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The 2 Types of Social Anxiety

 

SUMMARY

Did you know there are two kinds of anxiety we experience socially?

In this episode, that is what Sebastiaan will talk about

Curious about what these two are?

Or want to know the difference between the two?

Then, go watch the video now!

Or…

If you found yourself thinking about how to overcome your Social Anxiety, you can check out my FREE Social Confidence Starter Kit.

Go to: https://bit.ly/socialconfidencenow

FULL TRANSCRIPTION

There are two types of Social Anxiety.

And in this video, I’m going to talk about the two types that there are, and how you address each.

Because there’s a difference.

Hi, my name is Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solutions.com.

I’m a former social anxiety disorder sufferer and a social confidence coach and specialize in using Energy Psychology, EFT tapping, and Traditional Psychology in order to overcome social anxiety completely.

I’ve been doing that for a long time. You’ve seen many, many video testimonials on my channel.

I’m a bit of a speech impediment today. Don’t ask me why.

But here we go.

Social Anxiety Type #1: Fear-based Anxiety

How do you know you’re experiencing this?

Well, your heart’s racing, you’re really scared, you experience a lot of physical symptoms. Heart racing is probably the most obvious one of it.

The second type of Social Anxiety is being extremely rigid, and frigid. And not knowing what to say, and like weighing everything that’s coming out of your mouth, and being very stiff and controlled. And you’re not feeling super strong anxiety, but you really cannot be yourself either. You’re just uptight. That’s the word for it.

That second kind of anxiety is the result of Social Perfectionism.

The first kind of anxiety, the more fear-based anxiety is the result of…

…you guessed it!

FEAR!

Your brain perceiving strong threats!

Now, in both situations, it’s related to the threat.

But in the first one, with the fear-based anxiety you might be:

Your brain is trying to avoid you experiencing something that you experienced at some point in the past, that was very painful.

So, say that in the past, you experienced a really painful rejection, then when you’re in a situation, that’s where you might experience rejection.

Your brain is hypersensitive to re-experiencing that.

And whenever it senses that you might be experiencing rejection, it fires off the alarm — you relive the feelings from that previous experience that gets reactivated, that memory becomes active.

When that becomes active, fight, flight freeze gets activated as well, and your brain perceives a threat and cortisol gets released into your bloodstream, your heart starts to raise…blah, blah, you’re seeing a threat.

This the fear-based.

So, in fear-based kind of social anxiety.

And in this situation, you have a big fear.

In this case, in this example, it’s the fear of rejection — that’s this big emotional pain, that your brain is warning you about ‘careful, danger, risk, alarm, alarm! — you might experience this huge emotional pain of rejection again! Watch out carefully, hide, run, fight, do whatever you can!’ So that’s the fear-based kind of anxiety.

So that’s more intense -heart racing.

Then the other kind of anxiety is where you can be yourself and your frigid and your rigid and you can say whatever comes to mind, and you’re holding things back, and you’re pretending you’re cool, and that kind of stuff. So that’s the result of Social Perfectionism.

So, what is that?

Well, these are your should’s in your should not.

Your rules about how to behave in a social situation.

So, I should be cool, I must be liked, I can’t come across uncomfortable nervous, I have to impress people — all of these rules, they make you more frigid and rigid.

And how this is related also to threat is like, well, when you break any of these rules, then there’s a consequence.

So, if I’m not cool, then I’m going to get rejected.

So then, there’s the fear-based anxiety that will then show up.

That’s how they’re related to each other.

Now let’s look at how to work through this.

Let’s start with the 1st one – Fear-based Social Anxiety.

Say that you experienced that you can imagine the last time that you experienced it, for example, and that will kind of tune you into that strong experience of anxiety.

And when you see what you saw back then you hear what you heard back then, in your sense and feel and experience what you felt back then, you might ask yourself the question:

What am I afraid of happening most?

What’s the worst-case scenario that I’m trying to avoid here?

And that will likely bring you to or at least get you closer to the pain that your brain is trying to avoid.

