Say goodbye to social anxiety

Has your social butterfly given way to a hermit crab? Overcome fear and re-emerge wiser and empowered

IT WAS A GLORIOUS SUNDAY WHEN a message buzzed on my phone. ‘We’re going for a picnic in the park. BYOB. Wanna come?’ My heart leapt. A picnic in the sunshine with a group of my oldest friends – I could think of nothing more delightful. But my euphoria was short-lived, soon replaced by a rising sense of dread.

The venue for said picnic was a park in the far west of the city, miles from home. The journey would involve a train, then a bus. As an extrovert, such details never normally trouble me, the desire to socialise eclipsing the most challenging of logistics. But not that day. The more I contemplated it, the more anxious I felt. It wasn’t only the journey. I felt – and this is probably a first – that I had nothing much to say for myself.

‘The thing about socialising as we come out of lockdown restrictions is that we’re simply not used to it, no matter how many years we spent doing it before,’ says Sophie Mort, psychologist and author of A Manual For Being Human (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). ‘All that time not chatting to others and navigating the social world has made some of us feel rusty and unsure of the normal way of responding to people. Add to that the fact that there is still a pandemic going on, and it’s no surprise that many of us are apprehensive about leaving the house. We feel anxiety, excitement and uncertainty about a world we don’t really know how to be part of any more.’

It’s not just people who live alone or have been shielding who are experiencing these worries. ‘We’ve been hearing from families who have struggled without the framework of frantically busy weekend schedules for the children,’ says Amy Perrin, founder of the loneliness charity Marmalade Trust. Family units, siloed during lockdown, are having to learn to reintegrate with the world again too.

And, while we may be eager to get back to some semblance of normality, it’s worth considering that our collective psyches may not have caught up with that desire. ‘Whether we are aware of it or not, the pandemic has activated a part of our emotional system that is alert to, and responds to, threat,’ explains Nelisha Wickremasinghe, psychologist and author of Being With Others (Triarchy Press, £14.99). ‘During lockdown, we’ve been exposed to threats in the form of job insecurity, physical ill health, relationship loss and social isolation. Our “threat brain” deals with this by activating a fight, flee or freeze response.’

The impact of this on our ability to resume

our old social lives will vary among individuals. ‘Some people will react to this sense of social threat with the fight response and may feel unusually aggressive and irritable around others,’ says Wickremasinghe. ‘Some will feel they don’t want to mix with others because they still represent a threat (flight), and some will be desperate to reconnect and find relief through being with others by, for example, excessively organising social events for others – and this is the freeze response – where we put our own needs on ice by people pleasing.’

Let’s just be together

A pressing issue right now is recalibrating our sense of self. For many of us, social confidence is derived from the stories and anecdotes we share with others. But, with so many routines and rituals off limits, no wonder many of us feel unmoored. Recently, I called a dear friend to arrange a night out. To my surprise, my gregarious friend sounded reticent: ‘Look, the thing is…’ she said, ‘I haven’t been anywhere, I haven’t done anything and I’m not working at the moment. I don’t have much to offer.’

How did we get to the point where we believe that worthwhile conversations are based on describing a list of activities? ‘I’m seeing this a lot in my clinic and my life,’ says Mort. ‘It’s the reason that on lockdown video calls, we ran out of things to say so quickly – none of us had been doing anything!’

There is a solution to this though – to plan more ‘side-by-side’ activities, suggests Mort. ‘If you are worried about having nothing to say when you go out, arrange a walk or a visit to a gallery, rather than meeting in a pub or for coffee. And, if you can’t face going out, arrange a communal activity, such as watching a film or doing a workout together. Doing so takes the pressure off and minimises the energy we burn because we don’t have to pay direct attention to other people for an extended period. It gives us a shared experience to talk about.’

The other bonus of such activities is that they usually have a natural end point. The movie finishes, the gallery closes and it’s time to go home, as opposed to being marooned on a video call that keeps getting extended.

There are sound psychological reasons why some of us sometimes feel we have nothing to contribute to a conversation. ‘There are three modes of communication – power mode (doing), affect mode (feelings) and meaning mode (inquiring and sense-making),’ says Wickremasinghe. ‘Our cultures are heavily weighted towards the language of power, which is about the doing, action-orientated aspect of life. We have not been taught well enough how to talk about feelings and how to simply philosophise together – there is always so much to talk about so, if we are finding that hard, it is probably because we have come to believe that we are only interesting if we have accomplished something.’

At the root of this lies self-confidence issues. ‘There is often an unconscious fear that we are not good enough and that this will lead to social rejection,’ says Wickremasinghe. ‘And “good enough” in our culture means doing, having and accumulating.’ However, by paying more attention to how we feel in the moment, we can start learning how to soothe these perfectly natural reactions.

Another strategy might be to deploy humour. ‘It can help to acknowledge that many of us feel the same way,’ says Perrin. ‘With my closest friends, I find that being honest and laughing about life helps. On occasion, I have joked: “I’ve got no news, but I did put the bins out. How about you?” Conversations don’t have to be led by what we’ve done.’

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