If your teen struggles with social anxiety, it may sometimes feel like there isn’t much you can do to help. You can’t snap your fingers and magically take their anxiety away, and you won’t (nor should you) always be by their side to help them cope when they start to feel anxious.
However, what you can do is just as important. You can equip your teen with helpful strategies that will help them manage their social anxiety so that it becomes less debilitating and overwhelming.
It is never too early, or too late for that matter, to start teaching your teen ways to handle their anxiety. When you notice your teen is having trouble managing their social anxiety, try suggesting these strategies:
1. Learn about social anxiety
Have your teen learn about social anxiety and what causes people to feel social anxiety. Before they can work on addressing their social anxiety, it is important for them to know what it is, where it comes from, and why they need to manage it.
As they learn about social anxiety, they will be able to recognize when they are experiencing normal levels of anxiety or when their anxiety gets in the way of their day to day life. While it is important to be able to experience anxiety when the body is in danger, it is harmful when your teen experiences anxiety when there are no present threats.
Learning about social anxiety will also show your teen that there are millions of other people who are facing the same situation. Often when teens feel alone with their anxiety, they have trouble trying to combat it. When your teen realizes that there are other people who are working on managing their social anxiety, it will help them feel less alone.
2. Practice self-awareness
In order to address their social anxiety, your teen needs to become familiar with the reasons and triggers behind their anxiety and how their anxiety tends to present itself. One of the best ways to do this is to have them keep a journal tacking different situations when they feel anxious.
Sometimes teens aren’t aware that they are experiencing anxiety or they have no idea about what made them feel anxious in a particular situation. Writing down moments when they felt anxious and the symptoms they experienced in those moments will help them start to recognize patterns so that they know what to look for in the future.
For instance, maybe they notice that they get nervous every time they have to order at a restaurant or every time they are at a social event. Maybe their anxiety presents itself with flattened vision or a racing heartbeat or a stomachache. Noticing these patterns is the first step to learning how to manage social anxiety.
3. Try calming techniques
When your teen is experiencing social anxiety, it can feel overwhelming in the moment. During these times, it will be hard for your teen to think rationally about their current situation because they will be in panic mode.
Teach your teen to try calming techniques like deep breathing, meditation, muscle relaxation, or counting backwards from fifty.
This will help keep the sympathetic nervous system from going into overdrive, allowing your teen to calm down and focus.
4. Tackle the root of the problem
When your teen is able to recognize situations when they feel anxious and has strategies to help them cope with anxiety in the moment, eventually, they will be ready to address the roots of their social anxiety.
For instance, if they have noticed that they always feel anxious when they are at a social event where awards are presented, like a sports banquet or an honors night, it could be that they are less worried about the event itself and more worried about feeling embarrassed if their name isn’t called. From there, they can start to ask themselves why it is such a big deal if they don’t win an award and remind themselves that people will still value them if they don’t win.
Remind your teen that their thoughts and perceptions are not facts. Just because they think everyone is staring at them, doesn’t make it true. Just because they think they’ll say something that will make them feel dumb, doesn’t mean that it will happen.
Breaking down the root of the problem and understanding the facts of a situation will help your teen reframe situations where they tend to feel anxious until they are less panic-inducing.
5. Practice!
Like anything worth doing, managing anxiety takes practice. When your teen has trouble with their social anxiety, remind them not to be discouraged because they will only improve with practice.
Before they know it, they will have made serious progress toward tackling their social anxiety.