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Although anxiety is common, it isn’t easy to ‘snap out of it. With the right help and support, you can feel better. Here are some tips from serenity-method.com/social-anxiety-disorder that you may find helpful.

• Avoid avoidance. When feeling anxious, you may want to avoid or run away from situations that are making you feel tense. The more you avoid these situations, the more your anxiety and fear will keep going.

• Stay with the anxiety. Set a realistic time to stay in a slightly fearful situation (e.g. 10 minutes). Keep staying in this situation until you are comfortable in it (this may take 5 attempts or more). Once comfortable in this situation, celebrate your efforts. Acknowledging your successes can keep you going. Then, move on to a situation that is making you a bit more anxious, and so on. Follow the same steps again.

• Challenge your thinking. When feeling socially anxious, you may believe that others will judge you negatively — “They’ll think I’m stupid” etc. The truth is, just because you think something, doesn’t mean it’s true. Although such thoughts may seem believable, they are often unrealistic and unhelpful.

• Drop your safety behaviors. We often use ‘safety behaviors’ in order to reduce our anxiety (e.g. hair over the face when talking, avoiding eye contact, fiddling with something or tensing up to hide our shaking, using alcohol or drugs to increase our confidence, etc.). 

Try to gradually drop your safety behaviors one at a time. You will find out that there is nothing to fear and that you can cope without them, no matter what the situation.

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