How Facial Blushing Influences Social Anxiety ?

You know how facial blushing feels, right?

You first hear that comment, you see that look or you say or do something that you think is “wrong”. You feel judged and you become ashamed and embarrassed.
Then in a split second you feel that heat rush starting to come up. In my case going from my back, over my shoulders and neck up to my ears. And then finally to my cheeks and into the rest of my face. And then you’ve just turned into a human tomato…
Facial blushing was the thing that kicked off my social anxiety disorder.

In the beginning, I only became embarrassed some of the times when I was teased. But this slowly developed into more and more situations where my face got red.

Most of the time I could hide it by walking away, making a comment or turning my head away. But this was not always the case unfortunately.

The worst thing for me was when I “got caught” and someone pointed it out or even laughed at me. This made me become even more embarrassed.

Due to this I developed a huge fear of blushing. In some situations I would even feel the warmth coming up in my body just by the fear of my face becoming red itself.

And it became even worse…

My personality changed. I became more introverted and very cautious of what I said and did. I feared making a mistake or doing something wrong constantly. In just about anything in life.

I became very anxious of being in the spotlight while I was such an extravert before. I now thought “What if everyone is going to see my facial blushing? “

Since I had this fear I avoided all possible situations where I would become ashamed. I hated the weekends…

It became so bad that I was ashamed of who I was as a person. If you can identify with this you know how bad it can get.

In this article I write about what facial blushing is. I speak of the causes and I inform you about how it affects you and your social anxiety. In later articles I write about the blushing cure. Because there is definitely one as I am free of blushing myself now.

What Is Facial Blushing?

Dictionary.com : “To become red in the face, especially from modesty, embarrassment, or shame; flush.”

This facial blushing occurs when you feel criticized by others. Or when you perceive to be judged negatively by someone or a group of people. You feel embarrassed and/or ashamed and this results in blushing.

Not everyone blushes though. Some people have the same insecurity, and it will show in their face, but they won’t blush.

This is because the people that do blush have nerves that are more sensitive to emotional stress. When you have this “condition” your nerves instruct the blood vessels to open up wide. These open blood vessels then make it easier for blood to flood to your face. Resulting in you becoming red-faced.

Facial blushing occurs mostly when in the company of strangers, but this is not the one and only situation.

When you are around specific friends or some family members you may become embarrassed and/or ashamed as well. Resulting in facial blushing.

Sometimes you are perfectly fine when you are with one friend, but you won’t be with another friend. Or you won’t blush speaking one-on-one, but you will be more prone to blush when you are in a group setting.

In short, it is different for everyone and you are more likely to blush when there is someone around you that is important to you in some way.

What Are The Causes Of Facial Blushing?

The causes are shame and embarrassment (and in lesser form anger).

But this shame and embarrassment gets triggered by people, circumstances and events around you.

To stop these triggers you have to find out what the causes are of your shame and embarrassment. Kill the triggers and the problem is gone.

So what causes shame and embarrassment?