The Fear of Being Seen as Anxious in Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is usually understood as a fear of negative evaluation. Someone might fear that other people will find them boring, unlikeable, awkward, incompetent, strange, or otherwise socially inadequate.

There is, however, another form of social fear that I think is discussed less often. Sometimes, the thing the person is most afraid of being negatively evaluated for is the anxiety itself. They are afraid that other people will see that they are nervous.

In these cases, the problem is not simply a broad fear of judgment. It is closer to a fear of experiencing fear in front of other people.

When Anxiety Itself Becomes the Social Threat

Consider two people entering the same social situation. The first is worried that the other person will not like them. The second is worried that the other person will notice that they are anxious. Both can be described as experiencing social anxiety, but the feared threat is subtly different.

For the first person, anxiety occurs because they anticipate negative evaluation. For the second, appearing anxious is itself one of the things they expect to be negatively evaluated for. They may fear blushing, shaking, sweating, struggling to maintain eye contact, their voice changing, their face appearing tense, or simply giving off the impression that they are uncomfortable.

The feared sequence might therefore be: I will become anxious, they will notice, they will realise I am uncomfortable, and they will think there is something wrong with me. The social threat begins with somebody else being able to see their fear.

Fear of Fear in Front of Other People

This can create a particularly difficult feedback loop. The person enters a social situation and notices some anxiety (often because, they are already highly sensitised to the experience of anxiety). If anxiety itself is socially threatening, noticing that anxiety immediately creates another concern: What if they can see this?

That thought produces more anxiety. The person notices the increase and becomes more concerned that the anxiety is becoming obvious. Attention moves further inwards, anxiety increases again, and the possibility of being seen as anxious becomes increasingly threatening.

The cycle can therefore be understood as:

Social situation → anxiety → fear that anxiety is visible → increased self-monitoring → increased anxiety → greater fear of being seen as anxious.

In this way, the person is not only anxious in social situations. They become anxious about being anxious in social situations.

Negative Evaluation of What?

This distinction can easily be missed when formulating social anxiety. We might ask somebody what they are afraid another person will think about them and receive an answer such as, “They'll think I'm weird.” But it can be useful to continue asking what would lead the other person to that conclusion.

Sometimes the answer is: “Because they'll see how nervous I am.”

This gives us a slightly different formulation. The person may not fundamentally believe that their personality, intelligence or conversational ability is unacceptable. They may believe that if they could interact without anxiety, there would be relatively little to worry about. What feels unacceptable is other people discovering how anxious they actually feel.

The negative evaluation is therefore still important, but we need to be more precise about its object. The feared judgment is a judgment of their anxiety.

The Fear of Being Found Out

For some people, this also develops into a sense that their anxiety needs to be concealed. They may actually appear socially confident and function very well around other people. Friends and colleagues might have little idea how much anxiety they experience internally.

The social task then becomes more complicated. The person is not simply having a conversation, attending a meeting or meeting somebody new. At the same time, they are trying to prevent the other person from discovering their internal state.

This can make relatively ordinary signs of nervousness feel disproportionately significant. A blush is no longer simply a blush; it could reveal the anxiety. A shaky voice, moment of reduced eye contact, awkward pause or tense facial expression can similarly feel like evidence that the person's internal experience has become visible.

The fear becomes: What if they find out that I am not as comfortable as I appear?

Self-Focused Attention

If the primary concern is whether somebody can see your anxiety, it makes sense that you would begin monitoring yourself closely. The person may pay attention to whether their face feels hot, whether their voice sounds nervous, what they are doing with their hands, whether they are making enough eye contact, or whether their facial expression looks normal.

They may also construct an image of themselves from the other person's perspective. They imagine themselves looking visibly tense, frightened, awkward or uncomfortable and begin responding to this internal image as though it accurately represents what the other person can see.

This is one of the difficulties with self-focused attention in social anxiety. Internal experience can start to become evidence for external appearance. I feel extremely anxious becomes I must look extremely anxious. But the intensity of someone's internal anxiety and the visibility of that anxiety to another person are not necessarily the same thing.

