Understanding the Mechanics of Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is usually described as a fear of being judged negatively by other people.

This is accurate, but often an incomplete description of the nuances.

It does not explain why one person fears judgment and another does not. It does not explain why someone can feel completely comfortable with one group and intensely self-conscious with another. And it does not explain why particular forms of judgment carry so much psychological weight.

To understand social anxiety, I find it more useful to think about the interaction between the biological, psychological and social world of the individual. Social anxiety does not occur in isolation. It develops within a social mind that has learned something about what it means to be accepted, rejected, included, excluded, respected and seen.

The Bio-psycho-social Model

There is rarely one explanation for why somebody develops social anxiety and we do not know for certain, why some people are more prone than others. However, the biopsychosocial model provides a good level of understanding of how things may interlink.

Biological factors can contribute to differences in temperament, sensitivity to threat, behavioural patterns and physiological arousal. Psychological factors include beliefs about the self and others, attention, memory, previous learning, self-image and the strategies someone has developed to protect themselves socially. And then there is the social environment itself.

Family relationships, friendships, school, culture, social class, race, gender, sexuality, workplaces, hierarchies and previous experiences of acceptance or exclusion can all influence how someone learns to understand themselves in relation to other people.

These factors interact.

The important question is therefore not simply:

Why is this person anxious?

But: what has this person's mind learned about what happens when they are seen by other people?

Social Anxiety Is Partly About Social Threat

Humans depend upon other humans.

Historically, belonging to a group provided access to protection, resources, relationships and cooperation. Our social environments are very different today, but acceptance, belonging and social position continue to matter deeply to us. This makes social information potentially threatening. Being ignored, laughed at, rejected, criticised, humiliated or excluded can matter because each communicates something about our relationship with other people. For someone with social anxiety, the social world can therefore contain a heightened possibility of threat.

The precise threat varies between individuals, but I commonly see several recurring themes:

Belonging: Do I belong here?

Acceptance: Will these people accept me if they really see me?

Isolation: What if I am rejected and end up alone?

Social standing: Where do I stand in relation to these people, and what happens if I fall in their estimation?

These themes frequently overlap.

Identity

Social anxiety is not only influenced by what we think other people will think of us.

It is also influenced by who we understand ourselves to be in relation to them.

Someone can feel confident in one social environment and deeply insecure in another because different parts of their identity become relevant. They may feel comfortable around people from a similar background but conspicuous in a room where nobody seems like them. They may feel socially equal among friends but inferior around people they perceive as more successful, educated, wealthy, attractive or powerful. They may feel accepted within one cultural group while feeling that they have to modify themselves to belong within another. This is why social anxiety cannot always be understood purely as an internal cognitive problem.

Sometimes the person's history has genuinely taught them that particular environments contain greater risks of exclusion, judgment or misunderstanding.

The clinical question becomes:

Who does this person feel they are when they enter this particular social world?

Trauma, Bullying and Social Learning

For some people, social anxiety develops following repeated experiences of social threat.

Bullying is an obvious example. A child who is repeatedly laughed at, excluded, criticised, targeted or humiliated is not simply learning that individual children can be unpleasant. They may begin learning broader rules: People are dangerous. Being noticed makes me vulnerable. If I am different, I will be targeted. Groups can turn against me.

Other experiences can produce similar learning.

Repeated criticism within families, racism, class-based exclusion, rejection, unstable friendships, humiliation, emotional abuse, being treated as socially inferior, or repeatedly feeling like the outsider can all influence expectations about future social environments.

This does not mean that everybody with social anxiety has experienced trauma or bullying. But where these experiences exist, they can be important because current anxiety may partly represent learning from previous social environments being applied to new ones.

Self-Image

One of the most important mechanisms in social anxiety is self-image.

When socially anxious, people often do not experience themselves simply from inside their own body. They begin imagining how they appear from the outside. They may see themselves looking awkward, boring, nervous, weak, unattractive, inferior or out of place.

This image can feel completely convincing.

Someone who blushes slightly may imagine themselves bright red. Someone who pauses while speaking may experience themselves as visibly incompetent. Someone who feels uncomfortable may imagine that everyone else can see precisely how uncomfortable they feel.

The person therefore begins responding not only to the actual social environment but also to an internal representation of themselves within that environment.

This can become self-reinforcing. The more negatively I imagine I appear, the more threatened I feel. The more threatened I feel, the more self-conscious I become. And the more self-conscious I become, the more convincing the negative image becomes.

Self-Focused Attention

Once social threat is activated, attention frequently moves inwards. Instead of participating fully in the conversation, the person begins monitoring themselves.

What am I doing with my hands?

Was that weird?

What should I say next?

Do I look anxious?

Am I talking enough?

What did their expression mean?

This creates a bi-directional problem. The person is trying extremely hard to understand how the interaction is going while simultaneously paying less attention to the interaction itself. They begin using internal information, anxiety, self-image, bodily sensations and thoughts, as evidence of how other people perceive them.

I feel awkward, therefore I must look awkward.

I feel inferior, therefore they must see me as inferior.

I feel like an outsider, therefore I probably don't belong.

The feeling becomes evidence for the feared social reality.

But What Is the Person Ultimately Protecting?

This is where I think formulation needs to go beyond identifying automatic thoughts.

If someone thinks: They're going to think I'm boring.

we still need to understand why that matters.

For one person: If I'm boring, people won't want me around.

For another: If I'm boring, it proves there's something fundamentally missing in me.

For another: If I'm boring, I'll always struggle to form relationships.

For another: If I'm boring, I'll be excluded.

The surface thought is similar but the underlying social meaning is different. This is why themes such as belonging, acceptance, isolation and social standing can be useful. They help us understand what the person's social threat system is actually trying to protect.

Social Anxiety Exists Between the Person and the Social World

Social anxiety is not simply something happening inside an individual's head. Nor is it entirely produced by the outside world. My opinion is that it occurs at the interaction between the two.

Treatment therefore involves more than simply telling someone that other people probably are not judging them (also because, that may not be true).

It involves understanding why being judged matters, what the person believes is socially at stake, and what they have learned they must do to remain safe around other people.

Ultimately, the central question is not just: why am I so anxious around people?

It is: what has my mind learned that I need to protect when I am with them?