Social Anxiety & Phobias (Including Public Speaking and Fear of Flying)
If you have social anxiety, it simply means you get especially anxious or panicky about certain social situations
If you have developed a phobia, it means you get especially anxious or panicky related to a specific object or situation (for example, flying, public speaking, heights, animals or insects, being in crowds). It is not uncommon to have a fear or phobia about more than one thing.
What these have in common is:
- Anticipatory anxiety - worrying and strategizing ahead of time about how to handle possible exposure to what you fear
- Immediate distress and survival response in the body (fight-flight-freeze)
- Jumping to catastrophic conclusions about what will happen or how you'll be perceived - sometimes there are so many of these thoughts that it seems like your mind goes blank
- A very strong impulse to completely avoid what makes you anxious
- Embarrassment or shame because part of you knows your reaction to the situation or focus of your phobia is out of proportion to the actual risk or threat.
Note: You might also take a look at "Stress, Anxiety & Panic" (under "Specialities").
How does therapy help?
To conquer social anxiety or phobias, you first learn about the nervous system's hard-wired response to any sense of threat. It doesn't matter if the threat is real or a memory or just a "what if" scenario - the nervous system gets mobilized to get you out of whatever trouble it perceives.
There are easy-to-learn techniques for calming your nervous system, through a combination of correct breathing and releasing muscle tension, sometimes adding in visualizations. This skill is important so that you know how to calm yourself when you expect to encounter a situation or trigger (for example, right before giving a speech or going to a party, or when you know you'll be taking a flight). It's also important for when you unexpectedly find yourself in a situation, and your fear spikes. Getting good at calming your system also helps you maintain your composure as you get through, for instance, that speech or that flight.
Hand in hand with lowering the temperature in your nervous system is learning to look at things in a new, less frightening way. There are straightforward methods I help you learn, to get a handle on the runaway extreme thoughts that are part of social anxiety and phobias.
Once you have tools to calm you body and mind, planned exposure is what really moves you beyond social anxiety or phobias. We do this in session together, and soon you move out into situations in your "real" life. The basic approach is to start by calming yourself, then allow your anxiety to rise noticeably as you face a situation or feared object, and then use your skills in calming your body and mind to prove to yourself you can reduce your fear and physical symptoms to a manageable level, and stay in the situation. Staying in the situation or in the presence of the focus of your phobia allows you to learn and make sense of it. This makes it less frightening or overwhelming.
Facing your fears in a therapeutic way means you have tools, and a supportive, knowledgeable coach on hand to help you take it step by step. We might begin just imagining a situation, then move to using a representation of it (for example, a stuffed animal or drawing), then gradually and planfully move into actually doing or encountering what you have feared. For social anxiety, for instance, that might mean imagining an interaction you're worried about, then role-playing interactions in session, then interacting in a context that feel less anxiety-provoking to you (such as interacting with someone you trust), then attending or hosting a small gathering, and so on. At each level of exposure, you'll be using your calming toolkit as much as you need so you can increase your ability to stay in that type of situation without becoming overwhelmed.