Concealing and Suppressing Anxiety as a Safety Behaviour

Once appearing anxious becomes the threat, safety behaviours are often organised around concealing and controlling anxiety. Someone might carefully control their facial expression, avoid prolonged eye contact, rehearse sentences before saying them, speak quickly to prevent pauses, hide their hands, force themselves to smile, or continually regulate their breathing.

There can also be much subtler internal safety behaviours. The person might repeatedly check their bodily sensations, monitor how their voice sounds, analyse whether they are behaving normally, will the anxiety away, or continually instruct themselves to calm down.

Although these behaviours are different, their function is the same: Do not let them see that I am anxious.

The difficulty is that successful concealment can reinforce the original belief. If the interaction goes well, the person may conclude that it went well because they successfully prevented their anxiety from being seen. They therefore never discover what would happen if they stopped working so hard to conceal it.

In addition, nearly all attempts to suppress or control anxiety often result in more anxiety.

What Is Wrong With Being Seen as Anxious?

Identifying a fear of appearing anxious is not necessarily the end of the formulation. We still need to understand what the person believes visible anxiety would mean.

For one person, being visibly anxious might mean that others see them as socially awkward. For another, it might mean appearing weak. Someone else might fear that people will wonder why they are so nervous and conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Others may fear losing respect, making other people uncomfortable, appearing inferior, or revealing that the confidence they usually present is not entirely real.

For some people, the feared consequence goes further still. They may believe that visible anxiety will lead to rejection or exclusion: If people realise how uncomfortable I am, they won't want me around. For others, the experience of somebody witnessing their vulnerability may itself feel intolerable.

This is where the person's deeper fear becomes important. The visibility of anxiety may be the feared event, but we still need to ask what the person believes will happen because it has been seen.

Fear of Anxiety Versus Fear of Being Seen as Anxious

It is also useful to distinguish between fear of anxiety itself and fear of socially visible anxiety. Someone may tolerate anxiety relatively well when they are alone, yet become intensely distressed by exactly the same sensations when another person is present.

This tells us something important about the nature of the threat. The person is not necessarily frightened by a racing heart, blushing or feeling nervous in isolation. They are frightened by what those experiences might communicate socially.

In this sense, the feared outcome is not simply anxiety. It is anxiety being witnessed.

This also helps explain why attempts to regulate anxiety can become so persistent. If anxiety must not be visible, then controlling anxiety appears to be a way of controlling what other people are able to see.

Implications for Treatment

If this distinction is missed, treatment can inadvertently become focused on helping the person reduce or conceal anxiety more effectively. Relaxation, controlled breathing, reassurance or strategies designed primarily to make someone feel calm may provide temporary relief, but they can also leave the central belief untouched: I am safe socially as long as nobody can see that I am anxious.

Treatment instead needs to examine what happens when anxiety is allowed to be present without the same level of concealment and control. This might involve reducing self-monitoring, dropping particular safety behaviours, allowing natural pauses or signs of uncertainty, redirecting attention towards the interaction, and testing predictions about what actually happens when the person does not work so hard to appear calm.

The aim is not to deliberately make somebody look anxious. Nor is it to convince them that nobody will ever notice their anxiety. The aim is to weaken the rule that being seen as anxious is a social outcome that must be prevented.

Conclusion

Fear of negative evaluation remains an important way of understanding social anxiety, but sometimes we need to ask a more specific question: negative evaluation of what?

For some people, the answer is not primarily their intelligence, attractiveness, personality or social skills. It is their anxiety. They fear that another person will notice their nervousness and that the nervousness itself will communicate something unacceptable about them.

This creates a particularly self-reinforcing form of social anxiety. The person becomes anxious, notices the anxiety, becomes afraid that somebody else will notice it, and then monitors, regulates and conceals themselves in an attempt to prevent that from happening. Those attempts can make anxiety increasingly important and increasingly threatening.

In these cases, social anxiety may be understood partly as a fear of fear in front of other people. A particularly useful formulation question is therefore: if someone could see exactly how anxious you felt, what would you be afraid that meant about you?