How to Handle Physical Symptoms of Social Anxiety? // Fear of Anxiety, Blushing, Sweating, Trembling

For many people with social anxiety disorder, the fear of doing or saying something stupid is not the only reason they fear being rejected. Frequently, the physical anxiety symptoms resulting from their excessive worries add an extra layer to the problem. Not only are these physical symptoms uncomfortable to bear in social settings, but people with SAD often fear they might be negatively evaluated because of these symptoms in the first place. Like this, a secondary manifestation of social anxiety can become the person’s primary problem area. Let’s take a person who is afraid of blushing, for instance. Blushing is a normal and common physical reaction related to the emotion of shame. When we feel we have violated social norms, many of us react with a facial blush. Let’s say you ask a women in which month of her pregnancy she is, and she responds that she is not pregnant. Ouch! Yip, a facial blush, a quick “sorry” and change of topic might be the right thing to do in this situation. Your physical reaction signals your acquaintance that you are aware you have been rude and that you did not mean to. It is an adaptive reaction since it aims to secure your relationships with others. However, in the case of the fear of blushing, also called erythrophobia, the physical reaction has become counterproductive. The person is not ashamed of an objective violation of social norms, but of blushing itself. Logically, this leads to a fear of blushing. Our person starts paying excessive attention to her physical reactions. “Is my face feeling hot?”, “Am I blushing right now?” – questions like these start popping up in her mind. When her answer to these questions is yes, a negative feedback loop is set into place. A feeling of shame starts to arise, which only provides even more reason to be ashamed, and the vicious cycle is complete. But this does not only happen in the case of blushing. Any physical symptom, such as sweating, trembling, a rapid heart beat and so on, can be reason of concern for an individual with social anxiety. What they all have in common is that the person believes that others might reject or look down on her because of these manifestations.