What's the greatest piece of advice you've received for your social anxiety? That's the question I asked on the social anxiety subreddit. It received lots of comments detailing people's favorite and greatest tips they have heard for social anxiety. Overall, I'm impressed by the quality of advice. Take a look for yourself by watching this video and be sure to tell me your greatest social anxiety tip
About three weeks ago, I posted on the Social Anxiety subreddit asking this question, What is the greatest tip you've received for your social anxiety? And it received over 40 comments to my surprise, which I have not read any of. Because I want to read them with you. Without So, without further ado, let's take a look at some of the best social anxiety tips.
At least, the best ones from Reddit. Also, take a moment to write down in the comments your best social anxiety tip, and maybe it'll be one of the ones that I cover today. Or maybe not, it'll be something completely new that someone else watching can take advantage of. Tell yourself with sincerity that no matter what happens in a social situation, you're going to be there for yourself.
Now, on first glance, this looks and sounds like the overused and cliché advice of just be yourself, which is really hard to comprehend, especially if you struggle with social anxiety. Well, who am I? But, that's not what it is at all. They said, be there for yourself, which means you're not there to make people laugh, you're not there to be the center of attention, You're not there to entertain others.
You're just there for you and how you want to feel in this social situation. When I was at my TEDx event, I was unseen and to the side watching the person in front of me give their own TED talk knowing that I was about to go on stage and give the biggest speech of my life up to that point. Don't get me wrong, I was prepared as humanly possible for this talk, yet I was still nervous.
Nervous that I might mess up or make a mistake and those thoughts kind of just started to consume my thinking. So I started talking to myself and I started saying things like, I'm just here to have fun. Like that's all I'm here to do. I'm here to have fun, do the best I can, but no matter if I mess up or, you know, I slip up on a word, I'm just here to have fun.
That's my goal. And by doing this, I was able to center the talk that I was doing completely around just how I want it to be. Which was to have fun and you know do my best give a good message, and I just had fun with it So that's just an example of something to do, but I want you all to start thinking How can you implement this step into your life?
This tip is a really good one for just kind of releasing that pressure I feel in social situations and can even be used in public speaking. It reminds me of a tool my favorite therapist suggested. That before I go out, I do a visualization. Imagine I'm holding the younger version of me. Okay. Step one.
Check the one who's deeply scared about this situation. I tell him it's going to be okay, and that favorite therapist is going to take care of him while I'm gone. It's okay. My favorite therapist is gonna take care of you. And when I come back, I'll pick him up. I visualize my therapist, then put little me into my therapist's arms and tell him he'll be 100% safe here.
The most important thing is when I get home from the event, absolutely do the visualization to get him back from the therapist. Ah. Oh. I forgot it. I am a huge fan of visualization, but this is honestly the first time I've heard it used like this. Many may read what this person wrote on Reddit and think that it's ridiculous, it would never work.
It's kind of stupid. But those are also probably the same people who have never tried visualization. You have to try things out. If you never try things out, you'll never know if they work really well for you or not. You may be missing out on one of the most impactful practices for you, but because you think it's stupid, or childish, or silly...
You don't even want to try it. It's kind of like the similar thing that I say to my kids all the time. And they're like, oh, I don't want to eat that. It looks weird. It looks gross. And it's like, this could be your favorite food ever. Why would you at least not try it? It drives me insane. Like, I just cannot say that I'm willing to try anything.
Food wise, mental health practice wise. Oh, maybe not anything, but generally anything. Bottom line is, it is worth feeling silly for a little bit. To try out different practices. All right, let's find another one. Here we go. That no one is paying attention to you as much as you are, and no one cares that much about what you're doing.
This was true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today. You're sitting at a red light. What are you doing? You're on your phone. You're standing in line waiting to be checked out. What are you doing? You're on your phone. You're filming a YouTube video. What are you doing? Oh, sorry about that. The point is, is that you probably couldn't even tell me what color the car was that was next to you at the last red light, or what the person in front of you looked like at the checkout line at the store.
It's because nobody cares, and is already pretty consumed in themselves. They don't have time to judge other people. Even if you go Over the top to get people's attention a lot of times. They still won't notice you In fact in april of last year, maybe it was the year before. I don't know in april of some year somewhat recently I dressed in a full santa suit and went to target and it was Staggering the amount of people that acted like they didn't Didn't even notice me you would have thought that everyone would have just been staring at me But that was not the case.
All right, here's a reply to that comment And you know regarding the one of nobody cares what you think or doing that type of thing So you walk down the street and everybody's looking at you you walk into a room and everyone is looking at you thinking about you wondering what you're doing talking about you and when you leave they're all still thinking and talking about you.
Really? Do you know how narcissistic that sounds? They're not even thinking about you. They're all too busy thinking about themselves Even if you do something embarrassing people will completely forget it within 10 minutes
To accept yourself. Easier said than done but yes, learning to accept yourself fully for who you are is really helpful not just for social anxiety but really just your overall general mental health. And understand that you control your thoughts, nobody else can. I think this part is worth explaining a little bit further cause I don't want people to think that the goal should be to approach.
Get to the point where you can control all of your thoughts. Thoughts are like breasts, they're pretty involuntary. You can control what thoughts you give power to, which ones you really focus on, and you can also see thoughts and give power to reframing them, or maybe digging a little deeper on those thoughts.
