January 8, 2025 • 14 mins
Dr. Thomas E. Brown is Yale educated psychiatrist whose new book "Social Anxiety: Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults" is available now. Dr. Brown is an expert in this and other disorders, including ADHD. He'll explain when social anxiety can become a problem and offers help.
Click here for more about Dr. Brown.
Click here for info about Dr. Brown's clinic.
Click here for more about Dr. Brown.
Click here for info about Dr. Brown's clinic.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This week on iHeart Sensey.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
It's just a terminally used to talk about people who
worry way more than most people do about what other
people might be thinking about them.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
He's talking about social anxiety. Doctor Thomas E. Brown is
here to share his experience about this social phobia that
affects millions of people. Social anxiety is a condition that
disrupts people's social lives because they experience crippling fear or
are very anxious about how they're perceived. He's released his
new book Social Anxiety, Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults.
(00:34):
Doctor Brown explains that we all worry about what others
might think of us, and when that disrupts one's life,
it's a problem that can be dealt with. Now on
iHeart Sensey with Sandy Collins, So glad to have you
here today. My first guest is here to talk about
a condition that many teens and adults experience. It's called
social anxiety, and it can be a crippling fear of
(00:58):
being judged. It affects many people in many ways in
their work and their personal lives well. Doctor Thomas E.
Brown is a Yale educated, caring and compassionate psychiatrist. He's
here with us today. He's written a new book called
Social Anxiety, Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults.
Nice to see you. Thanks for being on the show today, Pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'm very happy to have a chance to be on
your program.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Your new book caught my attention because my daughter has
social anxiety. She's twenty five. You're a specialist in ADHD,
is that correct?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yes, And you have your own institute.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well. I operate a clinic called the Brown Clinic for
Attention and Related Disorders. We're in Manhattan Beach, California. Previous
to that, I was for twenty years teaching on the
clinical faculty at Yeal Medical School and running a similar
clinic in Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
And ADHD was interesting to you. Why what was it
about AD that caught your attention?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I worked for a number of years. I had to
earn money while I was going to college, and I
worked for a YMCA, and part of my work was
coaching swimming teams and getting swimming lessons and stuff. But
then I was also asked to be a counselor for
kids that had been in trouble with the Juvie Court,
and I enjoyed that work, and then ended up doing
(02:24):
some more work along that line and eventually figured out
that even though I was a history major in college,
I wanted to be a psychologist at that point. Interesting, Oh,
I went to do my graduate work at Yale.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Social anxiety is to me, it's sort of a new term.
I've first heard of it maybe ten years ago myself.
Can you explain what is social anxiety and how it
differs from just playing kind of being nervous around other people?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, well, I think it's important to see that it's
related to being nervous around other people. It's just a
term that we use to talk about people who worry
way more than most people do about what other people
might be thinking about them. You know. It's the kind
of thing that all of us wonder sometimes did what
I say in that meeting makes sense? Or does this
(03:15):
outfit I've got on and look good here? Or I
wonder if people really like the food that I've prepared
for this meal. But that kind of wondering about how
how are other people looking at me? Is something all
of us have. But then the point at which we
would say it really is something we call social anxiety
(03:37):
is where it's like way more than usual and the
person has a hard time shaking it. And the fact
is that the data that we do have on it
suggests that it's about maybe twelve to fourteen percent of
adults in the United States might qualify for that diagnosis.
But the thing which is striking about it is that
(04:00):
less than half of those people who have it ever
seek any help for it. It's almost though it's too
embarrassing to have anxiety about being embarrassed.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I would say that, but I would also think that
maybe they just don't realize what the symptoms are pointing to, don't.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I don't think the information is out there, you know, widely,
and you know, there's certain kinds of situations that make
it more difficult for people. Many people spend a whole
lot of time worrying about what other people think of
what they're worrying, what they're doing, what they're.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Saying, very ecocentric kind of a thing you're thinking about themselves.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well yeah, but it's it's ecocentric, but it's also just
scaried us about what other people might be thinking about me.
And the thing is that it operates in two ways.
