Social Anxiety: When the Room Feels Like a Test You Might Fail

When you walk into a room you may know what it is to immediately feel a heightened awareness of how you are being perceived. A background level self-monitoring of whether you are saying or doing the right things. A feeling of relief when you can finally leave and quietly replay everything that was said and done. Or you may avoid these rooms altogether, because the anticipation of that anxious feeling is enough to keep you out of them as much as possible.

Whilst social anxiety may be accompanied by shyness, or introversion, it is defined in different ways. It involves a fear of being negatively evaluated, judged, rejected, or found wanting in social situations. This fear activates the body’s threat response as though the danger were physical rather than social. Our hearts race and our minds may go blank. We may flush or get sweaty palms at the worst possible moment. Surprisingly enough, our bodies are doing exactly what they were designed to do in the presence of threat. However, the threat on this occasion is the possibility of not being liked or accepted, or the perceived threat of being rejected.

Where it comes from

Social anxiety does not arrive from nowhere. The self-scrutiny that is part of social anxiety in adolescence and adulthood often started much earlier, developing from a history of learning that a sense of belonging was not guaranteed. You may have learned early in life that acceptance was conditional, and that social groups could be unpredictable or hostile, rather than safe.

For some of us, that learning happened in the context of family. Perhaps love felt conditional on our achievements or performance. Criticism was maybe more present than praise. In some households, certain ways of being were viewed as acceptable and others were not. Each of these environments teach children to monitor and manage themselves carefully before they even arrive in the social world beyond the home.

For others, the history of social anxiety began in childhood peer groups. Exclusion, bullying, being the one who was left out or mocked. The one whose attempts at connection were met with cruelty or indifference. Beyond childhood, those experiences often become template for our social worlds. We may carry the belief that social groups are potentially dangerous, that belonging is fragile, and that the cost of putting yourself forward is the risk of being publicly shamed or humiliated.

For some people social anxiety manifested from family cultures where social performance mattered enormously, where making the right impression was paramount, or where other people’s thoughts about us were the most significant indicator of our worth. In these circumstances, social anxiety is inherited as much as it is learned from the social settings surrounding one’s family life.

The threat system in social situations

The amygdala (the brain’s threat detection system) isn’t really able to neatly distinguish between physical and social threats. Exclusion from a group was for much of human history, genuinely life-threatening. The social threat response is not irrational, rather it is steeped in evolution. And for some of us whose early experiences taught us that membership is precarious, the threat system can remain sensitive to social cues around belonging and rejection.

In practice this means that social situations may be scanned constantly for evidence of exclusion. A neutral expression may be read as disapproval. A pause in conversation may be interpreted as us being boring. A text message left unread may be received as rejection. The mind that is used to catastrophic interpretation is one that is following a pattern laid down by an accumulation of challenging experiences over the years. As a result we may find ourselves searching for the threat signals that our brains were trained to look for, and finding them even when they are not truly present.

Being chosen, and the focus it creates

Often one of the central preoccupations of social anxiety is the question of whether we are being chosen, included, invited, sought out, or wanted. Each social situation becomes a repetition of that question. Often the stakes feel high because the question beneath each social event is really a version of: do you accept me, am I acceptable, worthy, liked, or safe?

The focus on being chosen tends to magnify the conditions that make genuine connection harder. When all of our available attention is directed outwards (monitoring how we are being received and perceived) there is very little resource left for actually being present with the people in the room. The irony is that the preoccupation with being liked and deemed interesting, tends to make us less curious about others, and interested.

Not needing to be liked by everyone

Social anxiety tends to erode our capacity to tolerate the inevitable life experience of being disliked by some people, without it feeling catastrophic. This requires our sense of self-worth to be intact enough that the opinion of any individual, or any room, cannot destabilise it. When that sense of self is absent, every social interaction carries a weight that can feel impossible to bear.

Part of what sustains social anxiety is the belief that being universally liked is possible and necessary, when neither is actually true. Some people will not warm to us, and that is completely natural and OK – we all have our own histories, likes, dislikes, preferences and preoccupations.

Learning to see the difference between being disliked and being deficient tends to help us to manage those connections that do not endure over time.

How social anxiety sustains itself

Often the behaviours that feel protective in social situations tend to be the ones that prevent our social anxieties from ever being challenged. For example, you may find yourself preparing exhaustively before social events or speaking carefully to avoid saying anything wrong. Perhaps you have started leaving social events early, staying quiet, or going over interactions and conversations after an event in forensic detail and looking for everything that could have gone better. These behaviours may feel like they help us to manage our discomfort in the moment, but they also prevent us from attending to the fact that we made it through the event and perhaps even enjoyed it. When we miss opportunities to learn that our anxiety is unnecessary, anxiety tends to remain and often gains strength.

Healthy relationships

For people whose early relational experiences were conditional, critical, or unpredictable, healthy relationships can feel genuinely unfamiliar. Unconditional warmth can register as suspicious. Being liked without having to earn it can feel confusing. The relational templates that were built in our early lives, can shape what feels normal or safe in adolescence and adulthood.

Addressing social anxiety is a combination of understanding our anxiety symptoms in social situations and also developing a clearer sense of what healthy connection looks and feels like. Learning to recognise the relationships that are safe and those that are not, can help us to choose which social situations we actually want to participate in.

What therapy can offer

Therapy for social anxiety can explore historical and present-day experiences. It can offer a space to understand where our learning about social survival came from. What early experiences shaped your belief that belonging is conditional? Where or from whom did you learn that social groups could be dangerous? How did you learn that you have to carefully manage yourself to survive social interactions?

Therapy can also offer a space to begin building a different kind of relational experience: getting to know yourself, your own likes, dislikes, relational preferences, the types of social experiences that you enjoy the most, and who you like to engage in them with.

The therapeutic relationship itself is part of the work. Being accepted and heard without being judged, or having to perform, can start to provide different templates for healthy relationships and social experiences that go well.

Therapy can also help with the practical work of gradually reducing those safety behaviours that in the long term maintain the anxiety. It can also help you to slowly build the evidence that social situations are more survivable than they currently feel.

If social situations have been feeling anxiety provoking and you would like some support in understanding why, and how to have more enjoyable social experiences, you are welcome to get in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and ‘Walk and Talk’ therapy in North West London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.