Social anxiety - help me understand it

[KayPassa]

I know I’ll get piled on for this so have NC’d. Am genuinely not being critical - just curious & seeking to understand things.
So many posts recently have mentioned social anxiety. The cat who attacked the postman & its owner couldn’t go and help. The tenant who wasn’t able to let the estate agent & owner visit to name just a couple.
I can’t say I would enjoy dealing with either of those situations but I would do it. Maybe I’d need to push myself & feel a bit nervous but I would do it. How can social anxiety become so horribly crippling that the OPs couldn’t?
I read posts every week about problems caused by people not being able to deal with confrontation & ending up in a much worse situation. Don’t they just have to take a deep breath & face things? Short term pain for long term gain? What sort of life do they have if they can’t do that? Everything must be overwhelming & draining for them.
Very few of us relish confrontation or dealing with tricky situations but we can’t avoid them all the time surely? Where’s all the resilience gone?

I agree, social anxiety is a hell of a lot more than "being shy".

Has anyone used bupropion for anxiety and depression? If so how long did it take to work? Did you feel a bit low and anxious before you felt better? I’m 12 days in and want to have some hope.

Most of the time I'm fine. I'm not great in social situations unless I have a particular and clear role to fulfil but mostly I get by.

Some situations are overwhelming and then I freeze physically and sometimes can't talk - the words just won't come out or I'm gasping individual words out, while inside just screaming at myself to talk properly.

My heart will be beating crazily, I will be bright red and sweating and I will desperately want to run but I know this is wrong so instead I end up stuck like a statue - or I do run away and hide somewhere, but this is pretty awful too.

It's even worse when someone asks 'are you okay' because then I will either burst into tears or just nod and try to stay upright because I'm starting to feel dizzy with it all.

That's how it feels for me. It will be different for different people.

Let me rephrase. From a very early age, the idea of leaving my room and having to speak to people made me panic. I wasn't allowed to express that panic because my mother would shout, and she terrified me. So I did what I was told. It was horrible, but I do think eventually I got something good out of it.

I think anxiety is hard to understand because, by definition, it is an irrational fear.

If you’re scared you have cancer when you’re going for a biopsy of a crusty mole, that’s not anxiety because it’s a rational fear based on factual evidence.

If you’re scared you have cancer but there is 0 evidence for that, that is anxiety.

So BY DEFINITION it is irrational and therefore hard to understand.

I know from personal experience that it is hell- and it absolutely feels real when you’re in the thick of it.

Practicing empathy is the best route forward.

Its no way to live a life, never going out, never seeing anyone and sitting at home watching TV and playing on the computer.

I know someone who has it and she is a burden to her sister, she has no friends, no partner, no job says she cant work, and her sister carries here all the time. It affects her sisters life too.

She has to check in all the time, make sure she is ok, and take her to appointments all the time, deal with people on the phone because she says she cant do it, sister is also rude to her as well.
Her sister had to help find her somewhere to live, where she lives she constantly moans about it and sister has to sort problems out. Never ending liablility.

It so bloody selfish. What is the sister wasnt there??? Would she just get on with it.

OP I think a good place to start would be reading about anxiety disorders. Everyone feels anxious from time to time which can be in response to social situations but this isn't necessarily anxiety disorder which is bloody horrible.

I have it thanks to some essential meds.

It is the sympathetic nervous system firing up inappropriately so that you feel bouts of genuine fear, dizziness, and an urge towards 'fight or flight' but with nothing to fight against and nowhere to flee to. I woke up last night full.of adrenaline. Imagine there was an armed intruder in the room. That level of fear. I knew full well there was nothing of the sort but I still couldn't shake the reaction. That's what you're dealing with, not a bit of nerves.

There will be triggers. Mine match my epilepsy triggers so certain lighting, patterns, reflections that occur in the most normal places such as car parks and supermarkets. I do go in these places but when my side effects are bothering me, you wouldn't believe how hard it is. I am a very resilient person, I assure you. I have achieved a lot and seen a lot of difficult experiences through.

