Ever had that experience where you suddenly find yourself the center of attention and turn bright red for no reason? Where the more you think about stopping it the more you face starts to look like an overripe tomato? It hasn’t happened to me for quite some time, which I guess is a mark of progress. But of course, as is the way with social anxiety, just when you think you’ve got something beaten it comes back at you with a vengeance from time to time. I got my hair cut really short last week, shaved number 2 all over. I’m still not sure why – I suddenly decided on a whim to just see what it would look like. And Monday mornings at work we have a regular team meeting with about 12 people. So of course I rock up and am instantly faced with all sorts of comments about my hair. “What happened? Are you joining the military? “Are you going to Iraq” and so on. I make a lame attempt at defusing it with a joke and start to turn bright red. I start to think that everyone must be noticing me turn red. I turn even more red. It’s a classic vicious circle. The same thing happens to me again later in the day when someone jokes that she heard I went red in the meeting (not a very sensitive comment but I don’t think she was intending to be mean). So it was a horrible day. But I’m trying to think about it rationally. A couple of years ago I would have treated that sort of event as a catastrophe and crawled back into my shell for weeks. Now after feeling shaken up a bit for a day, I’m fine. Who cares what anyone thinks about my hair? And if I did go red, big deal. Is it really the end of the world? There are more important things to worry about. I have no plans today, so I’m going to go out, do some shopping, and practice talking to some random people asking for directions. Just a little bit every day and I can’t help but keep making progress.
Paul said
The first step in overcoming social anxiety is to stop worrying what other people think about you and figure out what you think about your self. The next step is to work on developing your self into something you like. You really have to be careful with this ’cause it is a double edged sword.
You want to develop your self into something people like but if your not careful in how you think about it, it can lead you right back to your anxiety that you worked so hard to get away from.
Social Anxiety starts when you start worrying what other people think about you and psychologist actually have a label for this. It is called “The Disease to Please” and it is very easy to overcome with the right kind of mental conditioning.
I suggest reading a few books on psychology.