Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

Is there really a cure to social anxiety? The answer is yes and no. It all depends on how you define the word ‘cure’. In terms of, is there something that can help you build up your social confidence levels to that of an average person or above, then yes, that kind of help is available, but whether or not you would call that a cure is another matter.

The word cure implies that we can rid ourselves of our social anxiety and that our social anxiety is some kind of illness. Academic research, including research I have undertaken myself, has clearly shown that if you take a sample of the population and measure their levels of social anxiety then you get a full range of differing severities of social anxiety. What you do not get is a group of people who clearly do not have social anxiety and a group of people who clearly have the ‘illness’ social anxiety disorder. Such research tells us that social anxiety is a normal part of a biologically fully functional human being.

Social anxiety should not be labelled as an illness as it is not an illness in the traditional or typical sense. It is true that people suffering from severe social anxiety may have experiences and limitations similar to those found in an illness, such as unpleasant physical symptoms and decreased ability to engage in everyday society, but the term ‘illness’ is not appropriate. The research in support of social anxiety being any sort of physical illness is weak at best.

So why is social anxiety labelled as an illness? Aside from the history of the evolution of the term ‘mental illness,’ the best answer to this question is probably that it is useful for health care providers, such as the NHS, to make a distinction between people who need help for their social anxiety and those who do not. They therefore use categories such as ‘social anxiety disorder’ and ‘panic disorder’ which they group under the term ‘mental illness’. These categories and headings are useful to health care providers who’s business is based around illness, but they send out a confusing message about the nature of social anxiety and other anxiety and mood related issues.

By describing social anxiety as an illness, the public, sufferers, and even some professionsals, become misguided about the nature of social anxiety. Illnesses are generally biologically caused and are ‘cured’ with external treatments. People often end up attaching these assumptions to social anxiety which can create barriers to progress and complicate the process of helping someone become more socially confident. Through understanding how social anxiety works and how people perform certain patterns of thinking and behaviour that keep them feeling socially anxious it becomes very clear that there is nothing physically wrong with social anxiety sufferers.

If a social anxiety suffer can switch from the mindset of thinking that their suffering being caused by an illness to one where they can see that it is caused by specific things that they think and do then they have a much better chance of making solid progress. This is because social anxiety ceases to become a mysterious illness that needs to be fixed and instead becomes something that they themselves can learn to understand and take control of. They may not know what those specific things are yet, or how they would contribute to them being socially anxious, but by acknowledging their existence they step on the path of progress.

So in conclusion, if you are looking for a cure for your social anxiety then think carefully about the assumptions you are making about it’s nature. Are you looking for something external to rid you of your fears, or are you looking for information that can help you change yourself so you can gain control over your fears? Given that social anxiety is a natural part of being human and to be without fear totally would be abnormal, you may wish to consider the searching for the latter.