Mental health
Social anxiety – what it is and how to overcome it
By Mandana Ahmadi, founder and CEO of Alena
Have you ever experienced the flutter of butterflies in your stomach when approaching a conversation with someone? Have you found yourself debating whether to attend a party where everyone is unfamiliar? Have you ever felt profound regret over something you said, causing sleepless nights?
These are all telltale signs of social anxiety, a common yet often overlooked condition that quietly exerts control over our lives.
Left unaddressed, social anxiety can lead to significant comorbidities such as depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders. However, the good news is that social anxiety is highly treatable.
Social anxiety itself is not inherently negative; it serves as an essential function in creating effective societies where individuals care for one another and understand their place in the larger community. However, when social anxiety becomes impaired—whether excessive or lacking—it hinders our ability to tap into the resources that society offers.
This struggle often underlies the development of comorbidities: we feel down and spiral into depression when we can’t advance in our careers despite our potential and skills, we turn to drinking or comfort eating to soothe our anxiety, and the accumulated sleep debt harms our overall health.
By addressing the root cause, which can sometimes be social anxiety, we can reverse these negative patterns.
Social anxiety is influenced by various cognitive functions, which, when impaired, intensify social anxiety or drive it to suboptimal levels. Four major drivers include the rumination function, avoidance behaviour, accurate perception of others’ opinions, and attentional focus during social interactions.
Here at Alena this is our area of expertise, and the Alena app can help measure the health of these cognitive functions and provide scores, followed by cognitive behavioural therapies that target these specific areas. While there is no instant remedy for social anxiety, there are steps you can take.
The first step towards overcoming social anxiety is to recognise that it is a common and normal experience. Many people struggle with social anxiety, but it often remains misunderstood.
By acknowledging it, you are already on the path to overcoming it. Understand that your anxious feelings are more a product of how your brain processes information rather than an accurate reflection of how others perceive you.
When anxiety strikes, there is a tendency to want to escape, hide, or distract ourselves from the discomfort. Instead, allow yourself to experience those feelings and focus on calming your body through slow breathing techniques commonly used in meditation.
By slowing down, you can help your body break free from the fight-or-flight response. Shift your attention away from your inner thoughts and redirect it towards the external world. This can be done by immersing yourself in the sounds around you or paying close attention to the visual details in your surroundings.
You will notice a sense of relief as your attention releases from the internal spiral, leading to a lighter and less tense state.
Next, try to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone you love who is going through a similar situation. Consider how you would talk to them and evaluate the seriousness of the situation if it involved them.
By adopting an external perspective, you distance yourself from your own anxious thoughts and gain a more objective view of reality. This helps to ground you in the present moment.
Lastly, the most effective way to overcome social anxiety is through exposure to small social events and gradually increasing your comfort zone.
Often, you will realise that nothing catastrophic happens, challenging the belief that social situations are as major and terrifying as they may seem. By incrementally expanding your social experiences, you will build confidence and realize that you can handle them.
Remember, you are not alone, and overcoming social anxiety takes time and effort. With the right support, strategies, and a gradual approach, you can regain control of your life and thrive in social situations.
Mandana Ahmadi is the founder and CEO of Alena. Mandana is dedicated to tackling the world’s mental health crisis, starting first with social anxiety. She has worked with the International Brain Laboratory, and achieved her PhD in computational neuroscience from UCL Gatsby.
First-time mothers using the Baby2Home app for a year after birth reported fewer symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety than those receiving usual postpartum care.
The study found women randomised to the app reported better overall health than first-time mothers who received usual care alone.
Baby2Home is a digital tool to help new families with newborn care and staying healthy.
It offers tailored educational content, infant care trackers and mental health self-management tools, plus access to a care manager for on-demand mental health and problem-solving support.
Emily S. Miller is principal investigator and division director of maternal-fetal medicine at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island.
She said: “Evidence-based digital tools like Baby2Home are opening the door to a new era of postpartum care.
“We can now extend high-quality support beyond hospital walls and into families’ everyday lives. The mental health improvements we saw underscore just how transformational that support can be.”
Researchers from Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago ran a multi-site randomised controlled trial between November 2022 and July 2025.
