After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable levelāeven academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my lifeāexcept for my phone anxiety. Itās literally the one and only thing Iāve never been able to significantly improve.
I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.
I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that āyes, you really need to ring that person right nowā.
I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.
I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.
I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.
Iām also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. Iām normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.
Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threatsāmore specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called āpessimistic biasā). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that theyāve left their stove on.)
Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and ātalk down the anxietyā. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us āappropriateā.
But non-verbal social cues arenāt available during phone calls!
There isnāt any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You canāt monitor your audience for approval. They donāt follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a āphone voiceā, ācustomer service voiceā or āprofessional voiceā) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden youāre back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because youāre not getting constant feedback.
Itās a Recognised Psychological Thingā¢.
Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxietyāof which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent triggerāis one of the most common, most recognised and most treated anxiety disorders in the world.
Itās most definitely real, most definitely notĀ āchildishā, and youāre not alone.
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