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Editor's note: social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, is an anxiety neurosis with a high incidence in adolescence and adulthood. In this article, the author introduces the definition, performance and causes of social anxiety disorder, and shares 10 useful suggestions to overcome social anxiety, hoping to be useful to you. This is the last article in the series, which mainly shares the last five practical suggestions to overcome social anxiety.
Extended reading: "social phobia": definition, manifestation and causes
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6. Avoid wrong coping strategies, such as alcoholism
Overall, coping with social anxiety by mistake is a bad idea in itself.
Specifically, there are two main problems in the error response strategy:
Treat the symptoms but not the root causes. When you spend all your time and energy dealing with anxiety by mistake, you can't spend all your time and energy dealing with the root causes of anxiety.
In the long run, treating the symptoms rather than the root causes will only make the symptoms more serious. When you try to deal with or avoid anxiety through wrong coping, you are telling your brain that feeling bad is a bad thing. This means that when you face worry and anxiety in the future, you may become more worried and anxious, forming a vicious circle of anxiety growth. In this regard, the solution is to show self sympathy and self acceptance, rather than regard it as a bad thing and a problem to be solved.
So, whether it's going to a place that makes you happy, or sitting down for a few vodka, the whole wrong attitude towards social anxiety will only self defeating in the end.
It is also worth mentioning that the most common way to deal with social anxiety is to drink alcohol.
The problem is that even if drinking makes you feel better right now, and even after drinking, you may no longer be afraid of socializing, it will only undermine your confidence in the long run. The main reason is that alcohol makes your brain think that you can only participate in social activities that make you feel uncomfortable when you drink too much.
If you want to overcome social anxiety for a long time, the problem is not that you will never feel anxious again; It's about building confidence so that you can continue to do important things even when you feel anxious.
If you use alcohol to relieve your worries as soon as you encounter problems, you may only "worry more", and you may never be able to build self-confidence.
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7. Set (and stick to) more reasonable boundaries
Many social anxieties stem from harmful boundaries.
Give a few simple examples:
If you are afraid to refuse certain tasks or projects at work, you may often feel exhausted. This feeling of being overwhelmed, after you compare with your colleagues, can easily make you feel inferior and feel that you are not good enough, which will cause you to feel anxious about the people around you at work.
You are good at setting boundaries with your mother-in-law, but she will always kidnap you morally in various ways. Because you confuse feeling guilty with true guilt (I call this phenomenon "false guilt"), you finally give up this boundary. In this way, whenever you communicate with her (or just think of communicating with her), you begin to worry about whether she will respect your boundaries and whether you will succumb to her moral kidnapping again. Now, when you associate so many worries and difficulties with your mother-in-law, whenever you are around her or decide whether to communicate with her, if you feel social anxiety, do you think it's unexpected?
In any case, one of the most practical ways to start overcoming social anxiety is to pay more attention to your life to see if you have not established appropriate boundaries, or if you have set boundaries but have not strictly implemented them.
Once you have identified these aspects, you can start to find out what a more reasonable boundary will look like, how you should set such a boundary, and make a clear plan for yourself to know how to stick to this boundary when you inevitably encounter resistance.
In the final analysis, the emergence of social anxiety is still because you are not confident enough. If you don't set reasonable boundaries for the people around you, or don't implement the reasonable boundaries you set, it's hard for you to feel confident.
Source: unsplash com @Duy Pham
8. Spend time with people who appreciate you
For some reason, people with social anxiety tend to spend a lot of time with people they don't like.
For example:
You don't like your colleagues, but the idea in your mind is that you must embrace the process of getting along with them.
As a result, you often fall into a dilemma, tell yourself you should go to social activities you don't actually want to go, then feel anxious about it, and then scold yourself severely because you don't want to go.
Then, when you go out with these people to participate in a pastime, you don't actually enjoy it. The atmosphere soon becomes embarrassing and you start to feel anxious. Then you criticize yourself for feeling anxious and blame the whole thing on your social anxiety.
It's worth noting that overcoming social anxiety doesn't mean you can miraculously begin to enjoy being with everyone on earth. It's perfectly normal if you just don't like to get together with some people, or try to avoid contact with them.
Just because you want to overcome social anxiety doesn't mean you have to constantly force yourself to spend time on exhausting social activities.
In fact, the opposite is often true: refusing to allow yourself to spend time with someone is actually very helpful. You can use this time to get along with people you really like and people who really appreciate you.
The advantage of this is that it allows you to see that you have more than just your social anxiety. When you get direct feedback from others and know that even if you have social anxiety, they like you and like to spend time with you, it will continuously improve your self-esteem and make you more confident.
In this context, if you want to put aside social anxiety and participate in some social activities that are important to you, you are also more likely to succeed.
Just because always avoiding situations that cause social anxiety can make your social anxiety worse doesn't mean you should always spend time with people you don't like.
Leave yourself a way to live. Spend more time with people you get along with, stop insisting that you need to be a social butterfly, appear frequently in all kinds of social occasions, and build social relationships with everyone.
