The Fastest Solution for Social Anxiety Symptoms

Even though your genetic predisposition for having social anxiety symptoms cannot be changed with modern technology, there are several approaches you can take to eliminate your social anxiety symptoms by changing what you expect to happen when you face social situations that have provoked your anxiety in the past.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder if a person could do magic of some sort (like moving an object with the mind) if one simply believed strongly enough that one did indeed possess the power to do so. I wondered what would happen if I could get myself to truly believe that I could move something with my mind (as opposed to trying haphazardly as an experiment that I expected to fail). Well, it turns out that there is a real application for that same process of building belief. If you believe strongly enough that you are not at risk for feeling anxious in a particular social situation, you will not feel anxious in that situation. Of course, this is very difficulty to pull off in real life, because the tendency of your mind is to focus on the things that you fear. If you keep reading, I'll explain how you can actually use a belief-shifting method that leads to a temporary, but very rappid, elimination of social anxiety symptoms if done correctly.

The solution I am proposing for your symptoms will be much easier to understand if you first develop a deeper understanding of the problem that you are facing. The root cause of your problem is a genetic predisposition that causes you to be more tuned in to the thoughts, feelings, and facial expressions of other people. This root cause does not necessarily mean you'll have Social Anxiety Disorder. The disorder part only becomes true when a second to ingredient is added. I'm talking about a life story that includes several incidents that involve a strong fear response to your own anxiety symptoms, followed by the development of a pattern of avoidance of situations that could cause you those same anxiety reactions. In other words, the second ingredient is that you develop a fear of your own fear reaction. You learn that you do not like feeling anxious and so your mind identifies that feeling as something to be avoided.

Let's take the example of a shaky voice that shows up every time you want to speak up in a meeting or in a classroom setting. Because you have a strong tendency to be aware of how you are coming across to others, your mind has learned to "watch out" for situations that could cause your anxiety to emerge in the future. It is this very tendency to "watch out" the ends up getting you into trouble. You see, once you begin to watch for the symptoms of social anxiety, your mind ends up creating those symptoms because of what it expects to happen next. Just like the miror situation where you believe that you are alone, your mind expects to feel calm and relaxed and it does not identify a reason to become alarmed, while expecting that people are watching you (even if they are actually holograms of people) leads your mind to expect the anxiety and therefore create it. In other words, it is not reality that causes your anxiety but rather what you expect to be your reality.

As a clinical psychologist, some of the most fascinating research that I have ever sifted through was bundled into a book called, The Psychology of Action. The book describes the powerful tendency for our minds to act on what we see in our visual thoughts about the future. Research studies that were carefully designed to determine what causes people to take the actions that they take revealed how powerful our expectations are. And those expectations are most highly linked to the mental visualizations that occur in the holograms of our brain. Are you beginning to understand why the process of "watching out" for a recurrence of symptoms ends up creating the symptoms that you dread? Don't get down on yourself about this. Realize that this is simply a part of what it means to be a person with a socially anxious temperament. You have a built in tendency to monitor how you come across to others. In some situations, this is a great advantage, but when it comes to feeling calm and enjoying social settings, this personality trait sometimes builds up too much momentum in our lives and our tendency to self-monitor becomes a huge problem.

There is a solution, but it requires that you have a certain level of introspection, which is the ability to look into your own mind to observe your thoughts. The solution is that you need to take control of what you expect to happen next. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by building up your trust in your ability to use mental visualization and mental intentions to create automatic reactions in your mind and body. You would already have a great deal of faith and trust in your ability to use this form of self suggestion if you had ever seen some of the amazing phenomenon that I have witnessed via self hypnosis. I entered into the field of psychology as a skeptic regarding hypnotic phenomenon. Having spent some time under one of the country's best hypnosis researchers, I now have a profound respect for the ability of our mind to respond to our own intentional self-suggestion.

