How To Overcome Social Anxiety

For most of my life, I thankfully never really dealt with social anxiety. I went to a very small high school in a very small town, so I always felt comfortable around my peers since I had known all of them for as long as I could remember. During my senior year of high school after the pandemic, I suddenly felt estranged from everyone and everything I knew and I had a strange feeling inside of me whenever I was around people. I was nervous to be myself or even just speak up in class and I honestly didn’t know how to handle it.

That year, I decided to take a public speaking class and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made to help with my newly established social anxiety. By taking this public speaking class, I was literally forced to speak up in front of my classmates, tell stories, and give speeches in front of a classroom full of 30 high schoolers from all grades. To make things even worse, my teacher made us record ourselves when we gave our speeches in class so that we could look back on them, reflect, and recognize the ways we could become better. I would HIGHLY recommend to anyone with the opportunity in high school and especially in high school to take public speaking as an elective because it truly helped overcome my social anxiety!

Here are a few more practices to help overcome social anxiety:

1. Explore specific situations that trigger anxiety

- It is important to understand your bodily cues that are brought about when experiencing social anxiety because it will allow you to recognize when you are having this experience easily. Bodily cues could be anything like biting nails, looking down at the ground, increased heart rate, crossing arms, etc. Allowing yourself to recognize situations that trigger your anxiety will help you in the future to recognize what types of situations trigger your social anxiety.

2. Practice acts of kindness

- It might sound kind of silly, but practicing acts of kindness allows for positive interactions to occur, thus making it easier to initiate conversation with others.

3. Have a job in customer service

- although it may seem scary at first, having a job in customer service such as a hostess, server, or cashier will greatly improve your social skills and over time, help reduce high levels of social anxiety due to constantly practicing social interaction