Again depending on the fight/freeze/flee response, my anxiety can manifest as stiffness in my body, requiring special concentration to force myself to do normal things, or it can manifest as a jitteriness, like when you drive a car with a lot more power than you're used to and every time you touch the accelerator it surges forward in an alarming way. It can be accompanied by elevated body temperature, even sweating.
The way I differentiate the paralyzing kind of anxiety from depression is that depression paralyzes with lack of energy and an inability to believe that anything you do will come out well. Anxiety paralyzes with stiffness and a blank mind that is too twitchy to make plans.
Paralysis is the flight/freeze response to anxiety, but it also has a fight response, where I single-mindedly execute the next thing to do. I can get a lot of things done this way, and sometimes this is the only thing that snaps me out of procrastination, but sometimes the "clear next step" I'm unthinkingly executing is not the right thing. And when it becomes unclear what the next thing is, I'm back to being paralyzed.
Likewise, in social situations, anxiety can make me talk a lot (for me) and become much more open and engaging, and it can be a great thing to get me over the hump to knowing someone well, but more often it just makes my mind blank and makes me so slow to say the things I want to say that the moment passes. From the point of view of my social anxiety, I guess that's a win, preventing me from engaging more than superficially.
Seriously, it's so, so different, and most people in group therapy are having difficulty maintaining social connections already, because sharing emotionally icky stuff is a really hard thing to get right. Some people aren't good at recognizing boundaries and get ostracized because they overshare. Other people undershare because they aren't sure where the boundaries are or don't have the sophistication to share within boundaries without accidentally crossing the line. How to talk about your issues with various people (coworkers, family, friends) is a common frustration that gets talked about in group. No matter how progressive your social network is about whatever issue you have, people still conform to the law that if you make them feel good, you will see more of them, and if you make them feel bad, you will see less of them.
For example, one woman in my group was left by her husband after she discovered he was cheating with a woman twenty years younger than her. He had told this woman he was divorced and fathered a child with her. What her husband became widely known, and the women in her social group were, theoretically and vocally, supportive of a woman in her situation. But her social opportunities dried up overnight. Nobody was comfortable with the fact that she was miserable, that she couldn't afford to go to fancy brunches with them, that she was now selling her house and taking classes in the afternoon to get a nursing certification while they were sipping chardonnay and worry about hiring a new maid. None of them wanted to be face-to-face with a reminder that they were aging and their husbands might have a hot young sexual outlet somewhere, and that their lives could fall apart for the same reason. Some of her most loyal friends would meet her occasionally to express sympathy, but it just happened to always work out that they couldn't invite her to anything with other people. You'd be surprised how thin people's support is, and how strong their tendency is to assume that if being around you makes them feel bad, and other people don't make them feel that way, then you aren't doing what you need to do to deserve their support.
Even in intimate relationships, people don't always process why they're feeling the way they do. When someone says, "It's okay, whatever you're going through is okay, I just need to feel like you're here for me," they might not realize that they equate feeling like their partner is there for them with feeling safe and secure with their partner, and they don't feel safe and secure when their partner expresses anxiety.
I didn't know this until I got in group therapy and realized that many of the other people in my group (the women, in fact) didn't register the fact that I was feeling a lot of anxiety, even though I talked about all the time. When I talked about it, they didn't see any reflection of it in my face or body language, so what I said didn't register. I could say that I was feeling anxious, I could tell them about situations where I was paralyzed with anxiety, and still the absence of the expression they expected outweighed what I was telling them. They even accused me of withholding and not being open about my feelings until I learned how to act it out for them. I had to fake it to be accepted as authentic; my words were not enough.
This knowledge has proved to be very important to me. I realized that in many situations where I have mentioned my fear of something without expressing it physically, people have assumed I was lying. For example, when I talk about my fear of the financial consequences of a purchase, if I don't show fear, my wife may assume my fear is not real, and I'm making up an excuse because I want to spend the money on something else. Also, in situations where everybody else is feeling and expressing fear, if I don't consciously produce an expression of fear, I will come off as apathetic and detached.
It's very, very frustrating. From a young age we learn we are punished for showing fear, conditioned to hide it, and then later we realize there are situations where we are punished for our inability to show it.