Today’s professionals experience significant uncertainty and pressure for a variety of reasons. Resultantly, levels of anxiety and a variety of other difficult mental health concerns are affecting people at an all-time high.
If you currently experience social anxiety in your workspace or wonder if you might, this article delves into the nature of social anxiety and how to alleviate it so that you can experience your work space (and any other spheres of your life) with less anxiousness.
How to Understand Social Anxiety and Its Causes
Let’s start by defining what “social anxiety” actually is. The Mayo Clinic defines social anxiety as a phobia in which “Everyday interactions cause significant anxiety, self-consciousness and embarrassment because you fear being scrutinized or judged negatively by others.” Social anxiety can be coupled with other forms of clinical anxiety disorders or it can exist independently.
Social anxiety fits within the family of mental health ailments and illnesses and can range from slight to severe. In intense instances, social anxiety might only be treatable with medications or therapeutic interventions.
Some instances of social anxiety can be caused specifically by conditions or phenomena that occur in your professional life. Workplace experiences can commonly cause social anxiety and related mental health issues. This is particularly common in careers or work environments that are characteristically stressful, demanding, or fast paced.
These include various healthcare professions and settings, law enforcement roles, high-pressure sales jobs, public accounting firms, politics, and many more. Working in stressful environments that demand high performance and output levels can exacerbate the experiences and feelings of social anxiety. However, it’s not just high-stress environments that can cause social anxiety – anyone who works with or for other people is susceptible to the experience.
Tip One: Identify Feelings of Social Anxiety
Treating a problem has to start with knowing the problem exists. The definition above can give clues about the nature of social anxiety. If you notice experiences of general angst or internal difficulty, take a quiet, undisturbed opportunity as soon as you can to sit and reflect on those experiences for a few minutes.
What are the feelings you’re experiencing? When do they occur? What emotions do they cause? Are they affecting your performance at work or your interactions with people in your life? Try jotting down your reflections on paper, in a journal, or talking to someone you trust about them to help clarify them further.
Tip Two: Narrow Down Causes
If you’ve become aware of feelings in your life that sound like the description above and may be social anxiety, try to identify or notice what specific things in your life might be causing them. This might be something you can identify by reflecting over your recent history, or it might need to be something you look out for over a period of a few days or a week to identify in the moment. Knowing whether your social anxiety happens in the workplace or in other spaces in your life (such as in your home or during social situations) is an important piece of information that can help you determine the next steps.
Additionally, if you can drill even further into specific experiences or activities that cause social anxiety (for instance, your weekly check-in with your boss or a certain type of responsibility or task), this can help you more quickly identify the things that are likely causing your social anxiety and can guide the quickest and most effective action steps to alleviating it.
Tip Three: Practice Makes Perfect
If specific workspace responsibilities or experiences are causing your social anxiety, there are a number of tactics you can use to lessen that anxiety. If it is a responsibility you cannot change or trade for different duties that are less anxiety-inducing, one strategy you can implement is increasing your comfortability with that task.
By increasing your comfort level and confidence in that area, you can often greatly diminish the social anxiety the responsibility causes you. One great example of this can be a task like a regular presentation you need to make to others in your organization or stakeholders you’re responsible for. By increasing your public speaking skills with standard practicing techniques, you can drastically improve your confidence in public speaking and diminish the amount of anxiety that presentation causes you.
Tip Four: Speak with a Professional
All forms of anxiety can be serious and important. Whether or not you have a clinically diagnosable form of anxiety, social anxiety and other forms of anxious experiences can be (or become) debilitating if they aren’t treated effectively. If you think you may be experiencing some form of anxiety or you have been struggling with anxious feelings and are seeing them affect your health, wellbeing, relationships, or performance in any area, don’t ignore it. If you have safe, supportive relationships in your workplace and can speak to someone there (particularly a supervisor or manager), that can be a great start.
Either way though, it can also be extremely beneficial to seek out a professional psychologist or therapeutic counselor and explore your anxiety in an introductory session. They will be able to help you determine the severity of the anxiety you are experiencing and suggest next steps.
Taking the time to address any anxiety you experience in the workspace can often help you drastically improve not only your performance but your work experience and quality of life.
Photo Credit
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
Guest Author Bio
Sarah Daren
With a Bachelor’s in Health Science along with an MBA, Sarah Daren has a wealth of knowledge within both the health and business sectors. Her expertise in scaling and identifying ways tech can improve the lives of others has led Sarah to be a consultant for a number of startup businesses, most prominently in the wellness industry, wearable technology and health education. She implements her health knowledge into every aspect of her life with a focus on making America a healthier and safer place for future generations to come.
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