What Causes Social Anxiety Disorder

Social Anxiety disorder is a very common disorder that faces millions of people each year. Like many other disorders, it is a very complex disorder that is constantly being looked at and studied in order to understand it better. What many people do not realize is that there are three different types of social anxiety disorder. These are non generalized or performance anxiety in which a person has social anxiety in certain situations (like public speaking), generalized anxiety where they have the anxiety all the time and avoidant personality disorder, which causes a person to isolate themselves from almost everyone. There are 3 main causes that have been found thus far for these various forms of social anxiety disorder.

One of the things that a person must look at when figuring out what causes social anxiety disorder is genetics. Children who have certain attributes that they develop that cause them to have less appealing attributes, even if it is merely in their minds, put them at a higher rate of developing this disorder. This can be anything from a certain color hair, freckles or even a birth defect. It has also been shown that being sensitive to social criticism can be passed through genes as well. This means that even people who do not have anything wrong with them may just have this disorder because they are sensitive about what other people will think or say about them.

Another of the causes of social anxiety disorder is a chemical imbalance in the brain. As with many mental disorders, social anxiety disorder can stem from a lack of the chemicals that regulate the person’s emotions, such as Serotonin. These chemicals are also what give people a sense of well being, which when not in the right proportions can in itself contribute to this disorder. This can be remedied with medication to get these chemicals back to the proper levels that they should be at. However, this is the least understood of all the causes of social anxiety disorder.

Development can also be a cause of social anxiety disorder. As a child grows, they tend to become self conscious of their development at some point or another, though the most common time for this to happen is when puberty begins. However, some people develop social anxiety disorder through development just by watching their parents. It is the same principle as the child who is scared of spiders because their parent is.

Even though there are multiple factors to figuring out what causes social anxiety disorder, there are many things that can be done. There are many different forms of treatment that can be done to help get this condition under control. A person can talk with a therapist, see a support group, read different material on their condition as well as various prescription and alternative supplements and herbs. By learning the ways in which a person creates the negative thoughts inside of them that create the disorder, they can then learn how to stop the thoughts and turn them into more positive ones.