Is EFT tapping enough to beat social anxiety?

SUMMARY

Is tapping enough to beat social anxiety?

This is the question that I got in one of my videos.

And in this episode, not only will I be answering that questions, I will also be giving you insights as to how the power of tapping can really help you overcome your social anxiety.

FULL TRANSCRIPTION

Here’s a question that I got on one of my videos.

It goes something like this:

Hey, I’m going to become a waiter at a very high end place in L.A. (a server). And it’s in about six months from now. And I no longer want to avoid these kinds of opportunities. So I’m just gonna go for it. Now, I will be doing the tapping for a bit. But you said somewhere that that’s not enough. What else do I need to do other than tapping?

Here’s the answer.

First of all, tapping is a technique to:

regulate your emotions
neutralize excessive negative emotions
shift beliefs
get rid of negative fantasies
process traumatic experiences

It is amazing, and it’s wonderful.

And it is the tool that makes the difference, because it addresses the emotional side of the problem. And social anxiety is predominantly an emotional issue.

But there can be a misunderstanding that goes like,

Okay, I learned how to do the tapping, I know on which points to tap. And I think you need to focus a little bit on things that scare you, and blah, blah, blah.

In other words, the tapping is super simple, that a 12-year-old can learn it in half an hour.

However, the real magic comes from applying the tapping to the right kinds of targets.

The targets that create the perception of threat, that activates the fight-flight-freeze response, which results in your social anxiety symptoms.

When you neutralize the triggers of your social anxiety, the social anxiety will be gone.

So, what to aim the tapping at is very important.

Further, you’ll also need to know, “If I’m tapping on this particular fear, and the fear is not decreasing. Why is that happening? And what should I do instead in order to neutralize the fear?”

See, the tapping is super simple, but it is a particular skill. And it takes time to learn the skill. And it takes time to learn to apply the skill to the right kinds of targets.

And for that, you need to know more about what social anxiety really is:

what triggers are (by the way there are memories, fantasies and beliefs).
which particular one’s trigger to social anxiety
how to do it

In other words, it is just like learning, dancing, or it’s just like getting your degree in something. It requires education, it requires learning the skill, practicing the skill, figuring out what doesn’t work, and then coming up with solutions so you know what to do when you run into that problem next time, so that you can get consistent results.

You need to learn about your psychology, some essentials.
You need to have a particular mindset that keeps you motivated, that keeps you going because it’s challenging to go on the journey from social anxiety, social confidence.
You need to understand the psychology of change – the obstacles that are going to be on the path.

There are three main keys to get the social ease:

Allow acceptance, achieve acceptance.

Come to terms with the anxiety, come to terms with yourself come to terms with where you’re at.

Very challenging. But with the tapping, you can do that

Release resistance.There’s a part of your brain that does not want you to be free of social anxiety because the anxiety is seen as something that protects you, it’s alarming you about threats that your brain is perceiving.And the threats that it’s perceiving is due to your belief system.And so that needs to be altered.
But in order to make this change and get rid of the social anxiety, you’re dealing with resistance, so that resistance needs to be released.

That’s key number 2.

Terminate your triggers.The actual things that trigger the social anxiety and like I mentioned, that’s memories (traumatic memories and that can be shock trauma or relational trauma).It is beliefs.And further it is negative fantasies. These worst-case scenarios that you make in your mind. Well, when you make these worst-case scenarios, you feel these emotions in your body, you can tap on that.

When you have a particular belief, “I’m not good enough”, it’s associated with emotion, you can neutralize that.

When you think of a particular traumatic memory, all of the emotions associated to that memory become activated and you can use the tapping to process that.

And as you neutralize these memories, beliefs and fantasies responsible for the social anxiety. Yet then you actually get rid of the social anxiety to the point where there is none and then you can just relax and have a good time and feel free and be in the moment and express yourself and connect with people authentically and effortlessly.

You can be your real self because you feel safe being your true self.

Now then, or within that process, you also need to expand your comfort zone.

Now, does that mean that you need to force yourself outside your comfort zone and push yourself to do scary exposures, and that kind of stuff?

No!

That is such an outdated approach, feel the fear and do it anyway, the book came out in the 80s, and was the best what they had at the time – it is not that great for social anxiety.

But you do want to face your fear. So, what should you do?

Well, you can imagine the thing that you’re afraid of, say getting rejected, or being ridiculed, or being humiliated, or being the center of attention, blushing, and people seeing it and laughing at you, or whatever the case may be for you.

And as you imagine that, that will trigger feelings within you. And then you can begin to neutralize that.

And when you’re good at this, when you’ve practiced the scale, when you understand the psychology, then you can neutralize all of your reactions to that worst-case scenario, to the point where you’re comfortable imagining it, where there actually is no reaction to that anymore, then actually going for it won’t have any emotional responses either.

Or there might be some tiny triggers left, which you can then work through with the tapping.

So it’s a much more gentle approach, where you’re then expanding your comfort zone.

And because you’re more comfortable doing it, it’s a lot easier to get positive social feedback, and discover that “hey, I can handle this situation.”

Great. This situation is now included in my comfort zone, I have expanded my comfort zone. That’s it.

So that’s the answer.

Yes, tapping is very important. And it’s important that you learn how to do it properly, effectively, that:

you know what to do when it doesn’t work,
you need to learn about your psychology, you need to learn about psychology of change,
you need to understand particular mindset so that you remain motivated on the challenging journey.
you need to expand your comfort zone by using the tapping to do the things that scare you.

But you don’t force yourself into scary situations.

No, you imagine scary situations, neutralize your reactions to them, and then go do the thing that you used to be afraid of, and then include that experience in your comfort zone.

That way, you expand your comfort zone, you build your resilience, and you just become more comfortable in more situations, you start to feel safer and safer and safer being you.

Now that’s not a quick fix. That’s not something, oh, I’m going to do 30 minutes of tapping and my decades long social anxieties gone, doesn’t work like that.

However, when you apply the tapping, and you learn this, and you do it over a period of time, then you will see that your social anxiety begins to decrease and decrease and decrease.

The number of times that you get triggered will become less. So maybe instead of getting triggered with social anxiety 20 times a week, it’s only 15.

Well, that’s a big life improvement!

Maybe and you know, the social anxiety will go away faster. Instead of going out one night and being anxious the whole night for four hours, the anxiety gets triggered and it’s gone in 15 minutes, big life improvement.

And the intensity of the social anxiety will begin to decrease instead of being an 8/10 and you can hardly function, it may be a 4/10. Well, that’s much, much better, then you can function still uncomfortable. But that’s what it’s like.

And so progressively, all of those measures begin to improve. So, you get triggered less and less frequently. It stays around for less and less long. And the intensity just decreases and decreases.

And as those things begin to happen, your social ease starts to grow.

You become more and more comfortable, more and more relaxed, easygoing about things.

You also start to feel happier, you have more energy, you’re not so negative.

It’s amazing what this can do.

So, while it doesn’t happen overnight, it is so worth it.

So, hope that helps you. That’s it for today.

Bye for now.

If you experience Social Anxiety, click below to receive the FREE “7 Secrets to Social Confidence” Mini Course!

November 10, 2022 #SASBlog

Author
Recent Posts

Join me

Sebastiaan

Sebastiaan van der Schrier is a Social Confidence Coach and ex social anxiety sufferer. He helps socially anxious people become confident using a unique and painless approach. He is the host of the Social Anxiety Solutions podcast show and runs the first ever online Social Confidence Community.

Join me