The chapter started off with giving us a snippet of Deena’s struggle with social anxiety and depression for us to keep in mind while reading the rest of the chapter. I, however, ended up reading the chapter relating the concepts to my own anxiety instead.
One of the main reasons that I changed my major from Journalism to Psychology is because of the fact that I have battled with anxiety and many different phobias for as long as I remember. Majoring in psychology has actually played a pivotal role in my ‘recovery process’, even though many family members and even therapists urged me not to switch majors, thinking that being more submerged in the context of psychology will be detrimental. I proved them all wrong.
A lot of social psychological theories have helped me understand the roots of my anxiety and the mechanism behind the physical symptoms that accompany a panic attack, and it has been life changing. One question that used to keep me up at night was: “Why do I care so much about what other people think about me all of sudden? Why does it matter so much?” Before my anxiety worsened, I didn’t give a s*** about what other people thought of me, and I used to behave exactly the way that I wanted to. But as my anxiety symptoms increased, so did my concern about what other people thought about me. As I talk to more people who also have different types of anxiety, I noticed that they exhibited the same trend– they also started worry compulsively about other people’s impressions. At around this same time this happened, I also noticed my avoidant behavior when it came to social events, especially with a lot of new people, because of my fear that I would completely embarrass myself – either faint, throw up on someone, or run away – and that everybody would remember it until eternity. Of course for those of you who have never experienced anxiety, these circumstances don’t sound horrifying or don’t qualify as ‘worst-case scenarios – but it can be extremely debilitating.
There is an existing theory about what I’m experiencing, and it is illustrated in chapter 5 of our textbook, called self-presentation theory (SPT), developed by Leary and Kowalksi (Schneider et al., 2012). SPT underlies the origins, maintenance, and treatment of social anxiety; and according to SPT, it becomes more probable for people to experience anxiety or a fight-or-flight response in social situations when two conditions are present: high self-presentational motivation and low self-efficacy (Schneider et al., 2012). What self-presentational motivation refers to is how much people worry about what others think about them, and when people have high self-presentational motivation, it means that they are very concerned about their image in the eyes of other (Schneider et al., 2012). As for self-efficacy, it refers to the level of confidence that a person has about exhibiting a particular image of themselves to other people. As you probably guessed, having low self-efficacy means that people don’t feel confident that they are portraying the image that they would like others to have of them, whether that is being interesting, loyal, responsible, or sexy (Schneider et al., 2012). As if feeling these two conditions wasn’t enough, they work together to create a main symptom of social anxiety, which is anticipatory embarrassment. Anticipatory embarrassment is what led me to avoid social situations, because I was convinced that if I did go, I would completely humiliate myself in one way or another, and that it would not only haunt me forever, but would also result in “irrevocable social rejection” (Pg. 91, Schneider et al., 2012).
Now you are probably thinking that my social life looks pretty bleak – but I think you’d be happy to know (or maybe not) that I’m fighting my anxiety head on, and pushing through the debilitating and suffocating burden that is panic attacks. Majoring in psychology has truly been an amazing experience for me, and I cannot wait to be there for other individuals who are fighting the same battle, and extend my hand to pull them out of the rabbit hole.
I would also like to say that if anybody has any questions about anxiety in general, or would like to hear some tips about how to help a loved one or for yourself, I will be more than happy to help in any way that I can, with not only the knowledge that I obtained from my psychology courses, but also from the many personal experiences I’ve had with anxiety.
Hope everybody has a great weekend!
Hilda
References:
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., and Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
https://www.google.am/search?q=helping+someone+from+a+hole&rlz=1C5CHFA_en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN-9qhxYPSAhUGXBoKHafjDO0Q_AUICCgB&biw=1168&bih=597#imgrc=Wf58qmGMvUf4nM: