Social Anxiety and the Physical Environment
October 30th, 2006 by Ryan Oelke
Last week I shared a little exercise I thought of to help differentiate which preferences are personal and which are due to social anxiety. In other words, some of our choices and decisions are our own and some serve our social anxiety. This week I thought I would give an example using the physical environment, meaning the different types of physical contexts we find ourselves in.
Two aspects of physical environments that I take note of are the size of the room and how many people are there. For me this comes up specifically in my educational experiences. Personally, I prefer small classes in small rooms because of the intimacy it affords the learning experience. As for my social anxiety, it prefers large classrooms and lots of people so that I can get lost in the mix, and so I feel “safer”.
Even though I truly prefer small classes, I experience more anxiety in them and if weren’t aware of this I might avoid them completely and miss out on wonderful opportunities, plus I’d put myself in situations that I really don’t like (big classes). So, with this awareness I instead am trying to focus on what’s happening for me when I get anxious in those small classes and go from there. Of course this would change if I were giving a presentation in which case my personal preferences don’t change, but I would most certainly avoid the large class. So, we have to be cautious of how it is we are making our choices and acting.
This is just one example. And even with the physical environment there are many other factors such as lighting, colors, smells, etc. The point is simply to look at your life and develop a strong awareness of what you really want and see how you might be avoiding that, and then to generate the courage to find out what is behind all of that.
What are your preferences for physical environments? What other areas of life do you notice discrepancies between your personal preferences and your social anxiety preferences?
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Social Anxiety Blog wrote on 10/30/06 at 9:44 pm :
Ryan, I’m going to tell you about my job environment, because our work is the place where we spent a lot of our time of our lives.
Fortunately I have a good job now, I work with computers, that really reduces the time I have to spent with people, see I couldn’t handle a job where I would have to be in contact with people permanently, I just have contact with my co-workers with whom I learned to get alone well, I even enjoy their company.
I didn’t learn many social abilities when I was I child, that is part of the difficulty I have when I am around people, I just don’t know how to handle certain social situations.
So I think that each of us must learn to know ourselves well in order to know where we can be productive, with our own potentials and weaknesses, we must learn to accept ourselves the way we are and find our own place in society, where we can be comfortable and have a better life quality.
Ryan Oelke wrote on 10/31/06 at 7:38 pm :
Hey Gus, thanks for sharing about your job. I totally agree, the workplace has a HUGE impact on our life. We spend the majority of our time there! And as you said, we really need to focus on knowing ourselves, which is something I’ve been writing a lot about. Working in residence life was extremely challenging for me, but it has helped along the way to grow. But for the longest time I couldn’t sort out what was anxiety and what was simply my preference. I realized that my workplace went against both in many aspects (although to be fair I resonate(d) with much of it too).
In the end, I’m much like you with the workplace. I really enjoy being with others, but only a few people at a time:) I need my space!:P