If you ever have experienced social anxiety, then you know just how difficult and challenging it can be to find yourself in social situations. However, a key factor to being able to overcome your fears is being able to face them. You can face your anxiety through a technique known as exposure therapy. Exposure therapy, simply put, incorporates the act of exposing yourself to the feared situation or anxiety inducing situation and learning ways of overcoming the fear. Exposure therapy is clinically proven to help individuals overcome fears and anxiety. Below are some tips to aid in the process of exposing yourself to assist in overcoming anxiety:
You can begin by identifying your catastrophic belief related to your anxiety. Your catastrophic belief is your belief associated with the anxiety inducing situation, that overestimates the likely hood of a negative event to occur. Most often, people with social anxiety overestimate the degree to which others are evaluating and criticizing them. Furthermore, they believe that they are unable to cope with the criticism, rather it be real or imagined criticism.
Try the gradual exposure approach. This can be done by breaking down your fears into a series of steps, starting with mildly challenging steps and increasing in difficulty. You can do this by creating a list of situations which elicit anxiety or fear and then number how much distress you would feel if you were in each situation. Then rank each situation from the least distressing to the most distressing situation. The first exposure attempt should be difficult enough to induce some anxiety but easy enough that you feel able to complete it. It is extremely important as to not try and confront a very difficult/feared situation to soon, because you have the potential to become overly anxious which can induce a panic attack. A negative experience such as this, would only strengthen the connection between the fear and the setting.
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. A key factor to overcoming your anxiety is to repeatedly place yourself in the same situation until you feel very little to no anxiety inducing distress from the situation. This means placing yourself in the situation frequently enough to become habitual. If your exposures are too far apart your fear will rise again by the next time you attempt the exposure.
Prolong the exposure. Another key factor to ensuring effectiveness of the exposure is to remain in the situation until your anxiety level decreases. It is very common behavior to want to escape the situation the moment the fear or anxiety appears. However, when we leave or avoid an anxiety inducing situation we will further strengthen our belief that the situation causes anxiety. Furthermore, due to the decrease in anxiety once out of the situation, we come to believe avoidance to be a helpful strategy. However, by staying in the situation until our anxiety decreases, we actually help ourselves to feel less anxiety when confronted with the same situation again.
As we find ourselves in anxiety inducing situations, it is important to remember to remain in the situation until the anxiety has decreased, as this is an important aspect in being able to overcome the anxiety. However, if you feel your anxiety level is too high, you may find that you will benefit from taking a timeout from the feared situation.
For example, if you were attending a wedding you can choose to either step outside for a moment or break away to the bathroom. During your timeout, you can allow yourself time to think over the situation and rationalize the anxiety. Remember what your catastrophic belief is and think about how it may be effecting your ability to overcome the situation. Try some deep breathing or other therapeutic stress reduction exercises if needed. Once, you feel less anxiety, you can then go back to the wedding. Keep reminding yourself of your goal and how essential the exposure is to your ability to overcome.
Written By: Lara Pomnitz, graduate level intern.
Edited by Charity Loring, LMSW Loring Therapy, LLC http://www.loringtherapy.com/