Most people think about hypnosis as something involving a hypnotist and a hypnotic subject. In reality, all hypnosis is self hypnosis, even if you have a hypnotist guiding you through the process of using self-suggestion. You don't even need to deeply relax into a trance-like state for the power of hypnotic suggestion to be in effect. As an example, recent research findings have revealed that our society as a whole has been hypnotized, in a way, by commercials. What I am referring to is the profound impact that drug company commercials have had on the power of the placebo response. The placebo response is more powerful now than it was 15 years ago. In other words, taking a sugar pill in a research study now causes improvements in symptoms that are much stronger than they used to be. Why in the world would that happen? The answer is that people's expectations have changed regarding the power of drugs. They have changed so much, in fact, that the effect size (a statistical measure of power) has increased by 20% for placebo response in general during the past decade. People respond more strongly to a sugar pill these days than they used to.

Consider the implications of what I just told you. There was never a point when Western society as a whole sat down with a hipnotherapist who was going to change their expectations about how powerful medications are. Rather, people simply absorbed a new belief system over time. What I'm trying to get you to do is to reach for expectations that your social anxiety symptoms will not surface. To do this, you must build your faith in the power of your chosen expectations rather than pouring all your mental energy into "watching out" for the symptoms that you fear. If you adopt the expectation that your social anxiety symptoms have disappeared, and you do so with fierce intensity, you will not need to monitor whether or not those symptoms actually disappear. Rather, you will simply adopt an attitude of blind faith, assuming that your expectation will become reality. If you can learn to pull this off, you can virtually eliminate social anxiety symptoms.

You have already begun to increase your faith in the power of your own expectations and self-suggestion. You did so simply by reading this article in which a clinical psychologist emphasizes just how powerful your expectations really are. Now I'm going to offer you a new exercise to practice with for increasing your faith in the power of your expectations. What I would like for you to do is to increase the amount that your mouth salivates simply by imagining yourself biting into a lemon. In time you will learn to be able to do this simply by expecting that your mouth will salivate, but when you are first learning, you need to use visualization in the hologram of your thoughts. To do this, imagine the bright nubbly skin of a fresh yellow lemon. Imagine that you are cutting that lemon in half and see the squirts of juice as you cut the lemon. Pick up one half of that lemon and smell the citrus scent. Now cut that half of a lemon into two pieces. Pick up one of the imaginary quarter wedges of the lemon and look at it. See it vividly in your mind's eye. Now imagine as vividly as you can the experience of biting into that lemon and feeling that juice run between your teeth and over your gums and tongue. Taste the lemon flavor and notice how your mouth may actually pucker up just a little bit as it begins to salivate more.

Your body responds to what you imagine in the hologram of your mind. If your body can produce saliva in your mouth based on a short imagination experiment with no powerful emotion to increase your focus on it, imagine what can happen at the micro level of neurotransmitters in your brain when you are expecting to feel anxious as you approach a social gathering. I hope you are beginning to appreciate why expectations create such a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take this information and use it. Plan on generating more and more confidence in your ability to use your expectations to create a confident and socially assertive way of responding to all social situations. Don't start with the most difficult symptoms that you face. Instead, build your strength and faith in the power of your chosen expectations by first using your new skills in situations that only cause a very mild level of social anxiety. For example, if you're worst fear is that you will blush and people will wonder what is wrong with you, don't start with that fear. Instead, start with building the expectation that you are going to feel very relaxed and outgoing in your next interaction with someone that you already feel fairly comfortable with. Build gradually towards the fear of the blushing problem, or whatever problem you struggle with the most. Remember, that the key is to use powerful expectation by seeing a picture in your mind of what you expect to come next. The intensity with which you adopt that vision is the point that matters the most in developing this ability. When you see a vision of what you do want in the next few minutes as far as your own personal reaction, adopt the strongly held assumption of absolute certainty that your positive vision will be your reality because of having intended for it to happen.

This is the fastest way to overcome social anxiety simply because you can use it today and see a huge change by tomorrow. That doesn't mean that you can use it and then drop it and live without symptoms for the rest of your life. The degree to which you succeed in eliminating all symptoms is dependent on the sustained mental focus you put on developing a new way of thinking. You will eventually become what you think yourself to be. Start today. Become the person you have imagined.

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