Overcoming Social Anxiety

Overcoming Social Anxiety- Social anxiety can be one of the most uncomfortable feelings and treating social anxiety can seem like a lengthy process or for some, a never ending process.  But, with some trial and error and patience, we can learn to treat our social anxiety and eventually curing it.

First, we need to discover the causes of our social anxiety and then we can work on treating it.  Some people have developed social anxiety through years of dealing with regular anxiety as the anxiety started to consume their whole life.  Others, may just have social anxiety and that is it.

I know I have suffered from social anxiety and never thought of getting help because I figured that was just who I was.  I now realize that my general anxiety basically took hold of my entire life and I had to learn of ways to deal with every single aspect of that anxiety.  The social part seemed to be the most overwhelming and it was the basis of my perpetual anxious cycle.

Okay How Does Social Anxiety Work? – Overcoming Social Anxiety

Overcoming Social Anxiety – Anxiety in general is the constant and overwhelming worry.  Most of the times the worry is about things that we shouldn’t worry about.  Maybe we are too sensitive of people, maybe we over analyze situations and maybe we are just different, but the worry of interacting with our peers is something we should never have to worry about, yet we still do.  Even when we know the worry is stupid, we still do.  So, how do we not worry?

With dealing with treating social anxiety on myself, I learned that a lot of it has to do with confidence and self esteem.  If you are lacking confidence and self esteem and see yourself as an inadequate person who can’t add value to any social interaction, you are going to feel insecure and insecurity will create the anxiousness and worry.  We worry how others will think of us and we are worried that we will say the wrong thing.  Many times we avoid the situation all together and every time we avoid the situation, we feel worse because then we let the anxiety win.  Never ever let the anxiety win.  No matter what!

If you are afraid to approach a situation, just do it and tell yourself good job for doing it.  It is when you avoid the whole situation in general is when you let the anxiety win and it is when you reinforce that anxiety.

So building up confidence and your self esttem are good pre-emptive things and doing some of the other anxiety management techniques that I have mentioned, but even those thigns take long to kick in.  Confidence doesn’t happen over night and social anxiety doesn’t disappear over night.  We can however work to diminish the symptoms and learn to deal with it now.

One thing that worked for me when feeling anxious and socializing was to first never avoid a situation and second is to actually seek to go out and socialize.  Trust me, I know it sucks but every time I did this, regardless of if it went bad (it would go bad a lot!), I would tell myself good job for actually doing it and not letting the anxiety take control of me.  I was actually proud of myself and this would help work up my confidence and esteem.

The Perpetual Cycle

Overcoming Social Anxiety – You can see how if you avoid social situations you just make yourself more anxious and worse at approaching people.  Although you avoid the feeling of unconfortablness but you also avoid the whole social interaction all together.  Then you get that feeling of beating yourself up because you aren’t approaching social interactions.

Your not alone.  The feeling sucks.  But, the feeling of regret is way worse.  So what if you were awkward or the people think you weird.  Everyone is weird in their own way.

Also remember that person will have forget about any awkward moment in about 10 seconds.  So it might be awkward right in that moment, but ten seconds later that person already forget about what you said or how akward you were.  Remember this.  Let yourself know this before, during and after any social interaction.

Also remember that they are people too.  They are no different than you.  Your human with needs, feelings and wants and they are too.  They are no better than you or no worse.

And don’t worry because even some of the most shy and socially akward people have moved on to become some of the most socailly inspiring people on this planet, which means you can too!

 

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