Some patients have difficulty attending parties, making phone calls, going to the store, or asking authority figures. It is diagnosed in psychology as social anxiety disorder (SAD), a type of anxiety disorder. The disorder first originated in 1985 as neglected anxiety disorder, and it took 14 years for it to be taken seriously.
How to tell if you have social phobia
How do you know if you have social phobia? Physicians point to the following three things to do to test yourself:
One, are you afraid that people will think you’re stupid or worried about looking shy?
Two, do you not want to be the center of attention?
Three, do you not talk to others or do certain things because you are afraid of feeling shy or embarrassed in front of others?
If you have two of the above three conditions, you may be suffering from social phobia; if these conditions have made you want to hide at home and not engage with any strangers, you may need counseling or therapy.
Treatment of social phobia
The general procedure is to increase tolerance to fear by incrementally increasing the social situation, thereby eliminating the social fear response.
The first step is to keep telling yourself that this fear can be eliminated. And get a proper understanding of the process of human interaction and how to interact with people.
Secondly, find out the kinds of things that create social fear in yourself and try to tap into the deeper roots of your mind. Then, in a hypothetical space, keep simulating scenarios in which social phobia occurs, keep practicing repeating episodes in which the symptoms occur, and keep encouraging yourself to be brave enough to face such scenarios in order to adapt from the hypothetical to such anxiety-producing and stressful situations.
Then go to small gatherings and try to voice your opinion; finally socialize with people you are very afraid of and always give yourself rewards. Using this approach and practicing it regularly and constantly will make a big difference in the disease.
Finally use compulsive therapy in small incremental steps. The first step is to stand in the middle of the street with all the traffic; after you get used to it, reduce the number of people and shop in the mall, and then reduce the number of people and go to large gatherings; because people are under more and more pressure these days, there is a trend for more and more people to suffer from it. And for doctors, the difficulty in treating these patients is not that more people are suffering from the disease, but that people suffering from social phobia are often reluctant to seek medical attention because they are afraid or unwilling to contact strangers, or afraid of being labeled as “mentally ill”. The only way to break through the psychological barrier is to fundamentally look at yourself, understand yourself, and face the society in which you live.