Are you someone who feels anxious when you have to meet new people? Perhaps you worry about what others think of you, or feel like people are judging you? Social anxiety and shyness is something that a lot of people deal with, and it can be hard to face, not knowing how to overcome it. So, keep reading to discover how to overcome social anxiety today.
Once you learn what helps you, you can start trying to put the techniques into practice and hopefully, you will start to overcome social anxiety step by step. In this article, we are going to take a look at some things that you can do which should help you to not only learn ways to control your social anxiety but to also put them into practice and overcome it.
Although we do not know the exact cause of social anxiety and shyness, we do know the factors that contribute to it. One of which can be your genetics, and also your environment.
However, a very common cause of social anxiety is a negative experience that could have happened to someone. For example, bullying; the pain and negativity from this experience can sometimes stick with people.
The anxiety can possibly carry on through to adult life, causing fears of social situations and fears of being rejected or judged etc. It’s even known that some hormone imbalances such as serotonin imbalance can contribute to social anxiety.
Now you know the causes of shyness, you can move forward and learn how to overcome social anxiety.
There are many techniques that you can use which will help you to overcome anxiety. It is all about finding the right ways that work for you personally, and we are going to talk about a variety of techniques that should help.
Once you start to put some techniques into practice, you should hopefully start to see that it is possible to overcome your social anxiety and shyness. This will also help you when dealing with social situations, being able to focus on the positives and dealing with negative thoughts.
A self-help manual may not always be everyone’s first choice, but they can be a massive help. If you are self-driven, it is a great way to independently learn and practice self-help techniques, you also get to do this at your own pace.
You don’t have to answer to anyone and can take things in your own time. This is very helpful, especially if you are the sort of person who likes to create goals and projects for themselves, you can do this through what you learn and in your own time, start to put what you have learned into practice.
If you can create objective goals that will help you to overcome your social anxiety, it can be a great technique to use.
You can create goals to focus on which revolve around ways to help your shyness.
When we have goals to focus on, we can also judge our performance on these goals and how we achieved them.
What this also does is helps you to focus on yourself, rather than how others may react.
You can then focus on your goal (such as speaking in front of a room full of people) rather than focusing on how everyone else may or may not have reacted. As long as you have achieved your goal, that is all that matters.
A common symptom of social anxiety and shyness is that we tend to listen to our negative thoughts that are normally caused by our anxiety. If we can challenge these negative thoughts, we can start to rationalize what it is we are worrying about.
This can also help to reduce your symptoms as you are stopping to think about what these negative thoughts mean and why they are most likely not very rational.
Once you have identified your irrational negative thoughts and challenged them, you can then start to replace them with positive, more realistic thoughts which in turn will help you begin to overcome your anxiety.
There are some physical changes that can happen when you have anxiety. This can include dizziness or increased heart rate and muscle tension, which will tend to happen from losing the control of your breath from anxiety.
If you can learn to control your breath, you will then start to reduce and ease the physical symptoms, making your anxiety easier to control.
You should then start to feel a lot calmer, which will help you to start thinking rationally about what it is you are having anxiety about. A great way to control your breathing is by learning some breathing techniques, which you can also learn using hypnotherapy.
Another effective way to overcome shyness or social anxiety is to face your fears head-on. If you can challenge your fears, you are effectively putting your techniques that you have learned into practice. This will help you to push your boundaries, in a positive way.
Putting yourself in more social situations may seem very worrying at first, however it is normal to feel slightly anxious, to begin with. Once you have overcome your initial fears and have stayed in your social situation, you will start to realize that anxiety is not as noticeable as you may think, and you are also helping yourself by putting what you have learned into practice.
Doing this will help you to overcome your social anxiety and shyness by facing it head on and using what you have learned to tackle your fears.
Hopefully, you will now start to put these techniques you have learned into practice and will be able to see a change in the way you react to social situations.
As mentioned before hypnotherapy is a great way to control your stresses and worries, so if you are keen to learn more about how hypnosis can help you, click here to find out more.