By Taylor Scantling & Maria-Nikka Sitchon
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
What this story covers
There’s more to social anxiety than not wanting to present in front of a class. College students who struggle with this often go out of their way to avoid social interactions with peers and professors. The anxiety is very real to students. And professors can take steps to help.
Why it matters
Students with social anxiety often avoid participating in class or visiting office hours — which can hurt their grade. These negative experiences have repercussions far beyond school. Social anxiety can lead to sleep disturbances, panic attacks and more.
It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday. Towson University’s campus is brimming with students getting ready to walk to their classes. They are eager to see their friends, to begin a new week and, for some, to just get through another day of school. Chatter can be heard across classrooms as students mingle in the narrow hallways and make small talk as they settle into their seats. It may just be another normal, uneventful day to many, but not for junior Kristen Herraiz.
She has social anxiety, “the fear of social situations that involve interaction with other people,” according to the Social Anxiety Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes understanding and treatment of social anxiety disorder. Walking into the classroom and being in class can cause her severe discomfort.
“I have to leave my [bedroom] at the same time every day,” Herraiz said. “If I don’t and I leave too late, I’ll feel like I’m running to class. I’ll have a panic attack because I didn’t leave by a certain time, even though I’m 20 minutes early to class and I’m walking from West Village to Burdick.”
She makes sure to give herself plenty of time to get to her classes before anyone else to avoid stares or anyone noticing her presence. The thought of people looking at her for an extended period of time is terrifying.
“Once I get into class, I try to focus on my phone. So I’m not looking at all the people in the lecture hall because I feel like they’re all staring at me.” — Kristen Herraiz
When in class, she typically doesn’t raise her hand or participate in a way that would bring extra attention to her. Oral presentations and group work are nightmares.
“I won’t ask questions in class — I’ll always email the professor afterward,” Herraiz said. “I guess it’s just… I don’t want people staring at me when I’m asking questions. I won’t present in front of classes. I’ll email them and say, ‘I have severe social anxiety, I can’t stand in front of a classroom and talk.’ It just doesn’t happen. I’ll just panic and collapse from all of the anxiety in my body.”
These are just some of the ways that social anxiety can be crippling for students in everyday classroom settings. Social anxiety can lead to sleep disturbances, poor school performance, school refusal, panic attacks, tantrums, and obsession with perfection, according to the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards, a group of leaders and experts in the mental health field.
When students are extremely and obsessively self-conscious, it is difficult for them to speak up in class or even talk to the people around them, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates individuals about mental health and learning disorders. Social anxiety, when severe, hinders students from participating in everyday settings that may seem mundane to the average person.
“Social anxiety is a fear, an intense fear of being observed, judged or criticized by other people generally in a social situation,” said Dr. Patricia Carlson, a psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety and mood disorders at Sheppard Pratt Health System, a nonprofit psychiatric hospital in Towson, Maryland. “Sometimes it’s known as social phobia.”
Carlson said social anxiety is often hard to detect because there aren’t outward symptoms. “It’s just an internal thought process that’s going on inside of their heads of extreme fear.
“Shyness is more of a personality trait,” Carlson said. “It doesn’t generally lead to impairment. Social anxiety generally leads to some kind of impairment or limitations in functioning…Sometimes you can have an extrovert, and they can still have social anxiety. It’s not necessarily like if you’re shy, you’re going to have social anxiety.”
People with social anxiety more likely than not also have clinical depression, according to the National Institutes of Health, a medical research agency. Approximately 20 percent also have an alcohol abuse disorder, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, a nonprofit organization that helps inform the public of different anxiety and depression disorders.
The effects can be difficult for students to manage, in extreme cases leading to prolonged absences from school.
“Another thing that sometimes happens is that people stop coming to class altogether,” Carlson said. “And not because they’re not smart or they don’t understand the class material, sometimes they just stop showing up. The anxiety could be so bad.”
Speaking up to professors about social anxiety
For students, approaching professors about their anxiety can be an anxiety-inducing experience. And professors’ responses vary greatly.
“This semester, [a professor] said, ‘I understand you have anxiety but you need to learn how to deal with it and learn how to get in front of a class and talk to them,’” Herraiz said. “I was able to get up and talk in front of the class but I struggled and it did affect my grade a little bit.”
