Social Anxiety

Social Anxiety is the mind’s learned response — it associates being in public with being dangerous. When around other people, the sympathetic nervous response system creates an adrenaline response that makes the mind and body feel like it’s in danger. As a result, people get sweaty, diaphoretic, and their blood pressure rises. Because of the adrenaline, the rate of thoughts increases, confusing the brain. The brain starts thinking in absolutes and treats hypotheticals as reality. When hypotheticals become reality, all the hypothetical judgment that people can imagine feels like reality and leads to more anxiety. This is the cycle of social anxiety.

People that are bullied often have social anxiety. Bullying is a bad experience because people suffer a lot of physical and/or emotional abuse and they are often surrounded by onlookers or witnesses.

As a result, the victims’ mind learns to detect whenever there are a lot of people around so that their survival instincts kick in. And the mind also learns that the only way to be safe is to not be around other people. This mind learns to do this to protect itself from being bullied. It’s important to understand and not blame the mind for the discomfort of anxiety because it is doing its best to care for people’s safety.

Dealing with Social Anxiety

1. Cultivate the observant self to acknowledge when the anxiety is reacting.
2. Cultivate a meditative technique/breathing exercise
3. To control your adrenaline and break out of the cycle of social anxiety, slow down your exhalation.

Tip

The meditative technique for this is for three breaths, inhale for 3 seconds, and focus on your exhalation for 7 seconds.

Neuroscience: This increases your carbon dioxide levels and decreases your oxygen levels, which activates your vagus nerve and parasympathetic nerve. The vagus nerve slows down the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and shuts down the adrenaline response. The half-life of adrenaline is one to five minutes, so you will eventually think more clearly.

Get to the root of your social anxiety. When did you learn that being seen means being in danger? If you can get to the root of it, you can digest the samskaras or unlearn the lesson.

You cannot practice being less socially awkward. All you can practice is being socially awkward. If you practice being socially awkward for long enough, then over time you will become less socially awkward. You cannot skip the socially awkward phase. Its a part of the process.

Additionally, you may not actually be socially awkward, you may just FEEL socially awkward. If you talk to people who have social anxiety, their perception of how they’re doing socially is far worse than how other people think they’re doing. Over time, the social awkwardness will decrease.

Managing Conversations with Social Anxiety

Sometimes, you might worry about struggling to know when to respond, or be afraid of being annoying. Although it is good to be considerate in conversations and interactions, these worries can often come from a belief that you are not worth getting to know or interact with. As a result, when you find the courage to reach out, the belief puts discouraging thoughts in your head, prevents you from connecting, and creates a stronger sense of being boring. This belief can also affect your preexisting relationships by pushing them away because of your fear of having your friends see your lack of value and reject you. Following this line of thinking, there is no point in making and keeping friends because it will only lead to more rejection and ghosting. And even if your friends try to convince you out of this thinking or even if you fight with those feelings of worthlessness, you will continue to create more feelings and create more rationalizations for your belief.

However, to work on these feelings, you need to see that you have a belief or even a samskara of being boring or worthless. Rather than resolving the byproduct of the belief or samskara, you can resolve the samskara watch as all your insecurities slowly fade away because it is the root of the problem.

1. Like all emotions, you need to acknowledge and understand where your emotions and belief comes from. Where did you learn that you are not valuable? Why are other people more valuable than you? Why are you less than other people?
2. After finding and acknowledge these feelings, you begin to let go of and have to wait these feelings go. And each time you do not give in to these feelings of worthlessness, the more the belief weakness.

References and Related Content

1. How Do You Deal with Social Anxiety?
2. Therapist Reacts: “I am too boring for other people.”
3. How to Stop Ruminating and Overcome Social Anxiety