March 17, 2026
Dear Colleagues,
The National Social Anxiety Center (NSAC) provides information about relevant and current research in service of disseminating and promoting evidence-based treatment. This month’s summary is written by Morgan Benner, PhD of NSAC Montgomery County, Maryland, and examines the article, “Safe within reach of my phone”: Explaining the relationship between social anxiety and problematic internet use through social connections and avoidant safety-seeking behaviors, by Hansen et al. (2024). This article discusses the results of a study investigating the impact of two potential drivers of problematic internet use for people with symptoms of social anxiety: online avoidant safety-seeking behaviors and seeking social connections online. The article not only looks at whether each of these factors, avoidance and connection seeking, is the driver individually for problematic internet usage among those with social anxiety, but also looks at the relative importance of each of these factors.
The article discussed two potential factors that link social anxiety and problematic internet usage, defined by difficulty controlling internet usage, causing impairments in functioning and leading to negative consequences. The first factor is safety-seeking behaviors, which are any behavior whose function is intended to avoid, escape, or minimize a feared outcome. Examples of online safety-seeking behaviors include scrolling on a phone in public to seem busy and avoid talking with others, and using memes or stickers to avoid longer responses. While safety behaviors reduce anxiety in the short term, they contribute to the maintenance of anxiety in the long term. The second suggested potential driver of problematic internet usage among those with social anxiety is the desire for social connection: the tendency to use social media to connect to and feel included with friends.
The authors’ rationale for the importance of this study was to better understand the specific factors that contribute to the stable association between symptoms of social anxiety and problematic internet use in adults. They hypothesized that for individuals with symptoms of social anxiety, engaging with smartphones and the internet may allow them to subtly avoid or “control” social interaction while “safely” fulfilling their need for social connection, such that safety behaviors and social connection-seeking explain how socially anxious people may develop problematic internet usage.
The study consisted of a correlational and cross-sectional study, sampling 537 adults (69% identified as women) aged 18 to 74 from Chile, South America via online advertisements on social media. Participants completed measures of social anxiety based on diagnostic criteria from the DSM-III-TR that were previously adapted to Spanish and found to have satisfactory reliability. 58% of participants were classified as having social anxiety based on a previously established cutoff score. Participants were also assessed on a subscale of a problematic internet use assessment that measured time spent on the internet and loss of control over internet use. The authors developed three items to measure avoidant safety-seeking behavior. Internal consistency for this measure was acceptable. They used a previously established subscale from an assessment for motivations of social media use to assess the extent to which participants use the internet to seek social connection.
Key Findings:
The findings indicated that both avoidant safety-seeking behaviors (eg. sending memes instead of typing out a response online) and using social media for connection (eg. using social media to avoid feeling left out socially) play a role in the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and problematic internet use, and they also tended to co-occur. The authors also found that the role of avoidant safety-seeking behaviors online was five times stronger than the role of connection-seeking in mediating the relationship between social anxiety and problematic internet usage. They suggest that both the avoidance of social vulnerability and the desire for social connection could lead people who are higher in social anxiety to rely on the internet to both feel “safer” in social situations by avoiding the discomfort associated with social vulnerability, as well as provide a “safer” way to interact with others and attempt to fulfill their needs for social connection. It follows that if socially anxious people both feel the need to avoid feeling socially exposed via using the internet AND feel that they can more “safely” fulfill their social needs via the internet, then they may also have trouble controlling the amount of time they spend on the internet.
The authors suggest that determining the functions of problematic internet use may lead to different clinical considerations for treatment and future research directions.
Limitations and Future Directions:
The authors identify several limitations. First, because this is a correlational study, directionality and causality cannot be concluded (eg. that social anxiety symptoms cause people to use the internet problematically). Future studies could use experimental methods to assess causality. The authors also noted that their sample was majority women and a convenience sample, which may limit the generalizability of these findings to the broader population.
Another limitation of this study is that the assessment of social anxiety symptoms is based on the DSM-III-TR, rather than the current edition of the DSM, the DSM-5-TR, and thus, symptoms assessed may not perfectly match the current diagnostic standards for social anxiety disorder. The authors stated that they used this measure because of its previous translation into Spanish, the commonly spoken language in Chile, the location from which they drew their sample. Future studies may include a social anxiety disorder assessment, such as the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS; Liebowitz, 1987), which has been frequently used and established as a current measure of social anxiety disorder symptoms.
Finally, the measures of socially avoidant internet safety behaviors that the authors created, as well as the subscale that the authors utilized to assess social connection seeking on the internet, each contained only three items. Though the authors found that internal consistency reliability was acceptable, such short measures may lack the nuance and details of how these phenomena appear in the population. In the future, scale development with more items for the constructs of online socially avoidant safety behaviors as well as for online social connection seeking would provide more generalizable information and conclusions.
Questions for clinicians:
- How might you discuss the function of patients’ internet use and utilize this information for effectively treating social anxiety
- What other online behaviors not identified in this study might you look out for as potential safety behaviors?
Reference:
Hansen R, Garcés JA, Quevedo S, Ferrada M, Cottin M & Hernández C. (2024). “Safe within reach of my phone”: Explaining the relationship between social anxiety and problematic internet use through social connections and avoidant safety-seeking behaviors. Current Psychology: A Journal for Diverse Perspectives on Diverse Psychological Issues, 43 (22), 19918–19927.
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Morgan Benner, PhD
Clinician at NSAC Montgomery County, Maryland
(The Snow Psychology Group, LLC)