Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

Blushing and Sweating are two common concerns of the social anxiety sufferer. To some, blushing is a sweet and endearing quality, but for the social anxiety sufferer it can feel like a nightmare. For them, rather than a slight pinkness in their cheeks, their blushing can often be more describable as looking beetroot red, feeling like their face is on fire and something that not only affects their face, but spreads in a blotchy manner to their neck and chest.

Likewise, for the social anxiety sufferer who is concerned about sweating, it is often not just a matter of a slight dampness under the arms on a hot summer’s day. Many report profuse sweating on the palms their hands, face, armpits and other areas of the body. This is usually exaggerated when in social situations where they least want it to appear and it can be particularly problematic for people whose job involves shaking hands a lot.

When we get anxious, our sympathetic nerve activity is increased. This results in various changes in our body, including blushing and sweating, which serve to help ready us for an adverse situation. In the distant past, most adverse situations usually involved a physical danger that needed to be run away from or fought off. This can still be true, but is less so in the world we live in today. Both running away and fighting involve physical activity and that produces excessive body heat. To make our bodies more efficient and increase our chances of survival, humans have evolved to start cooling themselves through sweating when danger is anticipated. This is great when the danger is a swarm of killer bees and you need to run as far as possible, but it is not so great when the danger is the potential rejection of your colleagues when giving a presentation.

Blushing seems to be less explainable than sweating. Scientists have not figured out exactly why we blush when we are anxious or embarrassed. It is possible that it serves to communicate our remorse to others which may mean we are treated less harshly when we get things wrong, but the exact reasons for it’s function remain elusive.

Although blushing and sweating is a natural and healthy part of being human, many social anxiety sufferers end up feeling very self-conscious and anxious about these physical traits. The big problem is that getting self-conscious and anxious makes one blush and sweat more rather than helping with the situation. People often get stuck in a vicious cycle where they fear the onset of blushing and sweating in social situations and then this causes them anxiety which then actually creates the very blushing or sweating that they feared happening in the first place. The thought of other people noticing this then causes more anxiety and consequentially more blushing and sweating and so on.

Although it often does not feel like it for the sufferer, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual blushing or sweating, but rather the fact that they think something bad might happen if other people notice their blushing and sweating. Once these psychological issues are resolved and the cycles are broken, blushing and sweating will not be exaggerated by anxiety and they will cease to be a problem.

Often the ways that people have come up with to try and cope with these physical traits, such as habitually hiding them, tend to only serve to worsen the problem in the long-term. This can lead to people feeling like they are fighting a losing battle and like they are stuck with an excruciatingly embarrassing physical problem they cannot solve. This desperation is reflected in the increase in the number of people who risk irreversible surgery to reduce their visible anxiety symptoms.

For some, operations such as Sympathectomies can seem like the best escape route out of their suffering, but these operations can sometimes lead to worse problems that cannot be easily solved, or solved at all. These include permanently increased sweating elsewhere on the body and abnormal facial features. These risks can be avoided if people get the appropriate psychological help to address the root cause of their severe blushing or sweating.

It is fully understandable how when someone feels stuck with a problem, and when their own efforts to overcome it result to nothing, they turn to such drastic measures to seek relief. People considering this option should know that there are effective and risk free alternatives that actually address underlying psychological issues rather than just treating the symptom. Ponder the question: If someone has a spider phobia, would you treat them by killing all the spiders in the world, or would you work to help them come to terms with the fact that the everyday spiders they are scared of pose no threat to them?