6 Insider Tips To Navigating The Workplace If You Have Social Anxiety
Social anxiety can make navigating the workplace a stressful and challenging task. Networking, sharing your opinions in meetings, or interacting with colleagues can be difficult. However, having social anxiety does not necessarily mean it can hold you completely back from advancing your career and achieving your goals. In this blog, I will share six tips to help you navigate the workplace if you have social anxiety.
1. Identify Your Triggers
Before anything else, it is important to recognize what triggers your anxiety. Even though everyone has different triggers, some common factors exist among those with social anxiety. Some triggers shared by those suffering from social anxiety are:
Meeting new people
Being in large groups
Public speaking
Engaging in conversations with strangers
Being the center of attention
By identifying these triggers, you can create ways to cope when you are triggered. By knowing your triggers, you can create a plan to help you healthily handle these triggers.
2. Self-Care
Now that you have identified your social anxiety triggers, it is time to focus on helping you handle them. This is when self-care comes to play. Self-care is a great way to manage social anxiety, and there are several ways to approach self-care if you have social anxiety:
Accept that mistakes will happen: It is essential to understand that we are not perfect and that mistakes will happen. Doing this will decrease your anxiety levels.
Acknowledge your achievements: Focusing on our accomplishments and celebrating ourselves will help you cultivate self-esteem, which enables you to manage your social anxiety in the long run.
Exercise: An exercise routine will help reduce stress and improve your overall mood. Exercise’s impact on social anxiety will help your body’s response to stress. The sense of fulfillment you experience from exercise will enhance your social confidence.
3. Seek Support
One of the biggest things that can help you navigate the workplace with social anxiety is seeking support. There are several ways you can find support and get help from others:
Talk to a mental health professional: Regularly meeting a counselor or therapist will help you develop strategies to cope with anxiety. Additionally, it will help you learn to live a healthy life while managing social anxiety.
Talk to your manager or an HR representative: By openly communicating with a manager, team lead, or HR representative about your social anxiety, you open yourself to opportunities to make specific accommodations to your job to help support you. This can include adjusting your workload or providing a quiet place for you to work.
Seek support from colleagues or join a workplace support group: Talking to others who understand the harsh realities of social anxiety can provide you with a meaningful support system. It will also prevent you from feeling alone, and you will be open to hearing advice from others who have experienced social anxiety differently.
It is essential to seek support for your social anxiety. Support can make a big difference when you are at work.
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4. Keep It Real
One of the biggest things you can do to help yourself is set realistic work goals. This will help you prevent feeling overwhelmed and discouraged. You can do this by starting with the anxiety triggers we previously discussed and prioritizing them based on their difficulty level. By doing this, you can turn around and look at your work responsibilities.
You want to identify which tasks are most urgent, most important, or ones you can put on the back burner. Doing this lets you focus on projects with impending deadlines or tasks critical to a project’s success. This will help you less likely to experience a social anxiety trigger.
Now that you prioritize your work tasks, you can break the larger tasks into smaller and more manageable parts. This will help you feel less overwhelmed in the office, making your work goals more achievable, which will help reduce anxiety.
5. Drop Safe Behaviors
Retaining safe behaviors can reinforce anxiety and prevent you from learning how to cope. Although this may not make sense initially, dropping safe behaviors, such as avoiding eye contact, staying silent in meetings, or not asking questions at work, can help you.
By dropping safety behaviors and doing the opposite, such as starting a conversation or offering to help on a project, you can gradually build confidence to navigate social settings at work. And with that confidence, you can reduce your social anxiety at the workplace.
6. Stay Focus
One of the most challenging but beneficial things you can do Is focus less on your inner thoughts and shift your focus on things around you. This will help you prevent letting anxiety take over your mind and be more present in the moment. The ways to help you stay in the moment are:
Practice active listening: Actively listening to others will help you stay present at the moment.
Engage in your environment: Focusing on the details in your physical space can help reduce anxiety.
Keeping busy: By tackling on tasks and using your solving problem skills will keep your mind occupied and less on anxiety-driven thoughts.
Social anxiety at the workplace can be hard to navigate, but it is not impossible. By identifying triggers, practicing self-care, and seeking support, anyone can build confidence and feel more comfortable in social situations at work. With effort and support, you can navigate your social anxiety at the workplace and be a thriving employee.
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Meet The Writer!
Hola! I’m Amanda Ortiz. I am a freelance writer and run my own freelance writing business, Starlit Writing. I have a B.A. in English from the California State University of Channel Islands and an M.A. in History from the California State University of Los Angeles. I have experience in technical writing in marketing and content writing. In my freetime, I spend writing about social and cultural obstacles that come with being a first-generation Latina. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and check out my blog on my company website!