The trial enrolled 642 postpartum patients, all first-time parents. For 12 months after birth, all participants received usual postpartum care; half also used the Baby2Home smartphone app.
Participants reported progress electronically at five time points over the first year. Compared with the control group, those assigned to Baby2Home reported significantly fewer symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety.
They also reported better overall health, higher relationship satisfaction with partners and family members, and greater confidence in their parenting than the control group.
Miller said: “The first year after birth is a critical period for parental mental health. Baby2Home helped new parents feel more confident, more supported and more connected.
“That translated into better health outcomes for them and their families.”
By Katrina Zalcmane, co-founder | partnerships and growth, Véa
The global corporate wellness market reached US$70.65 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit US$128 billion by 2033 – Europe leads the charge, capturing over 39.5 per cent of market share.
Meanwhile, femtech investment hit US$2.2 billion in 2024, representing 8.5 per cent of all digital health funding.
The message is clear: companies recognise that employee wellness matters and women’s health technology is finally getting serious investment.
So why are women still drowning?
In the UK, 91 per cent of adults report experiencing high or extreme stress levels – despite consumers spending an average of US$3,342 annually on wellness and self-care.
60 per cent of women in leadership positions report feeling constantly burned out, while 69 per cent of women feel emotionally drained after every workday.
Around 1 in 4 working women say they can’t manage workplace stress, with only 44 per cent confident their employer even has a burnout plan.
The numbers don’t add up. Billions flowing into wellness programmes. A femtech revolution promising personalised solutions.
And yet women ages 25-45 – the backbone of the modern workforce – are hitting crisis levels of exhaustion.
The problem isn’t a lack of investment – it’s what we’re investing in.
The Mismatch: What Companies Offer vs What Women Actually Need
Health risk assessments captured 21.2 per cent of the European corporate wellness market in 2024, while stress management programmes hold 13 per cent market share and continue expanding.
Companies are checking boxes: biometric screenings, mental health apps, flexible work, meditation subscriptions.
Yet these programmes consistently miss three critical factors:
1. Emotional data is invisible
Modern workplaces reward thinking, problem-solving and constant cognitive output.
What gets lost is the intelligence that comes from recognising early warning signals in the body – somatic indicators that burnout is building long before it becomes visible.
Women are taught to “think through” stress rather than listen to what their bodies are telling them. By the time burnout shows up in productivity metrics or sick days, the damage is done.
2. Hormonal rhythms are ignored
Corporate wellness assumes constant, linear productivity.
But women’s bodies don’t work that way. Menstrual cycles, perimenopause, fertility journeys – all create natural energy fluctuations that impact focus, stress response and cognitive performance.
Instead of working with these rhythms, most women fight against them, blaming themselves for “productivity dips” that are actually biological.
The result is chronic disconnection from their bodies and accelerated burnout.
3. Emotional labour stays uncounted
Women carry disproportionate loads of invisible work – managing team dynamics, mentoring, smoothing conflicts, holding space for others’ stress.
This labour never appears on performance reviews or workload assessments.
It accumulates beneath the surface until women hit a wall.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
In the UK, mental health-related absences cost the economy approximately £21.6 billion annually, with employees taking 34 million sick days each year due to stress, depression and anxiety.
Employee burnout costs an average 1,000-person company US$5.04 million per year globally. Burned-out employees are 6 times more likely to leave, costing companies 50-200 per cent of salary in recruiting and training.
For women specifically, the crisis deepens.
Women new to leadership report 70 per cent burnout rates; for women of colour in senior positions, it reaches 77 per cent..
Nearly 40 per cent of women actively seeking new jobs cite burnout as the primary reason.
Replacing a mid- or senior-level woman costs up to 213 per cent of her annual salary.
We’re not just losing individual contributors but hemorrhaging the women leaders who hold institutional knowledge, mentor the next generation and drive diversity initiatives.
What Needs to Change
Instead of more generic wellness programs, we need to fundamentally rethink how we support women at work.
1. Shift from crisis response to prevention
Only 44 per cent of women feel confident their employer has a burnout plan – but by then, you’ve already lost.
Companies must teach women to recognise burnout signals in their bodies before a crisis hits. Somatic awareness catches exhaustion early, when intervention still works.
