Many of us with social anxiety have negative thoughts and beliefs. For example:

• automatic negative thoughts about yourself, your performance or how you appear to others
• strongly held beliefs about your inadequacy in social situations
• negative biases such as dwelling on past perceived failings, discounting any positives or magnifying the social abilities of others

When faced with social situations that trigger their anxiety, individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) tend to shift their thoughts away from the situation they are in and towards themselves.

Negative thoughts and beliefs are typically part of the process that keeps social anxiety going – see social anxiety maintenance cycle.

Common socially anxious thoughts may include:
• I am useless at this • people don’t like me • I look foolish • I am boring • everyone is watching me • everyone’s gone quiet and it’s my fault • I must be entertaining, otherwise people will not like me • they can see how anxious I look • I will lose control and everyone will see

These socially anxious thoughts can be seen to fall into particular patterns of thinking, or “thinking errors”.

Thinking errors may include:
Mind-reading – assuming you know what others are thinking about you: ‘they must think I’m so anxious/quiet/foolish/boring’
Fortune telling – predicting the future: e.g. you will never be able to feel comfortable in social conversation or activities
Discounting the positive – ignoring all the positive feedback you received for something and focusing on the one negative person or comment
Dwelling on the negative – one person yawns and it means no-one finds you interesting
Projecting – thinking that because you believe something negative about yourself, other people must think that about you as well
Overgeneralization – thinking that if one situation had a negative outcome, all other similar situations will be the same
Catastrophizing – believing things are worse than they are or one social faux-pas means everyone will judge you
Emotional reasoning – mistaking your feelings for facts e.g. if you feel inadequate sometimes, assuming you must actually be inadequate

Negative self-imagery
Some individuals may describe experiencing problematic self-conscious images. Whilst many of us have images or pictures in our minds when thinking about things, in SAD these can be exaggerated or disproportionately negative.
Common examples of self-conscious images may include:
• An image in my mind of myself as blushing more than I actually am
• An image in mind of myself as looking hot, sweaty, flustered
• An image of other people looking bored or stoney faced when I am talking

Challenging Negative Thinking

An important component in self-help, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and other therapies, involves helping individuals with SAD to become more aware of particular unhelpful and biased ways of thinking they may be experiencing.

The process often starts with thought records, where you physically write down thoughts about past or future situations to contrast them with alternative perspectives. These alternative perspectives should be rational and realistic, so that you are able to believe them, rather than unrealistically positive.

Such thoughts, which may have become automatic or habitual can then begin to be “challenged” by considering other information which may not be being attended to or was previously discounted.

Beginning to practise with thought records, over time, can lead to the development of more accurate and helpful ways of thinking and behaving.

See the following example from Australia CCI –Thought Record Example or this thought record 3 shorter examples

The challenge process can also work within real social situations. If a conversation dries up, rather than thinking ‘I’m so useless’ or ‘I never have anything to say’ or ‘they must think I’m so boring,’ you might consider the following alternative thoughts: ‘some conversations naturally come to an end’, ‘the other person is also not saying very much either”, “perhaps they are distracted and have other things on their mind”. They may even be worrying the gap in conversation is actually their fault.

It can help to think back to a situation that you recently found difficult and identify what came into your mind when you began to feel nervous or embarrassed. Which thoughts triggered your anxious feelings? Are there alternative perspectives?

See Thought Record Worksheet (Blank template).

It is also worth remembering people simply don’t judge us in the ways we might imagine. Anyone may misspeak, dry up, lose fluency, look anxious or foolish at times. Try not to dwell on these things – they happen to everyone and likely no one will remember these slip-ups in a few days’ time. These issues can feel so important but imagine it had happened to someone else – you would not condemn or judge them.

Coping with setbacks and learning to move on rather than dwell on small mistakes that others have forgotten, forgiven or not noticed or – are all part of the journey to getting better.

Remember, when filling in thought records, or simply reflecting on your social anxiety challenges, the idea is not to convince yourself that everything is, was, or will be perfect. It is simply to develop a kinder and more balanced thought process which leads to more helpful patterns of thinking.

Please also see www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/ Module-2—Overcoming-Negative-Thinking.pdf and www.verywellmind.com – Unhelpful-thinking-styles

Challenging beliefs

Our thoughts and behaviours sometimes stem from our deeper beliefs and underlying assumptions about ourselves and other people. Beliefs that perpetuate social anxiety might include things such as ‘there is something wrong with me’, ‘people things have always gone wrong in the past’, ‘no one understands how I feel’, ‘other people are mostly hostile and critical’. Such beliefs are probably based on negative experiences you have had in the past, or you may feel like the belief has always been there. However, beliefs like this are often outdated and unhelpful, even if at one time they seemed useful (e.g. avoiding anxiety).

As with negative thoughts, the process starts with trying to identify the difficult negative beliefs you hold that may stop you from making progress. Then try to re-examine them: are things really as absolute as you think? Are you forgetting that no one is perfect? Or jumping to conclusions because of your experiences when you were younger? Unhelpful beliefs can be challenged in a similar way to unhelpful thoughts. You can start to look for new information: very often we only notice things that confirm our beliefs (this is known as confirmation bias). You may take the negative from a recent social experience rather than from a wider balance of evidence and perspective.

Building up new and more helpful beliefs should help you to feel more confident in yourself. As with previous techniques, you need to work out which new realistic beliefs are going to work best for you. It can take time, and you may not feel that the new beliefs seem true to begin with. However, with time and patience, we can begin to shift how we see ourselves. See our worksheet called challenging core beliefs.

Please also see: Australia CCI – Module-8—Challenging-Core-Beliefs.pdf and Australia CCI – Module-9—Strengthening-New-Core-Beliefs.pdf.