Diamond Ward, a 2019 Towson University graduate, is one such student who has spoken to a professor about her social anxiety.
“All of the professors I have disclosed to have been beyond understanding,” Ward said. “I remember one time I had a really big presentation or paper where it was worth 40 percent of my final grade and I was panicking because everything was falling apart. I went to my professor’s office hours to talk to my professor for help. The professor ended up helping me and while talking said that the day of presentations, they would like me to choose when I would go.”
However, not every student has had that type of positive experience after they’ve disclosed their social anxiety. Some opt not to tell their professors at all due to a bad experience.
“So to all of the professors who don’t understand social anxiety, please hear me now,” Erica Lampert, a writer for The Odyssey, wrote in a blog. “I am going to be the student who comes into your classroom, sits down and does all of the work you need me to do, but I’m probably never going to speak. […] you have no idea how hard it is to turn around and talk to my neighbor about a problem when my heart is racing.”
Lampert, who was a student at Xavier University, wrote in the blog post that many professors didn’t understand her struggle and mistook her for being lazy or checked out.
But sometimes, there are professors who are understanding and accommodating to students who have social anxiety.
“I had a class last fall, it was a creative writing class for a core,” Herraiz said. “We had to do a presentation of a poem and we were supposed to present it in front of the class. I emailed him and said, ‘I have really bad social anxiety, I can’t physically stand up in front of the class and talk, is there any way I can present it to you before or after class?’ And he said he would do it after class. Then when he graded it he took off a point for not standing in front of the class to do it. But he let me do it, just me and him.”
How professors respond to social anxiety
Ron Snyder, who teaches media ethics at Towson, said he’s become able to spot signs of social anxiety in the classroom.
“It varies, every semester there’s at least one or two students who have anxiety, I guess the question is what do you define as social anxiety?” Snyder said. “For some it’s just being in a classroom with a large amount of people, for others it’s balancing school life and work life. Others it may just be generalized anxiety. You see it each semester and it comes in different shapes and forms. And you just kind of… some students are more upfront about it at the beginning of the semester.”
Even if students don’t approach him, Snyder often notices behavior that could be an indication of anxiety.
“Certain things you might see is fidgetiness in a larger class,” Snyder said. “You may see them kind of not be able to stay in the class the whole time, may be constantly getting up or leaving early. We may see them, some extreme cases, get emotional and crying. Sometimes it can be something as simple as not coming to class one or two times. They have great attendance and then it just sort of falls off. When someone is sick they’ll usually just give you a call and tell you but it’s completely different for anxiety.”
Dr. Matthew Mychailszyn, a psychologist and assistant professor at Towson, said he’s had a variety of experiences with socially anxious students.
“I certainly have had students express concerns and they’ve shown up in different ways,” he said. “I’ve had some who indicated that they have anxiety geared towards their performance and their reflection of how they’re doing in the class. I’ve also had students that have indicated that have some information processing difficulties and it’s harder for them to keep up in class, or even perhaps anxiety about contributing to a conversation because they’re struggling to keep up and anticipate what the next logical contribution might be.”
Class discussions often bring out anxiety among students — even those who aren’t socially anxious.
“One example in which I see this show up is I think there’s a general trepidation perhaps of being wrong,” Mychailszyn said. “I find that when I ask questions to students very frequently the segue words are ‘this might not be right, or this might be wrong or, I’m not sure if this is right or I’m just taking a guess but..’ and it seems that for many students, clinically or not, there’s a worry or nervousness about being right or what that might mean.”
How students can cope — and professors can help
Mychailszyn said he tries to help socially anxious students in his class by helping them get into their comfort zones. One way to do that is to stress that there are many ways to participate in class other than raising your hand to ask questions.
“What is the goal, what is the objective to be accomplished in having a participation requirement or expecting students to do that?” Mychailszyn said. “If it’s a formal presentation that requires a grade, trying to help them facilitate practice [is helpful]. Having as much of an open environment where students can feel safe, that an incorrect answer is okay…maybe just having professors spend a bit of time at the beginning of a term sharing that attitude in knowing it’s okay to not be correct and it’s not a reprimand or punishment it’s just feedback. If we’re not willing to be wrong, we’re not going to grow in the future.”
