In this week's episode, I'll touch upon a few situations all city-dwellers run into - some more than others. I'll talk about why these situations raise our anxiety and what we can do about them.
This episode is mostly from my personal experience and perspective living in Europe but relevant to anyone living in an urban area.
Thank you for listening to the social anxiety podcast!
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🔗Social Anxiety Action Plan
💻All my best social anxiety resources
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In this week's episode, I'll touch upon a few situations all city-dwellers run into - some more than others. I'll talk about why these situations raise our anxiety and what we can do about them.
This episode is mostly from my personal experience and perspective living in Europe but relevant to anyone living in an urban area.
Thank you for listening to the social anxiety podcast!
❤️ RESOURCES
🔗Social Anxiety Action Plan
💻All my best social anxiety resources
❔Ask me anything
➡️ LET'S CONNECT
✨ Instagram
✨ Website
✨ Youtube
The 55% of us who live in an urban area find ourselves colliding with strangers, neighbors, and people of all sorts daily. On the subway commute, on the bus, walking home, and so on. Life in a city is stressful, and adding social anxiety is not cool. Not cool yo. I can’t express how much more frequently my social anxiety has been triggered since I moved to Amsterdam a few years ago than when I lived in the American Suburbs.
It makes sense. In America, the majority of people spend their time in cars. To work. To School. To buy groceries. Drive, drive, drive. And while, yes, driving anxiety is real, it is amplified in a city, and I’ll happily explain why in just a few minutes. But we’re going to talk about much more than just driving.
I live in a European city, so most of these talking points are from that perspective. But we’ll have much in common if you live in a city too. And by the way, if you don’t, chances are you might in the future, with the projected number being that 68% of us will live in an urban area by 2050.
Alright, so first order of business.
Let’s talk about driving in a city.
Here are some of the reasons why driving can trigger your social anxiety:
In addition to these general reasons, some specific triggers can trigger social anxiety while driving. For example, you may feel anxious about driving in certain situations, such as:
Let me share my story about driving in an unfamiliar place and how social anxiety visited me.
I will preface this part by mentioning that I’ve had my driver’s license since I was 16. I had my first car at 17 and then many more after that. Since I moved to Amsterdam in 2019, I fully gave up owning a car because we don’t need it here. But, sometimes, I need to get back behind the wheel, and that’s where I run into nonsense.
Now, mind you, I do not have a Dutch driving license (which I probably should), which means that most of the time, I do not understand the road signs and find myself stuck in a pickle. No matter how often my husband tries to explain them to me, I’m so not used to them, and they go by so fast that I can’t process them.
So here is one example of when my social anxiety was triggered:
Amsterdam is a beast, OK, there’s a lot of movement at all times. Pedestrians, tourists, bikers, trams, buses, cars. They’re all moving at the same time in different directions. Most of the time, I have no clue where I’m going, and let me tell you that my Google Maps has failed me so many times that I had to figure out where to go at that moment.
I remember this one instance when I ended up on a tram line where no cars were allowed to go. So there I was, looking for a way out, but there was none. The road just kept going. I started to panic because 1. I was driving with an American license, and 2. It wasn’t my car, so if the police saw me driving alone on the tram line, I wouldn’t know how to escape it.
Luckily, no tram came from either side, but oh my gosh. Serious social anxiety just thinking about that moment.
Here are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself:
The second order of business is biking in the city.
If you don’t know, there are about 1.3 bikes per person in the Netherlands (more bikes than people in this country). So bikes here are like the staple of the culture, right? People bike everywhere, at any time, in any weather. They bike with five kids on the bike while holding another bike, a dresser, flower pots, and so on. It’s almost like seeing a daily circus act over here.
So people bike everywhere with their whole household, and I'm not that strong of a biker. Again, I grew up in America, and it was all about the car.
If you bike in your city, here are some reasons why you might experience social anxiety:
Here are some situations that are prime for social anxiety on the bike:
And that’s the thing about biking: you’re exposed to the world. People can talk to you at any moment; there’s no shelter like the roof of your car.
