You probably already have an instinctual understanding about what you are about to learn from this article. But you will be amazed when you discover the true power of purposefully generated emotions like laughter and anger when you use them to beat your social anxiety symptoms with this unique approach.
Laughter reduces psychological tension (in the mind and brain) as well as physical tension (the shaky sensations, the tight stomach, the churning stomach, the racing heart, and the sweating and blushing reactions that come from the natural fight or flight response). When you have social anxiety, your fight or flight stress response gets activated in situations that your brain automatically labels as dangerous (dangerous only to socially anxious people because our brains put a high priority on making the right impression and not being scrutinized or negatively evaluated by others). If you suffer from excessive amounts of social anxiety, you have probably had the experience of “trying to not be anxious,” to no avail. If you are particularly introspective, you may have even noticed that mentally trying to be less anxious makes you more self-conscious and more anxious. It just doesn’t work.
One thing you need to understand is that the solution to excessive self-consciousness will not be found in your efforts to use logic (e.g., “There’s nothing to be afraid of here”). You already know that your anxiety is out of place based on logic. You feel afraid anyway. That’s how your brain is wired. Also, trying to relax by sheer mental effort won’t work either. It may even make it worse.
What does work? Any mental action that decreases self-awareness and increases your focus on things outside of you will help to reduce your automatic social anxiety reactions. So how can you use laughter to accomplish that? The answer lies in the subtle forms of laughter. By “subtle laughter” I mean the kind where you are laughing a little on the inside, and there is only a small smirk (if anything) showing on the outside. This is a state of mind that relaxes the limbic system (the part of your brain that controls emotional reactions to stressful events). But what’s even better is that the actual process of getting yourself into that state of mind will end up reducing your self-consciousness (and thereby reduce your anxiety). So how do you get yourself into that “process” of subtle laughter? It’s easier to do than you might think. You use the creative aspects of your mind to create absurd internal images in your mind that have to do with the situation you are currently in. Here’s an example. I’m standing in line at the post office and I start feeling self-conscious when several people get in line behind me. I notice the people behind me are making small talk and the people in front of me are making small talk, and I start to worry that I look out of place or anxious or something. But I’m even more worried that one of them is going to start a conversation with me and I will blush, stare at the floor, or otherwise feel uncomfortable. This gradually increasing social anxiety then gets me feeling uncomfortable about the fact that I will have to interact with the postal clerk in front of the people standing behind me. So here’s what I do. I imagine what the look on people’s faces would be if I suddenly turned around and started making cat noises while maintaining a perfectly straight face. Then I imagine what people might do if I suddenly started making the most annoying nasal laugh I could muster. Picturing these absurd ideas in my head causes me to think about other people (and less about myself). It also puts me in that unique state of mind in which I feel like I could burst out laughing. This is a relaxing state of mind. It calms my anxiety automatically and makes me feel more jovial, comfortable in my own skin, and more sociable.
They secret here is that you want to think of the absolute most bizarre situation that you can, while still linking it to the situation that is making you feel nervous. Then focus on what other people would look like (instead of what you look like to them). What I have described here is just a weak version of the powerful methods unleashed in a course that I recommend you study. It’s a system of incredible ideas packed into a course that you can find a link to on my website, http://www.anxiety-counselor.com/improving-social-anxiety.html
So how do you use anger to overcome social anxiety? In some ways, anger is the opposite of the self-conscious fear of negative evaluation that we call social anxiety. It puts the focus on other people and things outside of ourselves that need to change. It also opens up the energy centers that allow for rapid, confident decision making (sometimes too confident). Anger increases impulsiveness (and social anxiety is the brains inhibiting response that causes you to feel reluctant to be in the spotlight and reluctant to take any action while being scrutinized by others). Anger is not a great emotion to purposefully develop access to for most people, but for someone with social anxiety, I can guarantee that more access to angry emotions will only balance you out, rather than make you an angry person. I’ve noticed that people with social anxiety are overly nice, giving in too easily because their social anxiety causes them to avoid confrontations at all costs (unless it’s someone you know really well like a best friend or family member). So how do you access anger? You channel it. What does that mean? It means you think of a person who is very aggressive and overly confident in sticking up for themselves, and then you try to use them as a mental template to decide how they would be thinking and acting if they were in your exact situation right now. Once you have that vision in your mind, play out a couple of your feared scenarios (you know, the catastrophe’s you think would embarrass you) while envisioning how the angry/confrontational person would react. You won’t feel any sudden change or instant transformation. Rather, you will gradually adopt a less self-focused, fearful sensation and pattern of thought and reaction without really even noticing it. The key is that you are using your mind’s hologram to decrease your social anxiety. This works better than logic because the primitive emotional centers of our brains are affected much more by images and visual stories than by the words and higher-level logic that comes from the cerebral cortex of the brain. To learn more about how to use these methods in real life, I recommend that you study a course that focuses on mental games specifically targeted for people with social anxiety. Check it out by visiting my website, www.anxiety-counselor.com
Live with Passion!
Dr. Snyder
