Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

Eating. It keeps us alive and well, but what if you get scared when you eat around other people? For lots of people with social anxiety, eating in a presence of others causes a lot of anxiety and self-consciousness. Not all fears around eating are the same and it is usually not the food people with social anxiety are scared of, but rather the actual process of eating around other people. There are then lots of different aspects of eating and it might be just one of these that causes distress or many of them.

For myself, the main fear I had around eating was noise. Could people hear me munching and crunching and was it really annoying them and even making them angry at me? I was not really clever enough to avoid noisy food and always used to end up with an apple, a bag of crisps or something else with a noisy bite or wrapper. I remember working in an office and sucking each crisp before I chewed it and trying to bite apples slowly so I did not make any noise. Another strategy I employed was to crunch quickly to get it over with. I used to imagine the people behind me getting more and more irritated by my crunching until they just wanted to explode and shout, ‘JUST SHUT UP WITH YOUR STUPID CRUNCHING YOU ****’. I did not want to draw any attention to myself, but of course I probably did through my unconventional eating habits because people tend to notice what is novel and blot out the rest. I really would have been much better off just eating normally.

As I said above, not all eating fears are the same and I have come to realise that my main eating fear was less common than the usual ones people have. Most common seems to be concerns over shaking or messing up when bringing the fork to ones mouth. People will often avoid difficult foods such as peas that might make their shaking more noticeable and stick to safe food such as mashed potato. Another common problem related to shaking is holding drinks and tea cups where the shaking might be more noticeable and there is a possibility of spilling tea everywhere. If shaking is a worry for you then you might find my ‘shaking and tension‘ post interesting.

Really anything that might cause embarrassment can be a problem, including slipping with your knife and shooting a tough bit of steak across the room, spilling soup down your front, making slurping noises,  and missing your mouth with your fork. People also commonly worry about etiquette like what to wear, what knife and fork to use, and am I eating too fast or too slow?

The consequences of all this are usually that the person starts to associate a lot of stress with meal time and starts to adjust their life around their fears. This might mean skipping meals, only feeling able to choose ’safe’ foods, declining invitations to restaurants, or eating in secret. This can then be noticed by other people who might be concerned or who might find it difficult when it affects their plans. Usually people do not want to explain what is really going on and sometimes even when they do other people might not understand the severity of their fears and that they cannot simply switch them off. This can then result in further stress being associated to eating fuelling the anxiety that surrounds it.

I hope by writing this post you can at least know that you are not alone with these fears and that they are actually very common. I am planning to address how to overcome them in my audio product, but I would encourage people to start seeking help with them now rather than waiting as since eating is so fundamental to our lives, such fears can have a big impact. Also, going hungry is known to make people more susceptible to feeling emotional and anxious, so skipping meals or not eating properly can heighten anxiety overall.