Social Anxiety, a crippling process whereby you render yourself stuck by fear of what others might think and say about you.

Social anxiety

When you feel that you are being judged by others.

A crippling process whereby you render yourself stuck by fear of what others might think and say about you.

We all have an inner judge, a voice that judges ourselves, situations and others. That voice can get quite loud, quite obnoxious and persistent. It is also often very untrue.

If you might describe yourself as a people-pleaser then this judge may be very self-berating about your looks, your conversation, your actions and if you fall short of perfection, berate you for days, weeks and months to come.

Social anxiety makes everything dark and hopeless. It makes you feel powerless and helpless. Social anxiety likes using your brain's neural pathways and doesn't want you to start using them to learn new things that would steal you away from it. Social anxiety holds on tight and gets you to believe huge, ridiculous lies about yourself. such as: 

I will always feel this anxiety,

I will never have friends,

I can never feel good at work,

I can never take a promotion because then I would have responsibilities I couldn't handle.

I can't go to university because I’m bound to fail, I won't be able to make friends there, people will look at me funny and make me feel like I've done something wrong.

Walking past a policeman makes me feel guilty, even though I've done nothing wrong.

Even cleaning my desk is uncomfortable because people are watching and judging me.

Maybe I walk funny.

Maybe I don't hold my back straight enough.

Maybe people know I didn’t wash my hair today.

I know everyone dislikes me.

Why am I like this? What did I ever do wrong? I've never hurt anybody. Why can't I be normal? Why can't I get a good job? Why can't I have friends? Why am I so hopeless? Everyone else seems to be fine...

SOCIAL ANXIETY is a LIAR. IT MAKES YOU  BELIEVE A HUGE AMOUNT of LIES about yourself.

One of the biggest turning points for me in overcoming #socialanxiety is that moment when I realised that actually, very few people were even thinking about me at all!

Those who were similar to me were worried about what I and others were thinking about them.

Those who were self-assured were thinking about a multitude of things other than me, the shopping list no doubt was higher on their thoughts than I was.

And those who might be judging me were not nice people anyway and didn't deserve an ounce of my cognitive energy.

That loud obnoxious judge, you can tell him/her to be quiet - in a kind and understanding voice otherwise, that anxiety will ramp up even more as you become your own worst judge of you.

You can tell the judge that he/she is mistaken, that you are ok, you're doing the best you can, and you are good enough already.

The best thing about social anxiety is uncovering the lies about it, especially the one I most frequently come across - I'll always have anxiety - no you won't, unless you really want to...