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Anxiety Care

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Anxiety & Panic Care  /  Social & performance anxiety

Social & Performance Anxiety

When so much attention goes into trying not to appear anxious, it becomes difficult to discover how other people are actually responding to you.

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How treatment works

Social anxiety is more than simply being quiet, introverted or preferring smaller groups.

It may involve persistent fear that other people will

  • judge you;
  • think you are incompetent;
  • notice that you are anxious;
  • see you as awkward;
  • think you are boring;
  • reject you;
  • notice a mistake;
  • think less of you because you hesitate or do not know something.

Situations can include

workplace meetings
presentations
interviews
conversations
groups
meeting unfamiliar people
telephone calls
video meetings
eating around others
dating
interactions with authority figures
conflict or disagreement

How this pattern works

Safety behaviours can hide the problem.

These strategies often help in the moment.

But they can also make it difficult to discover whether the feared judgment would really occur without them.

You may protect yourself by

  • rehearsing every sentence;
  • speaking very little;
  • avoiding eye contact;
  • speaking quickly;
  • agreeing automatically;
  • preparing excessively;
  • monitoring your face or voice;
  • checking whether people appear approving;
  • using your phone to avoid interaction;
  • replaying the conversation afterward.

Treatment focuses on what happens during social situations.

Treatment may include:

  • identifying feared social predictions;
  • reducing excessive self-monitoring;
  • shifting attention outward;
  • identifying subtle safety behaviours;
  • behavioural experiments;
  • planned exposure;
  • testing assumptions about judgment;
  • reducing anticipatory worry;
  • reducing post-event rumination;
  • returning to meaningful social and occupational activities.

How this pattern works

The social anxiety cycle

↺ repeats
  • Social or performance situation
  • “They will see that I am anxious.”
  • Anxiety and self-monitoring increase
  • Rehearse / stay quiet / avoid eye contact / leave early
  • Short-term relief

The feared judgment is never actually tested

Treatment

Notice → Test → Approach → Learn → Generalize

Rather than relieving anxiety in the moment, treatment interrupts the loop: you notice the prediction, test it against what actually happens, approach what has been avoided, and let real experience update what your mind expects.

Social anxiety is not a social-skills deficit by default.

Many people with social anxiety already know how to interact effectively.

The difficulty is that anxiety interferes with using those abilities naturally.

The goal is not automatically

“Learn better social skills.”

It may instead be

“Stop using so much mental energy trying to prevent other people from seeing an imperfect version of you.”

Related: Perfectionism & procrastination · How treatment works

You do not need to feel completely confident before participating.

Treatment can help you learn to participate without anxiety making every social decision.

Anxiety screening & clinical review

$40

Complete a structured screening for anxiety-related symptoms and receive:

  • a clinician review of your results;
  • a brief written screening summary;
  • a short follow-up call to discuss recommendations.
Start the screening

A non-refundable $40 screening fee applies after submission unless the screening is covered through an approved funding arrangement such as NIHB. This is a screening and clinical review service, not a formal diagnostic assessment.