Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

Is there really a cure to social anxiety? The answer is yes and no. It all depends on how you define the word ‘cure’. In terms of, is there something that can help you build up your social confidence levels to that of an average person or above, then yes, that kind of help is available, but whether or not you would call that a cure is another matter.

The word cure implies that we can rid ourselves of our social anxiety and that our social anxiety is some kind of illness. Academic research, including research I have undertaken myself, has clearly shown that if you take a sample of the population and measure their levels of social anxiety then you get a full range of differing severities of social anxiety. What you do not get is a group of people who clearly do not have social anxiety and a group of people who clearly have the ‘illness’ social anxiety disorder. Such research tells us that social anxiety is a normal part of a biologically fully functional human being.

Social anxiety should not be labelled as an illness as it is not an illness in the traditional or typical sense. It is true that people suffering from severe social anxiety may have experiences and limitations similar to those found in an illness, such as unpleasant physical symptoms and decreased ability to engage in everyday society, but the term ‘illness’ is not appropriate. The research in support of social anxiety being any sort of physical illness is weak at best.

So why is social anxiety labelled as an illness? Aside from the history of the evolution of the term ‘mental illness,’ the best answer to this question is probably that it is useful for health care providers, such as the NHS, to make a distinction between people who need help for their social anxiety and those who do not. They therefore use categories such as ’social anxiety disorder’ and ‘panic disorder’ which they group under the term ‘mental illness’. These categories and headings are useful to health care providers who’s business is based around illness, but they send out a confusing message about the nature of social anxiety and other anxiety and mood related issues.

By describing social anxiety as an illness, the public, sufferers, and even some professionsals, become misguided about the nature of social anxiety. Illnesses are generally biologically caused and are ‘cured’ with external treatments. People often end up attaching these assumptions to social anxiety which can create barriers to progress and complicate the process of helping someone become more socially confident. Through understanding how social anxiety works and how people perform certain patterns of thinking and behaviour that keep them feeling socially anxious it becomes very clear that there is nothing physically wrong with social anxiety sufferers.

If a social anxiety suffer can switch from the mindset of thinking that their suffering being caused by an illness to one where they can see that it is caused by specific things that they think and do then they have a much better chance of making solid progress. This is because social anxiety ceases to become a mysterious illness that needs to be fixed and instead becomes something that they themselves can learn to understand and take control of. They may not know what those specific things are yet, or how they would contribute to them being socially anxious, but by acknowledging their existence they step on the path of progress.

So in conclusion, if you are looking for a cure for your social anxiety then think carefully about the assumptions you are making about it’s nature. Are you looking for something external to rid you of your fears, or are you looking for information that can help you change yourself so you can gain control over your fears? Given that social anxiety is a natural part of being human and to be without fear totally would be abnormal, you may wish to consider the searching for the latter.

If you are a sufferer of social anxiety then you may find that you get tired a lot. This is because our bodies use up much more energy when we are feeling anxious than when we are calmer. When in a state of anxiety we may feel the opposite from tired, such as feeling hyperactive, alert and tense, but once the anxiety passes and we are able to relax more we may feel exhausted. Increased heart rate, racing thoughts, adrenaline release, increased muscle tension, shaking and general nervous energy all draw from our reserves and can leave us feeling totally drained.

It is good to be aware of this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it might help to know you are not suffering from some mysterious tiredness disease, although if your tiredness is having a significant impact of your daily life then it would be a good idea to discus this with your doctor. Secondly, it might help to know that your anxiety related tiredness is not just laziness and therefore your lack of energy is not something to beat yourself up over. Finally, it is good to know that once you have managed to feel more confident and less anxious, your energy levels will increase and you will feel able to do much more.

In addition to anxiety related tiredness, you may be experiencing depression related tiredness. It is common for people with social anxiety to also experience depression. This is because the fundamental thinking that is at the root of social anxiety is also at the root of depression and therefore it is possible for people to develop both social anxiety and depression separately, but also it is common for people to start to feel hopeless and depressed about not being able to fulfil their social needs as a consequence of social anxiety.

Depression related tiredness is a very different sort of tiredness to that resulting from anxiety. This kind of tiredness, very convincingly so, makes us feel like we have no energy and cannot do anything, but it is a block to accessing our energy rather than an actual lack of it that we are experiencing. When we are depressed we are generally feeling hopeless and because we think there is no point in trying to do anything our brains shut us down and produce feelings of low motivation to help us conserve energy for the times when there is hope and something worth engaging in.

