Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

As with blushing and sweating anxiety symptoms, shaking and jerky movements are caused by the increased sympathetic nervous system activity that occurs when we get anxious. During this process adrenaline is released that causes our muscles to become ready for physical activity. A side effect of this readiness is trembling or shaking. In addition to shaking, sufferers may also experience muscle tension. This tension can cause us to have uncoordinated clumsy movements that do not flow as naturally as they normally would. During very strong anxiety individuals may also experience involuntary jerks or spasms due to this muscle tension.

Shaking

The shaking some people experience during anxiety is usually most noticeable in the hands. Since social anxiety sufferers are often very self-conscious about others noticing their anxiety this can be a problem. Wobbling teacups, peas jumping off forks and shaking speech notes all make anxious shaking more visible and this can lead to sufferers avoiding these things when around other people. Shaking legs and quivering lips are also common visible symptoms.

The main worry of sufferers is that people will see their visible anxiety symptoms and then make a unfavourable judgement about them. The feared judgements will typically be that the sufferer is weird because of their odd movements or that they are weak because they are feeling anxious.

People will often do their best to try and hide their anxious shaking, but this tends to only worsen the situation. Anxiety sufferers are nearly always caught in vicious cycles where the ways they try to manage their anxiety only serves to worsen it. Fears about starting to shake in front of people leads to increased worry about the onset of shaking. This worry then increases anxiety levels during social situations which in turn leads to the actual shaking they are trying to avoid. Self-consciousness is increased because of this visible shaking which leads to more worry and more anxiety and more shaking creating a distressing vicious cycle.

In addition to this, sufferers will try to hide or control their anxious shaking, but this only adds fuel to the fire. A common strategy is to tense up to try and keep movements still, but this increased muscle tension only exaggerates the shaking. Another strategy is to try and hide shaking through avoidance or keeping hands out of sight, but this too will worsen the situation. Avoidance strategies like these reinforce the idea that we need to hide these symptoms and that revealing them could have negative consequences for us. They prevent us from finding out that, most of the time, revealing our anxiety will nearly always have no negative consequences for us and that doing so will prevent the anxiety from occurring in the first place.

Tension

Jerky uncoordinated movements resulting from anxious tension can cause social anxiety sufferers to find it difficult to move naturally. It can be harder for them to coordinate their movements and this can, in part, lead to them feeling self-conscious about the way they move. This increased self focus can then further interfere with coordination because it reduces their awareness of the space around them. For example, a suffer may be feeling self-conscious about how they are acting and then end up knocking over their drink. They become so distracted by their anxious thoughts that they are less aware of the objects around them and accidents are more likely to happen. An accident such as spilling a drink can feel very embarrassing for a social anxiety sufferer and this can mean more even anxiety and distress which can further interfere with they ability to function well in social situations.

As with shaking, often the very things we do to try and improve unnatural anxious movements tend to only serve to worsen them. Over the years I have heard many social anxiety sufferers report feeling self-conscious about the way they walk. They worry that other people think they are walking an odd way and have trouble moving naturally when other people are watching them.

This was also my experience, especially when walking in the streets around the general public. I used to worry that people would be making fun of the way I walked and would possibly laugh at me or think that I was odd. My strategy to deal with this at the time was a logical but unhelpful one. I used to make a conscious effort to walk more naturally. The problem was that natural movements come from unconscious behaviour, rather than conscious behaviour, and therefore rather than improving my walk, I only made my tense anxious movements even more uncoordinated and unnatural.

With all anxiety symptoms, including blushing, sweating, shaking and tension, they all disappear once the vicious cycles that keep them going are adequately broken and new ways to feel confident are learnt. In the product I am producing I will explain these vicious cycles in more detail and clearly show how to overcome them and gain that all important confidence.

Please note that shaking, muscle spasms and other physical symptoms mentioned in this article can be due to other medical conditions. If you are uncertain if your shaking relates to emotional states then you should seek the advice of a qualified medical practitioner.

