Why does anxiety arise when communicating with people? Well, the situations are different, but if the anxiety is constant, and it doesn’t matter to you exactly who you communicate with, then most likely you have a social phobia, expressed to one degree or another.
Very often, people who are anxious cannot concentrate on the conversation. They say so: “I seem to be talking to a person, but I ignore half of his words, I can’t concentrate, I can’t keep up the conversation because of this.”
This situation is caused by only one factor – the way a person thinks.
In cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, the concept of “cognitive distortion” is used. In essence, these are errors of thought that lead to anxiety, depression, or other conditions.
People who have encountered a social phobia in their lives most often have two mistakes in their thinking: “mind reading” and “catastrophizing”.
In this situation, a person constantly begins to read the thoughts of other people, although this is impossible.
Anxiety when dealing with people
“He thinks I’m stupid,” “He looks at me, so he thinks I have an ugly face,” “He thinks I’m crazy,” “I just nod and can’t hold the conversation. He thinks I’m a fool. “
As you can see, thoughts of this kind lead to anxiety, since the person does not concentrate at all on the conversation. All his thoughts are occupied with predictions and assumptions, as well as attempts to read the thoughts of another. That is, a person is engaged in exactly what is initially impossible to do.
You can get rid of such thoughts. And even necessary. One has only to study them well, and then try to challenge them and replace them with more adaptive ones. All of the above examples relate more to mind reading, but there are also such: “I will not say anything, it will be a disaster”, “They will stop communicating with me, because I cannot answer anything. I will die alone. “
As you can see, thoughts here have more negative conclusions, and therefore, as a rule, they cause more anxiety.
But I repeat that you can get rid of such thoughts. Therefore, you can get rid of anxiety when communicating with many people. Everything is only in your hands.