Simple Tips To Help With Social Anxiety

After having social anxiety and using self help methods for some time now, I have discovered that the reason I kept experiencing social anxiety is because I kept thinking about it. Constantly labelling myself as someone who has social anxiety, and being lost in my head much of the time. Now of course this may not be true for many people because I know people have social anxiety to varying degrees but for me this was the case. Looking back I feel a little silly not knowing anything about social anxiety or that there was such a thing because of the fact that I was a tour guide for several years taking groups of people around sightseeing and showing off my country to them, who would have thought?

I spent a lot of time lost in my head, wondering what people thought of me, was I being judged? Of course it wasn’t true but this is something that sufferers of social anxiety do. And this is something that causes social anxiety. You have to build up to a feeling of “who cares what people think”, and this takes time. Sometimes many months of self help using various tools and techniques, often the very tools and techniques I share with you here.

Enter presence. What do I mean by presence and why is this important? Simply put it means to come out of your head, to stop thinking all the time and be here in the now. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are. This is being present, and learning about how to become present has really helped me move forward with my life and enjoy it again. It also makes sense because the flow of the universe is in the present moment, it’s not in the past or the future, and so, projecting your thoughts to some future moment is not really helping you in your quest to be calm and relaxed and happy again.

I was thinking the other day about a pearl of wisdom I received years ago whilst reading a book and it was talking about using your imagination if you are ever in a stressful situation. So for example, if you ever go to a job interview and you get extremely nervous; imagine the person you’re going to be speaking to with no clothes on. I have done this MANY times and it has actually helped. Because our brain can’t tell the difference between what is imaginary or real, after a while it actually re-wires the brain. You might find yourself in 3-6 months from now in a stressful situation and because you have re-wired your brain by repetitively sending electrical signals to say “this person is naked before you”, you actually find yourself reacting different to how you would if a person wasn’t naked. So instead of being nervous, sweating and absolutely dreading the moment for the past several weeks, you begin to no longer fret. The up and coming doom and gloom of a social situation, becomes the opportunity to see naked people while you are still fully dressed and you begin to look forward to it.

Of course you don’t always have to picture the person naked but using the power of visualizing actually does work. I’m pretty sure cognitive behavioural therapy is based around this premises. When you’re not afraid of people and you begin to slowly but surely look forward to social occasions, you are able to start feeling confident again. When you feel confident about yourself and are comfortable in your own skin in front of others you start to look people in the eye when they’re talking to you and can then start to read body language of other people.

For some kids growing up with social anxiety or perhaps extremely shy personalities like a couple of my friends when we were perhaps 10 years old, I noticed one of my friends not very good at reading people. He couldn’t tell if someone was angry and often times would misread facial expressions. He suffered from some kind of social anxiety back then but is totally fine now and living a happy life with plenty of socializing. We spoke about this several years ago and he said it took him a while to get things right. He took an online class on ‘how to read body language’ and improved his life. It helped him get in touch with himself too and helped him get to know his own feelings and start reading how he felt first, if that makes sense. So just goes to show where there’s a will there is a way.

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