How do anxiety symptoms such as shaking interfere with your life?

Blushing and Sweating are two common concerns of the social anxiety sufferer. To some, blushing is a sweet and endearing quality, but for the social anxiety sufferer it can feel like a nightmare. For them, rather than a slight pinkness in their cheeks, their blushing can often be more describable as looking beetroot red, feeling like their face is on fire and something that not only affects their face, but spreads in a blotchy manner to their neck and chest.

Likewise, for the social anxiety sufferer who is concerned about sweating, it is often not just a matter of a slight dampness under the arms on a hot summer’s day. Many report profuse sweating on the palms their hands, face, armpits and other areas of the body. This is usually exaggerated when in social situations where they least want it to appear and it can be particularly problematic for people whose job involves shaking hands a lot.

When we get anxious, our sympathetic nerve activity is increased. This results in various changes in our body, including blushing and sweating, which serve to help ready us for an adverse situation. In the distant past, most adverse situations usually involved a physical danger that needed to be run away from or fought off. This can still be true, but is less so in the world we live in today. Both running away and fighting involve physical activity and that produces excessive body heat. To make our bodies more efficient and increase our chances of survival, humans have evolved to start cooling themselves through sweating when danger is anticipated. This is great when the danger is a swarm of killer bees and you need to run as far as possible, but it is not so great when the danger is the potential rejection of your colleagues when giving a presentation.

Blushing seems to be less explainable than sweating. Scientists have not figured out exactly why we blush when we are anxious or embarrassed. It is possible that it serves to communicate our remorse to others which may mean we are treated less harshly when we get things wrong, but the exact reasons for it’s function remain elusive.

Although blushing and sweating is a natural and healthy part of being human, many social anxiety sufferers end up feeling very self-conscious and anxious about these physical traits. The big problem is that getting self-conscious and anxious makes one blush and sweat more rather than helping with the situation. People often get stuck in a vicious cycle where they fear the onset of blushing and sweating in social situations and then this causes them anxiety which then actually creates the very blushing or sweating that they feared happening in the first place. The thought of other people noticing this then causes more anxiety and consequentially more blushing and sweating and so on.

Although it often does not feel like it for the sufferer, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual blushing or sweating, but rather the fact that they think something bad might happen if other people notice their blushing and sweating. Once these psychological issues are resolved and the cycles are broken, blushing and sweating will not be exaggerated by anxiety and they will cease to be a problem.

Often the ways that people have come up with to try and cope with these physical traits, such as habitually hiding them, tend to only serve to worsen the problem in the long-term. This can lead to people feeling like they are fighting a losing battle and like they are stuck with an excruciatingly embarrassing physical problem they cannot solve. This desperation is reflected in the increase in the number of people who risk irreversible surgery to reduce their visible anxiety symptoms.

For some, operations such as Sympathectomies can seem like the best escape route out of their suffering, but these operations can sometimes lead to worse problems that cannot be easily solved, or solved at all. These include permanently increased sweating elsewhere on the body and abnormal facial features. These risks can be avoided if people get the appropriate psychological help to address the root cause of their severe blushing or sweating.

It is fully understandable how when someone feels stuck with a problem, and when their own efforts to overcome it result to nothing, they turn to such drastic measures to seek relief. People considering this option should know that there are effective and risk free alternatives that actually address underlying psychological issues rather than just treating the symptom. Ponder the question: If someone has a spider phobia, would you treat them by killing all the spiders in the world, or would you work to help them come to terms with the fact that the everyday spiders they are scared of pose no threat to them?

Birthdays – are they a time for celebration for you? When a person is socially anxious, times for celebration can become associated with stress, anxiety and depression. You may dread the added attention that birthdays can bring. Things such as surprise parties, receiving gifts, birthday phone calls and singing happy birthday can turn what is supposed to be a joyous event into an endless stream of anxiety provocation. Avoiding telling people about your birthday might seem like the solution, but this can leave one feeling depressed as it can seem like no one cares.

