Hello, I appreciate your writing in this forum to try and get a better understanding of yourself. Many of the symptoms you have enlisted are quite normal. Most of us have social anxiety to varying extents - some have less anxiety than you do, while some have more. So, when does it become an illness? For symptoms such as these which fall on a continuum, abnormality/illness is determined on the basis of how much trouble the symptoms are causing you. If your symptoms are significantly impacting your functioning in an important domain (e.g. social, interpersonal, work etc), then it can be considered a disorder and be treated. From your description, you most likely do not have Social Anxiety Disorder; your symptoms represent a slightly more extreme variation of normal. In any case, even if it is not a disorder, an improvement in these features would be of benefit to you. Psychotherapy is the best solution in this case. You will certainly benefit from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy or Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. However, psychotherapy requires hard work and commitment; you have to decide if an improvement in these symptoms would be worth putting in all the hard work. Finally, let me reiterate - some amount of social anxiety is very common, so you are not alone. The fact that the anxiety has gotten better with age is reassuring. Warm regards, Dr. Saifuddin Kharawala MBBS, DPM