human beings are social creatures we are surrounded by other people so what happens when
social interactions and other people become dangerous or scary in today's
video we're going to be talking about a model for understanding social anxiety
hi everyone in today's video we're going to be talking about a model for understanding
uh what goes on and how social anxiety works and some of the factors that really drive
social anxiety but before i get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm
a registered psychologist in the province of british columbia canada and this video is for
informational purposes only it is not intended as a substitute or replacement for advice
from your doctor or mental health professional now with those things out of the way let's start
talking about social anxiety now this is a sort of part two of a mini video series that i'm doing
talking about social anxiety and the previous video i talked about where social anxiety comes
from some of the factors that can contribute to setting a person up to develop social anxiety
and there's sort of two main factors the first is kind of this innate physiological sensitivity
the person has a more reactive nervous system and they tend to have stronger responses stronger
physiological responses to unfamiliar people the second factor contributes the second factor
that can contribute to a person developing social anxiety are early social experiences things like
negative school experiences bullying bullying teasing criticism from teachers or parents so
a person can have either one or both of these
predisposing factors and what they do is they leave the person to develop negative beliefs
about themselves things like i'm not good enough i'm unlovable i'm incompetent and it can lead a
person to develop negative beliefs about other people so other people are critical they're
rejecting they're judgmental they'll notice even small signs of anxiety or nervousness so
these beliefs then form the foundation that social anxiety is built on because these beliefs can lead
a person to develop negative expectations and predictions of what's going to happen
in social interactions and so going into social interaction these expectations can lead to high
levels of what i call anticipatory anxiety or that anxiety that happens even before
the situation so even before i go to that party i anticipate uh all of the negative things that
are going to happen and i feel really anxious in the the week leading up to that party and so
i developed this anxiety based on a variety of predictions that i have about how it's
going to go so things like you know maybe i won't behave appropriately at the party
maybe i'll come off looking anxious or awkward or odd to other people maybe other people are going
to respond negatively to me then i'm going to have a bunch of really kind of awkward or
uncomfortable interactions so i go into the party thinking about all of these things that are
likely to happen those are my predictions even just going into the party so if i'm predicting
all those negative things that are potential to happen it's natural for me to want to
do some things to try and prevent those bad things from happening and so
we call these safety behaviors that uh i'll engage in safety behaviors that are aimed at
preventing the feared outcome from happening so uh the safety behaviors are sort of
twofold so they prevent the negative thing from happening but they're also aimed at reducing my
anxiety because i'm hopefully preventing the negative thing that's going to happen
now the thing about these safety behaviors is that they're not always in my conscious awareness that
sometimes these safety behaviors can be automatic and that we're not even aware
that we're doing them so they can be kind of sneaky that way so what are some examples
of these safety behaviors well the most common and most obvious is avoiding social situations
so if i avoid social situations then i'm not going to have those awkward interactions and that people
aren't going to judge me if i'm not if i don't put myself in those situations um things like avoiding
eye contact so if i'm at the bus stop and there's other people around i'll pull out my phone and
pretend like there's something really engaging on my phone that i'm looking at in order to avoid
eye contact with other people because that might lead to striking up conversation and what if that
leads to something awkward you know what i'll just avoid eye contact focus on something else so that
other people don't get a sense that i want to talk other examples of safety behaviors are things like
trying to blend in so if i'm at a party i'll sort of be on kind of the periphery
of a group i'll do lots of smiling lots of nodding agreeing with everything that's said
try not to stand out try to kind of blend in with the crowd and not draw too much attention to me
another thing i might do is try not to talk in social situations so limit how much i say so
ask the person lots of questions to keep them talking about themselves so i don't have to say
very much about myself now alternatively what can also happen is that people can sometimes engage
in safety behaviors that involve talking so much and ensuring that the conversation keeps going
so that there aren't any uncomfortable pauses so i'm feeling all the time and just talking
talking talking talking talking because i don't want the conversation to have a pause
and the both of us just staring at each other with nothing to say so i'll fill that space
i'll fill those uh even those little pauses with talking to keep the conversation
going so what can happen is these safety behaviors then lead to a response from the other person
so um social interactions are transactional so the way we're interacting with the other person
is going to lead to them to interact with us in a certain way so how i engage with the person
how i behave towards the person is gonna exert a an interpersonal pull on their part