One is what anybody would think of is what do
you think of my and what do you think what
I just said. However, there's another aspect of it, and
(05:05):
that is that many people have thoughts they have about
what they might like to do or about how they
feel about things that are embarrassing to them to even
be thinking that, and then their heads get going on
that and start thinking what would my parents think or
(05:27):
what would my spouse think, or what would my good
friends think if they ever knew that I have these worries,
that I have these things I think about. It's also
stuff about what I did do back in the day.
One of the subtitle for my book Social Anxiety is
(05:48):
hidden fears and shame, and it's because people who experience
this often hide their fears and hide their shame because
it's almost too embarrassing to even talk about. You if
you're afraid of going going up in elevators, or if
you're afraid of flying things like that, most people, well
(06:09):
at least to people that they trust, would be able
to say, yeah, that scares me. But people are often
very embarrassed about even imagining some of these secrets they
may have in their own head known by the people
that they care about, So.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
How does someone recognize social anxiety and others and does
that help any way in dealing with them.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Well, if you if you're dealing with somebody who just
seems super cautious about things, or I think we've all
dealt with people sometimes who end up apologizing for things
that most people wouldn't bother apologizing anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh, I know that girls do that NonStop.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I'm sorry, I'm boys and also men and women. But
when you see that somebody is coming across in a
way that suggests they're very self conscious about what it
is that they may be doing or saying, or what
they may think you would be thinking about them, sometimes
(07:17):
it's possible as to say, you know, you're talking as
though somehow this is a bad thing. But I think
everybody has worries like this, normalize it.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
We're talking with doctor Thomas E. Brown, and he has
written a new book that's out available now called Social Anxiety,
Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults. So you
said there's a significant amount of people in the United
States that have this. What do you do about social anxiety?
Where do you get help? What kinds of help is available?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, one of the things that can make a difference
is talking with somebody else who's going to be patient
about it and who can understand it, who could empathize
with it. And sometimes you may find that among your friends,
and some people may want to seek some help in
psychotherapy or with a counselor or somebody like that. And
(08:09):
it takes a little bit of courage to do it,
because the whole nature of this is the person is scary.
And let me say before I go on to respond
more fully to that question, that there's studies, including a
couple done at Harvard where they looked at little infants
and brought them in with their mothers one at a time,
(08:31):
and had the infant in front of the mother, and
then they had some noises and some activity that would
be a little bit scary for many kids. And what
they found was that there were a lot of differences
among children we're talking about under a year, where there
are some who just freak out when they have this
(08:52):
sort of unfamiliar stimuli around them. They cry and thrash
and so forth. There are others who you know, thrash
a lot, but they don't cry, and some others they
just don't have that much problem with it at all.
And what they did was they and they tracked this
(09:13):
by looking at how the kids looked when they got older,
when they were, you know, two years old, when they
were six years old, and when they were thirteen years old,
and the ones who were thrashing about and crying a
lot and freely freaking out in that situation had a
much higher likelihood of turning out to have social anxiety.
Interesting so that there seemed to be some genetic factors.
(09:37):
We know it runs in families, and that very often
if there's one person in a family, there's a pretty
good chance that somebody else does, although they may or
may not have mentioned it to anybody else.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Can social anxiety be acquired through your experiences?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
If you're a young kid, and well, let's say you
go to school, you've got physical education classes, and all
the other kids in the class seem able to do
a forward and backward summr assault quite easily, and you
happen to find you're very clutchy with that kind of stuff.
It's embarrassing. And then suppose that that's happening to a
(10:16):
kid who is really among the top students in the
class academically. That puts the kid in a situation where
they're much more vulnerable to being teased about it.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Because that's what you kind of focus in on, is
the higher IQ people that have these social anxieties and
these ADHD issues. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, it is, actually, and there's a reason for that.
I'm particularly interested in work with high IQ folks who
have ADHD or who have social anxiety or other emotional problems.
