At the company party, Tee stands in the corner holding a glass of water, looking for an opening to join his colleagues. But the moment someone turns and asks him something, his voice shakes on its own, his face starts to burn, and a voice in his head keeps up its whispering: “is my face red? Did that answer sound stupid? Is he looking at me strangely?” Tee is so absorbed in himself that he barely hears what anyone is saying. He gives a short answer and retreats.

Home that night, he cannot sleep, preoccupied with every moment he thinks he got wrong — the sentence that came out badly, the pause that ran too long, the expression on the listener’s face. He circles it for hours, and decides that next time he will find a way out of an event like this.

What Tee is experiencing is social anxiety: an intense and persistent fear of being watched, evaluated, or viewed negatively by others in social situations or in situations requiring performance in front of people. Many people also fear that others will notice signs of nervousness — a flushed face, shaking hands, sweating, a trembling voice — and will see them as weak or not good enough. What separates this condition from ordinary shyness is not the feeling of self-consciousness, which is an experience most people have. It is that the fear, and the attempt to avoid those situations, creates real distress or affects study, work, relationships, and opportunities in life.

What social anxiety is, and how it differs from ordinary shyness

Feeling self-conscious on meeting strangers, speaking in front of people, or entering a new situation is a common experience. Human beings are social animals who place weight on being accepted, so wanting to look well in others’ eyes is not a disorder. It is part of our nature.

Social anxiety disorder differs in degree and in impact: the fear of being judged is severe and persistent enough to cause clear distress, and the person begins avoiding social situations, or enduring them in misery, until study, work, or relationships are affected. The symptoms usually arrive with visible physical changes — a flushed face, a trembling voice, shaking hands, sweating, a pounding heart.

Social anxiety is not the same as being an introvert. It is sometimes loosely called a fear of people, but it does not mean a person is afraid of everyone or does not want relationships. An introvert is someone whose energy comes from being alone and who may not want a great deal of social contact — a preference, not a fear. Many people with social anxiety, by contrast, want very much to take part with others, and are blocked by the fear of being judged.

Why fearing judgment becomes a loop

What allows social anxiety to recur again and again is what is called self-focused attention.

In an ordinary situation, when we talk with someone, our attention rests on the conversation and the person in front of us. In social anxiety, attention turns sharply inward instead. We keep watching how we appear — is the voice shaking, is the face red, is any of this making sense — as though a camera were trained on us the whole time. The result is that we see only the image of ourselves that anxiety has constructed, which is usually far worse than the reality, and we also overestimate how closely others are watching us. And because we are so occupied with watching ourselves, we take in less information from the person in front of us, which leaves no opportunity to check whether what is actually happening may be different from, or more complex than, the negative picture we have built in our head.

Some people avoid eye contact, speak as little as possible, rehearse sentences in their head before saying them, or grip a glass tightly. These behaviors are not always a problem in themselves — preparing before speaking is ordinary in some contexts. They become part of the loop when we feel we must do them to keep others from seeing a flaw, or believe that without them humiliation would certainly follow. Although they may reduce anxiety temporarily, in some cases they prevent us from learning that we might handle the situation even without controlling everything about ourselves. And certain behaviors, such as answering briefly or avoiding eye contact throughout, may leave communication with the person in front of us less natural than we would want.

And when the situation is over, the loop in the head has not finished, because many people replay the event again and again, catching themselves out. This process is called post-event processing. Such reviewing tends to select only what the person believes they did wrong, which is likely to make self-assessment more negative still, and to raise anxiety for the next occasion.

Social anxiety is like a monitor in your head zooming in on every mistake

Suppose there is a monitor in your head projecting an image of yourself all the time. In a conversation, instead of looking at the person you are talking to, you are staring at that monitor and its live feed of you. And the monitor does not show a neutral picture. It zooms in on every point you think you got wrong. A voice that shook slightly is amplified into something loud. A face that flushed a little fills the whole screen. A sentence that came out badly plays on a loop. Because you are staring at this monitor, you cannot see the person in front of you fully, and you miss the information about what is actually happening, which may be neither as severe nor as negative as the picture in your head insists. The answer is therefore not to try to make the image on the monitor perfect, because the monitor is already distorting. It is to take your eyes off the screen in your head, gradually, and turn back to the person in front of you and the real conversation — until one day that monitor loses its power to hold your attention.

When social anxiety needs serious care

If the fear of being judged is starting to make you avoid what you want to do, turn down opportunities in study or work, withdraw from relationships that matter, or endure social situations in misery on a regular basis, that is a signal that serious care can help your life become wider again.

What is important to say is that social anxiety is a condition that can genuinely improve, and asking for help is not a sign of weakness. A great many people who look confident to others have been where you are. You do not have to wait until it is at its worst before beginning to care for yourself. And if at any point the distress becomes more than you can carry, Thailand’s mental health hotline, 1323, is staffed by people who will listen, twenty-four hours a day.

What part hypnotherapy plays with social anxiety

At NBRH we use hypnotherapy as our principal approach with the people we work with, and not in place of diagnosis or medical care where that is needed. From experience in practice, work with social anxiety in the therapy room tends to focus on helping a person gradually release their attention from watching themselves and return more of it to the situation in front of them; on adjusting the automatic pattern that binds a mistake, or being seen negatively, to the feeling of not being good enough or not being able to cope — toward being able to stand with oneself even without controlling everyone’s opinion; and on gradually easing the habit of replaying an event to find fault with oneself afterward. These are things we encounter often in real work, and they align with the goals of care that a number of studies describe.

At NBRH we work on the principle of Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy: adjusting the nervous system’s patterns of response, and behavior, systematically. Because lasting care for social anxiety does not come from forcing yourself to stop fearing other people’s eyes, or from pretending to be confident at all times. It comes from gradually changing the automatic patterns that turn attention back onto our own faults, read an ambiguous signal negatively, and replay a mistake after the event — along with loosening the tie between our own worth and other people’s assessment, until the fear of being judged no longer determines who you approach, which opportunities you accept, or how wide a life you are able to live.

If your worry is not confined to social situations but floats across many things in your life, “Generalized Anxiety Disorder” may be worth reading. And to understand why the brain forecasts in advance that others will judge us negatively, “What the Predictive Brain Is” connects that part of the picture.

What Social Anxiety Is: Why the Fear of Being Judged Makes Us More Self-Conscious, and How to Care for It