It’s the nature of the symptoms themselves that distinguish between a severe case of shyness and one of the social phobias. The symptoms of fear, sometimes amounting to actual physical responses like nausea or trembling, don’t seem controllable. If the symptoms seem to have a life of their own, sometimes even influencing and augmenting each other, then they are almost certainly social anxiety disorder symptoms, and need to be treated accordingly. They tend to fall into the three general areas of cognitive, bodily and behavioral symptoms.