SUMMARY
In this post, I’m sharing a quick social anxiety tip to tell you to stop beating yourself up about social anxiety…
Here are some things you’ll learn:
- How it’s not only the social anxiety itself that you’re dealing with, but your treatment towards yourself for having it
- How this actually only makes the problem worse, and
- What to do instead to overcome social anxiety
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Sebastiaan: Hey, this is Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solutions.com. I am a former social anxiety disorder sufferer and a social confidence coach. I help people to go from social anxiety to social ease, so you can be relaxed and at ease in social situations, have a good time, connect with people and all of that stuff.
I’ve been doing that for a long time. I had to overcome my own social anxiety and I’ve been coaching socially anxious clients for the past nine years, only working with socially anxious clients. If you don’t see patterns with a setup like that then you’re pretty stupid.
There is a pattern that I want to talk about today and that pattern is this.
When you get anxious, that’s an event that happens. You’re still dealing with a particular problem; your brain is perceiving a threat. It activates the fight flight freeze response which is your biological built-in response to danger, so the body gets activated, blood rushes away to your outer limbs, hormones get released into your bloodstream, pupils dilate scanning for danger.
Your whole body is prepared to deal with the danger it perceives – That’s really difficult. That’s really hard to deal with. It’s not pleasant, I know.
However, we actually make it worse by how we talk to ourselves and how we feel and the rules that we’ve made up about what it means that you have this experience.
In other words we’re beating ourselves up when we get anxious and that makes your anxiety many, many times worse. And it prevents you from being able to solve it because you’re too busy with beating yourself up in order to come to terms with the problem that you have, to look at “Well, why is my brain perceiving a threat in the first place?”
One of my colleagues Steve Wells psychologists in Perth, Western Australia he says the feelings about your social anxiety… He doesn’t say social anxiety because this kind of is across the globe with big problems in general. We have feelings about it and we have judgments about our problems and these lock the problem in place, he says it puts a lid on it which I think is a great metaphor.
When you are in a social situation and you get anxious, you have all sorts inner dialogue about it but then social situation is over and you go home.
If you ever found yourself like ruminating over it, beating yourself up about it “Why did I say that? Why am I such a loser? I shouldn’t have said that. What does he think of me now? I probably ruined it with that person. Oh, my God I came across like such an idiot. Why am I having these feelings that shouldn’t be anxious? What’s wrong with me for being so anxious? Oh, my God what’s going to happen the next time I run into this person? Blah blah blah blah blah blah and you beat yourself up and you criticize yourself and you put yourself down and all of that just makes your anxiety worse.
It makes you feel horrible and that lowers your self-esteem and that isn’t very helpful for your upcoming social situation.
This is just a quick tip. This is just to bring in some awareness. I can’t solve that problem here for you. I can just point out like “Hey, you’re not the only person dealing with this. This is actually a common problem that people with social anxiety deal with. You’re not alone”.
You’re not alone yeah, great, but, I still have the problem right. But you can do something about that problem.
Here’s a super simple thing that you can do – whenever you start beating yourself up because it’s a pattern, it’s a pattern in your mind. It has particular upsides, your brain thinks at least that it has particular upsides while if I beat myself up then I’ll do a better job next time.
Or if I beat myself up hard enough then maybe I’ll do the right things to be good enough. It’s a lot more complex than that I can give you here in this quick video.
To eliminate it completely as a different story and go to my website and figure out how to do that because that’s beyond a quick five-minute thing. But a quick thing that you can start doing which will already start to decrease it over time, maybe not the first time you do it but over time definitely you might very well experience some release in the upset that you feel when you’re beating yourself up when you start doing it is to add tapping to whenever you notice yourself beating yourself up or being down on yourself or ‘shoulding’ on yourself or whatever you do.
In case you don’t know tapping, tapping is a different name for EFT or it’s kind of like a collection name. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. It’s very funny looking technique because as you’re tapping with the tips of your fingers and specific acupressure points in the body, it’s a psychological form of acupuncture. Instead of using needles you tap with these tips on these acupressure points.
What that does, studies have shown, that it reduces the production of cortisol, which is your stress hormone and it increases the production of serotonin – your happy hormone and these biochemical responses create a sense of calm.
You’re tapping, I know this sounds weird but give it a go. Try it, check out my website, check out previous videos, look at the comments under these videos. This really works, it’s amazing I tell you. I used it to overcome my own social anxiety, I’ve helped hundreds of people do the same. This is really the real deal. Give this a go.
What that does is you’re focusing on a particular feeling or emotion. When you’re beating yourself up you’re right into the crappy feelings anyway and then you just start, when you then add the tapping what that does is it starts to soften and release and let go of that emotion.
Whenever you find yourself beating yourself up, just add tapping. You don’t have to focus on what you’re saying or what you’re thinking or the feelings that you have. You can focus where you feel the feelings in your body, you can verbalize your inner torture if you want but it doesn’t need to.
All you want to do is just add tapping. Just start tapping from point to point and you can learn the tapping points on my website social-anxiety-solutions.com or just type EFT tapping points on Google, whatever. But on my website, you get a lot more extra and it’s geared to overcoming social anxiety anyway.
You just do the tapping and you do that while you’re beating yourself up but what that starts to do over time is it starts to break up that pattern of beating yourself up. And that is good because then you don’t decrease your self-esteem so much and you’ll start to feel a lot better.
Why I keep this under five minutes? Dammit, I couldn’t but seven and a half minutes it’s good enough.
Alright, I hope it has been helpful. If you want to learn more about the tapping or how to overcome your social anxiety completely go to my website social-anxiety-solutions.com.
I’m also the host of a podcast called “Social Anxiety Solutions” and here I interview best-selling authors, psychologists, coaches, healers, researchers, psychotherapists for their best social anxiety solutions. I have over a hundred episodes and it’s really awesome, it’s really amazing. It’s so empowering, after you listen to an episode you’re like “Holy shit, I can actually overcome this. This is amazing”. You want to consider checking that out.
I also run an online Social Confidence Community. I started that a month ago, it’s closed right now you can’t sign up for it but if you sign up to my newsletter once it reopens, I will let you in on to the possibility of signing up for that. That’s really cool because there I guide you step by step to overcoming your social anxiety and the people in it right now are loving it.
Anyway, I hope that’s been helpful. If you have any questions or comments put them under the video and subscribe because I release a video like this every Thursday and I have been doing that for a long time. Check out the other videos.
Alright, thanks for now, I’m Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solution.com. Bye.
If you experience Social Anxiety, click below to receive the FREE “7 Secrets to Social Confidence” Mini Course!
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