Hopefully this hard period won't last.

It's more than just being a bit anxious and having to push through. Some anxiety is normal but when it stops you from doing things or even really 'living' it's a problem.

Many years ago when my dc were young I was practically housebound the anxiety was constantly so high, it was awful and made worse by feeling guilty that I wasn't functioning properly. I'm lucky I got some help and was able to move on and although anxiety is still often there it's at a normal level and I can cope. Even now social situations can set me back and I have to be very careful with myself.

Thank you for such interesting & illuminating responses. For me @Echio summed it up really helpfully. For those saying I was being critical - truly I wasn't. Sorry to those posters who describe how they suffer with it & the difficulties they face in everyday life.

I have bad social anxiety sometimes. I mean i always have and alot of the time I can push through but sometimes it is so bad i just cant, will honestly have a full blown panic attack if i try and would rather a whole heep of problems happen instead of just do it.

That all said its funny really because the one thing that over rides it everytime is if something sets off my inner mama bear about the kids and then im like "nope" and i can confront anything 😂

But yeah tbh my life is largely an overwhelming mess and i am quite disabled by my anxiety at times.

I have social anxiety.

Mine is focused around men and was probably caused by one specific incident which I won't go into.

Now, my brain is on high alert because it knows that I can be harmed quite badly by men.

If enough aspects of that incident align (man who is tall, in a room, being shouty) then my brain goes - in the past these aspects have led to harm. This is a dangerous situation.

In general my brain goes to flight rather than anything else for which I am grateful but what happens is that I lose conscious control of my body, I lose the ability to speak and my autopilot brain gets me the fuck out of there.

I don't have ANY conscious control over it at all.

The idea of having resilience and trying to fight it is laughable. If your subconscious brain thinks you are about to die or suffer severe harm it can and it will take over and your conscious brain gets exactly zero choice about it.

I picture the worst case scenario all the time, it's exhausting, I go over every conversation I've ever had and torture myself for years afterwards thinking what I should have said. It's far easier to avoid situations tbh. I do force myself to get involved but I have in the past hid from situations because I was too scared to deal with them. It's hard to explain but it is debilitating

For me it is like a very very loud hyper critical voice screaming at me inside my head. My ears ring and my vision narrows. Imagine trying to respond normally in any social situation whilst some shouty arsehole stood next to you telling you how awful/ugly/pathetic/embarrassing you are, much louder than anyone else in the room. Imagine trying to read a menu or talk on the phone or respond appropriately to a question. It’s miserable and embarrassing and then people just think you’re being a bit wet and it all just feeds into that awful voice.

I'm a bit sick of the cries of "were has all the resilience gone', because it's only my children's generation that were meant to be truly independent. I'm 55, women could never leave the house and be thought of as 'home birds', there wasn't criticism, it was thought of as a good trait in women, keeping themselves to themselves and devoting themselves to their family. A lot of the women never read a newspaper and the television had three channels and none of the anxiety inducing programs of today. Life was simple. So a good proportion of those who had anxiety just went under the radar of anyone. Now we've got to be all things to all people while never aging and earning our own money.

What sort of life do they have if they can’t do that?
Not great.

Everything must be overwhelming & draining for them.
Yeah, it is.

Not sure what else you want people to say?

Social anxiety disorder is an illness.

Why can't people who have paralysed legs just get up and walk? I mean, if they just tried harder they could.

I had it in my late teens / early 20s
I also still hate eating in public, think this was because I was teased as a child
Had wonky teeth and used to eat covering my mouth and laugh covering my mouth

Over it now but I remember how awful it was at one point, it causes you to be paranoid too and you feel everyone is watching you

Anxiety is NOT just something you can 'push through', or something that everyone feels but copes with because they're 'more resilient'.

It can be utterly, utterly crippling.

Maybe turn to Google for bit of research, rather than making assumptions.

Sometimes we all have leg discomfort but we GET UP!! 😂

It so bloody selfish. What is the sister wasnt there??? Would she just get on with it.