When we are feeling depressed every fibre in our body might be telling us we are too tired to do anything, but this is not necessarily true, and if you get yourself to start engaging in an activity that brings you pleasure and a sense of achievement then your mood and energy levels are very likely to lift. Unfortunately, there is not time in this short blog entry to address the issue of feeling like nothing will bring you pleasure or a sense of achievement, but just remember that such feelings are always a lie that feels true.

For the social anxiety sufferer, the main issue with anxiety or depression related tiredness is that it can make it harder to feel motivated to work on improving one’s confidence. As already discussed, depressed feelings lie, so stay focused on encouraging (not forcing) yourself to take a first step. Once this step has been made, the subsequent steps will most likely be easier. With anxiety related tiredness, the best advice is to make sure you look after yourself well with regular exercise and a healthy diet to help the stress have less of an impact on your body. This may also take effort, but the rewards are worth it.

Overall, remember that you are feeling tired because of your social anxiety or depression and through working at overcoming it you will start to feel better and more energised about life. The more time and effort you invest in feeling more confident, the better you will feel and the easier things will get. So even when your energy is low, stretch to put in the work to improve your well-being and your life. We always have a little energy left, so keep going and invest it well

In an age that is focused around efficiency and productivity it is not surprising that many of us are looking for shortcuts to get to where we want to be. If you were hoping that this blog entry will give you some quick answers then I am sorry to disappoint you, but if that is what you were looking for then this is still an entry relevant to you.

If there was a super-quick easy solution to social anxiety without any drawbacks then we would have certainly heard about it, as well as the people whose lives it has transformed. Unfortunately, there is no easy quick solution to social anxiety, but this does not mean that results cannot be produced in a relatively short space of time. What it does mean is that if you want quick results, you are going to have to heavily invest your time and energy into making the changes you want and do so as soon as possible.

This alone will not guarantee results though. If you are investing heavily in the wrong strategy then results will still not materialise. If you invest heavily in the right strategy though, then you can get to where you want to be faster with less effort, but avoid getting caught up in seeking answers that require little or no effort. These quick-fixes are rarely, if ever, quick at all. They might take up little time and effort, but the result they produce will be a disappointment at best.

A saying I live by is that the long route is the shortcut. I strongly believe that if I take my time to do things properly and carefully then my investment will give me returns that are greater or equal to my investment in the long-term. It may be that sometimes this is not true and my efforts are wasted, but overall, living by this rule takes my life forward faster. The rewards gained from working this way are not always obvious, for example, even when it seems we have failed an opportunity might arise because someone has noticed we like to work diligently or it may just be that the reward is what the process makes of us and teaches us.

It is tempting to be lured by grand promises for little effort, but if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Shortcuts generally only lead to dead ends or get us lost, or worse, get us deeper into trouble that we originally were. Because of this, shortcuts just tend to delay our progress, waste our energy and add to our feelings of hopelessness about making progress, rather than get us somewhere quicker. If you take the time and effort to do things properly and carefully from the start then you will not waste time and effort on shortcuts and you will likely take the shortest route to the life you want. For this reason, the long route is the shortcut.

I have heard many social anxiety sufferers express being sensitive to noise or light and this has also my own experience. I used to find noisy pubs, loud voices and blaring music quite unbearable at times and around such noises I used to feel disorientated and anxious. Bright lights and sunlight were also intense for me, and although they would not trigger me to feel anxious they were certainly uncomfortable.

From this, myself and other anxiety suffers could come to the conclusion that we are highly sensitive people and that this is also why we get anxious and are very sensitive to criticisms. It is understandable how people may come to this conclusion, but it is an inaccurate one. It is not that we are anxious because we are sensitive, but rather that we are sensitive because we are anxious, and regarding sensitivity to criticism, this is a separate matter and it is not a sensitivity that works in the same way. Sensitivity to criticism comes from our perceived inadequacies or vulnerabilities and the way they cause us to take criticisms more personally.

Senses, such as vision, hearing, touch and smell, that become heightened do so because of the the ‘fight-or-flight’ response wich creates feelings of anxiety. The adrenaline that is released when we become anxious prepares us for danger and causes numerous physiological changes in our bodies. One of these changes is to heighten our senses and in evolutionary terms, this has most probably been important to our survival. For example, being better able to detect noises or movements in the undergrowth when faced with danger could mean the difference between running into danger or running away from it.

With social anxiety and other anxiety disorders we can end up so anxious, so much of the time, that we can almost be in constant state of alert. Therefore, we can end up being highly sensitive to light, noise, touch or even smell most of the time. This may lead us to think that we are just a highly sensitive person, but once we start to overcome our anxiety and feel more relaxed we will find our senses will return to a more comfortable levels.