Then you can imagine that experience actually happening – so if the pain that you’re trying to avoid is rejection, you imagine being rejected. And then you tune into the feelings of what that brings up for you when you imagine being rejected. And then you got that stuff to address that stuff to tap on.

This may lead you to earlier memories and so on.

But that’s how you get started.

Then the 2nd kind of social anxiety – Social Perfectionism, typically requires quite a bit of work in order to work through it.

The same thing goes for the social fears, really.

This is like a journey of a lot of little steps.

But I’m just giving you a way to get started.

And you can ask yourself the question…well, you first want to tune in.

So you might imagine yourself in a past social situation, you might imagine this if you’re in one now, or you might think about an upcoming one.

And then as you’re tuned into one particular social situation, you might ask yourself the question:

What are my social rules here?

What are my shoulds?

How should I behave?

And how should I not behave?

And the answer might be:

I should be cool, or I shouldn’t be quiet, or I shouldn’t be boring, etc.

And so, you have these social rules.

Now, these social rules, are really just beliefs, right, I should be cool. That’s just the belief.

Now, the difference between a should and a wand is huge.

Like, when I go out dancing (I’m a salsa dancer. I’ve become a salsa dancer for four years, I should say). And it’s not that that resolved my social anxiety, I resolve my social anxiety, thanks to tapping help brewing, brewing and therapists, and a whole bunch of inner work.

But I definitely recommend it. And it’s definitely something great, you can try challenging, but anyway, getting off-topic.

So, I am a salsa dancer. And so, I dance in front of lots of people. And, you know, I dance with women all over the world. And when I asked the girl, and we go dancing, I want to impress her, I want to look cool to the rest. That is true. And that’s okay. But I don’t need to impress her. And I don’t need to look cool to the other people. It’s a nice bonus. Right?

So, my sense of self-esteem, my sense of self-worth, how I see myself, how I see that my level of dancing is not determined by whether she thinks I’m cool, or whether other people think I’m cool, or whether I’m impressive or not, right.

I can still want to be impressive or be cool, or whatever it is. But I am unattached to the outcome.

See what I mean?

But when you need to be cool, and you need to be impressive, whenever you notice that that’s not there. So if a girl’s like, call that a move?

Then I’d be like, Oh, this is rejection in my heart; I feel this thing or if someone would make fun of me, then I might blush, because I have this belief that I should be cool. And I’m not living up to my own expectations.

Now, these beliefs come from somewhere.

You learn them.

You pick them up.

And what they are is nothing but thoughts that have emotion glued to them.

So, they’re just emotionalized thoughts, that’s all belief is really.

And often it’s quite easy to neutralize belief.

Sometimes it’s more challenging, and it requires more work, which goes beyond this video. But in its essence, all this is, is tuning into the particular belief and stimulating these acupressure points in order to neutralize the emotion connected to the belief.

So that can be as simple as:

I should be cool, I should be cool, I should really be cool, I should be cool, I should be cool, I should be cool.

Sometimes just doing that will start to neutralize the emotion connected to the thought that you should be cool.

And when it’s just the thought has no power over you anymore.

And then you start to loosen up that rigidity socially, that second kind of social anxiety, it’s really just a whole bunch of perfectionistic rules about how you should and shouldn’t be.

These two social anxieties both need to be addressed in order to get to a place where you’re not only anxiety-free.

But where you can actually enjoy yourself and be silly and you know have a good time automatically say whatever comes to mind.

The stuff comes up and it is here and it goes out. It doesn’t go through like all of these 27,000 filters about how you should and shouldn’t be.

I want to say this, but I should be cool.

I want to say that but I have to be impressive.

I want to say this but I can’t be this.

That.

So, this is going to liberate you.

Now, easier said than done this effort over time but hope this is helpful to you.

Leave down in the comment section: what are you dealing with more?

  1. Fear-based social anxiety
  2. The social perfectionism-based anxiety

Talk to you very soon!

Bye for now

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