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Social anxiety is more than just shyness or fear. Social anxiety begins with a fear of being judged negatively and results in self-consciousness and avoidance of social situations. Many people with social anxiety disorder often avoid situations which make them feel as though others will notice their anxiety and they will become humiliated. Social anxiety disorder leaves a high risk for substance abuse and depression due to attempts at trying to self-medicate. If you are experiencing social anxiety or feel as though you may have social anxiety and would like to seek treatment, visit your primary care physician for more options. You may also take the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) to assess the way social phobia may be affecting your life.
Managing Your Social Anxiety
i) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
One of the most important things you can do is work with a therapist. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has proven to be an effective alternative to drug therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapists focus on your behavior and what you are thinking to change negative thoughts into positive thoughts, and negative behavior into positive behavior.
The most common behavior problem for people with social anxiety is avoidance. Many will avoid situations in which their anxiety is provoked. Working with a CBT helps the individual approach social situations to realize that nothing bad is going to happen, this reduces anxious feelings. It also creates a personality for the person to face her fears and realize that her fears do not control her.
Ii) Create a Hierarchy of Fear
This is another way to face your fears and take back control of your life. Creating a hierarchy of fears is a technique that allows you to recognize the things that give you anxiety. It works by creating a list of all the things that give you anxiety and ranking them in order of least anxiety provoking to most anxiety provoking. Then, beginning with the least anxiety-provoking occasion or behavior, you expose yourself to it. As you master each item on your list, you move up the ?ladder? until you can participate in the most anxiety provoking occasion or behavior without anxiety symptoms.
Eliminate Safety Behaviors
Many people with social anxiety have created safety behaviors that attempt to suppress their anxious feelings and create less humiliation. These types of behaviors vary from complete avoidance of situations, avoidance of eye contact, and extreme use of drugs and alcohol to conversation rehearsal and fast-talking. These behaviors are used to eliminate the anxiety that occurs from everyday situations which normally cause extreme stress in individuals with social anxiety disorder. The belief here is that these behaviors will ?save? the individual. The problem with these behaviors is that they become a mechanism and a lifestyle in which a person believes the only way to get through certain situations is by performing the behavior.
Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation is a popular technique for reducing the feelings of anxiety, stress and other tensions. Meditation is an amazing way to calm down, focus your mind, and center your thoughts. Practicing breathing techniques can help relax your mind and body, and stop those thoughts that are racing and raising your anxiety. Meditation is not as complicated as it sounds. There are plenty of guided meditation video clips and audio across the internet. It is important when meditating to do so in a quiet place, away from distractions, while keeping your eyes closed to further block out any disturbances. You can notice a tremendous difference in your mental health through as little as 10 minutes of meditation a day.
Mindfulness is the practice of being aware and doing nothing about it, paying attention on purpose, and being in the present moment non-judgmentally. This means feeling your anxiety and not shutting it off. It is paying attention to every thought, emotion, and sensation your body feels. It takes practice but it is not impossible. Mindfulness allows your body to build emotional tolerance as well as allows you to choose your reaction. Permitting uncomfortable feelings to come and then choosing how to deal with them gives you power over anxiety and not anxiety power of you.
Practice Self-Love and Self-Acceptance
Humiliation plays a leading role in social anxiety, and safety behaviors are sometimes used to try to eliminate humiliating experiences. Being yourself and accepting who you are is a sure way to manage the self-esteem aspect of social anxiety. It is safe to say that negative self-esteem can stir feelings of anxiety in social situations. If you don?t think highly of yourself you won?t expect others to either.
Low self-esteem may also cause you to believe any negative thoughts accompanied with your anxiety. The best way to get rid of these negative thoughts and feelings about yourself is to change them into positive ones! Embrace the things that make you unique, the good and the bad. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses but don?t let them interfere with how valuable or worthwhile you see yourself. Explore the parts of yourself that you are not able to accept, and pass no judgement on yourself. You are your hardest critic so it is important to be kind to yourself and love yourself, flaws and all.
This workbook aims to help you to:
If you have ticked a number of these boxes, you may be experiencing symptoms of social anxiety. However don?t be alarmed, this is very common and there are things you can do to help. You will find some useful strategies in this workbook.
Referenced- How To Overcome Shyness: The Ultimate 3 Step Guide - Moldite
Socially anxious people often feel under the spotlight and believe that everyone is thinking badly of them. They often hold beliefs that they are no good socially, are boring, and that they have nothing interesting to contribute. After social events, they tend to pick out parts that they believe went poorly and ?beat themselves up? over them.
To cope with social anxiety, people tend to avoid social situations if possible (e.g. Pubs, can noteens, queues etc). If they can?t avoid them, they tend to try and stay in the background and attract as little attention to themselves as possible (e.g. Say very little).
Unhelpful thoughts also typically play a damaging role just prior to people entering social environments as they predict they will perform poorly (e.g. I?ll have nothing to say). Similarly, unhelpful thoughts influence people during social situations (e.g. I?m making a fool of myself), as they assume they are not coming across well. To make matters worse, after social situations, people often analyse their performance and assume they have performed poorly. When considering these factors, it is easy to see how unhelpful thoughts stop people overcoming their social anxiety.
This is because by avoiding social situations, people stop themselves having positive experiences that could disprove some of their unhelpful thoughts. Furthermore, the longer someone avoids a social situation, the more daunting it becomes and it is increasingly difficult to face.
A final point worth noting is that ?safety behaviours? can result in what is known as self fulfilling prophecies. For example, by staying quiet in social situations, people may come across as ?distant? and others may respond by making less of an effort. As a result, their beliefs that they can?t mix well remain in place.
The following section will help you begin to recognise if you are thinking about things in an unhelpful or unrealistic way, and discuss how you can start to make changes to this. By doing so, you can learn to see things in a more realistic light which can help to reduce your social anxiety. You might have unhelpful thoughts about all kinds of things. Here are some examples:
Once you have asked yourself these questions, you should read through your answers. Try to come up with a more balanced or rational view. For example:
Although we do this in the hope being reassured that we are not visibly anxious, this strategy actually just makes things much worse. This is because we tend to overestimate how visible our anxiety is and this of course makes us feel even more self conscious. Also, by focusing on ourselves, we are prevented from fully concentrating on the conversations around us. This naturally makes it more difficult to join in properly and we usually end up interacting less well than we could. This typically strengthens our beliefs that we are no good in such situations. The reality is that anxiety is a lot less visible than we think. Often we have no idea if someone is anxious or not and it can help to remember this.
Similarly, when we feel socially anxious, we tend to spend time monitoring how well we are performing during social interactions. This too prevents us from paying proper attention to the conversations we are engaged in. For example, we may spend time trying to figure out if our voice sounds shaky, or go over and over the things we have said in our minds. Again, by doing so, we end up finding it hard to follow conversations which likely makes us perform worse. Given all of this, it is helpful to try to remove this tendency to focus on ourselves. Below you will find tips designed to help you during social interactions:
Thank you
all the Best
TRY THESE NATURAL STEPS IF IT DIDN'T WORKED THEN GO FOR FACE TO FACE COUNSELLING PROCESS.
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