The reason for that is that often they're the ones
most reluctant to acknowledge they have such.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Problems because they're so smart, people who.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Are used to being very close to the top of
the pile for almost anything they're doing, and they feel
uncomfortable about disclosing their weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So your book is available now. It's on Amazon and
you can pick it up if you'd like to do that.
Do you have any advice for parents of children that
are experiencing social anxiety? What do you tell the parents
to do to help their kids?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
What I what I usually talk with parents about is
to try to help them to empathize with the kid
rather than just shake their finger and say you don't
have to worry about that. Nobody's thinking that, when in fact,
it's tough for them. But it's also true that some
parents who have kids with social anxiety themselves have social
(11:46):
anxiety or have had their struggles with it.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Do you outgrow it?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Some people do, And that has to do a lot
with who you're hanging out with. Whether the people around you,
parents and siblings or classmates, are you know, patient and
kind and dealing with you about your fears, or whether
(12:11):
you're getting a lot of grief from other people about
it and ridicule.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
We have a tendency to do that, don't we. We
ridicule what we don't understand and makes it worse.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, Unfortunately that happens to be true.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah. Yeah, we see it in the workplace as well.
Everybody's odd or quirky, or you're constantly losing your keys,
what's your problem? Or you're forgetting to finish all of
your work and come to find out later that there's
a reason why. It's not just a.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Forgetfulness, although the people are not always willing to disclose
those and sometimes they don't even.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Know I did. I had a friend who was a
really smart attorney who always was losing her key and
her wallet everywhere, and I said, you're so smart, why
are you not coming up with some sort of a
plan every day to do the same thing every time.
Don't ever put your keys down anywhere else other than
(13:11):
this one particular place. And this woman was in her
fifties and she said, I had never thought about that.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, and it's surprising sometimes, right, possible ways of dealing
with this.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So many times we struggle as adults with things that
actually there's a it can be named, it can be helped,
and we don't realize it because we just think we're
like everybody else and you suffer and you don't need to.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
You have many books if you're interested in social psychology
and things like that. You can pick up doctor Thomas E.
Brown's books, this one, Social Anxiety, Hidden Fears and Shame
and Teens and Adults. Doctor.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, most of the others are about ADHD related things
as well. But I appreciate your giving me a chance
to talk about the problem.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
I appreciate what you do too. Thanks, doctor Brown
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Thank you, Bye bye.
This week on iHeart Sensey.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
It's just a terminally used to talk about people who
worry way more than most people do about what other
people might be thinking about them.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
He's talking about social anxiety. Doctor Thomas E. Brown is
here to share his experience about this social phobia that
affects millions of people. Social anxiety is a condition that
disrupts people's social lives because they experience crippling fear or
are very anxious about how they're perceived. He's released his
new book Social Anxiety, Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults.
(00:34):
Doctor Brown explains that we all worry about what others
might think of us, and when that disrupts one's life,
it's a problem that can be dealt with. Now on
iHeart Sensey with Sandy Collins, So glad to have you
here today. My first guest is here to talk about
a condition that many teens and adults experience. It's called
social anxiety, and it can be a crippling fear of
(00:58):
being judged. It affects many people in many ways in
their work and their personal lives well. Doctor Thomas E.
Brown is a Yale educated, caring and compassionate psychiatrist. He's
here with us today. He's written a new book called
Social Anxiety, Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults.
Nice to see you. Thanks for being on the show today, Pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'm very happy to have a chance to be on
your program.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Your new book caught my attention because my daughter has
social anxiety. She's twenty five. You're a specialist in ADHD,
is that correct?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yes, And you have your own institute.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well. I operate a clinic called the Brown Clinic for
Attention and Related Disorders. We're in Manhattan Beach, California. Previous
to that, I was for twenty years teaching on the
clinical faculty at Yeal Medical School and running a similar
clinic in Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
And ADHD was interesting to you. Why what was it
about AD that caught your attention?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I worked for a number of years. I had to
earn money while I was going to college, and I
worked for a YMCA, and part of my work was
coaching swimming teams and getting swimming lessons and stuff. But
then I was also asked to be a counselor for
kids that had been in trouble with the Juvie Court,
and I enjoyed that work, and then ended up doing
(02:24):
some more work along that line and eventually figured out
that even though I was a history major in college,
I wanted to be a psychologist at that point. Interesting, Oh,
I went to do my graduate work at Yale.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Social anxiety is to me, it's sort of a new term.
