Have you tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)? It's best done with some professional oversight from a trained therapist to start -- especially because some issues may need pharmacological interventions -- but there are app-based options that can make it easy to dip a toe in daily practice.
Programmers tend to be quite rational people, and I've found CBT gave me a set of rational tools to interrogate my irrational feelings around social anxiety. It can feel like a dark cloud is hanging over you, and when you externalize the feeling and identify "fallacies" with those feelings then they become less nebulous and more manageable.
An example: a decade ago I remember sitting on a mostly empty BART train and feeling very low as I watched people get on and off at each stop. When I externalized the feeling it was simply "No one wants to sit near me", and once I'd written it down it became easier to interrogate -- I don't want to sit immediately next to anyone on an empty BART car either, why should I expect that others' decisions about where to sit are because of me and not because there's just plenty of space to spread out? Suddenly that feeling evaporated.
Once you've worked with a therapist and built up some habits, it becomes easier to identify those feelings on the fly and mitigate them. I rarely do written CBT journaling these days, it's mostly something I can react to in-the-moment through lots of practice.
Again: it's recommended to talk to a trained therapist and see if CBT is right for you (or whether you may need/want to try medication as well) but it's been one of the best self-care things I've ever done.
I've not really had any success trying to speak to therapists. Just getting an appointment feels like trying to draw blood from a stone. It costs more than my rent just to see somebody for an hour a week, and the waiting lists are literally months long. The one time I got to the end of a waiting list, I didn't check my emails the day I was pinged for it, and by the next morning my place had already been offered to the next person. This is all after a hospital referral for severe depression, I can't imagine how in the hell somebody could get an appointment for the kind of self improvement people talk about. Presumably by being very wealthy indeed...
Programmers tend to be quite rational people, and I've found CBT gave me a set of rational tools to interrogate my irrational feelings around social anxiety. It can feel like a dark cloud is hanging over you, and when you externalize the feeling and identify "fallacies" with those feelings then they become less nebulous and more manageable.
An example: a decade ago I remember sitting on a mostly empty BART train and feeling very low as I watched people get on and off at each stop. When I externalized the feeling it was simply "No one wants to sit near me", and once I'd written it down it became easier to interrogate -- I don't want to sit immediately next to anyone on an empty BART car either, why should I expect that others' decisions about where to sit are because of me and not because there's just plenty of space to spread out? Suddenly that feeling evaporated.
Once you've worked with a therapist and built up some habits, it becomes easier to identify those feelings on the fly and mitigate them. I rarely do written CBT journaling these days, it's mostly something I can react to in-the-moment through lots of practice.
Again: it's recommended to talk to a trained therapist and see if CBT is right for you (or whether you may need/want to try medication as well) but it's been one of the best self-care things I've ever done.