Social Anxiety Behavioral Experiment Worksheet
By
HappierTherapy
Author bio
The Happier Therapy editorial team is made up of Masters and PhD counselling psychologists. Each worksheet is created by a team member with exposure to and experience in the subject matter. The worksheet then gets reviewed by a more senior editorial member. This is someone with extensive knowledge of the subject matter and highly cited published material.
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What is the theory behind this Social Anxiety Behavioral Experiment Worksheet?
Behavioural experiments are a great way to test one’s irrational fears instead of avoiding them. These experiments involve carefully planning how one can go about facing the situations that trigger their fear or anxiety as a way to gather evidence against the underlying irrational and false beliefs. Since avoidance behaviour is known to maintain one’s anxiety, conducting such experiments and exposing oneself to those situations instead is known to gradually diminish anxiety.
How will the worksheet help?
This worksheet will help clients plan for a behavioural experiment to target their social anxiety. It will help them identify the areas they know they need to work on, their fears and anxious thoughts related to those areas and what they can do practically to face those fears. This information will help both the therapist and client to customise behavioural experiments.
How to use the worksheet?
Instruct the client to identify and write down the real-life situations particular to their social anxiety that they want to target in the behavioural experiment. Then tell them to write down the irrational beliefs and social fears related to that area. Then they must write down their own suggestions on how they can approach those situations. Tell them to begin with least anxiety provoking situations first.
