Social anxiety: The hidden habits that make it worse – and how you can break them

Mary, who has moved on to do a postgraduate course, is now managing her social anxiety better. After her undergraduate degree she got support from the NHS in the form of a talking therapy called CBT.

It is considered the gold standard treatment for social anxiety and encourages people to re-frame their thoughts and change their behaviours.

Prof David Clark, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, says he would like to see more people come forward for therapy but says people can also take steps to help themselves.

The first step, he says, is to stop obsessive self-focus. “People with social anxiety often monitor themselves constantly during social situations. Am I blushing? Do I sound stupid? Do I look nervous?

“Focus outwardly on the conversation, other person or your surroundings.”

He says you also need to test your fears with behavioural experiments by asking a question in a meeting or saying something in a group and noticing what happens.

“People with social anxiety often assume negative outcomes – that they will embarrass themselves or think others will find them boring. Testing that can help people break that. It’s frightening, but it can really help.”

He also says they need to drop safety behaviours, such as rehearing every sentence, avoiding eye contact or sticking close to one particular person.

And finally, Clark adds, try to avoid post-event rumination. “It’s so easy to distort what actually happened.”

This is something Mary can empathise with. “I used to play things over constantly in my mind. What I’ve learnt is that dealing with social anxiety is a gradual process. The therapy really helped me, but so did something a friend said to me a couple of years ago.

“When I said I didn’t want to join her in meeting some of her friends, citing my poor social skills, she said she’d never thought that about me and that I shouldn’t undersell myself. I was overcome with emotion.

“I’m now pushing myself to engage more. It helps that in my postgrad course we’re in smaller groups, but I’ve also joined an astronomy group. It’s still difficult and it doesn’t always go how I want it to, but I’m learning to manage it.”