How CBT Therapy Can Help with Your Social Anxiety
Cognitive behavioral therapy is one of the top recommended treatments for social anxiety. This is because CBT therapy targets the key elements of social anxiety that keep you stuck in the cycle.
Your anxious thought spiral that kicks off the whole system. This can include thoughts like “I’m going to look so stupid. Everyone will think I don’t belong there. I’m going to say something dumb or get tripped up on my words and embarrass myself.”
Your physical symptoms that only seem to escalate. This can include things like blushing, sweating, feeling dizzy or jittery, ringing in your ears, a tightness in your chest, upset stomach, and many others.
And your behaviors that keep the cycle going… and getting worse. This most commonly includes avoidance (such as avoiding making plans) and safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are anything you use to help you endure anxious situations such as avoiding eye contact by playing on your phone the whole time, busying yourself with cleaning up instead of chatting with people at the table after a meal, or using straws to avoid lifting your glass with a shaky hand to keep people from seeing that you’re nervous.
So how does it work exactly? CBT for social anxiety uses two main approaches to target these areas of social anxiety: cognitive skills and behavioral “retraining.”
Because thoughts play such an important part in social anxiety, we work with clients to help you master the skills of changing your thinking habits. This often begins with identifying what types of thoughts most feed into your social anxiety. Once we have an idea what types of thinking habits you’ve developed, we can teach you how to examine your thoughts to come up with more realistic, helpful thoughts. This is NOT the same thing as getting rid of a bad thought and replacing it with a good thought. On the contrary, it’s important for thoughts to be realistic and believable, otherwise they’ll do you no good. For this reason, we teach clients to examine their thoughts using factual evidence instead of assumptions, to set more realistic goals and expectations of themselves, and tools to help cope through anxious moments. Research has shown that the more realistic your thoughts are and the less dangerously you perceive social situations, the less physical symptoms you will experience. Additionally, the less you hyper focus on unrealistically negative thoughts and assumptions, the more you can actually focus on the situation at hand, which tends to improve your ability to function in all types of social situations.
The other main component of CBT is based around behavioral skills… in other words – actual practice. Research has shown that we can reduce anxiety by slowly facing the types of situations that make us anxious and practicing coping through them, rather than avoiding them. In this way, clients get a chance to learn practical steps for how to respond to their anxiety IN the situation. This always starts off easy and builds on your successes as you go, facing tougher situations once you’ve built some confidence in your skills. The real purpose of this approach is to give your body the opportunity to learn through experience, rather than just “in theory,” that you can in fact handle social situations. Over time, this can go a long way toward reducing your social anxiety as your body learns that social situations aren’t actually as dangerous as you once believed them to be.
We can help.
If you or someone you love is struggling with social anxiety, please reach out. We offer social anxiety treatment with CBT Therapists in Orlando and online throughout the state of Florida. Call today or send us your info and we’ll reach out for a free consultation to see if one of our therapists would be a good fit.