And you may be thinking like this person. They can be hard to put into practice. Well, yeah, transitioning from going from socially anxious to socially confident is not going to be an easy transition or a comfortable one. Many of you right now, life's got you up against the road. You can't give up. You can't give in.
Listen to me. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Make the commitment to yourself, knowing that. This is gonna be difficult, but I'm gonna stay consistent with it, and I'm gonna try these things out. Write down your social anxiety wins, no matter how small, and read over them often. Fear in the present is conquered by remembering victories in the past.
This reminds me of my quote unquote, yeah, folder. I keep screenshots of all the positive comments or emails. that I get, and I put them in this little folder, and anytime I'm feeling down about myself or my work and what I'm doing here, I will just browse that folder, read some of the stuff that maybe you've sent me, and that kind of just digs me back out of that hole and like, reminds me why I'm doing this, and I can continue going and you know, brings me out of it.
So, I like the idea of doing this for Social Anxiety Wins. I think it would be very helpful. Our brain is a learning machine. All these years it has been learning from the bad experiences that have happened to us in social situations. We have to unlearn some of these things and learn new things by going out and socializing more.
I did exposure therapy with medication for about 7 months and it completely changed my life. Oh, you know I'm all about this one. Exposure therapy completely changed my life. And honestly, I'm not real sure where I would be if I never mustered up the courage to take on the challenge of doing exposure therapy for my social anxiety.
If you're not familiar with what exposure therapy is, it's basically exposing yourself to situations that make you feel anxious in little small chunks. You keep doing this, you continue to build up and do stuff that is, you know, more and more anxious. What I like to call baby steps. And over time you learn to train your brain to realize, Oh, I don't need to be anxious in this moment.
Kyle is safe and this situation is not. All what my brain is making it up to be. If you want a full deep dive on exposure therapy, just go check out this video. I'll also put the link in the description. Oh, boy. I knew we were bound to get one of these. Get medicine. Muuuuh. I know it's hard, but often social anxiety is Especially when it gets chronic and gets disorderly is caused by an imbalance in your brain's hormones You are actively lacking the make you happy stuff I believe that's serotonin meds give you that input and while you still experience anxious emotions It gives you enough strength to juggle it instead of breaking down.
I'm not anti medication by any means But I am against taking medication unless by Last resort, I think you should try other things out first before just jumping straight to medication because the reason why is we have the ability to change those chemical imbalances in our head completely naturally and without medication.
And most of the time you can do it without medication. And by doing it that way, you don't get all the side effects of medication. Before hopping on the medication train though, do your research, go look it up. Go look at different studies, what they've found out about taking medication for anxiety or depression.
I've done a little of the research for you in this video that probably a lot of it will be greatly surprising to you and very interesting. Um, I'll show a little clip here. And go.
Oh, forgot. I gotta push the button. And go. There was a study published last week by JAMA that showed meditation was equally as effective for anxiety as a very popular anti anxiety drug called Lexapro. All right. I'm going to stop there because I think we've covered at least all the really good ones. If you want to see more of them, I'll put the link to the post from Reddit in the description below.
But I want to tell you all about some exciting news. So I don't think I even shared this, but there's this movie that just came out June 23rd called Heightened. And what's so cool about this movie is it's a social anxiety comedy. Intriguing, right? Bummer thing is that since it's an independent film, it wasn't, you know, widely released in theaters or available on streaming.
In fact, they only had one release of it in Los Angeles. on June 23rd, which for me kind of sucked because I live in nowhere, Indiana, and to travel that far to go watch a movie seems like a lot. But with there being no way for me to watch the film, I was not about to take that as an answer. No, because I'm not a quitter.
And when I come across problems, I say, I'm going to solve you, bro. I'm not sure how, but I'm going to do it. So what I did was, I figured out who the director was, and who was also the lead actor. Sarah Friedman, and I shot her an email, in which she responded to me the same day, wanting to collaborate in some way, to be able to show the movie off to you all.
That's about as detailed as I can get. She reached out, basically said, yeah, let's do something, um... You know, she's gonna reach back out to me in a couple months? A month? Six months? I have no idea. She told me that it takes a while for movies to get going, so I just made a reminder for myself to reach out in two months if I haven't heard from her, and hopefully I'll be able to watch that movie.
give my little take on it here on the channel and then I'll also have a link for you all can watch the full movie yourselves because if you're like me and have gone through social anxiety or maybe you're in it right now, whoo, isn't it nice to get a little comedic relief and I've never heard of a social anxiety comedy so I am excited about it.
I'm gonna try to play a little bit of the trailer here without going against YouTube's terms and services or whatever. Um, so I may only be able to play like a small clip here. I'm not real sure, but if you want to watch the full trailer, it'll also be in the link in the description below. So happy you're home, dear.
We were so worried about you. Can
I get anyone a drink? Eleanor shouldn't be drinking, but I'll have a G& T. You're all here because you have something in common. You have trouble connecting with others. I'm in this program? You'll make fantastic little workers. You'll be shadowing Dustin. You're Dustin? Dusty. What do
they call it? What you have. Anxiety, misophonia, OCD. These are what? You were
so fearless as a little girl. I wonder what changed.
Take the time you want to do and do that something you love.
Thank you for watching and make sure you subscribe so you know when I release that video about the heightened film about the social anxiety comedy and you'll. Probably be one of the first to watch it. Maybe. And if you haven't done so already, please comment your favorite social anxiety tip below. Until next week.
PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEACE!!!
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