2. Design work around cyclical energy, not constant output
Women need organisational cultures that acknowledge hormonal rhythms as legitimate biological factors affecting performance.
This means training managers to understand energy fluctuations and designing workloads that account for them instead of just offering “flexible arrangements”.
3. Make invisible labour visible
Emotional labor must be quantified, acknowledged and redistributed.
This requires new frameworks for measuring contributions beyond traditional output metrics and structural changes preventing this work from defaulting to women.
4. Prioritise personalisation over one-size-fits-all
Workforce wellness now centres on personalisation powered by AI and data analytics.
A 27-year-old establishing her career has completely different needs than a 42-year-old navigating perimenopause while caring for ageing parents.
AI-driven platforms can deliver tailored support – virtual health assistants, personalised insights, telemedicine – making care more accessible for women balancing careers, family and wellness.
The Opportunity
Closing the women’s health gap could add at least $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040.
But unlocking that value requires interventions addressing burnout’s root causes, not just symptoms.
The market is already voting.
Virtual workplace wellness programmes saw substantial growth following the pandemic and Europe continues leading corporate wellness investment.
Companies in the UK and France are implementing AI-driven burnout assessments, hybrid wellness platforms and data-driven mental health monitoring.
Still, investment alone isn’t enough.
The question isn’t whether companies will spend on women’s wellness – they already are.
The question is whether they’ll invest in solutions that actually work: reconnecting women with somatic intelligence before burnout becomes visible, designing around hormonal rhythms rather than fighting them and making invisible labour visible so it can be redistributed.
The companies that do will win the talent war.
The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their best women keep leaving.
About Véa Workshops
Véa offers evidence-based corporate wellness workshops designed specifically for women professionals, addressing the root causes of burnout that traditional programs miss.
Grounded in neuroscience, psychology and somatic awareness, Véa workshops focus on prevention rather than crisis response – teaching women to recognise emotional data and somatic signals, work sustainably with hormonal rhythms and make invisible labor visible.
Available in formats from 45-minute executive sessions to half-day leadership offsites, these workshops support sustainable performance without asking women to step back from ambition.
Learn more at veajournal.app/workshops.
Ageing anxiety may accelerate biological ageing in women, with fears about worsening health linked to faster epigenetic ageing, according to new research.
The study found that greater anxiety about growing old was associated with accelerated epigenetic ageing, as measured by the DunedinPACE clock, based on biological markers in blood samples.
Epigenetic changes are shifts in how genes are switched on or off without altering DNA itself, which can influence how the body ages and functions.
“Our research suggests that subjective experiences may be driving objective measures of ageing,” said Mariana Rodrigues, a PhD student and the first author of the study.
“Ageing-related anxiety is not merely a psychological concern, but may leave a mark on the body with real health consequences.”
Researchers analysed data from 726 women in the Midlife in the US study.
Participants were asked how much they worried about becoming less attractive with age, having more health issues and being too old to have children.
Blood samples were used to assess ageing with two epigenetic clocks: DunedinPACE, which estimates the pace of biological ageing, and GrimAge2, which estimates cumulative biological damage.
The study was conducted by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health.
Worrying about declining health showed the strongest links with epigenetic ageing, while anxiety about attractiveness and fertility was not significantly associated with biological markers.
The authors suggest health worries are more common and persist over time, whereas concerns about appearance and reproduction may fade with age.
“Women in midlife may also be multiple in roles, including caring for their ageing parents,” Rodrigues said.
“As they see older family members grow older and become sick, they may worry about whether the same thing will happen to them.”
The authors caution that the study offers a snapshot in time and other factors may influence these biological changes.
When analyses were adjusted for health behaviours such as smoking and alcohol use, the link between ageing anxiety and epigenetic ageing decreased and was no longer significant.
“Our research identifies ageing anxiety as a measurable and modifiable psychological determinant that seems to be shaping ageing biology,” said Adolfo Cuevas, associate professor of social and behavioural sciences and the study’s senior author.
They call for more research to clarify how this anxiety influences ageing over time, to guide support for those experiencing ageing anxiety.
“Ageing is a universal experience.” Rodrigues said.
“We need to start a discourse about how we as a society, through our norms, structural factors and interpersonal relationships, address the challenges of ageing.”
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