A one step guide to help begin the fight against social phobia:

If you suffer from social phobia, then the following characteristics of social phobia will be familiar to you.

1. Intense self focus
2. Shame that causes us to look away or look down most of the time.
3. Regularly feeling  that people are looking at us
4. Increase sense of anxiety
5. Increased fear that people may see our anxiety a some sort of weakness and attack, ridicule, abuse

I am going to one simple suggestion you can take to give use the strongest chance to overcome this problem.

The suggestion is to –

 Look around and take in what is really happening:

As simple as this step may seem, it is actually the most crucial steps.

Consider this question. Why do people look away in such situations?

In most cases it may be because we somehow believe we have a real reason to be ashamed. It could be because we feel ugly, fat, peculiar or to tall.

If this how we feel, we tend to assume that the only reasons people will look at us is because they find us surprisingly awful or may make jest of us and probably point fingers at us and laugh at us.

Looking around and viewing what is really happening around us on a regular basis helps to silence the voice of this fear. 

Unfortunately the very act of looking away has a tendency to make fears worse than they are. Try this experiment:

Ask a colleague to help you out with this (It works better if the colleague is fairly new to you)

Write out a list of negative things you believe people think about you (e.g. she looks ugly; He’s so fat etc).

Get the colleague to read this out in a menacing voice twice. At the first read look away whilst he/ she reads then at the second read look at him/or her.

You will notice that whilst your colleague read your list at you, looking away made you feel worse.

This is in spite of the fact that you know what they are reading at you. This experiment shows the negative power behind not looking.

Adewale Ademuyiwa
http://www.stresstherapist.net/fighting-anxiety-disorder.html