Suffering from anxiety disorders is not something that you should take lightly of. This is especially even more true for people who are suffering from social anxiety.
If social anxiety is not treated early or put under control at the early stage, it may lead to certain side effects such as depression or social phobia. If this is your first time hearing of the term social phobia, you might be currently thinking to yourself – what exactly is it?
I suppose you would be able to guess just from the words “social” and “phobia”. But to put it in simple terms, it is basically having a phobia associated with social or public situations, such as public speaking or eating in public. Social phobia is not something that you should take lightly or make fun of, as in the worst cases, you might end up staying cooped up at home the whole day, paralyzed by your own anxiety and social phobia to even step out of the house.
Have you ever had certain situations that you always seem to try to avoid? For instance, when you see that someone else is taking the lift, you choose to avoid that particular person and wait for the next lift instead. When you are window shopping in a new mall, you are afraid to step into the shops if you think that you do not have anything to buy from those shops. When you are in a new class, you are too afraid to even raise your hands to ask questions. All of these are basically just different forms of social phobia, and the difference between them is only how serious the social phobia actually is.
So how can you start to try and get rid of this social phobia? Well, first you would need to understand what causes social phobia in the first place. If you carefully go through all of the situations above and similar ones, you would find something in common between all of them – the person involved is basically afraid of criticism by other people and that how other people would look at them or judge them.
As long as you understand this fact and try to learn how to not care so much as to other people look at you, you will feel a lot better in these situations. Of course, it might sound easy on paper, but it is quite difficult especially if you have been doing this your whole life.
Therefore, a more logical way would be to approach this in a step by step manner. In order to do so in a step by step manner, you might want to first check out this article on how to cure social anxiety or how to overcome shyness.
Regaining self-confidence could also be a good way to get rid of this social phobia and anxiety.
I hope that this article has helped you to learn more about social phobia and let you understand how to tackle this problem in the right way.