I remember my 21st birthday. With being quite socially anxious at the time it was an achievement that I actually went out to a pub with some people I knew that night, but a celebration it certainly was not. In my usual style back then I spent most of the evening sitting quietly and not speaking to anyone. It so happened that everyone was celebrating someone else’s birthday who I did not know that night. The result was that no one gave me a card or wished me a happy birthday while I sat and watched them celebrate someone else’s.

As with many other birthdays of mine, I felt sad and hurt that no one had recognised that it was my birthday and made the effort to express their birthday wishes to me. I could blame these people for being insensitive and not caring but the truth is that it was mostly my fault. I had not invested much effort into building my relationships with those people, and in fear of too much attention being focused on myself or coming across as vain, I had also not made it clear to anyone that it was my birthday that specific night and I wanted them to celebrate it with me.

Although I was probably upset with the people at the time, I now take responsibility for what happened that night and can see that I did not put in what was necessary for me to have the experience I wanted on that night. By taking responsibility for the poor outcome I put myself in a position where there is a path for me to take to change that outcome. Although it may be hard for us to do sometimes, it is important to recognise that we need to take active steps to create the social experiences we want in our lives. We will get out what we put in and if we do not put anything into our relationships then we cannot make others solely responsible for the quality of our social experiences.

It may seem like a depressing situation where your relationships are unfulfilling because you do not put much into them while at the same time you feel unable to put much into them because of your social fears, but this view is only depressing if you believe you cannot change the situation. An alternative view is to see such situations as fuel for your motivation to change and improve your life. If social anxiety stands in your way then you must work on your social confidence until you can experience life as you want it.

A large part of becoming more socially confident is learning to accept that you are, or have the potential to be, a likable and lovable person. Social anxiety sufferers commonly find it hard to accept compliments and positive attention but it is an important to welcome it as part of making progress. You may not directly have a choice over whether you feel confident or anxious, but you do have a choice over your response to positive attention. If you choose to dismiss people’s or avoid positive attention then you may avoid feelings of embarrassment and having focus put on you, but you also harm your confidence and reject other people’s kindness. With this option no one gains. If you choose to allow yourself positive attention by not avoiding it and saying thank you to the compliments you recieve then you add value to your sense of self-worth and add to the other person’s sense of contribution without rejecting their kindness. It is important to remember that when someone gives you positive attention they want you to feel good about yourself and therefore they will not think negatively about you if you choose to accept it and enjoy it.

Birthdays are what you make of them and the meaning you give them. They can mean you are another year closer to death or they can mean you have successfully survived another year of life. They can be a trigger of negative emotions or they can be an opportunity to feel loved and positively connect with people. They can be a depressing reminder of your situation or they can be a motivator to change that situation. Choose carefully and put in the effort to make them what you want them to be, whether than means choosing to welcome positive attention or choosing to give your self the gift of time invested in building up your 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.

There are various relaxation and breathing techniques that are taught to people with social anxiety and other anxiety conditions. These include things like progressive muscle relaxation, changing breathing patterns and recycling exhaled air. Such techniques are great and not so great all at the same time. They are great because they really can help relax someone and help them deal with an episode of anxiety and if you are an anxiety sufferer they are well worth learning to add to your range of tools to help yourself. On the other hand though, these techniques are not so great because they do not really tackle the cause of unwanted anxiety.

