CBT for Social Anxiety Disorder

Does CBT cure social anxiety disorder? You're going to discover in this video what CBT is, how it's used for social anxiety disorder, how to get the most out of it, what its shortcomings are, and ultimately how to use this tool to free yourself from social anxiety. I'm Dr. Aziz. I'm the founder of the center for Social Confidence and author of multiple bestselling books on confidence and social anxiety. And I know this topic inside and out. And specifically. My original training at Palo Alto and Stanford Universities during my doctoral training in clinical psychology was in cb, cbt, well as a few other empirically supported treatments. And I had a great opportunity to train under David Burns, M.D. who's one of the preeminent cognitive behavioral therapists in the world. And I went to a training session with him weekly for two to three years and got to work with him closely with a group of about 10 other trainees. Many of them were psychiatrists working at Stanford. We all work together each week to master cbt, and I'm going to share exactly how it works and how you can use it to shift your social anxiety. If you're not familiar with cbt, the quick version is it stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And what that means is that the way that you behave, do you approach the person or not, are you confident or not? Relates to how you feel, right? Do you feel anxious or do you feel relaxed? And the way you feel is coming from your cognitions, the way that you're thinking to yourself and perceiving reality. So if I perceive you as aggressive, I perceive myself as inferior to you, then I'm going to feel shy and inhibited, and I'm not going to go talk to you. So the way that you intervene is you either intervene at the cognitive level with the thoughts or you intervene at the behavioral level, which is doing stuff or taking action with me so far. So cognitive, like, that's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of thinking going on in my head, Right? Well, you pay specific attention to two things in cognitive therapy. One is automatic thoughts. These are the thoughts that are basically subconscious. They're going through your mind without you being too aware of them, that are strongly influencing you in a negative way. So a thought like, I need to make a sandwich irrelevant for this discussion. But a thought like, they're not going to like me. I'm going to look like a fool. Extremely relevant for social anxiety and confidence. Right. So what you got to do is get good at identifying, catching your automatic negative thoughts, or as they talk about in the shyness Institute. I forget the name of the doctor who created that. He called them ants. Automatic negative thoughts. Regardless, you become better at identifying them. So you could just go on Google and type in David Burns mood log, and you'll find it. I have an adaptation in my book, the solution to social anxiety called an awareness log. It's slightly simplified and, I think, easier to implement, but you can find that as well online. So when you get this log, what it does is it helps you study what were my automatic negative thoughts. So after a situation where you felt anxious, you sit down with this little mood logger, even just a sheet of paper, and say, what went through my mind? And at first, you're not gonna be very good at it. You're gonna be like, I don't know, I just felt bad, okay? But when I was in that situation, I felt so awkward what was happening. You can close your eyes, you can tune in. All of a sudden you'll be like, I thought, I'm awkward. I'm not doing this right. Okay? Write that down. I'm awkward. I'm not doing this right. And you try to catch as many as you can. The next time, you'll catch more. The next time, you'll catch more. And then once you've caught them, a key aspect of cognitive therapy is to challenge them. So you chall negative thought. How do you do this? Well, you find a new perspective. You imagine a friend was with you. What would the friend say? You question the thoughts. So the thoughts like, everyone's going to dislike me. You might say everyone. And there's a whole method to challenging them. They call them cognitive distortions. They found that there's certain patterns of thought that are just batshit crazy, no offense, that we tell ourselves all the time. One is called all or nothing thinking everyone there is this. I never that neither of those is true. Right? They're pretty extreme. There's another one called magnification, right, where you take something and you blow it up so you get better at identifying the cognitive distortions. If you want to learn way more about this, I highly recommend David Burns material. He's got a book specifically around social anxiety that he uses cognitive therapy for called intimate connections. That is stellar. But you can also just look up a CBT workbook or other things around or even just type in CBT cognitive distortions. Go ask ChatGPT what the cognitive distortions are. It'll tell you, and you can get better at identifying them. The other thing you're looking for in cognitions is Your underlying beliefs, what are the themes? What are the beliefs that you have about yourself? Because those are reoccurring across a variety situation. A belief like, no one's going to like me. That's not just a thought. That's something that's like core to how you see yourself, part of your identity. You want to get better at finding and challenging those as well. Now, once you've challenged the thought, you'll notice that the feeling might be a little less intense because you don't buy into the negative thought as much. And that allows you to go do the behavior that scares you. Now, if you watched any videos on my channel, I'm a huge fan of the behavior part of this, where we do what scares us, take the risks, until confidence comes as a byproduct of that. Does this work for social anxiety? The answer is yes, yes, yes, it does. And other things can be useful too. But becoming aware of what I would think of as your story, the stories you're telling yourself and challenging them through behavior, which is part of what gradual exposure does, is a gold standard for treating social anxiety and can absolutely work for you. You got to test it out and use it. And you will see the downsides might be challenging your own thinking by yourself. We get really connected to and believe in our thoughts, don't we? Right. So you might say everyone's going to dislike me. Yeah, I don't. I can't think of a challenge to that. I mean, that seems pretty bulletproof. And so it's hard. Right. So that's where having someone to work with a therapist can be helpful because you get that outside perspective to help you challenge the thoughts. Another pitfall is people do a lot of the paperwork. I'm going to challenge my thoughts. Challenge my thoughts, challenge my thoughts. But don't go do the behavior side. The behavior side is where so much is going to shift for you that you can actually experience a radical result. Another pitfall and why I expanded beyond cognitive behavioral therapy in my own life and working with people is sometimes it feels all very heady and you're having this argument in your head and then you're like, no, that's not true. Okay, I should feel different. No, I feel kind of the same. And I found mindfulness techniques and really going directly to the emotion, getting beneath the layer of thoughts to actually be mindfully with the raw sensation of fear or self loathing or other things directly to be radically more powerful for me. So sometimes I'll use cognitive tools with myself or other clients. Often I will go directly towards the layer of emotion to resolve that. And if you want to find a tool for that, I call it the peace Process, you can go to my book page, not nicebook.com Enter your name and email there. And on the resource there will be the peace Process. Just follow along with that and it can help do so much of that cognitive like changing all those beliefs and stories and automatic negative thoughts without having to sit there with a paper and challenge them, although that can be extremely beneficial as well. And I would say try that out and see what works for you and have multiple tools. Try that. That's not working today. Do something else. The key here that I love about CBT for social anxiety, saying it is changeable. It's a pattern. Change the patterns of how you think and you'll change your behaviors, you'll change how you feel, you'll change your life. And that is a hundred percent true in my that social anxiety ultimately is just a pattern. It's not some flaw in your DNA. And so using CBT or other approaches is radically effective in freeing you from it. So share down below, what is your experience of cbt? Have you tried? Have you used it? What's worked? What pitfalls have there been? I'd love to hear more and have other people be able to receive the wisdom from your experience. Until we speak again, we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.