Anxiously Thriving: Inspirational Stories on l̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ Thriving with Social Anxiety and How You Can Do It Too

By Shubhechha Dhar

Do you feel like all eyes are on you in every social situation? Are you intensely worried about how others perceive you?

This feeling has a name-social anxiety, and depending on its intensity, it could be a disorder. One in eight people have suffered from social anxiety disorder (

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637302620

Book preview

ANXIOUSLY THRIVING

Inspirational Stories on Living Thriving with Social Anxiety and How You Can Do It Too

Shubhechha Dhar

new degree press

copyright © 2021 Shubhechha Dhar

All rights reserved.

ANXIOUSLY THRIVING

Inspirational Stories on Living Thriving with Social Anxiety and How You Can Do It Too

ISBN

978-1-63676-818-2 Paperback

978-1-63730-224-8 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-262-0 Digital Ebook

In the loving memory of my aatya (aunt), Joginderkaur Dhar, for being a testament of strength and resilience

and

To everyone battling with mental illness

Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1

The Realization

Chapter 2

Growing up with Social Anxiety Disorder

Chapter 3

A Fish Out of Water

Chapter 4

A Day in the Life of a Socially Anxious Person

Chapter 5

The One Where I Wish I Had F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Chapter 6

A Not-So-Perfect Romance

Chapter 7

#PicturePerfect

Chapter 8

Fake It ’til You Are It

Chapter 9

Center of Attention

Chapter 10

You Are Not Alone

Chapter 11

How to Help Someone with SAD

Author’s note

A Letter to My Social Anxiety Disorder

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

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Napoleon Hill said, Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.¹ I’d like to call BS. Ever since I could remember, my mind has been playing tricks on me, telling me that everyone around me was judging me in one way or another. Feelings of insecurity and self-doubt constantly clouded my mind and made it difficult for me to function in everyday social situations. It didn’t matter how many times I told myself everything was fine; my mind was already made up—I was meant to be awkward and alone. I remember times when I constantly questioned myself, and that made school, work, and being social incredibly difficult.

What are some examples of non-verbal communication? my communication professor asked one snowy day in December.

Hand gestures. Just say hand gestures. I kept repeating in my head.

But what if it’s the wrong answer? my mind argued back. I took a deep breath and mustered up all the courage inside me to raise my hand to answer the question. My heart was racing fast, and I could feel butterflies inside my stomach. I raised my hand halfway up before dropping it.

Hand gestures, the girl sitting behind me said.

That’s a good example! The professor smiled.

I shook my head in disappointment because that could have been me. I was afraid of being wrong and humiliating myself in front of the entire class, despite knowing that my answer was indeed correct.

As my fear of judgment grew, I changed my life to avoid this at all costs. I avoided going to restaurants or speaking with waitstaff by placing orders online. If I was having a good day and decided to go out, I would research the restaurant’s menu and repeat the order over and over in my head to avoid stumbling over my words or making a fool of myself. Everyday interactions were no better; I felt my stomach drop every time I heard strangers laughing on the street because I was convinced they were laughing at me. While listening to music on the bus with my headphones on, I would lower the volume of my phone because I was afraid that people sitting around me would hear the music and judge my music choices. As far as I could tell, no one ever noticed these little neuroses. From the outside, everything seemed normal—I was just an average student doing average things.

No matter how good I was at pretending things were alright, I knew deep down that no amount of faking it would ever help me feel normal. Why was I like this? Why couldn’t I be like everyone else? I spent years wondering what was wrong with me until, one day, I broke down. I had no one to talk to about how I felt, so I did what I thought was the next best thing at the time. I googled how I felt. I poured my emotions onto Google’s search box and typed something along the lines of I feel like everyone is constantly judging me and laughing at me, which wasn’t wise of me because Google always ends up showing cancer whenever you google your symptoms. Hundreds of articles and web pages began popping up with articles about something called social anxiety disorder.

If you’re thinking Oh my god! Your experiences sound so similar to mine. Do I have social anxiety disorder too?

Maybe. Maybe not.

We often use the words shyness, social anxiety, and social anxiety disorder interchangeably, and people with social anxiety disorder are often dismissed as being shy. However, there is a fine line that separates them.

Shyness is the tendency to feel awkward, worried, or tense during social encounters, especially with unfamiliar people.²

Social anxiety is the feeling of intense nervousness and self-consciousness that sufferers experience during one-on-one meetings or group social gatherings.³

The main things that separate shyness from social anxiety disorder are the impairment of functioning that it causes in a person’s life, the intensity of the fear, and the level of avoidance.⁴

Dr. Tynessa Franks, clinical psychologist and founder of Bashful & Bright, a website for helping people with social anxiety disorder find support, says, Everybody experiences social anxiety at some point in their lives. Even the people who appear most confident, they worry at some point about being accepted and being judged by others. But when you have social anxiety disorder, it crosses that threshold and becomes something that is really affecting your joy and how good you feel about your life.

Shyness will not impair your life, whereas social anxiety, depending on the degree to which you experience it, will. It will make everyday social interactions difficult to the point where it impacts your life hugely. Think of social anxiety and social anxiety disorder on a spectrum.

It can be a hard distinction, and there is no magic line. You have to ask yourself, ‘Am I not the person who I want to be specifically because I’m constantly worrying about how other people think of me?’ If the answer is yes, you are probably more in the disorder territory, Dr. Franks explains.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) affects fifteen million adults, or 6.8 percent of the population in the United States, and is equally common among men and women.⁵ More than 75 percent of people with SAD experience their first symptom during their childhood or early teenage years.⁶

I had the symptoms of SAD in my childhood, but I was often dismissed as being shy. I did not know something called SAD even existed. I was angry, frustrated, lost, and clueless. Over the years, I began learning more about it and started my mental health journey with it. Fast forward to a couple years later—not only do I know what SAD means, but I also know how to thrive with it.

The Google search I did back in my sophomore year of college left me wondering if I really had SAD.

It took me some time to find the courage to go to a counselor. My mind kept going back and forth on deciding whether I should talk to a counselor or not. I knew that if I didn’t go to a counselor now, I would have to spend my entire college life drowned in anxious thoughts. All of my big dreams flashed before my eyes—traveling the world, meeting new people, writing a book, public speaking, and more. In the end, my fear of the known anxiety drowned out my fear of what could be—I decided I was all in.

When I got to the counseling center at my university, a counselor greeted me with a smile and asked me, So, what brought you here today? I had been longing to open my heart to someone for so long that I kept talking for ten minutes straight with tears streaming down my face.

I saved the details about my first meeting with the counselor for another chapter, but long story short, I enrolled in group counseling. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Though I thought I would be anxious about people seeing me in that space, I realized pretty quickly that group was my safe space. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel alone or out of place. Nobody was judging me. I could just be myself.

There were about sixteen other students in my session who knew exactly what I was going through, and that felt comforting. Although I had done a ton of reading on SAD, I was shocked at how little I knew about this disorder. The counselors from group taught me more about anxiety and its prevalence in America today. During our first session, they explained that anxiety disorders were actually the most common mental disorders worldwide. The very first thing our counselors did was educate us about SAD. We started from the basics and learned what SAD meant and why someone might have it. All of this open talk about mental health was a first for me.

Growing up in India, nobody really talked about mental health, which led to a lot of misconceptions. A common misconception surrounding social anxiety is that people with SAD are simply nervous, whereas in reality, feeling nervous is just one symptom of it. Whenever I opened up about my anxious feelings to a friend or family member, I was told to ignore it, or stop overthinking. When people weren’t busy giving me advice on how to let things go, they were talking about me behind my back and calling me arrogant for avoiding conversation. I was tired of being misunderstood; I began to feel anxious about having anxious thoughts. It was like a never-ending cycle of worry.

All of this changed when I joined group counseling. Our counselors role-played with us and pretended to be interviewers, professors, or random people at parties to help us practice interacting in social situations. Practicing social interactions in a judgment-free zone was less stressful than doing it outside of the sessions. All of the group members always cheered each other on by saying things like you are doing great or you got this, and having that support meant everything to me. Our counselors even helped us realize which social interactions typically brought us anxiety by having us list out and gradually perform those anxiety-inducting activities. Joining group counseling made me realize there are numerous coping techniques that exist for SAD. The more we role-played in our sessions, the more comfortable I got using these coping skills and being in social situations outside of our sessions. We used cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a psychological treatment that helps to identify unhelpful thinking patterns and challenge them. You will see me use this technique of identifying thoughts throughout the book.

While the group provided me with the resources I needed to cope with my anxiety, I know that not everyone has these resources. I moved to the United States when I was nineteen, and the open conversation around mental health encouraged me to seek help. I was lucky enough to have the resources I needed, but most people don’t even realize they have SAD until much later in their lives, and some of them don’t even get a diagnosis.

According to a 2007 survey by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 36 percent of people with SAD report experiencing symptoms for ten or more years before seeking help.⁷ I was one of those people, and I know exactly how isolating it can be to struggle all alone. In fact, multiple people I interviewed with SAD for this book told me they realized they had SAD much later in their lives, and they did not have any resources to cope with their anxiety.

Growing up, I never had any books about mental health on my bookshelf, let alone anything specific about SAD, so I decided to write one, because mental health still remains a stigma in India to this day. While there is an open conversation about mental health in the United States, it remains a stigma in most South Asian communities in the States.

People with SAD and their family members often worry whether someone with SAD can lead a successful life.

Here’s the good news: yes, you can! You can not only survive but thrive with SAD. Yes, you.

Through my personal experience and through the interviews I have conducted with mental health experts and people with SAD, I found that SAD may seem insurmountable at first, but that’s only because we aren’t given the coping skills to handle it. Anxiety disorders are highly treatable and you will learn that from the stories I share in this book.⁸

In this book, you will see inspiring stories from around the world:

•Manas Jha, an Indian American musician based in New York City who had anxiety since the age of ten without even knowing it. You will see how Manas, who would avoid social interactions, now uses music to express himself.

•Marielle Cornes, a student at Mountain Brook Junior High, and how she struggled with anxiety when she moved from Maryland to Alabama.⁹ You will see how Marielle, who couldn’t ask a waiter for a napkin, went on to give a TEDx Talk at her school.

•Sophie, a college student based in the UK with big dreams of becoming an adult nurse practitioner, and how CBT turned the light on at the end of the tunnel for her and helped her dream seem like a reality.

In these stories and the many more I share in this book, you will see everyone use different coping techniques to deal with their social anxiety, and it is important to note that the same coping techniques will not work for everyone. You will also see expert insights from the counselors, therapists, and psychologists I have interviewed.

Not every technique is going to work for you, my group counselors would always say. But what matters is you keep trying and experimenting to find out what works for you and what doesn’t.

For me, going to counseling and the CBT technique of identifying unhelpful thinking pattern were the biggest things that worked, and I will show you how. CBT offers long-lasting benefits to people with SAD.¹⁰ It has helped me cross off