How To Calm Social Anxiety Before, During, And After Events

This guided practice supports you in working with social anxiety by calming the nervous system and bringing awareness to the present moment. Many of us carry memories of exclusion or judgment, which can make new social situations feel threatening. Through breath awareness, gentle somatic tools, and compassionate inquiry, we prepare ourselves before, during, and after social events. You’ll learn how to regulate through longer exhalations, grounding in your body, and noticing friendly connections. With kindness and practice, social anxiety can shift into greater ease, resilience, and even enjoyment of authentic connection.

Transcript

This is a practice that we can do when we're moving into a situation socially where we feel anxious.

Our nervous system is always trying to protect us.

When we're working with social anxiety what are we trying to protect ourselves from?

We all have experiences of not being fully welcome.

Some of us have experiences of being ostracized,

Bullied,

Excluded,

Shamed.

Sometimes that can be quite intense and was a huge part of our childhood and our life.

But for everyone we have that experience to some extent.

As we're thinking about moving into a social situation where we're not sure of our welcome there are things that we can do before we enter the situation and once we're there and that's what this practice is all about.

Before we leave for the situation let yourself do some practices that help to stabilize and settle your nervous system.

We often hold our breath when we're anxious and that signals threat to our nervous system.

Bringing more ease into the breath,

More continuity,

Longer exhales can help to settle our system and experience a more accurate interpretation of what might happen once we get there.

Before you leave do some things that are helpful for your nervous system.

It might be that you go out for a walk.

There are many things that we can do to help our nervous system recognize safety.

Before we go could mean every single day we do something to help our nervous system and that will help build our strength and resilience so that we have more capacity when something arises that we need to work with.

Like walking into a situation where we feel anxious about our inclusion,

About what's going to happen.

We have social anxiety.

We settle our nervous system.

Maybe you put your hand on your heart.

Offer yourself some kindness that this is difficult.

Reassure yourself.

One of the things that happens is that we have memories of our past where we weren't welcome.

Maybe where we were bullied and all of those experiences show up to prove to us that it's not safe for us to go out and meet these people or be in this social situation.

It might be helpful to do some ongoing somatic inquiry around that.

As you think about entering the situation,

What are the thoughts in your mind?

What is the evidence your nervous system is using?

Maybe it's a social event with friends or with work or with family.

There's something about it that you feel anxious about.

So what that really means is that you feel some level of danger or threat.

What exactly do I think might happen?

Our mind often moves into catastrophic thinking and we also might have experiences coming up from the past.

Maybe when you think about going out and making new friends through this activity that you've decided to participate in,

What comes to mind is all the times when you felt awkward or nobody seemed to want you there.

Or maybe there were mean people who were deliberately excluding you or making fun of you.

It helps to work with some of those.

Look at the images.

Do some tapping on your forehead.

Put the images in a frame on the other side of the room.

Take your eyes around the empty space.

Use those tools to take some of the charge out of those anticipations or of those memories.

So that's something that we can do before we ever go into the situation.

Work with building strength and resilience in our nervous system.

Reassuring ourselves through the breath and being in our body and working through some of those memories and associations.

And then as we're ready to go into the situation,

Remember to breathe.

Breathing out for six seconds or longer signals our nervous system that we're safe.

It's a really great thing to focus on.

We could do a slow motion walk through.

What exactly are the elements of this social anxiety?

What is it that we think might happen?

As we think about leaving,

We could do this nervous system regulation.

And then as we're in the actual situation,

We could remember to do that.

So imagine that you're walking into the room.

One of the things that we do in our own practice is we bring ourselves into the present moment through looking around the room.

We notice colors and shapes.

We notice if there's danger here.

If you're imagining walking into this social situation,

What are you likely to see as you look around?

Colors,

Shapes,

People.

Our mind,

Our nervous system is interpreting that the people that are going to be in the room are dangerous to us somehow.

Most likely there's a social impact or a social concern.

I might feel left out.

I might be made fun of.

People might look at me and judge me.

I might be shamed.

Often our interpretation of the likelihood of that or the intensity of that is way more than what will actually happen.

And having said that,

There are people who might look at us and we interpret that as a shaming look or maybe it is a shaming look.

We do have to deal with people who are perhaps anxious themselves or maybe in a fight response or maybe these are the mean girls from junior high that we're dealing with as adults.

We're not pretending.

We're not assuring ourselves there's no possibility that I'm going to feel awkward or be judged or get that look from someone.

What we're doing is we're building our strength so that we can stay here in the present moment and accurately perceive what's happening right now without the color that happens as we bring in our past experiences.

When we have experienced feeling left out,

Our window of tolerance for feeling that way gets very narrow.

Part of what we can do is acknowledge that not everybody is going to like us,

That perhaps there are things that people will judge us for,

And that we have the right to be respectful to ourselves,

To appreciate who we are,

And build the capacity for not being so affected by other people's opinions.

When we notice how affected we are by the way other people look at us,

By how we perceive they are judging us,

That is a separate inquiry that we might look into.

Who am I?

What does it mean about me that some people judge me or that they don't accept me?

I've experienced that a lot as someone who's queer.

Not everybody is going to approve of me and I know who I am and I am on my own side.

Other people's opinions don't count because I know who I am.

So we look around the room,

We notice colors,

Shapes,

We remind our nervous system that we're here in this present moment,

Not in the past.

And as we're looking at people,

We might look to see are some of these faces friendly?

Are some people anxious like we are?

Are there some people that look kind of shut down?

