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Social anxiety

Social anxiety is about a feeling of discomfort or fear when meeting other people. This is something that most people experience to varying degrees at some point in their lives. Social anxiety can feel limiting because you can no longer do what you would ordinarily be able to do. On this page you can read more about social anxiety and how our psychologists can help you.

Avoidance strategies and safety behaviours

For many, the social anxiety becomes so unpleasant that they attempt to avoid situations where it may be triggered. These are called avoidance strategies. It may feel tempting to leave a social situation when you experience strong anxiety because this quickly reduces the discomfort.

Many also develop what we call safety behaviours. Examples of this can include:

  • Avoiding eye contact
  • Not speaking up in conversations
  • Wearing headphones when walking outside

The problem with avoidance strategies and safety behaviours is that you don’t get the chance to test whether what you fear really happens. This maintains negative thoughts about making a fool of oneself and not mastering social situations. The anxiety also keeps the focus on yourself and how you appear, and can feel limiting because you can no longer do what you would ordinarily be able to do.

How is social anxiety treated?

For many people with different forms of anxiety and phobias, it will be important to gradually expose themselves to what they fear. This might involve practising speaking in a conversation or entering a room full of people. Recent research shows that this does not necessarily have to take place physically, but can be simulated using virtual reality (VR).

At Dr.Dropin Psychology you can therefore choose between two different pathways:

  1. Talk therapy with a psychologist
  2. VR-training combined with counselling with a psychologist

Many find it difficult and uncomfortable to expose themselves to situations where the anxiety occurs in the real world. By doing this training in VR the threshold to get started is lower, because you can be exposed in a virtual and safe environment in your own living room. The VR-training is always used only as a tool in addition to conversations with one of our psychologists.