Now, let’s move on to self-checkouts at grocery stores.
Yes, I realize that these are also available in non-urban areas, but imma talk about them anyway here.
So they've eliminated most of the cashiers here. You have to go and do your self-checkout, then click at the end, and you get a receipt. And with that receipt, you have to open the gate. So that's like the only to get out of the grocery stores. I don’t know what happened at some point, but I checked out, got the receipt, and lost it. I didn’t move. I was still in the same place, and fun fact: I couldn’t find it for my life. Then I thought, oh my God, they’re going to think I didn't pay.
I don't want to pay twice for all this food again. And I was already playing out the conversation in my head where they would say I didn't have the receipt. Where the hell did it go? Anyway, I found someone to help me. Again, it was very stressful because I also had to explain what happened in English, which isn’t always easy.
So I understand the whole technology thing at grocery stores, but it can create moments of social anxiety, where you have to go ask for help or freeze because something went wrong and people are staring.
Also, the feeling of being an inconvenience can be anxiety-inducing.
Here are some reasons why social anxiety shows up at self-checkouts:
Some specific triggers can trigger social anxiety at self-checkouts. For example, you may feel anxious about using a self-checkout if:
Things that have helped me in the past to reduce my social anxiety around check-outs:
Now, let’s talk about throwing the trash.
Yes, this probably looks very different for all of us, depending on where we live and the city’s services, but here’s the setup in Amsterdam.
Most of us don’t have personal garbage bins. There are underground containers on each street—one for cartons, one for glass, and one for regular trash. You have to walk out in all types of weather and put the trash inside the container, but you can't leave the trash bag outside on the sidewalk when it's full. We found out the wrong way.
The city went through our trash bag and found a paper with our name in it, and we got fined for leaving it there. You either take it back home (which sucks if you’re on the way to work and it’s heavy because you have to lug it back up the steep stairs), or you keep walking down the street until you find a container that has space.
So the other day, I had to walk around with this trash bag like three blocks, looking for containers because I didn't know where the other ones were on the other streets. I'm like, where the hell are these containers? And I'm just walking around with a trash bag, looking lost.
At that point, I got anxious. Because then, when I tried to put it in a container, and it didn’t fit, I had to force it somehow, which was a whole new type of ordeal. Oh my God, I hate it.
Here are some reasons why taking out the trash can bring out social anxiety:
You can do a few things to reduce this:
Lastly, we’re going to step into the shoes of a pedestrian in a city.
Walking the streets can bring out social anxiety in several ways.
I mean, this is the ultimate exposure, isn’t it? You’re bound to run into people you know or even strangers who give you strange looks for no reason. Being stuck in lines or at crossings can enhance social anxiety if you feel awkward about being there. And especially if you’re lost and staring at your phone and potentially bump into people by accident.
Then you’re THAT person. You know, the annoying one that can’t unglue themselves from the phone for a moment to be present in the world. Except you can’t make the case for yourself that you’re not.
So here are a few reasons why walking in a city can bring out social anxiety:
Listen, I got used to being ignored as a pedestrian in the States. You can imagine my horror of being placed under the spotlight whenever I must cross the street as if I'm some celebrity. All cars stop for pedestrians here; sometimes, I feel like I’m such an inconvenience for making them stop.
Worse still, if I’m walking with my 3-year-old, who likes to take her time, we’re the only ones crossing the street.
In one way or another, walking in a city can bring out a lot of emotions, triggers, and trauma if you’ve experienced something unpleasant.
I’m not saying there isn’t any social anxiety in the suburbs, but the city is more challenging as more moving parts are out of our control. It’s not like I can press a button, have my garage door open, and then walk into my home without ever running into a human.
If you live in a city, I’d love to hear what brings out your social anxiety and what you’ve done to manage it. You can reach me on Instagram or shoot me an e-mail at rox@honestrox.com