Here’s an interesting question from a reader:
“How can I fix my social anxiety?”
I wish I could give you a straight and easy answer to this.
But there isn’t any straightforward answer. Especially since there can be many reasons for your anxiety.
Let’s understand social anxiety a bit better.
It normally happens when you become nervous and anxious on a social situation like a party.
Your heart starts beating faster, your breathing gets shallow, your body temperature may increase, your sweat from your hands, your mind just signals you to get out of there as fast as possible.
Simply put, you associate that situation with a situation of danger. And your body, mind and energy reacts to that. There can be many different levels of intensity for the bodily responses.
A simple solution can be to regularize your breathing by starting to count your breath.
Count with 1-4 in the inhalation and 1-4 on exhalation.
When you normalize your breathing, you are telling your body to calm down as well as moving your mind away from the danger situation.
Another simple solution is a shift of focus.
I met someone who controlled his social anxiety by thinking on any random math problem he would be working on. You can also do it by focusing on something else, it just needs to be absorbing enough that you can forget your fear and bodily responses.
You can use any of these strategies to quickly manage the situation at hand.
Yet, these strategies, rarely fix the underlying problem. They just help you cope with it.
Most likely you will continue to have the same type of reaction on similar situations.
There are also many ways to “fix” the underlying problem. In terms of our framework, it’s related to two skills:
– The development of your inner power: so you can control your own mind to no longer feel weak and to create that steady source of strength inside of you. This is what we train mostly in the 10 Steps to Inner Power.
and
– The training of your energy: so that you can easily manipulate the energy in your body and are able to control your bodily and energetic responses. You would be able to stop the anxiety by willfully controlling the energy inside of you and better yet, to understand (energetically) where this anxiety is coming from. You gain this skill on the Vitality and Energy Training.
