Tips to Beat Your Social Anxiety

Living with social anxiety can mean many uncomfortable interactions. This can lead to an altering life that disconnects us and prevents us from connecting and engaging. This can mean changing the way we interact at work, on dates, or even attending classes at school.

To be honest, managing social anxiety is never easy. But one thing is for sure, it’s possible. If you’re looking for ways to create more comfortable social experiences, look no further.

Revisit the Beginning

Despite the misconception of social anxiety being compared to our nervousness, it’s a bit more serious than that. It’s actually a medical condition, but it’s still possible to work through these symptoms.

If getting professional help is beyond your financial means, a little reflection goes a long way. When you give yourself the time you need through reflection, a lot is uncovered. You not only start to understand where you’ve come from but also where it all started.

Another option could be joining support groups that give you the opportunity to practice social skills. In doing so we will find that our interactions with others become less anxious. Overcoming social anxiety will allow us the advantage of truly connecting. Having conversations with this group will allow us to raise certain concerns others have been able to overcome.

I’m not a huge fan of medication as I believe we’re all equipped to overcome it all. It may require a great deal of work, but it is all worth it.

Trigging Your Social Anxiety

Whether we know it or not, social anxiety is not the same for everyone. We all experience it differently. There’s one thing I find about this condition. And that’s the exterior focus it presents. How many times do we worry about the world around us? How many times do we focus on how it views us instead of how we show up in it? And because of that, we live inside our heads.

Understanding what provokes our social anxiety is key. If we can pinpoint the moments that influence our anxiety, we can begin to focus on how to deal with it. We can figure out how to maneuver through it all once we better understand what triggers it.

That’s what makes social anxiety so real. It is a way we subconsciously give our powers away. We start to disconnect from ourselves and start to accommodate others. Maybe a little more than we need to. Such a condition cripples us

Take some time to list a few situations that resulted in your heightened anxiety. Which one(s) do you feel makes you terrified? Is it a job interview? How about meeting people for the first time? Could it be an exam that determined your final grade? Overcoming social anxiety is a careful process, but one worth going through.

Embrace the Challenge

If you feel challenged, it makes sense that you think of the social situations that bring you discomfort. It may worry you that you may say something offensive to someone. Or, it may even heighten your anxiety by doing things that bring attention to yourself. That may include something as simple as sneezing, or even laughing at what we believe is the wrong time. That’s what I call living in your own head. That’s because a  lot of things we perceive of others aren’t really true.

Even the thing we fear most, others don’t share with us. That means others don’t always feel the way we expect them to feel about us. On the contrary, we may be surprised to find that people actually empathize with us. The truth is, no matter what you’re going through, you’re probably not the first. Therefore, there is never a real reason to separate ourselves from the pack.

What do you do when you start to feel overwhelmed by your social anxiety? Have you tried challenging the way you feel? If so, it would help you to start replacing it with something more realistic. Whenever I start to feel that shift, I try to separate the reality from the illusion I may have created? How do I assure that I am not only fair with myself, but with the feeling I am currently feeling?

Many of us don’t have a problem falling short. We just have a problem when our shortcomings are on display for all to see. We figure that if they’re around, they will notice every bit of it. As a matter of fact, social anxiety may cause us to believe that we are constantly on display. We actually all are, but not the way we tend to perceive it.

I’ll leave you with these quick tips so that you have something manageable to work towards. Remember, if you are to make any progress in any part of your life, you must be intentional. So wake up every day with the intention of acknowledging and dealing with your anxieties. You will find that the only person standing in your way…is you.