Mychailszyn said students need to have documentation of social anxiety to show professors and receive help from the university.
“Accommodations are there so a student’s performance is not negatively impacted by circumstances beyond their control,” said Mychailszyn. “In a similar fashion to if a student is sick and has visited a doctor and demonstrated that they are sick to an educated professional there is reason that they are absent and should not be penalized for an assignment. I think colleges should be willing to work to find alternatives, but also needs to come from whatever body that exists on a college campus.”
While most universities have some arrangements for students with social anxiety to speak with a counselor or attend individual or group therapy, there are often very limited resources for faculty to learn how to work with students who have social anxiety.
Professors can be understanding and willing to work with socially anxious students outside of class. Jeffrey Taulbee, a licensed clinical counselor and associate with the Anxiety and Stress Disorder Institute of Maryland, said faculty can help students learn how to cope with social anxiety without having to promote avoidance.
“[The goal is] working with the individual to come up with a plan of what they can do with the goal of challenging the anxiety and pushing that comfort zone,” Taulbee said. “And part of this is knowing, yeah this is really hard and I’m not going to be perfect and this presentation isn’t going to be perfect. If the professor can take that into account, the student can do the presentation without the pressure of having to achieve perfection. It needs to be an individual case by case with the student and teacher and information through their treatment team.”
Another way to help students cope is through cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches people to avoid automatic negative thinking patterns. “The goal of CBT is to gradually change the thoughts and hopefully lessen the amount of fear and anxiety individuals may have, as well as gradually exposing them to social settings to help with practice,” Carlson said.
Valerie Leonberger, the assistant director of Towson’s Public Communication Center and a Towson graduate, said students often overthink when preparing for a speech or spend an inordinate amount of time anticipating what could go wrong.
Her advice to students preparing to speak in front of a class or group? Diaphragmatic — or deep — breathing.
“When you take a deep breath in, it will actually flex your abdomen out and when you suck it back in, it is circulating more CO2 out than normal breathing would,” she said. “It helps you center yourself and figure out where the tension is, so you can release it. But you have to be really mindful with it, which is why a lot of people have to be told to do it and taught how to do it because they don’t know what the diaphragm is.”
Coping mechanisms can vary for everyone based on what helps them most, while some practice techniques that were suggested to them by licensed professionals, others are able to find things that help distract them.
Herraiz said she utilizes the different techniques suggested to her by her therapist to help her get through panic attacks and most social situations.
“I’ve accepted the fact that I have social anxiety, like that was a big thing, accepting that I have it and there’s nothing I can really do to stop it in certain situations,” Herraiz said. “But something that’s helped me drastically is lowering my heart rate and telling myself ‘everything is going to be okay’ no one’s here to hurt me or judge me or anything and then, in intense situations, my therapist taught me to imagine myself in a happy place and to slow my breathing down that way. Like imagine a place that I’m safe and like no one can like hurt me there, which has helped.”
Ward, who was not formally diagnosed with social anxiety, has a different approach — one that wasn’t suggested to her by professionals but works in her experience.
“Honestly, the easiest way to deal or cope with anxiety is I just try to listen to music to try to escape the present feelings,” Ward said. “I always have headphones. So I just stick them in and turn on one of my favorite playlists to try to focus on the words or beats and not focus on whatever is making me anxious. If music doesn’t help, then I try to remove myself from the situation to take a break.”
Having a game plan when it comes to being in class can make a difference for students who could potentially begin a destructive cycle of abusing alcohol, drugs or other substances in order to be able to sit through a class.
At Towson, one game plan can involve visiting the Public Communication Center to practice presentations.
“They can be presenting to mentors or if they could bring a friend or two, they could control who their audience is and I think that would be better and beneficial to them,” Leonberger said.
Leonberger likes to tell students that it’s normal to be anxious when speaking in front of a group. That anxious feeling can be interpreted as the student caring enough about their work that he or she wants to present it in the best way possible.
The hope is that more students view their anxiety through that lens.