I've first heard of it maybe ten years ago myself.
Can you explain what is social anxiety and how it
differs from just playing kind of being nervous around other people?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, well, I think it's important to see that it's
related to being nervous around other people. It's just a
term that we use to talk about people who worry
way more than most people do about what other people
might be thinking about them. You know. It's the kind
of thing that all of us wonder sometimes did what
I say in that meeting makes sense? Or does this
(03:15):
outfit I've got on and look good here? Or I
wonder if people really like the food that I've prepared
for this meal. But that kind of wondering about how
how are other people looking at me? Is something all
of us have. But then the point at which we
would say it really is something we call social anxiety
(03:37):
is where it's like way more than usual and the
person has a hard time shaking it. And the fact
is that the data that we do have on it
suggests that it's about maybe twelve to fourteen percent of
adults in the United States might qualify for that diagnosis.
But the thing which is striking about it is that
(04:00):
less than half of those people who have it ever
seek any help for it. It's almost though it's too
embarrassing to have anxiety about being embarrassed.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I would say that, but I would also think that
maybe they just don't realize what the symptoms are pointing to, don't.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I don't think the information is out there, you know, widely,
and you know, there's certain kinds of situations that make
it more difficult for people. Many people spend a whole
lot of time worrying about what other people think of
what they're worrying, what they're doing, what they're.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Saying, very ecocentric kind of a thing you're thinking about themselves.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well yeah, but it's it's ecocentric, but it's also just
scaried us about what other people might be thinking about me.
And the thing is that it operates in two ways.
One is what anybody would think of is what do
you think of my and what do you think what
I just said. However, there's another aspect of it, and
(05:05):
that is that many people have thoughts they have about
what they might like to do or about how they
feel about things that are embarrassing to them to even
be thinking that, and then their heads get going on
that and start thinking what would my parents think or
(05:27):
what would my spouse think, or what would my good
friends think if they ever knew that I have these worries,
that I have these things I think about. It's also
stuff about what I did do back in the day.
One of the subtitle for my book Social Anxiety is
(05:48):
hidden fears and shame, and it's because people who experience
this often hide their fears and hide their shame because
it's almost too embarrassing to even talk about. You if
you're afraid of going going up in elevators, or if
you're afraid of flying things like that, most people, well
(06:09):
at least to people that they trust, would be able
to say, yeah, that scares me. But people are often
very embarrassed about even imagining some of these secrets they
may have in their own head known by the people
that they care about, So.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
How does someone recognize social anxiety and others and does
that help any way in dealing with them.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Well, if you if you're dealing with somebody who just
seems super cautious about things, or I think we've all
dealt with people sometimes who end up apologizing for things
that most people wouldn't bother apologizing anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh, I know that girls do that NonStop.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I'm sorry, I'm boys and also men and women. But
when you see that somebody is coming across in a
way that suggests they're very self conscious about what it
is that they may be doing or saying, or what
they may think you would be thinking about them, sometimes
(07:17):
it's possible as to say, you know, you're talking as
though somehow this is a bad thing. But I think
everybody has worries like this, normalize it.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
We're talking with doctor Thomas E. Brown, and he has
written a new book that's out available now called Social Anxiety,
Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults. So you
said there's a significant amount of people in the United
States that have this. What do you do about social anxiety?
Where do you get help? What kinds of help is available?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, one of the things that can make a difference
is talking with somebody else who's going to be patient
about it and who can understand it, who could empathize
with it. And sometimes you may find that among your friends,
and some people may want to seek some help in
psychotherapy or with a counselor or somebody like that. And
(08:09):
it takes a little bit of courage to do it,
because the whole nature of this is the person is scary.
