Technique #3: Using Exposure to Overcome Social Anxiety

Exposure Techniques: 

Part 3 of the Series “10 Powerful Techniques To Overcome Social Anxiety”

Social anxiety can significantly impact your daily life, making social interactions and public situations feel fearful and overwhelming. Fortunately, there are practical strategies to help manage these feelings and build your confidence. 

In this multi-part blog series, I am covering ten powerful and effective techniques for overcoming social anxiety. 

Today’s technique is using exposure techniques. This technique is near and dear to my heart, because one of my specialties is treating phobias, and I have witnessed the power of exposure therapy in healing even the most stubborn of phobias.  

If you want to catch up on this series, so far we have covered:

Part I: I explained what social anxiety is, and the many ways that you can benefit by learning how to manage it. 

Technique #1: breathing as a powerful and accessible technique for calming the nervous system and managing anxiety.

Technique #2: modifying negative thoughts to decrease social anxiety.

Each strategy includes actionable steps to implement that technique in your daily life. Following these steps will help improve your social interactions and enhance your overall well-being. 

Whether you’re facing anxiety at social gatherings, work meetings, or casual conversations, these techniques can provide the tools you need to navigate social situations with greater ease and self-assurance.

Exposure: What it Means & Why it Helps

Exposure therapy is a highly effective psychological treatment designed to help you confront and reduce your anxiety. By gradually facing and engaging with feared situations, objects, or thoughts, you overcome your fear of them. Rooted in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), exposure therapy is particularly useful for treating anxiety disorders, including social anxiety, phobias, and OCD. 

The primary goal of exposure therapy is to help you break the cycle of avoidance. When you stop avoiding things, it allows you to reduce your fear and anxiety over time.  

Exposure Therapy Steps

Exposure therapy operates on the principle of habituation, which is the process of becoming desensitized to a stimulus through repeated exposure.

Here’s how it works:

1. Identify Triggers:

   • The first step involves identifying specific situations, objects, or thoughts that trigger anxiety. This could range from public speaking and attending social gatherings to more specific fears like making a phone call.

2. Create a Hierarchy:

   • Once you identify your triggers are identified, create a hierarchy of these feared situations. This hierarchy lists anxiety-provoking scenarios in order, from least to most distressing.

3. Gradual Exposure:

   • Starting with the least anxiety-inducing scenario, you gradually faces your fears in a controlled and systematic manner. This can be done through real-life (in vivo) exposure, imagined exposure, or virtual reality exposure, depending on the context and severity of your anxiety.

4. Practice and Repetition:

   • Repeatedly practice at each step of exposure until the anxiety decreases to a manageable level. This process is then repeated with increasingly challenging situations from the hierarchy.

Benefits of Exposure Therapy

1. Reduction of Avoidance Behaviors:

   • By systematically facing feared situations, your nervous system adjusts to each level of exposure. You learn on an experiential level that you can cope with and survive these encounters. Thus, you become less likely to avoid these situations in the future.

2. Desensitization:

   • Repeated exposure helps desensitize you to the feared stimuli, leading to a decrease in anxiety over time.

3. Increased Confidence:

   • Successfully confronting and managing fears boosts self-confidence and empowers you to tackle other challenges in your life.

4. Improved Quality of Life:

   • By reducing anxiety and avoidance behaviors, exposure therapy enables you to participate more fully in social, professional, and personal activities, which enhances your overall quality of life.

Types of Exposure Therapy

• In Vivo Exposure:

  Directly confronting feared situations or objects in real life. Spending time in a public place that typically feels anxiety-provoking for you is an example of In Vivo Exposure. 

• Imaginal Exposure:

  Vividly imagining feared situations. This is often a good place to start in a hierarchy of exposure situations. Often, real-life exposure feels too anxiety-provoking in the early stages. Also, real-life exposure is not always feasible or practical. For example, if you are working on feeling more comfortable at parties, you probably don’t have access to daily parties. Despite it being imagined, this exposure is quite powerful. Parts of our brain don’t discriminate between real and imagined scenarios. So, you are laying important groundwork when you imagine yourself socializing at a party and feeling relaxed. 

