Try This Quick Tip for Fast Social Anxiety Symptom Relief

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.

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.

You won’t understand the solution I am posing unless you first understand the problem. The root cause of social anxiety is an underlying genetic temperament that causes you to be more tuned in to the thoughts and judgments of others. But social anxiety doesn’t turn into Social Anxiety Disorder until a second ingredient is added. The second ingredient is a life story that includes a few incidents involving a fear response to your own anxiety symptoms, followed by avoidance of situations that might cause those same anxiety reactions.

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, one of the most useful bundles of research data that I ever read in graduate school was bundled into a book called, The Psychology Of Action. One of the research findings described in that book is the powerful tendency for our minds to act on what we visualize in our minds. What you see in your mind’s eye creates a basic template for taking action in the moments, seconds, and weeks following those visualizations. I’m sure you can see now why the process of “watching out” for a recurrence of symptoms ends up creating a much worse situation than you would have otherwise experienced. Before you go beating yourself up, realize that this is part of what it means to be a person with a socially anxious temperament. It’s not your fault. You have a built-in tendency to monitor how you are coming across to others. In many situations this is a great advantage. But when it comes to the actual social anxiety symptoms that sometimes build up momentum in our lives, 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 have the misperception of hypnosis that it is a process of sinking deeply into a relaxed state while the hypnotist gives you suggestions. In reality, hypnotic phenomenon occur just as powerfully in the fully awake and alert state without any relaxation necessary. I will give you an example of how society in the Western cultures have been hypnotized in the fully alert and awake state. I am referring to the fact that drug company commercials have caused the placebo effect to become much stronger during the past decade. It happened because the drug companies have put so much money into advertising their drugs on television. People now have a stronger belief in the power of modern medicine to fix things with a pill. As a result, when people are given a sugar pill (a placebo that has no active ingredients) the positive effect on the symptoms in question is now about 20% stronger than it was 10 years ago. The effect size (which is a statistical measure of the power and significance that a variable has in creating a change) has increased by over 20% for placebo pills in general when averaged out across the many drug studies that used placebos in the past decade. This effect has been so powerful that drug companies are having a hard time getting the FDA to approve their drugs for distribution to the public (because the drug has to do something more than a sugar pill). As a result, there were fewer drugs approved in the past two years than there were back in the eighties despite the huge increase in the amount of money being poured into the development of new drugs. The expectations of our mind are so powerful, that the drug companies ended up losing money by advertising too much. Ironic isn’t it?

Consider the enormous impact of what I just revealed to you. At no point did the American people sit down with a hypnotherapist to receive hypnotic suggestions while in a deep state of trance. Instead, we simply absorbed a new belief system gradually over time that supported an unconscious belief that medications are very powerful. The reason for this is because the drug companies have poured so much money into convincing us that their drugs are powerful. It’s kind of ironic than that drug companies are having a hard time proving that their pills are stronger than a sugar pill, which is one of the FDA’s requirements before a company can bring a drug to the public market. The implication for you, is that you should trust in the power of your expectations, and use those expectations as an ally in your battle against social anxiety symptoms. If you adopt an expectation of being calm and relaxed with fierce intensity, your expectation will have a very powerful effect. You will want to adopt and attitude of blind faith, assuming that you will be relaxed and calm, and seeing yourself feeling that way in your mind’s eye as you progress through any social situation. You don’t want to use “affirmations,” as those are just words floating around in your mind. Instead, use the full power of the hologram of your mind’s eye to see and feel yourself being relaxed in the seconds and minutes coming up.

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.

Did you notice your mouth salivating a little more even on your first try on this exercise? That is because of the power of your expectation created by the visualization that you have in your mind. Your body is actually trying to digest what it believes to be citric acid in your mouth. That is why you salivated more than normal. If your body will create that much saliva simply because of an expectation, imagine what can be possible on the micro level of neurotransmitters in your brain that cause you to feel calm or anxious in reaction to your expectations.

Put this information to use. Spend some time developing your confidence in your ability to use your expectations to create confidence and a socially assertive way of responding in every single social situation you encounter. Start with the easiest social situations and practice feeling confident and relaxed by imagination and expectation (not by forcing it to happen with willpower). You will want to build up your faith by having success in the easy situations first. Trying to not think of the feared expectation will not work. Rather, you have to flood your thoughts with the powerful expectation of what you do want. Only by increasing the intensity with which you see what you do want in the hologram of your mind’s eye will you succeed at forgetting about things that you fear. Work on adopting the strongly held assumption of absolute certainty that you are a calm person who stays relaxed in all social situations no matter what.

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.

Dr. Todd Snyder is a clinical psychologist who provides self-help resources to beat social anxiety symptoms at his specialty website: www.socialanxietysecrets.com