SMART Goals For Social Anxiety

What is Social Anxiety?

Social anxiety at its core is a fear of negatively evaluation. People with social anxiety are worried that they will do something to embarrass themselves and other people will judge them: “they are stupid”, “they are so boring”, “I can’t believe they did that” are a few worries that people with social anxiety struggle with in their daily lives.

As a result of social anxiety, these people might avoid social situations or endure them with great distress. For example, avoiding starting conversations with strangers, leaving a class if there are too many people, or deciding to never do a work presentation even if it would lead to a promotion.

Of course, one goal for these folks is to reduce their anxiety about negative evaluation. Because other people exist and sometimes they will judge. We all experience judgement from time to time.

Using exposures to reduce anxiety

Exposures are a great science-backed way to reduce anxiety. In exposures, we essentially put ourselves in anxiety-provoking situations to 1) reduce our fear over time because we see that most of the time, the feared consequence doesn’t happen and 2) understand even if the scary thing happens, that we can cope better than we thought.

Typically, you start with less challenging exposures and work your way up the hierarchy of fears. For example, if you have a fear of dogs, you might start by looking at pictures of a dog. Eventually, you’ll make your way up to physically interacting with a dog. Start small and build.

SMART Goals to plan exposures

SMART Goals – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Bound – are an excellent way to plan out exposures and make them specific enough to act upon and realistic to successfully complete. We want to set ourselves up for success and SMART goals are helpful in that regard.

A few examples of SMART goals:

Take a 15-minute walk twice a week
Practice piano every day for 10 minutes
Go to bed before midnight at least 5 times this week
Write down 3 things you are grateful for in the evening

A few examples of non-SMART goals:

Be happier (not specific)
Become less anxious about social situations (not actionable)
Spend more time with friends (not time-bound, meaning that you could start today, or you could start next year)
Run a marathon tomorrow, if you haven’t run in the last decade (not realistic)

In the coming sections, we’ll talk about a few SMART goals you can plan to support your goal of reducing social anxiety.

But first, it’s important to understand the causes of social anxiety, so we can plan our SMART goals to support this overall goal.

Two causes of social anxiety: skills vs anxious thoughts

In the beginning, we discussed social anxiety as a general fear of negative evaluation.

There are generally two causes of negative evaluation: 1) skills-based deficits and 2) anxiety-based deficits. Put simply, in the first scenario, the person simply sucks at social situations. They don’t know when and how to smile, maintain eye contact, continue a conversation, all the little things that allow a conversation to flow well. There is a skills deficit.

In the second scenario, the person has the skills; but their anxiety makes hard for these skills to show because they are so worried about how they are coming across to the other person.

Therefore, SMART goals for skills-based deficits should work to improve important social skills. SMART goals for anxiety-based deficits should work to better tolerate anxiety in social situations and reduce stress. Consider which one you are before thinking about which SMART goals to set for yourself!

Examples of SMART goals in social anxiety

Without further exposition, here’s a few SMART goals that can be helpful for either instance of social anxiety:

Skills-based SMART Goals:

Maintain eye contact long enough to notice the other person’s eye colour
Ask at least 1 follow-up questions in your next conversation
Reflect on one emotion the other person may be feeling, e.g., “You seem really happy/sad/excited about that”.
Give a sincere compliment during a conversation
Practice giving a presentation alone for 5 minutes about anything you want
Read a book on social skills training for 10 minutes a day

Anxiety-based SMART Goals

Complete a 5 minute relaxation exercise at least 3 times a week
Smile and say hi to 5 strangers throughout the day
Text a friend to hang out with you. If they say no, ask another person.
Ask the cashier how their day is going
Thank the bus driver
Start a conversation with the Uber driver
If your friends invite you out or to a party, say yes as an exposure

Again, choose a few that are challenging but manageable. You can make a list of SMART goals and categorize them as Easy, Medium, or Hard. As your anxiety reduces, you can make your way up the hierarchy and attempt more difficult goals!

Of course, facing your fears is never easy. To support you, here’s an interesting post on overcoming barriers when planning SMART goals.

Hope this was helpful!

Best wishes,

Photo credit: Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik