How Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Can Help You With Your Social Anxiety

Our thoughts have a significant impact on how we experience our day-to-day life.

Do you ever enter social situations and find yourself thinking, ‘‘I am going to say something stupid’’ or ‘’I am going to have no idea what to say’’. These thoughts impact the way we feel about ourselves and our value within the social situation and can even make us feel like we need to avoid social situations altogether.  

The good news though, is that it doesn’t need to end there. In the same way our thoughts can harm us, they can also be used to help us. The power of our mind can be harnessed to support a shift in our mindset and in turn how we feel in social situations. Seems too good to be true? Let me share with you the secret sauce: CBT.

What is CBT?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on the connection between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. One of the core premises of CBT is that our thoughts drive our feelings. Our feelings don’t just fall upon us, but they are directly correlated with the thoughts we have. Essentially, it’s based on the concept that the way we think can greatly influence how we feel and act. If you experience social anxiety, CBT can help you identify and challenge the thoughts that fuel your fears and in turn your behaviours in social situations.

What makes CBT particularly effective for social anxiety? It provides you with really practical tools to utilize in challenging social situations. Becoming more aware of your thoughts is the first step in that process.

Can you already pinpoint what thoughts pop into your mind as you enter the birthday party, or school event?

What are the thoughts that are specific to your distress within a social environment?

Identifying this for yourself is the first step on the CBT roadmap.

Our Mind Goes a Mile a Minute

Now we have thousands of thoughts a day. We couldn’t list them all, even if we tried. The ones we can recall are often repetitive ones or the ones that we get a bit stuck in. In the case of social anxiety, many of the thoughts we have about social situations may be distorted or exaggerated. These distorted thinking patterns fuel our anxiety and can create a cycle of self-doubt and eventually avoidance.

You may find yourself having thoughts like:

• "I’ll embarrass myself if I start speaking."

• "Everyone will think I’m stupid if I make a mistake."

• "I just know they’re thinking negatively about me."

  
  

These are examples of a distortion style called catastrophizing, where your mind automatically goes to the worst case scenario. Mind-reading is another cognitive distortion, or thought-based exaggeration, where a person has thoughts in which they assume they know what others are thinking, without any definitive proof that this is the case.

Once we got stuck in these thought patterns, we tend to only hear and notice the thoughts that follow these patterns. Hence the intensifying of social anxiety and the subsequent avoidance of the social situations that elicit these feelings. Over time, this avoidance only reinforces the anxiety because you never get the chance to challenge these fears. The more you avoid, the more entrenched the anxiety becomes, and the cycle continues.

Now For the Challenge

Instead of letting these automatic thoughts take control, we can learn with CBT techniques how to examine the thoughts more critically. For example, if you think, "I’ll make a fool of myself in this meeting", working with CBT will have you questioning this thought. Rather than just accepting a thought as a reality, asking questions like ‘’what evidence do I have that this is the case?’’ or ‘’How likely is the worst case scenario that I am imagining?’’

Replacing the irrational or distorted thought with more balanced and realistic ones, will allow your feelings to follow suit. Your experience of social situations can become more balanced and grounded when you balance out your thinking to have a more fact-based view of social situations. The goal isn’t to eliminate all anxiety, but to reduce the intensity of those anxiety based thoughts so you can approach social situations with more confidence.

Want to learn more about CBT and challenging your anxious thoughts? Read more on our anxiety page or contact us for a free consultation, where we can explore a treatment plan that’s right for you.