I was recently interviewed on BBC Radio Bristol to help raise awareness of anxiety disorders and also advertise our services at Social Anxiety West. It is something that I would never have thought I would be able to do back when I was socially anxious, so it feels quite an achievement to be able to do it now. Below is an edit of my section. The discussion was an hour in total and starred some of my good friends. You can listen to the whole show for a limited time using this link, Complete radio show on BBC iPlayer. It will only be the correct show if it is dated 6th March 2010. It is the middle hour that is on anxiety.
Continuing the story of my life, in this second chapter I talk about what life was like for me in secondary school (high school) in relation to social anxiety. I talk about friends, bullying, skipping lesson, eating in the canteen and lots more. You can watch chapter one which covers the primary school years here.
I have prepared this document which is intended as information for people who are new to the subject of social anxiety. It is mainly designed to help individuals educate their family, friends, carers and health care professionals about social anxiety and social phobia, but you may find it useful and interesting as a sufferer yourself. When trying to explain your social anxiety to the people who are in your life it can often be helpful to have to have some information sourced from neutral third party that clearly explains everything so you do not have to. This is what this document aims to do. It answers the following questions and can be downloaded using the link below.
What is social anxiety and social phobia?
How common is social anxiety and when does it start?
Is social phobia a recognised medical condition?
Isn’t social phobia just a term made up to sell medications?
Are socially anxious people anti-social?
Are socially anxious people just shy?
Are socially anxious people fearful around everyone?
How does social phobia develop?
What is most likely to be the cause?
Does anxiety involve your body as well as your mind?
What happens in the body when you are anxious?
What are the consequences of this?
Is social anxiety the same experience for everyone?
How do socially anxious people manage their fears?
Do the safety behaviours used help?
Is anxiety only experienced when around other people?
What kind of thoughts do socially anxious people have?
Won’t alcohol and just putting yourself out there sort it out?
What kind of situations do socially anxious people find difficult?
Why don’t they just snap out of it and pull themselves together?
What other feelings accompany social anxiety?
Does social phobia commonly occur with anything else?
In these videos I start to tell my story of my social anxiety and how it developed throughout my life. Chapter one starts with my early childhood and primary school years.
“It’s not surprising that if you fear interacting with other people, particularly authority figures and that means you find it hard to seek professional help for your social anxiety, then you’re going to be prone to seeking whatever solutions are at hand. Often that means self-medicating with recreational drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamines or more commonly alcohol.
Obviously this can then lead to additional health problems, financial problems or addictions, but aside from those issues, what I want to discuss in this video is the other processes at play when we use these drugs to cope with anxiety.
Essentially, these drugs, and by saying drugs I’m including alcohol, are attractive to people with social anxiety because they do things such as relieve anxiety, reduce inhibition, provide relaxation and increase a sense of confidence. In the short-term they provide almost immediate relief of anxiety symptoms but usually silently they are also keeping the problem going or even making it worse in the long term.
To just say that drugs and alcohol doesn’t work is a confusing message because it conflicts with the fact that when people use them they feel relief. In one sense, if your goal is to eliminate anxiety, then they do work, but the problem is that they are unsustainable and have other negative effects on our life.
As humans we have an amazing ability to physically adapt to our environment and when we are exposed to a drug our body often adapts to it. Eventually this means to get the same effect you either have to take more of the substance or wait until your body adapts to being without it. This may take a bit of time and because our body has normalised to being with the drug we then experience withdrawal, often including rebound anxiety, as our body adjusts back in the other direction.
This extra anxiety on top of existing high anxiety levels obviously isn’t good and drives a person to continue using drugs to gain relief, and too often leads to addiction. Not all drugs work this way, but many do. Although our body may adapt emotionally to the drug it cannot fully adapt to the ever increasing levels of toxins that are put in the body to get the same effect. Additionally, always being drunk or on drugs while building relationships, working or performing every day social tasks can severally effect your performance and introduce additional social problems into your life. It’s this that makes taking these drugs for social anxiety unsustainable.
So why not use them just for a bit of short-term relief? Well, apart from the problems mentioned already, such as rebound anxiety when not taking them, every time you rely on something else other than your self for confidence you undermine your belief in your own ability to cope with situations. Every time you use drugs or alcohol to cope socially you take another chip out of your self-confidence. Drugs don’t give confidence, they take it away. If you’re using drugs or alcohol to cope socially then when you do well or make progress that success is easily attributed to the drug rather than you. You miss out on the opportunities to build real confidence in your own ability and find sustainable ways of coping with your anxiety.
It can be hard to stop using say alcohol in social situations, because you feel so much worse without it. But really it’s not that you’re worse, it just that you have to face up to the full reality of the situation you’re in, and progress can’t be made unless you do that. Additionally, it’s hard to understand what really helps if any success you have can be attributed to drugs.
Consider that lasting progress will come though choosing to make your goal to increase confidence rather than to eliminate anxiety. That way you will not reach for instant relief in the form of drugs and you will see that it is through learning to cope with anxiety using yourself, rather than a substance, that solid self-confidence will be built.”
“I used to take drugs, mostly cannabis, but at around the age of 21 I started using other drugs – on the whole those other drugs were ecstasy, also known as MDMA, and like a lot of people do, I also drank alcohol. In one sense I used these because they were part of the scene I was involved in – involved is probably too strong a word there – and they were a form of enjoyment or fun, but I also used them to cope with my social anxiety.
