What is the best way to cure social anxiety?
Written by the clinical team at The Lyceum Clinic. Clinically reviewed by Sanah Younis, Clinical Director, BABCP-accredited (no. 1000792). Published 28 October 2026. Last reviewed 28 October 2026.
CBT based on the Clark and Wells model is the recommended treatment, and it is specific to social anxiety rather than general anxiety management. It targets the three things that keep the fear going: attention turned inward, safety behaviours, and the post-mortem afterwards. Cure is a strong word; what people get is the ability to be in a room without the dread running it.
The safety behaviour that surprises people most
Mentally rehearsing sentences before speaking. People think it keeps them safe. It completely disconnects them from the conversation they are in and makes them look rigid, which is the very thing they feared. Dropping it, in a planned experiment, is one of the fastest wins in the whole course.
What video feedback does
People with social anxiety carry a distorted internal image of how they appear: visibly terrified, shaking, awkward. We record a short interaction and watch it back. The reaction is absolute shock. They look normal. The distorted image shatters, and it is very hard to rebuild once you have seen the evidence.
For more detail, read about social anxiety therapy.
The experiments
Each safety behaviour is tested by dropping it: pausing for three seconds before answering, speaking without a rehearsed script, keeping attention on the other person rather than on the sensations in your own body. People are consistently surprised by how much of the anxiety the safety behaviours were causing rather than preventing.
What a course looks like
Usually within the short-term arm of The Lyceum Protocol, 6 to 12 sessions, with attention training, video feedback and graded experiments in and between sessions, and outcome measures at every review.
The post-mortem
After a social situation, people with social anxiety replay it for hours, hunting for evidence of humiliation and always finding some. The post-mortem is treated as a behaviour, like the rehearsal, and it is dropped in the same way: deliberately, as an experiment, with the person noticing that the dread of the next event falls when the replay of the last one stops.