How Can I Help Myself?

The main strategy used in treating social anxiety is to break the cycles that maintain it: to interrupt them and change the patterns that keep them going. There are four main methods of breaking these cycles:

• Changing thinking patterns
• Doing things differently
• Reducing self-consciousness
• Building up confidence

The combination of socially anxious patterns of thinking, safety behaviours, self-consciousness and lack of confidence gets in the way of being yourself, socially. These are the things that need to change. The self-help titles on this website will give you practical coping skills that you can use straight away. However, if you find that self-help alone is not meeting your needs (and this is sometimes the case), see your family doctor, medical practitioner or specialist therapist, who will offer extra support. If you do need to seek more help, it doesn't mean you have failed in any way; just that your difficulties are perhaps more complex.