Individual Therapy Worksheet
Social Anxiety
An individual worksheet for adults. Understanding how social anxiety works, where it shows up for you, what avoidance is costing you, and what helps.
Before you begin
More than shyness
Social anxiety is not shyness, introversion, or a personality trait. It is a specific anxiety response to social situations involving fear of negative evaluation, scrutiny, or humiliation. It is one of the most common anxiety conditions in adults and one of the most under-treated, partly because avoidance makes it possible to manage around it rather than address it directly. This worksheet is for understanding your own pattern and beginning to work with it.
Social anxiety exists on a spectrum. For some people it is specific — public speaking, phone calls, eating in front of others. For others it is pervasive across most social situations. Either is worth addressing. This worksheet works for both.
Avoidance is the central problem. Social anxiety is maintained primarily by avoidance. Every time a feared situation is avoided, the anxiety is reinforced. Over time, the situations that feel manageable narrow and the world gets smaller. Understanding and reducing avoidance is central to working with it.
Part One
Where social anxiety shows up for you
Understanding exactly which situations trigger it, what the anxiety tells you in those moments, and what happens in your body helps you map your own pattern specifically.
Meeting new people
Social gatherings and parties
Speaking in meetings or groups
Phone calls with unfamiliar people
Eating or drinking in front of others
Being the centre of attention
Expressing disagreement or saying no
Being observed or evaluated
Starting or maintaining conversations
Authority situations
Dating or romantic social situations
Work or professional settings
Name it specifically:
"What I am most afraid of in social situations is _____________"
The post-event processing that many people with social anxiety do — replaying and critiquing what happened — often extends the anxiety well beyond the situation itself.
Part Two
The role of avoidance
Avoidance makes the anxiety feel manageable in the short term and worse in the long term. Understanding your specific avoidance patterns and what they have cost you is essential to working with them.
Safety behaviours are a form of avoidance. Staying close to one person, checking your phone, leaving early, drinking to ease nerves — these reduce distress in the moment but prevent you from discovering that the feared outcome would not actually have happened, which keeps the anxiety in place.
Staying close to one safe person
Keeping quiet to avoid attention
Checking my phone or appearing busy
Leaving early or arriving late
Rehearsing what I will say
Using alcohol to take the edge off
Over-preparing to feel in control
Closely monitoring myself throughout
Part Three
What helps with social anxiety
Social anxiety responds well to treatment, particularly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. These approaches are drawn from evidence-based practice and are most effective when used consistently over time.
1
Test the prediction, not just endure the situation
Social anxiety makes predictions: "I will say something stupid," "they will think I am boring," "I will visibly panic." Most do not come true. Paying attention to whether the feared outcome actually happened — rather than just getting through the situation — builds real evidence over time.
2
Shift attention outward rather than inward
Social anxiety involves a great deal of self-monitoring — watching yourself from outside, evaluating how you are coming across. Deliberately shifting focus to the other person, to what they are saying, to the conversation itself, reduces this and often improves the interaction.
3
Reduce safety behaviours gradually
Safety behaviours prevent you from discovering that the feared outcome is unlikely. Reducing them gradually — one small step at a time — allows you to build real evidence that social situations are more manageable than the anxiety predicts.
4
Limit post-event processing
Replaying and critiquing a social situation after the fact is one of the ways social anxiety maintains itself. Setting a time limit on this review, and deliberately recalling positive aspects alongside difficult ones, changes what the process produces.
5
Build exposure gradually and deliberately
Gradual exposure to feared situations — not the most feared situation immediately, but a deliberate step-by-step approach starting with lower-anxiety situations and building — is the most effective approach to social anxiety over time. Working with a therapist makes this most effective.
Part Four
Moving forward
Name the life you want:
"If social anxiety were less limiting, I would _____________ and I would feel _____________"
Not the most feared situation. The one just outside your current comfort zone. Small enough that there is a real chance you will actually do it.
Sagebrush Counseling offers individual and couples therapy across Texas, New Hampshire, Maine, and Montana.
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