When Work Feels Like a Performance: Coping With Social Anxiety in the Workplace

For many people, the workplace can feel like a stage. A meeting becomes an opportunity to be evaluated. A conversation with a supervisor can trigger self-doubt. Speaking up in a group may bring an unexpected rush of anxiety: What if I say something stupid? What if they realize I don’t know what I’m doing? What if everyone notices how nervous I am?

Social anxiety at work can be especially challenging because avoiding the situation isn’t always an option. We still have to attend meetings, collaborate with colleagues, give presentations, ask questions, and navigate relationships. As a therapist, I often help clients approach workplace anxiety not by trying to eliminate anxiety altogether, but by developing a different relationship with it.

Getting Curious About the Anxiety

Anxiety often has a history. The intensity of your reaction in the present may be connected to earlier experiences of criticism, rejection, comparison, or feeling that acceptance depended on achievement.

For example, someone who becomes extremely anxious when receiving feedback from a supervisor may be responding not only to the supervisor in front of them, but also to an internalized expectation that mistakes will lead to shame or rejection.

Rather than immediately asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” we can become curious: “What does this situation mean to me?” and “What am I afraid might happen if I am not perfect?”

Understanding these patterns can create space between an old emotional expectation and the present-day situation.

Pay Attention to Relationships

Social anxiety is, at its core, relational. We are often anxious because we care about how we are perceived by other people.

In therapy, I help clients explore the roles they tend to adopt at work. Are they constantly trying to be the competent one? The agreeable one? The person who never needs help? Do they avoid disagreement because conflict feels unsafe? Do they take excessive responsibility for other people’s reactions?

These patterns can become particularly powerful when our sense of worth becomes dependent on being liked, useful, or successful.

Therapy itself becomes a place to notice these patterns. If someone worries about disappointing their therapist or feels pressure to appear successful in therapy, we can explore that experience together. The goal isn’t to judge the pattern, but to understand it and create new possibilities for relating.

Making Room for Anxiety 

We don’t necessarily have to feel confident before we act.

Trying desperately to eliminate anxiety can actually make it more powerful. Instead, I encourage clients to notice anxious thoughts and feelings without allowing them to dictate their behavior.

Someone might think, “Everyone is going to think I’m incompetent.” Rather than arguing with the thought, we can practice noticing it: “I’m having the thought that everyone will think I’m incompetent.”

That small shift—called cognitive defusion—can help us recognize that a thought is an experience, not a fact.

We can then ask a more useful question: “What kind of colleague do I want to be, even when I’m anxious?”

Maybe the answer is thoughtful, courageous, collaborative, or authentic. The goal becomes taking one small action aligned with those values: asking the question, contributing an idea, introducing yourself to a colleague, or sharing an opinion.

Being Human at Work

Overcoming workplace social anxiety doesn’t mean becoming the most confident person in the room. It may mean becoming more comfortable being imperfect, uncertain, and occasionally uncomfortable.

Therapy can help you develop greater awareness of where their anxiety comes from, recognize relational patterns that keep it going, and practice responding to anxious thoughts with greater flexibility.

Most importantly, we can learn that confidence doesn’t always have to come first.

Sometimes we act with courage while our anxiety is still present.

Over time, these experiences can teach us something anxiety often tries to convince us isn’t true: We can be seen, imperfect, uncertain, and still be okay.