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Your genetics cause you to be vulnerable to the excessive awareness of how other people are perceiving you. That is the underlying root cause of social anxiety. While you cannot change this underlying genetic vulnerability to developing social anxiety symptoms, you can eliminate the symptoms of anxiety that emerge from certain social situations by using the power of expectations and self suggestion. This article will provide you with some social anxiety help that can make a big difference if you learn to harness the power of your expectations.
As a child, I used to contemplate whether a person would be able to fly or move an object with the mind alone if the person could simply muster the faith that it was possible to do so. I reasoned that it would be easier to have that faith if you could just succeed once are twice. Well, it turns out that there is a real application for that concept of belief as an ally in bringing about change. While we may never move an object with our mind, the impact of our beliefs and expectation on our social anxiety symptoms is enormous. In this article, I would like to teach you how to begin the process of harnessing the power of your expectations.
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.
Your mind has the tendency to create the things that it expects. This is particularly true when it comes to anxiety. If you expect to feel anxious then your mind begins to create the physiological changes in your body to generate those sensations of anxiety. For example, let\’s say that you get a shaky voice every time you want to speak in a meeting or a classroom setting. Because you have a genetic tendency that makes you aware of how others perceive you, you feel anxious when all eyes turn toward you. Because you have had experiences of anxiety in the past, you begin to mentally \”watch out\” for the anxiety before you even speak up. It\’s your mind\’s tendency to \”watch out\” that actually gets you into trouble. It is your fear of developing the social anxiety symptom that causes you to expect the anxiety and therefore create the anxiety before you have even said a word. The anxiety may cause you to avoid speaking up, which leads to a pattern of avoidance that increases the likelihood that your anxiety symptoms will emerge again in the future. The more you avoid, the more your anxiety is reinforced. That\’s how our minds work.
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, I had to read a lot of research while I was in graduate school. Since then I\’ve probably read 10 times the amount of research, but my favorite research studies are still the ones I read during graduate school about the psychology of taking action. What research findings describe is a tendency for people to take action on the things that they expect. The thing that we expect to happen tends to be the thing that we mentally visualize in our mind\’s eye. So for example, if I picture myself being assertive as I walk up to return a defective item at a retail store, I am far more likely to find that my instincts and automatic reactions follow through with being assertive. However, if I imagine myself feeling anxious and avoiding eye contact as I walk up to the teller, that becomes far more likely to be my reality. What we see in our mind\’s eye creates a template that guides the action we take in the moments following those visualizations. That\’s why the process of \”watching out\” for a recurrence of social anxiety symptoms ends up creating the symptoms that you fear. It\’s a very problematic cycle that tends to escalate social anxiety symptoms into a very severe problem.
Let\’s say, for example, that you have a specific social anxiety symptom that emerges, like a shaky voice every time you want to speak up in a meeting or in a classroom setting. Your tendency to be aware of how this makes you come across to others is going to cause you to \”watch out\” for that same problem in the future. But in this situation, it\’s your mind\’s tendency to \”watch out\” that it going to get you into trouble. You see, your fear of developing the social anxiety symptom is triggered when you find yourself in a similar situation to those that have caused the symptom to emerge in the past. Once you begin to watch for the symptom, your mind ends up creating it because of how our minds work.
The solution that I am proposing will only work for people who have a fairly high level of introspection (which is the ability to look into your own mind to observe your own thoughts). The solution is to take control of what you expect will happen next. One way to do this is by building up your belief in your own ability to use self-suggestion and mental intentions. I entered into the field of psychology as a skeptic with regard to hypnotic phenomenon, but by the time I was finished with graduate school in psychology I had a very strong faith in the power of unconsciously held expectations to create psychological change. It was spending time working under the tutelage of one of the best hypnosis researchers that changed how I felt about hypnosis. Hypnosis is nothing more than a process of changing what a person expects to happen next. When done by the hypnotist, the person being hypnotized must gradually accept the words of the hypnotist at face value. People who do so are called \”good hypnotic subjects.\” Other people do not relinquish control of their thoughts and expectations, but they can do hypnosis just as well as the \”good hypnotic subjects\” by learning self hypnosis, whereby a person uses self-suggestion to change their own thoughts and expectations.
