Social anxiety and overcoming it

Hey! I saw no one has posted here yet and thought I'd share what's worked for me.

I struggle with social anxiety more than anyone I know around me which makes it harder for them to understand my boundries and what I struggle with. The best advice I've ever gotten was from my personal tutor in college, 'life begins at the end of your comfort zone' and I cannot stress how true this is.

If I know there's going to be a social with friends, I instantly say no. I never want to go and will put it off. But I have someone who pushes me and almost makes me do it (which is great). At the time I may hate them for it but it's the best therapy I could recommend. I would much rather deal with the aftermath of anxiety than I would miss out on events or small gatherings and regret not pushing myself further. And each time you do this, it not only becomes easier in the future but you begin to gain confidence in yourself and naturally push yourself further and further into a new comfort zone. I've been to therapy more times than I can count on one hand but this has worked more than anything. After an interaction I dreaded, I listen to music, play a game, take a shower etc. anything self-care related. The positive reinforcement helps to train my mind into thinking that social interaction isn't something that will harm me and I will be okay throughout.

This is all easier said than done, I know. But, this took a life-changing event for me to figure it out. I don't want to get older and regret not sitting with my friends for lunch because I was anxious and then feeling left out. I want to be happy that I felt comfortable with interaction and had friends I could talk to whenever. I want to laugh with others without worrying about what they think of me or how crooked my teeth are you know? I think with anxiety, the more and more you force yourself into situations and overwhelm yourself, the more natural social interaction comes.

In terms of keeping relationships with others, force yourself to send them a meme they might like every so often or say something in a group chat. This helps to keep a person interacting with you but lets them get to know you as well as them. Trust me, it keeps them friendships going. You don't need to interact with them often but little reminders go along way.

Looking at persenting yourself well is for me, through clothing. I keep pushing myself to this day with clothes I want to wear. Most of the time people don't notice but there are times where you'll get compliments for expanding your wardrobe.

Remember that little improvements, slowly overtime help the most with social anxiety and it doesn't change overnight. You have to feel uncomfortable in order to feel better!

Hope this helps somewhat on your journey. Im here to talk if you need to.

@Beayay Hey there! I've struggled with social anxiety & I can totally feel you. Yes, it is hard for us to face people & communicate but we have to realise that we can't run away from people. Right? :)

For that, try to start random conversations like sending someone a post, discussing new things. I'd recommend you to do activities with others. Like reading the same book & discussing it, taking art challenges. That way you'll have a certain topic to start with. Also, try to get involved in discussions. Try to ask people to join you in different things. If you open up once, it would not be that difficult anymore.

Also, try not to think about the consequences. We judge ourselves so much that we think everyone would. Try to be positive about yourself. Self care and self love are important.

I'd suggest you not to force yourself too much because it might affect your self esteem but you need to have those few people who are always there for you. Just keep trying. Good luck! :)

@Beayay

Hi Beayay

I think it's really proactive to use professional resources that are available to you for free, as well as asking for advice from peers. Sure people like us with anxiety have a much better chance of "knowing how you feel," but (even with the same diagnosis, and even in the very same situation) people's experiences perceptions and interpretations are still unique and individual and can be completely different. It's also a fact that people spend entire careers learning and working out ways to develop and test new professional therapies and to prove that they can work. In fact, if someone comes up with an idea that works, like self-care and presentation, likelihood is that idea actually came in the first instance from a published professional evidence-based technique. The downside to only asking peers for advice is that they could come up with something that they say works for them, but which can actually make the condition worse: for instance fighting social anxiety by always taking someone with you - Obviously this is a convenient temporary solution, but actually getting into a habit of taking someone with you can risk entrenching and reinforcing the unhelpful belief that you "need" to have someone with you, thus risks leading to you using your friends like a crutch and actually ending up codependent or even agoraphobic. A "quick fix" like this can be quite unhealthy, so if you get advice from someone who isn't a professional, even if their other advice has been helpful, it can be prudent to double check if you can find that advice published somewhere before you use it on yourself: You're going to find advice about self-presentation and self care published widely, but you're never going to find any professional advice telling you to 'get over' social phobia by always taking someone with you.

It's important to know that out of all the types of mental health issues, research actually supports that anxiety (and in particular social anxiety) actually has the best chance of responding to professional psychological therapy techniques. It can be a really hard slog, but social anxiety actually can be overcome, if you take your time and give yourself encouragement and understanding.

One good thing to remember about being stuck with "self-help" instead of "real" therapy is that, whatever mental health or emotional issue that you're facing, whether or not you have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of professional therapy, the actual healing that goes on is always inside your own head. . . all that "real" therapists do, for the most part, is teach you to monitor your own mood, teach you to challenge your own thoughts and replace any thoughts and beliefs that turn out to be unhelpful with more helpful thoughts; teach you to interpret your own body signals, teach you to manage your own reactions and teach you to calm yourself down if you experience freeze, fight or flight symptoms like racing pulse, sweaty palms, fast shallow breathing etc.

