Control Anxiety

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), also called Social Phobia, is a mental disorder which causes a person to feel intense, deep rooted fear in social situations or in public places. Social anxiety is the 3rd largest psychological problem in the world as of today, affecting over 15 million Americans annually. People who suffer from this mental disorder are still not diagnosed rightly 90% of the time, even though the medical fraternity has started to treat social anxiety symptoms.

Stress is one of the major symptoms associated with social anxiety. Stress mainly works in 2 ways, on one hand it can be caused due to social anxiety and on the other hand it can intensify the effects of social anxiety to a great extent. Common health related problems which occur due to stress include heart attack and blood pressure. This shows that stress has become a big problem in today's society, leading to social anxiety.

Social anxiety can be aptly termed as a fear of social situations. Fear forms a big part of social anxiety. So dealing with social anxiety involves coming face to face with the fear. The fear has to be confronted in order to deal with social anxiety effectively. The fear on the whole does not go away on its own, but when a person confronts it, he/she stops avoiding it or running away from it.

Types of Social Anxiety

There are mainly 3 types of social anxiety which patients go through. These include:

1) Generalized Social Anxiety

2) Specific Social Anxiety

3) Avoidance Personality Disorder.

1) Generalized Social Anxiety:

Generalized social anxiety is the most widely occurring form of social anxiety. People who are diagnosed with this type of anxiety fear interacting with other people, especially the ones they don't know. This leads to an unreasonable concern with if people are taking note of everything they may do and are noticing their actions. A person who is suffering from generalized social phobia, may find easy tasks such as eating out or shopping to be extremely difficult experience. It also leads to procrastination as simple things like talking to the employer or approaching other higher authorities may start to look like a fearful situation, when it's actually not. Even attending parties becomes a big problem for social phobic.

2) Specific Social Anxiety:

Specific social anxiety is specifically about confronting socialization situations. It includes eating with the others around, meeting new people or just using the restroom. One of the most common forms of this disorder is an unexplainable fear of public speaking, which itself connects to performance anxiety. This is nothing but stage fright for most of the people but for a few it is a much more traumatic experience.

3) Avoidance Personality Disorder

One of the extreme types of social anxiety is the avoidance personality disorder. In this disorder, the phobic person is very highly affected by a peculiar level of shyness on long term, causing him/her to go into total isolation just to avoid any such experience. This can occur in other forms as well, such as a person who has trouble with loss or rejection who finds it painfully distressing may choose to live completely alone and break away contact with the other people. It should be noted however, that there's a visible difference between a person who avoids by choice versus someone who is suffering from this disorder.

Conclusion

A social anxiety phobic should try to take a conscious decision to be in control. It is not easy to do this when you're facing fear all the time. He/she should construct a plan before the fear worsens, and make sure that the plan is put to effect right away at the time of any fear showing up. With the right amount of practice, social anxiety can be overcome in due time.