Like so many people with social anxiety, I would sometimes have a drink or two before meeting people so I felt more confident and less anxious. And then while out with other people I would keep on drinking, partly as something to do and make myself look busy, but also to cope and try and make myself more sociable. Everyone knows that alcohol makes you feel more confident and takes away some of your inhibitions and this is why a lot of people with social anxiety self-medicate with it. By self-medicating I mean using a drug for your social anxiety without the advice or recommendation from a qualified medical professional. Because so many people use it in this way though, unfortunately lots of people do end up having to deal with alcoholism as well as social anxiety.
Luckily for me, it didn’t quite have the desired effect, in fact nothing would cut through my fear enough for me to be able to open my mouth and speak to people or dance. However drunk I got, and even when I no longer actually felt that anxious, I still couldn’t take that risk to say something and talk to people. I had a similar experience while using ecstasy. Although I felt free from fear and felt comfortable around people, I still couldn’t bring myself to socialise and talk to people. I’m not sure exactly why that was, but I believe it does go some way towards showing how drugs such as these more mask the problem than provide any kind of real solution.
Despite that, I still thought that ecstasy could be a solution to my social problems and for a short while I took ¼ of a tablet every few hours each day. I would then have the courage to go out in the world. I didn’t really have anywhere to go so I just used to go out into the city centre and be amongst people. Actually though, those times were some of my most lonely because while on the ecstasy I really felt a love and longing to be with people, and people were all around me, but I didn’t have anyone to connect with, and I still couldn’t approach people or speak to them. It was a bit like being really thirsty while stranded in an empty boat in the middle of the ocean.
Although I only made the connection in hindsight, it was at about that time in my life when I started getting strong panic attacks where my heart would beat really fast, I’d go pale, sweaty, my vision would fade out and I’d almost pass out. These anxiety symptoms didn’t happen when I was actually on the drugs, but I do believe my anxiety was worsened overall through taking them.
I stopped self-medicating and gave up all drugs including alcohol fairly soon after that. I realised that they weren’t solving anything and were just making things worse in many ways, and although it was really tough to start with; being in social situations without those things to help me cope, in terms of building solid lasting confidence, I think it was one of the best moves I ever made. Giving them up didn’t get rid of my anxiety, but it gave me the opportunities to build confidence without anything adding confusion. Being without those things really forced me to find other ways of coping in those situations, things that really did provide a solution, and if I hadn’t of given up those other unhealthy crutches I believe wouldn’t have really been able to work on those things that really do make a difference.
I’ve made a second video on this about how self-medicating can stop you making progress and how certain processes at play have a negative effect on you. So if this subject applies to you, I’d really encourage you to watch it. This video might be the one you can connect and identify with, but it’s the other video that contains the important information, so I hope you’ll join me for it.”
“Drugs did not cause my problems with social anxiety – I had social anxiety from a very early age. In fact, as far back as I can remember. But, in my mid to late teens and very early twenties I took recreational drugs. It was mostly cannabis which I smoked almost every day, but later it became ecstasy and occasionally magic mushrooms, amphetamines or cocaine.
The cannabis, I used to be really into that. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I used to think everyone should try it. I used to almost worship it because it relaxed you, was non-aggressive, it could be humorous, made you appreciate music more, maybe even made you think more deeply about things, but I didn’t realise what it was slowly doing to me over time. I didn’t realise that I was becoming more and more introverted and my paranoid thoughts were slowly getting stronger. I also didn’t realise that I’d become so passive and didn’t have any ambition or desire to better my life. And it was only when I read that it was bad for social anxiety and completely gave it up and my system cleared over a month or two that I realised just how much it had suppressed me and my life.
One day I was at someone’s house and I’d been smoking cannabis and I had all those paranoid thoughts going around my head about people hating me, not wanting me there and thinking bad things about me. On that day they go so intense that I seriously thought I was going completely crazy. I was really scared and I left and walked to somewhere safe on my own and just freaked out and cried. I had no idea what was happening to me and I was bad enough for a couple of other people to get concerned and come and find me. It was a really scary moment and not one I’d like to repeat.
There are worse things than cannabis you can put in your body, but is cannabis a good thing? At least in my experience, I really don’t think it is, especially if you’re experiencing some kind of mental health problem. You don’t need anything else clouding your thinking and making you think any more paranoid thoughts than you’re already thinking. And you really don’t need anything that will make you more passive and less focused on making progress.
I’ve met a lot of people now, or have read about their experiences, where they’ve told me that they’re fairly certain that cannabis played a significant role in triggering them to become socially anxious in the first place or have other mental health problems or it at least made their social anxiety get much worse.
It can be difficult to give up if you’ve developed a lifestyle around it and what social life you have revolves around it. There may even be motivations pushing against you because you’ve always been an advocate of it. But I think if you’re a sufferer of social anxiety and you really want to overcome it, I’m not sure what chance you have if you continue to smoke cannabis.”
This video simply provides a list of some of the situations people with Social Phobia / social anxiety find difficult and anxiety provoking. If you suffer with social anxiety but fear a situation that’s not on the list then I would be really interested to hear about it. Please leave your comments below.
Please note that the voting deadline has now passed
Please help ‘The Socially Anxious DJ’ raise awareness of social anxiety and help someone with social anxiety live their dream. The video below explains why and how. Please feel free to put it on your blog or website. Apologies that some parts do not make sense. This is because it was created for YouTube viewers. The link to use is below the video.
This video is of ‘The Socially Anxious DJ’ talking about their personal experiences of social anxiety.
You can also further support his efforts to raise awareness of social anxiety by listening to, downloading and rating his excellent mixes at DJMix.net: http://djmix.net/SocioPhobicDJ
In these three videos I explain why improving your social skills is not a successful method of overcoming your social anxiety. I also explain why people with social anxiety often struggle to perform well in social situations. I have already discussed this topic in the blog entry called, Improving Social Skills, but I wanted to revisit it on video and go into a little bit more detail.