And let me say before I go on to respond
more fully to that question, that there's studies, including a
couple done at Harvard where they looked at little infants
and brought them in with their mothers one at a time,
(08:31):
and had the infant in front of the mother, and
then they had some noises and some activity that would
be a little bit scary for many kids. And what
they found was that there were a lot of differences
among children we're talking about under a year, where there
are some who just freak out when they have this
(08:52):
sort of unfamiliar stimuli around them. They cry and thrash
and so forth. There are others who you know, thrash
a lot, but they don't cry, and some others they
just don't have that much problem with it at all.
And what they did was they and they tracked this
(09:13):
by looking at how the kids looked when they got older,
when they were, you know, two years old, when they
were six years old, and when they were thirteen years old,
and the ones who were thrashing about and crying a
lot and freely freaking out in that situation had a
much higher likelihood of turning out to have social anxiety.
Interesting so that there seemed to be some genetic factors.
(09:37):
We know it runs in families, and that very often
if there's one person in a family, there's a pretty
good chance that somebody else does, although they may or
may not have mentioned it to anybody else.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Can social anxiety be acquired through your experiences?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
If you're a young kid, and well, let's say you
go to school, you've got physical education classes, and all
the other kids in the class seem able to do
a forward and backward summr assault quite easily, and you
happen to find you're very clutchy with that kind of stuff.
It's embarrassing. And then suppose that that's happening to a
(10:16):
kid who is really among the top students in the
class academically. That puts the kid in a situation where
they're much more vulnerable to being teased about it.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Because that's what you kind of focus in on, is
the higher IQ people that have these social anxieties and
these ADHD issues. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, it is, actually, and there's a reason for that.
I'm particularly interested in work with high IQ folks who
have ADHD or who have social anxiety or other emotional problems.
The reason for that is that often they're the ones
most reluctant to acknowledge they have such.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Problems because they're so smart, people who.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Are used to being very close to the top of
the pile for almost anything they're doing, and they feel
uncomfortable about disclosing their weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
So your book is available now. It's on Amazon and
you can pick it up if you'd like to do that.
Do you have any advice for parents of children that
are experiencing social anxiety? What do you tell the parents
to do to help their kids?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
What I what I usually talk with parents about is
to try to help them to empathize with the kid
rather than just shake their finger and say you don't
have to worry about that. Nobody's thinking that, when in fact,
it's tough for them. But it's also true that some
parents who have kids with social anxiety themselves have social
(11:46):
anxiety or have had their struggles with it.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Do you outgrow it?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Some people do, And that has to do a lot
with who you're hanging out with. Whether the people around you,
parents and siblings or classmates, are you know, patient and
kind and dealing with you about your fears, or whether
(12:11):
you're getting a lot of grief from other people about
it and ridicule.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
We have a tendency to do that, don't we. We
ridicule what we don't understand and makes it worse.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, Unfortunately that happens to be true.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah. Yeah, we see it in the workplace as well.
Everybody's odd or quirky, or you're constantly losing your keys,
what's your problem? Or you're forgetting to finish all of
your work and come to find out later that there's
a reason why. It's not just a.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Forgetfulness, although the people are not always willing to disclose
those and sometimes they don't even.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Know I did. I had a friend who was a
really smart attorney who always was losing her key and
her wallet everywhere, and I said, you're so smart, why
are you not coming up with some sort of a
plan every day to do the same thing every time.
Don't ever put your keys down anywhere else other than
(13:11):
this one particular place. And this woman was in her
fifties and she said, I had never thought about that.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, and it's surprising sometimes, right, possible ways of dealing
with this.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So many times we struggle as adults with things that
actually there's a it can be named, it can be helped,
and we don't realize it because we just think we're
like everybody else and you suffer and you don't need to.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
You have many books if you're interested in social psychology
and things like that. You can pick up doctor Thomas E.
Brown's books, this one, Social Anxiety, Hidden Fears and Shame
and Teens and Adults. Doctor.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, most of the others are about ADHD related things
as well. But I appreciate your giving me a chance
to talk about the problem.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
I appreciate what you do too. Thanks, doctor Brown
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Thank you, Bye bye.
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