New ideas always involve a bit of time between understanding and absorbing and making into your own ideas. With self help, if you're reading through a section and find it a bit confronting, giving yourself permission to take a break is a great idea: reading stuff that is personal and involves changing attitudes is hard work. Of course, having a 7 Cups chat if you reach a difficult spot in self-help training can help (even if that training is not 7 Cups training) - if you're doing the 7 Cups training, the handy thing is that you can check whether your listener has done the same training and therefore will "be on the same page" before you even start a chat. With self-help i's a good idea to always go through things a few times - it's really easy to skim over something that is really important. There are a lot of "der" moments, too, with psychology techniques, where you think - "Of course I know that!" : that is because you're human, and psychology is about the human mind, and you've definitely already got one of those. Also, don't be discouraged if you've realised that there is a new thought you've decided you should be having and it doesn't happen, just because you've learned it and know that it's logical: techniques for healing anxiety are like learning any skill, like driving or swimming or writing - it doesn't happen straight away, and you need to practise to improve, and just like them you often you need to drive quite a lot of miles, swim quite a lot of laps and write quite a few letters before a psychology recovery skill (especially helpful thinking) becomes automatic. Expect a technique you try to take at least a few weeks to have an effect, just like any diet or exercise

If "real" therapists are professional, they are compelled by the insititutions that give them their licenses to use "empirical" techniques - they promise to use techniques that have been proven to work in published and peer-approved research, not just techniques they've made up or tried on themselves or patients as if people are guinea pigs.

I wanted to make sure you know that there actually are both an anxiety course and a social anxiety course with videos and illustrations and links, right here at 7 Cups, at https://www.7cups.com/anxiety-help/ and https://www.7cups.com/social-anxiety/. So many people are here for years and don't realise they're there. The techniques that are described in these guides are all empirical techniques - they are worth trying, and most importantly they are all safe. Self-help psychology techniques are about finding out for yourself which ones work for you, personally. Just because a technique is empirical, doesn't mean it will work for everyone - a good idea is to give all of them a good try, and 'a good try' means giving them for a few weeks for an effect to kick in, so self-help needs a fair bit of patience. Just like trying on clothes though, some will fit better for some people than others, so never be discouraged if they don't work. For example, if one relaxation technique doesn't work personally for you - there are literally dozens of others.

You don't need to remember these 7 Cups links - they are always there if you go to your "my path" tag, and then scroll down to self-help guides, and you can access them from free membership accounts. It's certainly a good idea to do the anxiety self-help guide first and then do the social anxiety one afterward. (For starters, that's going to make you feel like an expert, when you get to parts of the social anxiety course that have already been mentioned in your first course)

Another good thing about self-help to treat social anxiety is that your first and most important skill to learn is nice and comfortable. It's how to relax, and calm down your symptoms (or "manage reactions") - and that can be pretty enjoyable stuff to learn, especially in your own study space, away from any social situations that might trigger your anxiety, when you are are already feeling reasonably safe. This step is about finding and getting proficient at using (more than one) of your own individually-tailored "calm down" buttons - whether that's imagery - your own "happy place", like Adam Sandler in that golf movie, "Happy Gilmore"; or whether it's controlling how slowly you breathe out (rather than how deeply you breathe in, which is a mistake that many people can make); or other techniques like EMDR (looking fast from left to right); listening to particular calming sounds; aromatherapy (e.g. bachs resue remedy); grounding techniques and icons etc, or whatever else you find that works for you. To succeed, you really want to get a handle on these techniques, which can all help manage anxiety reactions, and the trick with self-therapy is to know that you are the one that needs to remind yourself to be patient and get the relaxation techniques down and not skim over the top of them. The reason that you need to learn calm-down techniques is that they're not just what you'll use if you feel distressed: they're what you can use as a regular maintenance, to keep you everyday anxiety levels lower . . . before any event or situation happens that might trigger anxiety.

Any successful anxiety self-therapy is eventually (step by step) going to lead to asking you to imagine and then to asking you to expose yourself to real examples of whatever makes you anxious (for instance, therapy for fear of flying in airplanes usually ends up with someone taking an airplane flight), so skills that you learn to calm down your body's reactions to that stimulus are crucial to this being successful: the idea is that if you can be in the situation that causes your anxiety enough times without anything bad happening, and while being able to deal with any reactions that your body comes up with, that your body's auto-anxiety reaction will eventually recondition itself. The good news is that, nowadays, there actually are virtual reality environments that you can access online - so that you can actually put an extra step in-between imagining and actually experiencing anxiety-triggering situations and exposing yourself to the virtual environments bit-by-bit before trying the same thing for real. "Bit by bit" is key here, and the hard part of self-help here is having the patience to make "baby steps" and the presence of mind to recognise that even a few minutes in an uncomfortable situation is an acheivement and congratulate yourself for that, and for every time you successfully manage to calm yourself down.

