Anxiety

Overcoming Social Anxiety

By  | 

Overcoming social anxiety is a tough road if you structure your life to avoid the very situations, social encounters, that will help you achieve your end. Repeated exposure to the source of an irrational fear tends to make this fear dissipate because you come to realize that you don’t suffer any lasting consequences like you imagined you would.

If you have social anxiety, rather than dulling your senses with drugs or alcohol, the first thing you can do is determine whether you are catastrophizing, imagining the worst possible scenarios and believing one of them will come to pass. By making a mental list of what these scenarios are, ideas that might be flitting at the edge of your conscious awareness in half-formed thoughts and fleeting images, you might come to see that some imagined outcomes are frankly outrageous or highly unlikely, while the ones that are real possibilities aren’t all that bad and only involve feeling embarrassed.

But the logical knowledge that no lasting harm will come to you in a social setting might not do much for that aching feeling in your stomach, or for all the other symptoms of social anxiety, when push comes to shove and you have to decide whether to engage. To overcome you’ve got to pass through the fire, facing your fear by putting yourself in the social situations you have been trying to avoid. Just make sure you keep in the back of your mind that humiliation and rejection are not death.

You can’t necessarily change the way you feel overnight. You can’t just magically make your social anxiety go away. But you do get to decide if you’re going to let it hold you back from taking risks in social settings. You don’t have to feel completely confident and comfortable to reach beyond yourself, you just have to reach beyond yourself because you want to, in spite of the social anxiety trying to keep you in your bubble.

Related posts:

  1. Understanding Phobias Phobias are irrational, debilitating fears of objects like spiders, heights, or being stuck in enclosed spaces that really do represent some danger to the continued survival of the human organism but whose dangerous dimensions are blown way out of proportion. It’s interesting that the psychology with the most superficial explanation for phobias, behavioral psychology, has […]...
  2. Sitting With Existential Anxiety Mortality Lurks in the Background Existential anxiety always has mortality, symbolic or real, as its backdrop. The death of a loved one, the rupture or an important relationship, dismissal from a cherished group or occupation, or any other important loss all make painful existential anxiety bubble up into conscious awareness. What most of us don’t […]...
  3. Fear of Death The fear of death grips all of us from time to time and although we resort to all manner of distraction to avoid thinking about it, death anxiety finds a way to bubble to the surface, really affecting the quality of our lives. It’s like a cloud blocking the warm rays of the sun. How […]...
  4. Fear Of Heights If you have a debilitating fear of heights, if your fear has moved past the rational recognition of a real danger and into a phobia, then the very first thing to realize is that your aversion to heights has an evolutionary basis that in fact served your ancestors quite well. Anyone who was careless when […]...
  5. Anxiety Reduction Many people wish for a total cessation of anxiety and believe their lives would be better in its absence. The mental health industry helps propagate this myth with medications and promises that therapy can and should cure it. There is no doubt that existential anxiety can be one of the most painful psychic states, but […]...
  6. Grounding Yourself In The Present Moment To Combat Anxiety When unwanted life events make the future cloudy existential anxiety skyrockets. This anxiety is often funneled into obsessive ruminating around various possible bad outcomes. The imagination runs wild, which reinforces and strengthens the existential anxiety already there, causing a vicious anxiety loop where painful negative feelings are nourished and flourish. The anxiety causes terrifying guesses […]...
  7. Inviting Anxiety Into Our Psychic Living Rooms Diversionary Tactics to Avoid Anxiety Most of us try to deal with our anxiety by doing something, anything, to take our minds off of it. We resort to various diversionary tactics. This might be watching television, reading a book, pacing around, buying something, using drugs or alcohol, socializing, working a lot, or any number of other […]...
  8. Anxiety And Talking Too Much In Social Encounters When most of us think of social anxiety we think of shutting down, we think of talking very little, we think of becoming closed off, shy and unengaged. This is of course a common form anxiety takes but it also manifests on the other end of the spectrum as an almost compulsive need to fill […]...
  9. Overcoming Phobias Phobias and Anxiety All phobias have anxiety as their root. The car (phobia) might look different but the engine (anxiety) is always the same. So regardless of the phobia in question what we’re really dealing with is an anxiety disorder, a disorder that has crystallized around this or that terrifying object or activity. The good […]...
  10. Overcoming Excuses “If you wish to be a writer, write.” – Epictetus When people talk about their unfulfilled dreams and aspirations you are likely to hear a lot of excuses and rationalizations. Some of us become pretty adept at pulling the wool over our own eyes. Unconsciously we search for that plausible explanation that lets us off […]...
  11. Overcoming Loneliness At the superficial level the solution for overcoming loneliness is surrounding yourself with people. We know this doesn’t always work though. You could be standing in the middle of Times Square yet still be the loneliest person in the world. In an existential sense, loneliness is embedded in our Western way of life because we […]...
  12. If You Are Being Made Into The Mascot In Your Social Group If you are being made the mascot in your social group don’t go along with it. The psychology of turning someone into a mascot is maliciousness masked as good natured fun, it’s abuse masked as friendliness. As the mascot, you’re turned into a caricature, you’re robbed of your multi-faceted human dimensions and made one dimensional […]...
  13. Difference Between Fear And Anxiety Understanding the difference between fear and anxiety is an area where Western psychologists, who are usually highly concerned with dysfunction, have let us down. Most people do not have a favorable or accurate view of what anxiety is or the role it plays in human life, and they often confuse fear with anxiety. The standard […]...
  14. Sylvia Plath and Anxiety This article is based on the movie ‘Sylvia’, which is a biography about the life and times of famed American poet Sylvia Plath. All of the events and quotations that I will reference are taken directly from the movie. Most people associate Sylvia Plath with depression. She killed herself when she was only thirty-two by […]...
  15. Catastrophizing And Anxiety Catastrophizing is a faulty thinking pattern where various worst case scenarios are imagined and then treated as if they were a foregone conclusion. What this does is force people into a mode of being where those far off, unlikely outcomes have, as far as the psyche is concerned, already occurred. Most of those caught in […]...
  16. Psychic Energy And Playing A Role In Social Settings Jung’s conceptualization of introversion and extroversion had less to do with being shy or being outgoing as it had to do with the way in which we derive our psychic energy. The extrovert derives psychic energy from social engagement while the introvert derives psychic energy from solitude. This is not to say that the extrovert […]...
  17. Phobias and Anxiety When a phobia becomes socially crippling many decide they have had enough and decide to get professional help. As we will show in this article, therapists often make the monumental mistake of focusing entirely on eradicating the phobia without attending to the underlying existential issues that are responsible for its creation. Success rates are usually […]...
  18. Endings and Anxiety Mortality Lurks in the Background Many of us have a really hard time with endings. Why? Because they remind us, consciously or unconsciously, of our mortality. Death is what all endings have in common. Even in those many endings where physical death isn’t imminent symbolic death still is. The prospect of symbolic death cues off […]...
  19. Anxiety Is Your Friend A negative reinforcement isn’t necessarily bad for you, although it is aversive to you in the moment, and a positive reinforcement isn’t necessarily good for you, although it is desirable to you in the moment. For example, if you touch a hot stove you’re going to get burned. That aversive is a negative reinforcement that […]...
  20. Overcoming All Or Nothing Thinking We in the West get stuck in binary ways of thinking. Rather than embracing the wholeness of things we unconsciously seek to dissect them and then group them in ‘this or that’ categories. Our way of seeing the world has its strengths, science is all the proof we need of that, but it can also […]...
Related Items