How is social anxiety disorder treated?
Shoring up confidence is one goal of treating anxiety disorder. In this video, psychologist Dr. Tamar Chansky, who specializes in anxiety, discusses common treatments for helping patients go from anxious to self-assured.
Transcript
TAMAR CHANSKY: As with any anxiety disorder, the first step is understanding why you're having the symptoms that you are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
With social anxiety, people need to understand that just this feedback loop of paying way
too much attention to every single word that you're saying and every single reaction, trying to read people's faces--
did they like that? Did they not like that? Part of that is just a no-fault situation where the brain is just programmed
to look at these small details and really exaggerate the meaning of them. In understanding that, then what we
are looking for with treatment for social anxiety is changing the self-talk. So instead of editing it, you might think,
people are going to laugh at me, or people think that I'm crazy. And you want to edit in things like, I'm having a thought
right now that people are looking at me, or I'm having a thought right now that people are thinking I'm crazy because you want to get distance
from those thoughts. Take away the authority that they have because they're really coming from a distortion.
They're not coming from reality. Another part of treatment for social anxiety is working on any kind of skills that may be lacking.
Sometimes there's just an idea that, in a conversation, if the conversation isn't going well,
it's because I'm not a good conversationalist, I can't think of anything to say. What if I don't say something?
So correcting that idea that a conversation is 100% your responsibility. It's not.
It's a 50/50 venture. But you may also want to brush up on your conversation skills so that you go into a situation knowing some tools like how
to ask questions, how to make comments on someone else's question or statement.
Finally, what we want to do with social anxiety is work on practicing in the situations that cause distress.
You've worked on your self-talk. You also want to work on some breathing techniques to calm down the body's reaction.
But then you take the show on the road. You go into a store, and you ask questions, or you go and you order in a restaurant,
or you practice asking someone out for a date or giving feedback to a coworker. Practice makes not only perfect, but, really, it
makes confidence. So the more that you rehearse these things that you have been afraid to do, the more confident
you feel that you'll be able to do them, and you're no longer in that emergency mode. You've really shifted into a place
of taking charge of your life. [AUDIO LOGO]
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