Introduction

This page will discuss the type of negative thoughts and beliefs we might experience as a result of being socially anxious alongside how to challenge them to find more helpful ways of thinking.

Thoughts and beliefs may include:
• automatic negative thoughts about yourself, your performance or how you appear to others
• strongly held beliefs about your inadequacy in social situations
• a negative mindset or “bias” such as dwelling on past perceived failings, discounting any positives or magnifying the social abilities of others

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

Negative automatic thoughts (NATs)

It is quite common to experience negative automatic thoughts (NATs) when experiencing difficult emotions or in challenging situations. They are thoughts that come into our mind without us consciously thinking them and can feel very convincing.

Common socially anxious NATs may include:
• I am useless at social things
• everyone can see how anxious I look
• nobody really likes me
• I look foolish, stupid, different or weird
• I am boring
• I always say the wrong thing or mess up my words
• everyone’s gone quiet and it’s my fault
• I must be entertaining, otherwise people will not like me
• I will lose control and everyone will see

Thinking traps/errors

Our NATs can often fall into particular patterns of thinking known as “thinking traps” or “thinking errors”. Feeling socially anxious or stressed can trigger these thinking traps. These 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 mind of myself as looking anxious, hot, blushing, flustered
• An image of other people looking bored or stoney faced when I am talking

How to challenge Negative Thinking

An important component in self-help, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and other therapies, involves becoming more aware of particular unhelpful and biased ways of thinking you may be experiencing.

The process often starts with thought records – see this thought record example worksheet.

Within the worksheet, you write down your negative thoughts about past or future situations to deliberately compare and 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”, or “reframed”, by considering the alternative perspectives.

Here is a blank thought record worksheet.

Remember – people may not judge us in the ways we think
Remember people may not notice our flaws, imperfections or anxiety in the ways we might imagine. Even if they do, they may not judge us in the ways we fear. Such issues can feel so personal but imagine it was someone else – would you condemn or judge them for being anxious sometimes, some small mistake or something said in error?

Your thoughts are not always the truth
Just because you think a particular thought – about yourself or what you believe others think of you – it doesn’t make it true. Remember our inner critic may not always tell us the truth and we can never really know what others are thinking.

Its ok to be yourself
Sometimes we fear that if people see the real us, our anxiety, or hear our real thoughts and opinions, they won’t want anything to do with us anymore.  Think about people you like, sometimes it’s their unique humanity, their way of being – including any flaws – that helps you like them more. See more on our page on self-esteem.

Challenging core beliefs
Core beliefs are underlying assumptions about ourselves, other people and the world around us. 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 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 with you. Please see our page on challenging core beliefs.

Affirmations

For some people affirmations can help by replacing negative thoughts with more self-compassionate ones – see www.socialanxietyinstitute.org – Being myself.

Finally
Remember, when working with your negative thoughts, 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