People might be on screens.

Some people look like they're having a great time,

They're busy chatting to each other.

We could look around and notice faces and people that seem friendly and inviting.

So our nervous system is going to focus on possible danger and that's all we're going to see.

If we're in a situation where people are standing up,

They're talking with each other,

One of the ways to work with that,

We could do some minimal work around our breath,

Relaxing our shoulders,

Then bring our attention to the other people.

Pick someone that seems approachable,

Has a friendlier demeanor,

And what might you ask them?

And this is something that you could prepare ahead of time depending on the situation.

If you're in someone's home and you don't know a lot of the people there,

You might approach someone and say how do you know our hosts?

You might ask what is it that you enjoy doing?

Do you like to travel?

Find something that you're interested in or maybe something that's associated with the situation that you're in and have a couple of things in mind before you go so that you have a couple of ways to get conversation going.

Keep returning to the awareness of your breath,

Relaxing your shoulders,

Relaxing your body,

And remembering that these six second exhalations are very calming to the nervous system.

As you're standing or you're listening,

You might be just working with your breath.

Inhale to a count of three.

Exhale,

Let your breath slow.

Exhale to five or six.

Let your breath be smooth.

And if you're speaking,

Speak in longer sentences.

Often when we're nervous or feeling anxious,

We have these quick sips of air and we breathe in quite a lot.

We get very tight through our shoulders and our throat.

If we relax our neck and shoulders and breathe a little bit longer and then take a deeper in-breath,

Then we could speak in longer sentences.

And then when we complete our six seconds or more,

Then breathe in deeply and then let yourself talk some more.

Or perhaps you're moving into listening at that point and you could just let your exhalations go a little bit longer.

Those are a couple of really simple practices that are very powerful.

A lot of the preparation happens well before.

It's this ongoing work that we're doing,

Building resilience and strength in our nervous system.

We develop a habit of breath that's diaphragmatic,

Smooth,

Continuous,

That signals safety to our nervous system.

We work ahead of time with all of the thoughts we might be having about this to allow our neuroception,

Our perception of safety or threat to be more accurate.

We prepare as much as we can for safety.

We might take a friend with us if we could,

Or if we don't know anyone there,

We look around for someone who looks friendly or perhaps someone who also looks anxious and maybe we could talk together and we could both relax a little together.

We work with the expectations that we have.

Our nervous system might be projecting something about no one's going to talk to me or they're going to look at me and think I'm whatever it might be.

Instead of that,

We might think,

Well,

What if I meet somebody really interesting there?

We don't know.

We might meet our new best friend.

So we could work with those thoughts ahead of time.

We stabilize ahead of time.

As we move into the situation,

We work with our body,

Our breath.

We look around for people who are friendly.

We have a few conversation openers perhaps that we're ready to use to engage with people.

We try to get out of our own head and into the situation where we can look at other people and go,

I wonder if that person would enjoy a connection.

They look a little bit on the outside,

Just like I feel.

I'm going to go talk to them.

And if you weren't able to go through that door and into the room,

If you got there and instead you turned away and now you're shaming yourself,

See if you could offer yourself kindness instead.

We're not broken or to blame if we have social anxiety.

That's a result of experiences in our life that were difficult and now we're working with them.

Sometimes we're going to shut down and we're going to drive away.

Other times we're going to be able to go through that door and experience what's there.

Either way,

We need to be kind and reassuring and comforting to ourselves.

We're working with a difficult situation in a nervous system that's alarmed and we're doing our best.

If we can't go in one day,

We will be able to do it another day.

It's always helpful to put our hand on our heart and acknowledge our bravery for trying.

We might need to gather more resources or build more resilience.

It might be that that situation isn't for us and we're going to shift to something else that's more appropriate.

Take all of this into consideration.

Offer yourself some compassion.

This is really hard.

And then when we're finished the situation,

When we're out of the event and we've left,

It's very helpful to give yourself some time to notice what was my experience?

Was it as bad as I projected?

What were the positive things that happened?

And then to give yourself some time to rest and care for yourself.

If you have a difficult situation and you've worked with it in this skillful way,

Allow yourself to recognize now it's in the past.

I did it.

It went well in these ways.

There are these other things that maybe I'll work on a little differently next time.

Let your nervous system have some recovery time.

It's helpful to not schedule a bunch of stressful things one after the other if we can.

And when we've been exposed to stress,

Give yourself some self-care,

Some warmth,

Some kindness,

Your hand on your heart.

Offer yourself some appreciation that you did this hard thing.

And whatever happened,

Happened.

And we've learned something and hopefully we've enjoyed at least part of it.

And over time,

As we work with social anxiety in this way,

We get more and more accurate about what's from my past that I'm projecting might happen now.

And what are the catastrophic thoughts that are ramping up my hypervigilance?

And then we have ways to work with all of that so that we can come back into a more regulated nervous system and most likely enjoy at least parts of social activities without such a high level of anxiety.

We can really make a difference in how we move through the world through practices that build our strength and resilience.

Reviews

This was lovely, definitely adding it to the bookmark list. Thank you for including that these are strengths and skills to build up over time and with practice ... It can be easy to forget that this is an ongoing journey of learning, healing, and building resilience. 🙏🕊️

Thank you. That was wonderful. At 61 I don't socialize much. If I do these days I usually gravitate towards an elderly person who is sitting alone, I love to see thier face light up & for them to know how much I loved talking to them. Or I'll gravitate towards someone with a tattoo 😊