This is Performance Anxiety When Faced with Social Interactions

The social contexts in which we communicate with people we do not know well provide us with both the learning that we need to face in our daily lives and new opportunities and the possibility of establishing collaborations and alliances that are essential for our quality of life. It is in our nature to interact regularly with all types of people, since this is necessary to live in society without experiencing problems.

However, some people experience feelings of anxiety or stress at the mere idea of having to interact socially with a person or group of people, regardless of the context. And this not only produces discomfort; It also leads these individuals to engage in self-harming, self-sabotaging patterns of behavior.

Performance anxiety is one of the most common phenomena in those people who in these social interactions as a significant challenge for which one must mentally prepare in order to achieve a series of goals in each conversation, in each exchange of gestures or presentation before unknown. Here we will see What are the problems derived from performance anxiety applied to social situations?.

Table of Contents

What is performance anxiety in social interactions?

Social performance anxiety, by itself, is the dynamic of anticipatory anxiety at the idea of having to perform a complex task that tests our abilities and probably exceeds them. In other words, it is what we feel when, automatically and unconsciously, We generate and reinforce in ourselves the idea that we will not be able to achieve a goal that we have set for ourselves.

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On the other hand, when we talk specifically about performance anxiety in the face of social interactions, we are referring to the set of anxious reactions that a person experiences when anticipating having to interact with other people in the short or medium term, seeing these communicative exchanges (verbal or non-verbal) as a very difficult or unreasonable job in which several goals must be achieved that are too ambitious for the social skills available.

These social interactions can be of any type and generate a feeling of intense discomfort in the person who has difficulty relating, since they usually anticipate all types of unpleasant and negative scenarios. And therefore, the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy appears: the anticipation that we will fail when communicating with someone puts us in a situation of vulnerability that weighs us down and increases the chances that this experience will not be fluid and full of potholes.

Some of the scenarios that can generate cases of performance anxiety are usually job interviews, conversations with a neighbor to ask for an object, meetings with people we have met on the Internet family reunions or the fact of meeting our partner’s parents.

In any case, the person will always experience feelings of anxiety before the interaction with other people takes place and this psychophysiological reaction is usually linked to a phenomenon known as the self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is self-fulfilling prophecy?

The self-fulfilling prophecy consists of anticipating negative events or catastrophic events without them having yet occurred and without there being any objective indication to consider that they are going to happen.

People who have performance anxiety when faced with social interactions usually put into practice a thinking model based on a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is, the fear of feeling anxious when faced with any social interaction, ends up generating that same excessive anxiety once the time to interact has arrived. .

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For example, when holding a family reunion, a person may begin to feel anxious days before it occurs and you will feel more anxiety the closer the date of the celebration is.

In addition to that, shortly after meeting with his family he will begin to imagine negative scenarios in which he will see himself having a bad time during the meeting and he will also imagine all kinds of negative thoughts that his family may have about himself.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is that all these fantasies and unpleasant scenarios that the person imagines end up being fulfilled, and Your fear of suffering from anxiety ends up coming true.

Symptoms of performance anxiety in social interactions

There are many characteristics of performance anxiety triggered by social situations, and its symptoms are also varied and depend on each person; However, there are some traits common to the majority of people who have this alteration.

1. Cognitive symptoms

The psychological symptoms that most people with this disorder present are states of intense anxiety that can vary depending on the stimulus they face. They are based on catastrophic predictions of what will happen when we communicate with someone, something that makes it difficult to focus on that experience from a constructive mentality oriented toward the real goals that lead us to interact socially.

Part of the fears that people with social performance anxiety have is the fear of being judged or ridiculed the fear that others may think badly of oneself or the fear that others will notice one’s anxiety.

In addition to more or less constant anxiety, it is also common to present high levels of fear, agitation or shame at the possibility of participating in any situation in which it is necessary to interact with other people.

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2. Behavioral symptoms

Some of the most common behavioral symptoms are the progressive avoidance of all types of social interactions, which ends up causing the person to see all types of relevant social ties damaged.

Another of the common behavioral symptoms may be remaining silent in social situations, or drinking alcohol to lose inhibitions or to lose fear and shame, or directly wasting more time than usual to postpone or avoid these social interactions (for example, going around and around when returning). from work).

3. Physical symptoms

The physical symptoms are usually tremors, excessive sweating, flushing, or a shaky voice.

All of these physical symptoms can also cause the person to feel increasingly anxious, less self-confident, and more attentive to whether they are transmitting anxiety.

4. Overanalyzing yourself after an interaction

Another of the main characteristics that may indicate a case of social anxiety is the fact of overanalyzing oneself after a certain social interaction, with the intention of identifying all types of one’s own failures.

This habit ends up becoming systematic After participating in any social scenario and constantly thinking about our own mistakes and where we may have failed, it ends up undermining the person’s mental health.