions to avoid uncomfortable pauses.
7) Mentally keeping track of how the social situation is going.
8) Trying to disengage mentally from social situations.
9) Attempts to avoid social contact when in social situations.
10) Feeling like you have to be “on” and entertain others.
11) Attempts to try and hide physical signs of anxiety in social situations.
12) Using alcohol or drugs to manage anxiety in social situations.
As long as a person is engaged in these safety behaviors, they are likely going to continue feeling anxious in social situations. Therefore, overcoming social anxiety requires addressing the safety behaviors. The best way to do this is to engage in behavioral experiments in which you alternate between doing the safety behaviors and not doing the safety behaviors and see if there is any difference in the outcomes. By dropping the safety behaviors, you will likely find it you eventually feel less anxious and more spontaneous in social situations.
#SocialAnxiety #SafetyBehaviors #CBT
For background on the CBT model of Social Anxiety, watch this video: • Understanding SOCIAL A...
For a deeper understanding of safety behaviors in social anxiety, watch this video: • How You’re Making Your...
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