Social anxiety can be a challenging and overwhelming experience, but there are many strategies that can help you manage it. Here are some tips for managing social anxiety and improving your well-being:
1. Practice deep breathing and relaxation techniques: Deep breathing can help calm your body and mind, and relaxation techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation and mindfulness meditation can help you feel more comfortable in social situations. I offer my clients these techniques in all my programs because they are so powerful. Here are a couple of simple techniques to try.
a. Slow down for a moment as you are reading this and take a nice, deep breath. Be sure to make it a slow breath that completely fills your lungs up, and exhale at a relaxed pace.
2. Challenge negative thoughts: Social anxiety often involves negative self-talk and assumptions about what others are thinking or feeling. Try to identify these negative thoughts and challenge them with evidence to the contrary. Use cognitive behavioral techniques as a good “how.”
a. Try on that you don’t actually know what others are thinking about you. We tend to think we can read other people’s minds, but we can’t really 😊
b. If you are going to imagine what someone else is thinking imagine they are thinking something positive about you.
3. Gradually expose yourself to social situations: If social situations make you anxious, it can be helpful to gradually expose yourself to them in a controlled way. Start with small, low-stakes social events and gradually build up to more challenging situations. The key is to start with what you are comfortable with and build from there.
a. The key to “Exposure Therapy” is to expose yourself to situations only as fast as you can remain comfortable doing it.
b.You want to push your Comfort Zone, but not too much.
4. It can be helpful to join a support group for people with social anxiety. Having a supportive network can provide a sense of belonging and help you feel less alone in your struggles. Of course, doing healing work like self-hypnosis and learning tools to change your thoughts will work the best as a long-term solution. An it is also helpful to know you are not alone.
5. Use positive self-talk: Try to reframe your thoughts and focus on the positive aspects of social situations. This can help you feel more confident and less anxious. In almost all of my programs, I teach them how to do affirmations. Doing affirmations turns it into a habit that you can practice outside of high-anxiety situations. That way, the habit of positive self-talk is established before you need it on those bad days.
Managing social anxiety takes some time and practice, but with patience and persistence, you can learn to feel more at ease in social situations and improve your overall well-being. Beyond managing it, healing work can change the causes of it, so the symptoms abate. Doing deep healing work can also accelerate your recovery from the symptoms.