Before that step, "real" therapy would also probably be teaching you to self-monitor - to "STOPP" and pay attention when you feel anxious, or when you experience physical symptoms of anxiety - (the steps of "STOPP" monitoring are at https://www.get.gg/docs/STOPPworksheet.pdf and explained in more detail at https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/stopp.htm: Remember, for the "Take a breath" step, breathing out slowly is the vital part, and much more important than how deeply you breathe in - if you're counting with your breaths, try adding one extra count for the out-breath). A "real" therapist would also take this monitoring skill one step further, and teach you how to examine the thoughts that you "Observe", and make sure that that you know about and challenge any common unhelpful thoughts (these are covered in the 7 Cups anxiety short course. . . in the "self-help guides" on your "my path" tab). Even further, a "real" therapist would also make sure that you can think of more helpful replacement thoughts, if you discover that you are thinking unhelpful thoughts, and maybe even recommend that you keep a thought journal for a while, even if they don't ever see it. The "real therapist would also make sure that you know that these unhelpful thoughts are going to come up now and then, just like rain clouds, so not to be angry at yourself if they pop up. Instead of having you suppress unhelpful thoughts, a "real" therapist would encourage you to accept them and realise that you can be separate from your thoughts and beliefs: and maybe teach you to imagine watching them crossing the sky above you like clouds, or imagine them passing underneath you like railway carriages. (This technique is taught in the "acceptance and commitment" self-help guide on your my path tag)
The most common unhelpful belief in social anxiety is that experiencing symptoms of anxiety means that you are about to have a panic attack. That's why it's important that the first step in beating this issue is to have your self-calming reaction-management techniques learned and practised really well, even before you ever start imagining "taking yourself to the edge" or "leaving your comfort zone": that way you'll be able to prove to yourself that this belief is not true, by witnessing symptoms go away when you use your techniques to manage these symptoms. You can even practise and then test your favourite self-calming techniques on yourself in a situation when your symptoms are caused by nothing to do with social anxiety, for instance when you cause your heart to beat a bit faster and your breathing to become a bit shallow and faster by running up and down some stairs or doing some other aerobic exercise in your home, after you've already practised a technique for a few weeks and you're pretty sure you've got it down. . . remember to have an aid lined up before you raise your heartbeat - like for example the self-care graphic on https://www.7cups.com/img/exercises/breathing.gif or one of the mindfulness exercises on your "my path" tab, or the progressive relaxation video from the anxiety course.

In summary, the best "real" therapist you can have is going to be yourself, whether or not you have a load of money to pay the best professionals in the world or are lucky enough to have decent health insurance: it's your own work learning the skills professionals teach you, that will make the difference. In the meantime, that doesn't mean that you don't deserve relief if things get really hard to deal with: your GP can prescribe anti-depressants, like seratonin re-uptake inhibitors, which can actually also have an effect on anxiety (and which you need to allow a few weeks to take effect) and can even prescribe anti-anxiety medication like tranquilisers, if things get nasty in the meantime (but tranquilisers are best used short-term, like sleeping pills, because they are addictive - the body gets used to them and you need to take more and more to get the same effect, until the effect eventually disappears).

It's also good to know that diet is important to anxiety - caffeine and guarana are best avoided or limited and chamomile tea is a good replacement. Foods to avoid or limit are gluten, corn, soy, sugar, and dairy and the recommended foods are kale, eggs, spinach, leeks, nut-butter, honey, chicken, turkey, kimchi, nut-butter, cheese, avocado, ginger, basil, mint, garlic, turmeric, probiotics and a magnesium supplement. Foods which are sources of serotonin include tomato; banana; pineapple; plum and kiwi, and for melatonin, fenugreek seeds; white and black mustard and wolberry seeds. Besides bach's rescue remedy, aromas which are used to treat anxiety include lemon (C. lemon), bergamot (C. bergamia), lime (C. aurantifolia), mandarin (C. nobilis) and orange (C. aurantium), as well as lavendar. Taking or smelling peppermint oil can also be helpful, especially if your anxiety causes stomach upset or headaches.

I really hope something above is helpful for you (and that you double-check that you can find an idea published somewhere else besides from me or anyone else before you use it on yourself): this link below also has extra specific self-help information for social anxiety that might also be useful, and which is often used by "real" therapists as training aids.

https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-AfterYourself/Social-Anxiety

I'd really love to hear from you what you think about this - if you like this link, please message or post and let me know and I'll let you know some more links that also sometimes work for me when I'm anxious. I'd also love to hear back if you have any links that you find that work for you.

Have a great day.