so it's going to pull them to behave in a certain way so if you think about if i'm engaging in these
safety behaviors during this interaction at this party think about the message that some of these
safety behaviors may be sending to the other person how might the other person interpret
these safety behaviors so if i'm not saying very much or if i'm not making eye contact
how might the other person interpret that well maybe they interpret it that i'm not
interested in them or that i've got nothing to say or i'm not really interested in this conversation
if i'm talking too much they may interpret it as me being overbearing so notice i'm doing
these safety behaviors because i'm i'm anxious and i'm doing these safety behaviors to prevent
bad things from happening but what ends up happening from these safety behaviors is they
almost cause the feared reaction that i'm worried about happening now one of the things that can
happen in social anxiety is that people become so focused on their own anxiety in social situations
that they're not really aware of or they don't even recognize how the other person's responding
so it's almost like i've got this this magnifying glass that's examining what's going on inside
of me and i'm so caught up in noticing what's happening inside of me and how i'm coming across
and what i'm saying and if i'm stumbling over my words my focus is so much on me that i'm
not paying attention to the other person and so this can give the other person a message that i'm
self-preoccupied or that i'm not interested in them or that i want them to go away
which isn't the point that's not the message i want to give the other person
but it's the message that's coming across because i'm so caught up in my anxiety in this situation
and so the other person picks up on these messages and responds by you know ending the conversation
or walking away and so then i sort of see that the conversation ended maybe i like the other
person maybe i wanted to have a conversation with the other person but i was just so anxious
i engaged in these safety behaviors the other person stopped the conversation and left
and so now i'm left wondering what happened and so this can result in self-judgments
uh about that interaction and what happened so uh i might interpret the other person's reaction
as confirming all of those negative predictions that i had going into the interaction
so these self-judgments are also driven by my safety behaviors
in the interaction so remember i said that the safety behaviors tend to focus the attention
on myself how anxious i am uh all of the things that aren't going well that
little bead of sweat that's forming on the the corner of my my head so i'm so preoccupied
in everything that's going on with me and all the anxiety and the turmoil that's going on with me
that i'm not noticing any of the positives that might be occurring in this social interaction
things like the person nodding and smiling at me the things like the person asking me questions and
making eye contact with me i'm not noticing all of these positive behaviors and positive signs
that the other person's giving me in the social interaction because all i'm really focused on
is what's going on inside of me and the anxiety and the anxiety that's going on inside of me
and that has an effect on my judgment of how that social interaction
went now in social anxiety it's not uncommon for people to do what i call a post-mortem
after the social interaction so they review the social interaction and think about what happened
and the tendency of this postmortem tends to focus on everything that went wrong because
that's what i was paying attention to that's what i was processing in the interaction i
was processing how anxious i felt how nervous i was the times that i stumbled over my words
when i noticed the other person sort of look away i focus on all of those things and those are all
the things i remember because that's what i was paying attention to in the interaction and i have
no recall then of any of the positives that occurred in that interaction so i have no
recall of the person telling me wow that's really interesting can you tell me more i don't really
remember that so this postmortem is really just a review of everything that i perceived went wrong
in the interaction and that makes the interaction come across or i remember the interaction
as far more negative than it actually was and so then this experience serves as
evidence that feeds back into my negative beliefs about myself and about how other people are likely
to view me and so the cycle begins again in the next social interaction i have
i now have even more negative expectations and feared outcomes because that's what happened
the last time i went to the party and that's what seems to happen every time i go to a party
so it becomes this self-fueling cycle that when we're dealing with social anxiety
and we're working on treating social anxiety we look for opportunities in this cycle to try and
break or interrupt what's going on in the cycle and that's what i'll be talking about
in future videos ways to address and ways to manage social anxiety that targets specific parts
of this cycle and i'll give you a hint that the key is those safety behaviors because those safety
behaviors are things that a person's doing to try and make themselves feel safer but uh are actually
some of the things that are making the social interactions
uh uncomfortable and are actually driving a lot of the anxiety that a person experiences
in these social interactions so i'll be talking about that more in a future video
so that's a model of social anxiety i'd love to hear your thoughts ideas or questions about
this so please leave me some comments in the comments section down below if you're enjoying
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thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one