Exposure has helped, but this part of my social anxiety won't go away
I've gotten a lot better at managing my social anxiety over the past couple of years, but there's one part of it that I just can't seem to shake.
Whenever I'm talking to someone in a room with other people, I become hyper-aware of everyone around us. Instead of focusing on the conversation, I start wondering what each individual person is thinking about me whether they're judging what I'm saying, how I'm saying it, whether I sound awkward, etc. The more I think about it, the quieter and stiffer I become, which just makes the conversation harder.
It isn't just conversations either. Even if I'm walking alone through my neighborhood, I start thinking about the people in their houses or outside and imagine them noticing me and judging the fact that I'm walking by myself. I constantly feel like I'm being watched.
The frustrating part is that exposure has helped with a lot of my anxiety. I keep putting myself in social situations, and while I'm more comfortable doing them now, this underlying feeling of being watched hasn't really gone away. It feels like my brain is always scanning everyone around me and trying to imagine what they're think about me.
I'm not really looking for advice that's just "keep doing exposure therapy," because that's already something I've been working on. I'm more interested in mindsets, ways of thinking about it differently, specific techniques that helped you, or even books that changed the way you viewed this kind of anxiety.
Has anyone dealt with something similar and actually gotten past this?