Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

The downfall of many social anxiety sufferers is that their main goal is to eliminate their anxiety. Of course, when we have a problem that is significantly restricting our life and feels unpleasant it is natural to want to be rid of it, but we must first correctly identify what the real problem is. If we are not addressing the right problem then our efforts could be hindering us more than they are helping us.

It is important to recognise that although anxiety is the most prominent part of having social anxiety, it is actually more an effect of the problem rather than the actual root problem. Certainly anxiety interferes with our ability to socialise and that helps keeps us locked in the social anxiety vicious cycle, but we can’t directly control our feelings (except through artificial means) and therefore we need to address what causes us to feel anxious in the first place. What causes us to feel anxious is the way our mental focus and behavioural response to our feelings and situations cause us to feel vulnerable. It is therefore changing these to build inner strength, rather than eliminating anxiety, that needs to be the main goal if progress is to be made.

Anxiety is a natural part of being human. It is supposed be feel unpleasant. It works to motivate you away from potential danger so that you do not get harmed. It is therefore unwise, as well as futile, to make eliminating anxiety your goal. Anxiety is your friend and not your foe and by fighting it you only end up making yourself feel more vulnerable and therefore, more anxious. Rather than putting your efforts into fighting anxiety, put them into building strength so that you feel less vulnerable and therefore, less anxious.

The setbacks people can experience when trying to overcome their social anxiety are often not setbacks at all, but they are percieved as setbacks because people are working towards the goal of eliminating anxiety rather than building inner strength. When the main goal is to eliminate anxiety, success is measured by how much anxiety is felt rather than what has been achieved. This is a particularly problematic because building inner strength often needs to involve working through anxiety provoking situations and feeling the anxiety fully. It is learning that we can cope with the anxiety and will be ok in social situations that matters most for the social anxiety sufferer, rather than reducing anxious feelings. When eliminating anxiety is the goal, anxiety provoking situations are seen as potential moments of failure rather than potential opportunities to build strength. In addition to this, people will often feel like they are making progress when they feel less anxious and that they are failing when they feel more anxious, but this actually may not be true. The example of Sam will help illustrate this.

Sam used to work in an office but found that he spent most of his life feeling anxious. The constant interaction between colleagues, the meetings and work related social events were very anxiety provoking for him. Eventually the stress and anxiety made him decide to quit his job. While unemployed, Sam spent most of his time in his house as he only had to pop out for food and the occasional visit to his parents house. After a while he noticed that he had been feeling less anxious than before, which he was pleased about. Sam interpreted this as progress and thought that the break from working life had helped a lot, but he had misinterpreted the situation because his goal was to eliminate anxiety rather than to build strength.

What actually happened is that Sam had been feeling less anxious because he was avoiding the situations he felt vulnerable in and he unfortunately had made no progress with overcoming his social anxiety. In addition to this he was in a more vulnerable position than before because quitting his job had undermined his confidence in what he felt able to cope with. This became apparent when he was invited out to dinner with his old colleagues. Since he had been feeling better in himself he initially accepted the invitation, but on the evening of the dinner he started to feel more anxious than ever before and decided not to turn up. Sam felt depressed about the experience and interpreted the event as a massive failure and setback in his progress. Not turning up to the event further undermined his confidence and as a result he ended up reducing his exposure to the world even more.

The truth is that Sam had not worked at building up his inner strength at all and he had therefore not made any real progress.  The addition of the undermining effects of his avoidance meant he experienced cripling anxiety on the evening of the dinner, but this was not setback as he had not been making any progress to lose. The anxiety he felt was just a reflection of how vulnerable he was feeling at that point in his life and was a signal that he needs to take action to start building up his inner strength. Sam’s downfall was not that he quit his job, but that he did not then set about actively finding ways to make himself mentally stronger.

In contrast to Sam, some people have made significant progress but will perceive a sudden anxiety attack as a major setback because their goal is still to eliminate anxiety. Social Anxiety had affected Kerry for much of her life leaving her lonely and depressed, but through reading self-help books and attending a local support group she had started to build a social life and was feeling more able to cope socially. She had been experiencing much less anxiety while spending time with her new friends from the group. All seemed to be going well until she had to give a presentation as part of an evening class she had started. Since things had been fairly good the amount of anxiety and self-consciousness she experienced while giving the talk caught her by surprise. She ended up cutting the talk short to escape her anxious feelings, but felt like a failure as everyone else did a longer talk. She left the course because she felt too embarrassed to face the other students again. She was mortified by what she perceived to be a massive setback. This made her feel like all her efforts were for nothing and she started to feel depressed about ever getting over her social anxiety.

Unlike Sam, the anxiety Kerry experienced while giving her talk was not because she had not been making progress. It was because she was making a big step up in pushing her comfort zone. It is natural for us all, whether we have social anxiety or not, to get nervous when doing things that are significantly more challenging then we are used to. The strong anxiety Kerry felt was not a sign of a setback, but her responses to it significantly undermined her confidence and ultimately caused one. If Kerry had made her goal to build inner strength rather then eliminate anxiety then she might have understood that it was more important to let herself experience the anxiety, finish her talk and continue with her course than it was to escape the anxiety. It is important to recognise that Kerry’s response to her anxiety caused her setback rather than the actual anxiety or anything else out of her control. Since it was something she did, it is therefore something she can change. This means that there is a path to progress for her and she need not feel hopeless and depressed about overcoming her social anxiety.

I will be providing more detailed information about how to build inner strength in my audio product. Until it is released, think about Sam and Kerry and what their stories can teach you about your current strategy for overcoming social anxiety. Has your goal been to eliminate anxiety?

Tags: Building Inner Strength, Eliminate Anxiety, Facing Fears, Failure, Overcoming Social Anxiety, Setbacks, Undermining Confidence

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Overcoming Social Anxiety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.