The Shyness & Social Anxiety Workbook
144are fearful of experiencing particular feelings (for instance, sweating, shaking, blushing, 
racing heart) associated with being anxious or nervous. If you are not fearful of these 
behaviors, then the strategies described in chapter 9 will not be as important.
BEHAVIORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO  
SOCIAL ANXIETY
All organisms try to avoid situations that cause fear, pain, or discomfort. Avoidance is a 
method of protecting oneself from possible danger. In the short term, staying away from 
perceived threats is a very effective way of decreasing or preventing these uncomfort -
able feelings. Your experience has probably taught you that confronting feared situations 
causes you to feel overwhelmed and that avoiding or escaping from feared situations 
leads to a sense of relief. However, avoiding the situations, objects, and feelings that 
make you anxious is also a guaranteed way to ensure that your fear will continue over the 
long term. The likelihood of threat in the social situations that you avoid is probably very 
low. Avoidance can actually do more harm than good, particularly in the long term.
By avoiding the situations that make you uncomfortable, it may seem as though you 
prevent your feared negative consequences from occurring. Just as a person who fears 
ﬂying may believe that avoiding a ﬂight has protected him or her from experiencing 
a possible plane crash, you may believe that avoiding social or performance situations 
protects you from experiencing various social catastrophes, such as being humiliated or 
criticized by others. Of course, statistically, the risk of dying in a plane crash is close 
to zero (about one in ten million, according to some sources). In other words, the risk