Social anxiety Vs self consciousness

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What's the difference here for autistic peoples?
We'd have more cause for both than the general population. I consider myself very self conscious and at times, it really prevents / complicates me being comfortable in public. A little of this is necessary - mindfully restrict my behaviour in public so as not to be doing anything 'weird,' check my appearance is neutral providing no reason for people to treat me differently, mentally edit before I speak to save babbling or again, saying anything that might be considered 'weird.'
But at times this hyper awareness is all encompassing, out-crowding everything else and I spend all my time in this fashion, instead of focusing on what is going on around me, what I'm supposed to be doing, etc. So much so that I end up avoiding public situations / other people because I'm tired of doing this, thinking about nothing but myself.
I notice a tendency to avoid situations involving people because of the friction and disconnect between how we interact, and I dislike people coming at me without having a chance to prepare for them. Avoiding even casually social situations eliminates this, but at the same time, isolation is bad for you in many ways.
What's the difference for us? What is one supposed to do about it?

Well, everyone gets self-conscious sometimes. Worrying about others noticing that nasty facial blemish or realizing they've been delivering a speech with their fly undone. Worrying about social presentation counts, too, though this worry is rarely intrusive enough to shut down one's ability to interact.

Social anxiety is a psychiatric condition. In social anxiety, self-consciousness becomes an all-consuming focus making it difficult, if not impossible, to interact in most social situations. Avoidance of triggering situations is one of the diagnostic criteria, in fact. Anxiety disorders can be constant or intermittent; what matters for diagnosis is one's baseline for functioning and how significant the interruption is from anxiety when it occurs.

The difference as simply as I can put it is that self-consciousness, while uncomfortable, is something almost everyone deals with and can function around; social anxiety is much more intense, is nearly always there, and causes interruption to everyday life.

Social anxiety is one of the easier disorders to treat, though. Consider talking to a therapist about your experiences. It's quite common for ASDs and various anxiety disorders to coincide.

Literally, self-consciousness just means knowing that you exist, but I think people often use it to mean social anxiety. The self-consciousness of which they speak is a negative, anxious awareness of self. A person who has always been socially adept will be relatively unaware of themselves in social situations, but a person who has experienced mostly bad social things in which they've got the blame will often become very aware of themselves, seeing themselves like an unexploded bomb in social situations. To me, the only difference between the two terms is the degree of the unease. I suppose social anxiety is the medicalised term for self-consciousness, though I don't concern myself much with the difference, because I don't make a hard and fast distinction between the mentally ill the so-called "normal" people, though obviously there's a difference between somebody who just feels slightly nervous in unfamiliar company and somebody who gets absolutely terrified every time anybody goes near them.

This is really simplistic, and in reality it's more complex than this, but boiling it down:

self-consciousness: feeling anxious about what you will do
social anxiety: feeling anxious about what other people will do