How Social Anxiety Alters Your Perception of Emotions

I’m an Author and somatic movement educator, my clients call me “the nervous system whisperer." I specialise in helping clients overcome burnout, anxiety, and trauma-related issues with The Soothe Programme.

---

Hello , how are you at the end of this week? I’ve been planning my trip to LA and NY to promote the US edition of my book and have pinned down my venues to hold my press classes. I fly to LA on the 30th September and onto NY on the 5th October. I will be teaching a public class in NY. I’ll send out the final details over the next few weeks. I am in the mood to go elsewhere and have an adventure, it’s been SO long.

This week’s newsletter looks at social anxiety, a recent client whose issues were getting so bad that she suffered panic attacks whenever she left the house. It made her feel anxious about venturing beyond her four walls and was increasingly becoming an issue.

What is social anxiety?

Social anxiety can profoundly affect how we interpret the emotions of others, often skewing our perceptions toward the negative. Recent research sheds light on this phenomenon, revealing that people with high social anxiety tend to process emotional faces differently compared to those with lower levels of social anxiety.

A study published in Cognition and Emotion explored how people with high social anxiety adapt to emotional stimuli, particularly faces expressing anger or happiness. The findings indicate that socially anxious individuals exhibit a diminished ability to adapt to angry faces. This means that after repeatedly seeing angry expressions, they remain more sensitive to anger and less likely to perceive neutral faces as positive or happy. This persistent sensitivity to negative cues might contribute to a broader negative bias in social interactions.

In contrast, those with lower social anxiety do not show a significant difference in how they adjust their perceptions between happy and angry faces. This suggests that the altered adaptation seen in socially anxious people is specific to their condition, rather than a general trait of emotional processing.

The research further demonstrated that this heightened sensitivity is particular to anger—a socially threatening emotion—rather than to other negative emotions like sadness. Socially anxious people did not show the same heightened sensitivity to sad faces, indicating that their negative bias is particularly directed towards cues perceived as socially threatening.

Overall, these findings suggest that the anxiety-driven tendency to perceive social cues negatively can be partly explained by how we adapt to emotional information.

For those with social anxiety, a reduced ability to adjust to negative emotions, especially anger, can lead to a skewed perception of social interactions, reinforcing their anxiety and impacting their quality of life.

What can you do to break your perception skew?

Like all things, the more you practise something, the more adaptable you become.

Learn to notice the sensations in your body that make you feel anxious.

Once you identify them, could you soften them? Breathe into them?

What compassionate action can you take to ground the anxiety, putting your back against a wall or pressing your feet into the floor. Breathe to calm your system down and remind yourself that you are safe.

Think about what makes you feel socially anxious. Is not knowing what to say? You could think of a few easy ways to break the ice. Is it that you don’t enjoy going to things on your own? Take a friend. If is because you don’t enjoy big crowds, organise it so that you start with small groups first.

Start to examine what makes you feel uneasy and see if you can find a strategy to help you navigate around it.

Check out the few lessons in my book to help you to let go of anxiety from your body.

---

For paid subscribers please find a lesson below for when you feel boundless, with no boundaries or edges, this class will help you to find your inner resolve. You will need a small pilates ball, 2 x cork bricks and a bolster.

Thank you for reading.

Stay human,

Nahid x