Shaheen Bhatt Discusses How She Handles Social Anxiety

As always screenwriter Shaheen Bhatt has again spoken about the ever important subject of mental health. 

This time it was about social anxiety. 

In a conversation with singer songwriter Ananya Birla on her mental health platform ‘Here Comes The Sun’, Shaheen admitted that she experiences social anxiety and shared tips on how she handles this discomfort. 

She said that though the situation has improved, it  requires consistent work from her. 

She said that anxiety has to do with “how you think you are being perceived by other people.”

“there is a need to feel like you are behaving in the right way.” 

She got obsessed with minute things such as  “how much eye contact is enough–Is it too little or too much?”

She also defined this disorder as the ‘narcissistic disorder’ as one focusses too much on oneself in a social setting. 

“People have different types of social anxiety as well for different reasons but my version of it is that,” she added.

In these situations Shaheen says that she tries to  “realise that no one is thinking about me as much as I am thinking about myself — everyone is really focused on themselves.”

She offers all her attention on the other person which prevents her from focussing on herself and how she’s feeling. 

Another technique that Shaheen follows is the anchoring technique where she focusses on her foot and how it feels on the ground. This anchors her and distracts her from the panicking thoughts. 

For the unversed, Shaheen has lived with depression for seventeen years. She penned her entire journey with depression in her book “I’ve Never Been Un(Happier). 

In this book Shaheen shares her personal account with depression and what challenges she had to face to overcome the illness. 

Shaheen said, “It really is sort of a personal account of just an extremely internal journey that I've been on since I was 12 years old. It's pretty much every insecurity,every vulnerability, every fear that I've always had and it's my heart laid there on a page. It's literally about a good 20 years' worth of my personal journey.”