Ep 141: Getting Comfortable with Anxiety

Ellen Hendriksen, author of How to Be Yourself, clues us in on
what might be triggering your teen’s anxiety and
perfectionism--and what you can do to help them overcome those
and feel comfortable being themselves!


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Full show notes


The high school social atmosphere is pretty terrifying. You might
remember the feeling of your heart beating against your chest as
you asked a table full of kids if you could sit with them, or the
way you got tongue tied trying to talk to your crush in the
hallway. As stressful as it is, it tends to pass in time as kids
mature. For many teens, this is just a part of growing up.


But for some, social anxiety is a major challenge that keeps them
from finding friends and blossoming into confident adults. Too
often, these teens let their social anxiety rule their lives.
They flee any kind of challenging social interaction, falling
into a pattern of avoidance. They never learn to challenge their
fears and live in their comfort zones.


Today, we’re talking to a social anxiety expert to learn how we
can help teens break this cycle. Our guest is Dr. Ellen
Hendriksen, author of How to be Yourself: Silence your Inner
Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Dr. Hendriksen is a
clinical psychologist and faculty member at the Boston University
Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She’s also the original
host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast, which has been downloaded
over 15 million times on Itunes.


Dr. Hendriksen has spent years studying social anxiety, and she’s
here to share all her expert knowledge with you today. In our
interview, we cover what’s really going on in teen’s heads when
they’re overwhelmed by social situations. We also get into all
the wrong ways teens try to deal with social anxiety, and break
down healthier methods for teens to shed the inhibitions that
hold them back.


The Psychology of Social Anxiety


We all know what social anxiety feels like. But what’s going on
in our brains when we’re getting butterflies in our stomach? And
how is a socially anxious teenage mind different from that of an
adult ? Ellen and I discuss how teenagers have prefrontal
cortexes that have yet to fully develop, meaning their
rationality can sometimes be lacking. Stressful social situations
are instead processed in their amygdala, a part of the brain that
regulates emotion. This means that teens are prone to think that
a slight social mess-up is a life-ruining disaster.


Dr. Hendriksen clarifies the difference between someone with a
healthy amount of nerves and someone who might have an anxiety
disorder. If social anxiety is a metaphorical fire, she describes
the brain’s healthy response as “sending a fire truck” to put it
out. For those who are more prone to being overcome with anxiety,
she compares the brain’s response as a “man with a bicycle and a
bucket of water.” It still works, it’s just slower. These people
take more time to calm their nerves and find themselves seriously
shook when they feel socially inept.


Interestingly, Ellen goes on to explain how social anxiety is
really a fear of being “revealed.” Those who grapple with heavy
anxiety over talking to strangers or being vulnerable with others
often believe that there’s something about them that is wrong or
insufficient. Of course, this isn’t true, but it can certainly
feel true! For a lot of teens, this feeling is linked to their
appearance–maybe they’re self-conscious about their acne or
compare their body to those of their peers. In our interview, Dr.
Hendriksen and I discuss other ways teens tend to be insecure and
how this causes them difficulty in social situations.


So how can we help teens who let their social anxiety run their
lives? Before we can talk about what we should do, Ellen explains
behavior that we shouldn’t encourage, like avoidance,
perfectionism, and what she calls “safety behaviors.”


How Not to Handle
Social Anxiety


There are a lot of ways that teens tend to cope with social
anxiety that only lead them further down an anxious rabbit hole.
The most typical behavior, Ellen says, is avoidance. When
situations make teenagers anxious, the quickest and most
rewarding solution is to just get out of there. Dr. Hendriksen
explains how this only leads to more anxiety down the line, as
teens never learn how to deal with the triggers they’re faced
with everyday.


In addition, some people develop “safety behaviors”, or methods
of shielding themselves from their anxieties. For a lot of
socially anxious teens, walking around with headphones is a
common safety behavior–it restricts them from talking to anyone,
and, in their minds, saves them from embarrassing themselves.
However, this behavior only keeps them from making any new
friends at all, and in fact sends the message that they’re
uninterested in anyone, leaving them to remain on the outskirts.


Another problematic tendency teens adopt to try and remedy their
anxiety is perfectionism, says Dr. Hendriksen. In order to try
and become less insecure, they set certain labels or goals they
want to reach. They adopt an attitude of all or nothing–they have
to be the prettiest, the funniest, and the coolest, or they’re
not worthy of having friends at all. But then they find
themselves feeling ashamed when they can’t meet their own
standards, says Ellen. And when they feel bad, they strive for
their high standards to “fix” themselves, only to fall into a
cycle.


If these mechanisms only lead to disaster, what can we do to help
kids beat their anxiety for the long term?


Healthy Ways to Work on Social Stress


Thankfully, Dr. Hendriksen has plenty of methods for dealing with
social anxiety that are actually effective . One very powerful
practice is cognitive restructuring. This entails challenging the
natural, irrational assumptions of an anxious brain. Those with
social anxiety might assume that talking to strangers will go
horribly wrong, that they’ll be called names and the whole world
will explode.


The first step of cognitive restructuring is narrowing down what
it is you’re afraid of. Anxiety tends to be vague, Ellen
explains. Teens might have generalized fears of public speaking,
but what is it exactly that they fear will happen?


Let’s say your teen afraid that the whole crowd will laugh at
them. The next step, says Dr. Hendriksen, is to help them
evaluate just how statistically likely it is that their fear will
occur. Have people laughed at them during a speech before? How
often does that really happen? And if they still think their fear
is likely to unfold in front of them, have them ask themselves
how bad it would be if their fear did come true. Yes, they would
be embarrassed, but chances are, the people in the room would
forget about their speech by the next day and life would go on as
normal.


In addition to cognitive restructuring, Dr. Hendriksen emphasizes
the importance of breaking the cycle of avoidance. Teens need to
breach their comfort zones, she says, in order to truly leave
their anxiety in the dust. When they face their fears, their
brains gather data to understand just how greatly they
overestimated the danger. They can dive back in with less fear
when they’re challenged again. For socially anxious teens, going
u...