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9. Clarify personal values
An unfortunate result of a long-term struggle with social anxiety is that decisions in your life will be driven more and more by what you don't like (especially social anxiety), rather than what you want.
Give a few simple examples:
For example, if you have a new job opportunity, you may overemphasize the anxiety related aspects of the job (for example, you need to attend many meetings) and ignore other factors (for example, whether it will bring you interesting growth opportunities). So you decide to reject this potentially promising job opportunity because all you care about is that you don't want to feel too much social anxiety.
You're thinking about inviting someone on a date. But because the other person looks a little "unworthy", you're thinking that a first date can bring you great anxiety. So you didn't invite each other out on a date. You simply give up a potentially exciting and productive relationship because you tend to avoid anxiety.
The problem here is that although it feels good to avoid anxiety and discomfort in the short term, in the long term, this escape based lifestyle is a tragedy. It will make you miss what can make life more valuable: adventure, growth, learning, interpersonal relationships, community development, etc.
Fortunately, we can overcome social anxiety in specific ways. As mentioned many times before, the real trick to overcoming any anxiety, including social anxiety, is to build confidence instead of avoiding anxiety.
Having confidence doesn't mean you'll never feel anxious or afraid again. Confidence is the belief that you can accomplish important things even when you are afraid.
Although you feel scared, the more you dare to accomplish something scary and important, the easier it will be for you to accomplish it in the future. Constantly completing these things, you are also telling your brain that you can complete these things.
Having said that, it is very difficult to show confidence in the face of fear, especially in the beginning.
In this regard, you can improve your motivation and willingness to show confidence by clarifying the personal values behind your actions.
For example, even if you are afraid, under which circumstances are you more likely to invite someone out on a date? Spend all your time worrying about what's going to go wrong in the dating process, or spend time specifically imagining the various interesting, exciting, fun and even enjoyable aspects of the date?
The answer is obvious, the second case!
You need to realize that what we fear often runs counter to our personal values. If you want to increase the chance that values "prevail", you can try to clarify values - clarify the problem, color it, and make it vivid and concrete.
For example, if you want to start a long-term relationship with someone who is interesting and adventurous, you are more likely to overcome your fear and anxiety by clarifying and clarifying such values.
Therefore, when you have doubts, spend less time trying to reverse your anxiety and more time clarifying personal values that can eventually overcome anxiety.
Source: unsplash com @Lindsay Henwood
10. Adopt step-by-step strategies to overcome social anxiety
It is worth noting that overcoming social anxiety habits that are difficult to correct will not be achieved overnight.
Unfortunately, however, many people are very passionate at the beginning of their journey to overcome social anxiety, but after encountering one or two obstacles, they become frustrated and then give up.
There are two main reasons for this:
Unrealistic expectations. If you expect to save yourself from social anxiety in about seven days, you will inevitably feel depressed, disappointed and even self critical. If you really want to overcome social anxiety, time should be measured at least in months or years, not in days.
Rely too much on motivation. In the process of overcoming social anxiety, it is icing on the cake to get the motivation and motivation of others, but you need to realize that the initial motivation may not be maintained all the time. This means that if your plan to overcome social anxiety relies too much on motivation or willpower, you are likely to fail.
I think the solution to these two problems is that you should adopt a step-by-step attitude and methods to overcome social anxiety. By "step by step", I mean a baby like pace.
For example, after reading this article, you will at least have many good ideas and strategies, and want to overcome social anxiety through practice immediately. But don't try all the strategies at once!
Instead, choose one and focus on it. Don't consider trying the next strategy until you see progress and feel natural.
Another way to overcome social anxiety step by step is to focus on only one aspect of social anxiety at a time.
For example, in the beginning, you can focus on social anxiety at work. It's best to go deeper and focus on the social anxiety you feel when you meet at work.
Once you start to see your progress and build up your self-confidence, you can continue to focus on other situations that make you anxious.
When getting rid of bad habits, you should focus on "quality", not "quantity".
Overcoming social anxiety little by little every day is better than solving social anxiety at one time, which will inevitably disappoint you and eventually plunge you into more serious social anxiety.
Write at the end
In short, social anxiety is actually a persistent and excessive fear of caring too much about what others think of you.
As for how to overcome social anxiety, the most important difference to remember is that what initially caused your social anxiety is not necessarily what kept it going.
This means that in order to effectively overcome social anxiety, you need to identify which habits are inducing your anxiety and even increasing your anxiety. Then, all you need to do is to get rid of these habits in effective ways.
To make a simple summary, in order to really overcome social anxiety, you can try the following ten practical suggestions:
1. Find out what triggers your social anxiety
2. Control your worrying habits
3. Develop self compassion for your social anxiety
4. Talk more about your social anxiety
5. Adjust excessive negative self dialogue
6. Avoid wrong coping strategies, such as alcoholism
7. Set (and stick to) more reasonable boundaries
8. Spend time with people who appreciate you
9. Clarify personal values
10. Adopt step-by-step strategies to overcome social anxiety
Extended reading:
"Social phobia": 10 practical suggestions for overcoming social phobia (Part I)
Translator: Junyi