No, almost certainly not. She would either pay for private care (which most people can't, especially if they have a disorder that affects their earning capacity), get help from the State (not easy these days), or become one of those people who cannot manage life at all. Might well die young.

Any illness that cannot be managed easily, and requires a lot of help from others, could be called 'bloody selfish' if one wishes to. To give a common example, people with dementia often require a very burdensome amount of care from their families. But that doesn't mean that they're just doing it to be cussed, or could just snap out of it if they chose. The same in most cases of mental health problems.

I think it's unfortunate that the word 'anxiety' is used both to describe an everyday emotion, and an actual disorder. They're not the same thing, any more than temporarily aching muscles from hard exercise are the same thing as having severe arthritis.

'Social anxiety' used more often to be called 'social phobia' and while that term has its problems, I think it made it clearer that it's a disorder, and not just ordinary shyness.

Sometimes social anxiety disorders can be traced to past experiences of long-term school bullying or family bullying, but sometimes there is no such obvious trigger.

But maybe the point some PPs are trying to make is that there is a spectrum on which both these things lie, and there is a space in between where things aren’t so clear as definitely in one direction or the other. Since mental health conditions can’t often be diagnosed by, say, a clear yes/no blood test, but by a clinician with their own sympathies and biases, it’s not functionally helpful to sufferers of any anxiety to just say “you’re either shy or severely socially anxious”.

So perhaps many of these sufferers in the middle, especially children at school whose minds are developing and neurological connections are being laid down, might benefit from some focus on challenging themselves, leaning into achieving through discomfort, learning to sit with anxious feelings but getting done what needs to anyway? We’ve prioritised listening to our gut feelings (good) but gone so far with it that most teachers I know want to quit because so many students simply won’t work in class or at home because “it’s damaging their mental health and causing anxiety”.

Normalising never, ever feeling discomfort doesn’t help, so while recognition of the severe end of the spectrum now is great, shouldn’t we give tools to early sufferers to prevent them travelling to that end if possible?

it's only my children's generation that were meant to be truly independent. I'm 55, women could never leave the house....

I'm older than you, and I don't recognise this at all. My independence has never been limited.

My parents' generation was full of women not only leaving the house, but living alone, rising to senior positions at work or in professions, travelling abroad. Earlier generations had women running businesses. And my family was far from unique.

Towards the end of your post you said "Everything must be overwhelming and draining for them."

As someone who grew up being labelled as painfully shy but finally diagnosed with anxiety over a year ago (and recently told I come under the social anxiety umbrella), I can tell you that EVERYTHING is totally overwhelming and draining. I even had an anxiety attack in my therapy session today - a safe place where I should feel completely safe - but I can't even manage that.

Anxiety is an irrational, terrible disease that can be crippling. For me it is on top of depression which I was diagnosed with many years ago. Simple, everyday tasks like getting dressed and cooking are anxiety inducing, going out always results in an anxiety attack, no matter how many techniques I use to try to help. I would rather never go out, never meet anyone, never get out of bed, but unfortunately I have to. It was so bad recently I tried to commit suicide and at one point I was detained for my own safety. There is no way I could have just got on with life, there was no way I could have been rational at the time, the only way I got through those days was with other people helping me, I could not have done it myself.

So far in the last few months I have tried 3 different anti-depressants, they only take the edge off the depression and anxiety, the second one stopped helping and sent me into a downward spiral which resulted in the worst couple of months of my life, hence I am on a third one now. My therapy is, hopefully, going to help, but there is no explanation for why I have some of the anxiety. I have been 'on sick' for a year now and I have no idea when I will be fit for work.

I really don't want to feel this way, I try to just get on with things and on good days I can, but at other times it is literally impossible to. Life is hard, anxiety is tiring and terrifying at times.

I hope this small snapshot of my experience helps you understand a bit better. There is a difference between being a bit anxious, it happens to everyone, and full-on anxiety, and so many people nowadays think they have anxiety, but they may only have the normal, day-to-day thing.