Relaxation and breathing techniques are what I class as anxiety management tools. They are things you can use to help once the anxiety has already happened, but they are not so useful in preventing you from getting anxious in the first place. It is true that such techniques can be helpful in breaking cycles of anxiety, but in my experience the effect they have on anxious cycles is weak compared to making appropriate changes to one’s thinking and behaviour. They also don’t work towards the prevention of those cycles being re-established. For these reasons you shouldn’t bank on breathing techniques as a solution for your anxiety long-term, but while you’re working on other things they are a useful addition that can help you relax when you’re anxious.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation
There will be lots of varying examples of this technique on the web if you search for it, but detailed below is how I like to do it. I find it particularly useful if I need to get to sleep in good time after a busy day as it’s a quick and healthy way to unwind. I’d definitely recommend it to people who have trouble sleeping and the more you do it the better it works usually. Obviously by the nature of the technique, it’s not going to be one you can use in social situations, but you might like to try thinking of a unique image or word while you’re in the relaxed state after using it so you associate the state with that image or word. It’s best to use something you wouldn’t normally think of and something pleasantly relaxing. Recalling the image or word in anxious situations can then help you go some way towards going into this relaxed state. This is just a way of using the natural way one’s mind builds associations when things occur together. Here’s what to do…

1. Sit in a comfy chair on lie on the bed in a position you feel most comfortable in with your eyes shut. I personally like to lie on my back with my legs straight and my arms by my side.
2. Take a fairly deep breath in, but not so it’s hard to hold it in, and hold it for 5 seconds. This alone can start you feeling relaxed. You may like to experiment a little with how long you hold it for, 5 seconds should be fine though.
3. Now let the breath out slowly and as you do so relax all the muscles in your face and focus on feeling them going heavy and that part of your body sinking into the chair or bed.
4. Now do steps 2 and 3 again with your neck, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, hands, chest, back stomach and all other muscle groups in your body gradually working your way down to your feet.
5. At the end you can either repeat the process, or I like to do a few breaths while focusing on my whole body relaxing and sinking into the bed. Tension areas like the eyes, jaw, neck, shoulders and hands are good places to focus on and repeat if you are particularly tense.
6. If you have trouble relaxing any muscle group then try tensing it for a few seconds before trying to relax it.

This is not something to be rushed, in fact, purposefully do it very slowly and take your time. It will get easier the more you do it and you’ll be able to let go easier and relax more. Sometimes, if you get very relaxed you can go into a dream like state and see mental imagery, sometimes with a lot of clarity. It’s good to just let these images come and go without trying to think about them or control them, but don’t get frustrated if you find this difficult. Trying to be perfectionistic about relaxation does not really work so let what is just be what it is This technique is quite similar to meditation really, but some of you may like that it has a more practical focus. Enjoy!

As the title suggests, what I want to talk about is why it’s a good idea to welcome and accept your anxiety. This may go against a lot of people’s initial instincts, but there’s a very good reason to do it.

What we first must understand is that our goal should not be to get rid of our anxiety, but rather to address the parts of our psychology that produce it at inappropriate times. Anxiety is a horrible feeling, and it’s supposed to be, because it’s purpose is to make us avoid danger, not want to stick around it, but the anxiety wouldn’t be half as bad if it was just a physcial sensation that didn’t have any meaning behind it. It’s the meaning behind it that is our real target and once we understand that, we can start really making progress, rather than just fruitlessly fighting our anxiety.

So what is it that causes us our anxiety and our social distress? Well, contra to popular belief, it’s not what we fear that people will do to us or say about us. It’s true that it’s the fear of what people will do and say that is at the forefront of our minds, but what we’re usually really scared of is that we won’t cope if those people actually do or say those things. If we doubt ourselves and don’t trust ourselves to cope with what life throws at us then we end up feeling anxious about what life might throw at us. The goal therefore isn’t to become good enough so that people don’t reject us or do nasty things to us, but rather it is to have enough self-worth to trust ourselves to handle it when people do reject us or do nasty things to us.

By accepting and welcoming our anxiety we are sending a strong message to ourselves that we are able to cope with the anxiety and handle the situation, but when we try to fight our anxiety and control it we send ourselves a message that says, “I need to control this situation because I won’t be able to cope with it if I don’t”. Trying to fight or control anxiety is a losing battle, because the more you do it, the more you send a message to yourself that you’re at risk and therefore the more anxious you feel. Instead, welcome and accept the anxiety when you feel it and have faith in yourself to handle its presence and the situations you’re in. Only then will anxiety start to fade away and be replaced by confidence.