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.
Now try participating in the following experiment that is designed to show you that you can consciously manipulate your mind and body by purposefully generating expectations. Read the paragraph through and then go back and try it with all of your concentration. Imagine a bright yellow lemon with nubbly skin sitting on a small white plate in front of you. Pick up the little knife next to it and cut the lemon in half. Now cut one half into quarters as you watch the spurts of juice from the act of slicing the lemon. Pick up a quarter wedge and bite into it and notice how you begin to salivate a little more as you imagine sour lemon juice running over your tongue and puckering your mouth. Your mouth is salivating because of imagining biting into a lemon. In other words, your body is producing saliva to begin the digestive process for the citric acid that it believes is in your mouth or will be shortly. Your body responds to what you expect will happen next. You can manipulate what your body expects to happen next by using the hologram of your mind to imagine.
Most people think of hypnosis as sinking deeply into a relaxed state while a hypnotist gives you suggestions. But that is a misperception of hypnosis, as hypnotic phenomenon occur in the waking state without any relaxation necessary. In fact, society as a whole has been hypnotized, in a way, by commercials. I am talking about the impact that drug company commercials have had on the powerful suggestion effect known as the placebo response. Did you know that the placebo response has increased in its effect size (a statistical measure of power) by 20% during the past decade? In other words, people\’s expectation that pills will cure problems has increased due to the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical companies\’ advertising. The end result is that people respond more strongly to a sugar pill these days than they used to.
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.
Now put this information to work for you. Don\’t start with the most difficult and problematic symptoms. Instead, begin with building your confidence by practicing a general feeling of confidence by imagining how it feels in the mind and body when you are confident. Practice walking around with that confidence based on nothing but the power of your intention and imagination. Once you begin to have some success with that for a few days, pick a fairly easy anxiety symptom to challenge. Try to get a lot of practice in a short period of time with the same kind of social situation so that you can learn what works best for getting yourself into a relaxed and confident state of mind before you enter the situation. Then rely on pure intensity of the focus of your mind to bring your mind to a state of expecting to feel cool, calm, and relaxed. Treat any emerging anxiety reaction as nothing but a momentary phenomenon that can be ignored since you expect to feel calm, happy, and relaxed for the rest of the day.
The reason why I consider this to be the fastest method of reducing your social anxiety symptoms is because you can use it instantly for the next anxiety producing situation that you may face. But you should know, that social anxiety symptoms are some of the most difficult symptoms to overcome because they have a tendency to emerge out of the blue when your mind slips back into an anxious reaction as you become aware of other people watching you or perceiving something about you. What I\’m telling you is that you can succeed with this method, but only if you allow for the possibility that you may slip up from time to time. Do not allow temporary slip ups to stop you from using the most powerful method for changing how you react to social interaction. By continually focusing on changing the way you react to situations and purposely facing down your fears, you will have created a dramatic change in the quality of your life.
The release of extra saliva helps with the proper digestion of certain foods such as citrus fruit. In this situation, all you did was imagine, and your body responded. Your body tends to react to the things that are experienced in the hologram of your mind as if they were actually happening now. If your body response is strong enough to create saliva in your mouth, imagine what happens on the micro level of neurotransmitters in the brain when you imagine fearful events or feelings of well being and self confidence. Now you are beginning to understand why expectations create such powerful self-fulfilling prophecies.
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Live for Success, Stand for Something & Believe JR Edmonson
Bio:
Dr. Todd Snyder is a clinical psychologist who provides self-help resources to beat social anxiety symptoms at his specialty website: www.socialanxietysecrets.com
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