• Interoceptive Exposure:

  Inducing physical sensations of anxiety (e.g., increased heart rate) to help you learn to cope with the bodily symptoms of fear. Getting used to physical signs of anxiety is helpful, so that you become less inclined to interpret them as signs of actual danger. Instead, you grow accustomed to reminding yourself that these symptoms are unpleasant but not dangerous. As a result, the symptoms diminish over time. 

• Virtual Reality Exposure:

  Using virtual reality technology to simulate feared situations in a controlled environment. Personally I don’t have experience using this technique with any clients, but I am aware that it exists as an option.

Typical Exposure Progression for Social Anxiety 

Start Small 

For social anxiety, exposure work starts with small social interactions that are less anxiety-provoking. Gradually, you will increase the complexity and difficulty of these interactions over time, as you gain confidence in each step.

For example, you might begin by practicing a simple social interaction, like saying hello to a neighbor or making small talk with a cashier. These initial interactions serve as low-stakes opportunities to build confidence and familiarity with social engagement.

Move On Up

As you become more comfortable with these smaller interactions, it’s time to  gradually progress to more challenging social situations. These next steps are determined by your specific fears and goals. 

This progression may involve increasing the duration or frequency of social interactions, initiating conversations with strangers, or participating in group settings such as social gatherings or networking events.

By gradually exposing yourself to increasingly complex social situations, you have the opportunity to develop coping skills, challenge negative beliefs, and build confidence in your ability to navigate social interactions effectively. 

You will also be re-training your nervous system that these social interactions are not dangerous. Feeling nervous is absolutely okay! Becoming more accepting of some nervousness around socializing will ironically decrease those nerves. 

Be Kind to Yourself

Throughout the process of exposure therapy, it’s important for you to practice self-care and self-compassion. Acknowledge and validate your feelings of discomfort, while also recognizing your progress and resilience. This is hard work! 

With persistence, you can gradually overcome social anxiety and feel more confident. Connecting with others can become a source of fulfillment for you, instead of a sourse of distress. 

Exposure is Key for Overcoming Social Anxiety

In summary, exposure therapy desensitizes anxiety triggers over time, by exposing you to feared situations in a safe and controlled environment. It allows you to confront your fears gradually, and experience reduced anxiety responses.

Through repeated exposure, your nervous system learns that the feared outcomes are unlikely to occur or are not as threatening as you initially perceived. This process of habituation helps to recalibrate your brain’s response to anxiety triggers, leading to decreased levels of fear and arousal over time.

You Can Do This!

As you confront your fears repeatedly and experience them in a manageable way, you develop a sense of mastery and confidence. You start to trust in your ability to cope with anxiety-provoking situations, ultimately leading to long-lasting reductions in social anxiety symptoms.

Exposure therapy is a powerful and evidence-based approach to treating anxiety disorders. Through gradual, repeated exposure to anxiety-provoking situations, you can reduce your fear responses, build resilience, and enhance your ability to engage in everyday activities with confidence and ease.

In subsequent parts of this series, I will continue to cover ten techniques to manage and overcome social anxiety.  

How I Can Help

If you are reading this and thinking, “This makes sense, but I want help with exposure for my anxiety,” you might consider working with a therapist. This can help structure your exposure work, hold you accountable, and offer you expertise in formulating a hierarchy of exposure exercises that will fit your needs. 

In fact, therapy is one of the ten techniques I’ll cover in this series! 

I invite you to reach out to me to discuss working with me in therapy to help you overcome social anxiety. I am authorized to see clients in online therapy in 40 states, and I have helped people with anxiety for over 20 years. 

Your first step is to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with me. If I’m not available to be your therapist, I can provide you with appropriate resources so that you can find the help you are looking for.