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Mental Health Social Anxiety

LordOfThisWorld said:
I feel less social anxiety than when I was younger but I still feel it, I don’t like going to parties or being around a lot of people.

My company is having a Christmas party and I’m dreading it already.

I’m not a spotlight person.

it’s why I’m on anti anxiety medication, everyday is a struggle to get out of bed and go to work, I always feel like I’m not doing a good job or won’t learn the job.
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Yeah man. I feel almost the same. The only times I am very social it's when I'm on drugs (opioids or stims esp.)
 
I avoid lots, and I desensitize myself in the areas that I cannot avoid

Question for the normies, how do you stand in a crowd of people and not be aware of "if someone tells "FIRE" they will all go full cattle stampede mode and stomp each other to death out to get to the exit". Like, one word away from murdering each other.. and if you asked the survivors, not one would take responsibility for the trampling deaths (" I had no choice, everyone was doing it" etc). No thanks, humans, miss me with that "crowds are natural" buisness.

I've somewhat embraced full hermit mode. Like, animals have natural areas for territory. Cougars may be 1 per 20sq miles, but rats can be 10 per sq ft. What if I am a half alien half human breed whose territory needs are just much bigger than others? People are fucking nuts. Why would I choose to be completely surrounded by them? I live in the city, and I live like a city boy. Always have 1 eye open. Always look behind before you get into or out of your car, dont let a crowd get between you and the door, and all that. Its exhausting. I'm ready for my hermit cabin in the rocky mountains.



Tl;dr courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
 
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RedRum OG said:
I avoid lots, and I desensitize myself in the areas that I cannot avoid

Question for the normies, how do you stand in a crowd of people and not be aware of "if someone tells "FIRE" they will all go full cattle stampede mode and stomp each other to death out to get to the exit". Like, one word away from murdering each other.. and if you asked the survivors, not one would take responsibility for the trampling deaths (" I had no choice, everyone was doing it" etc). No thanks, humans, miss me with that "crowds are natural" buisness.

I've somewhat embraced full hermit mode. Like, animals have natural areas for territory. Cougars may be 1 per 20sq miles, but rats can be 10 per sq ft. What if I am a half alien half human breed whose territory needs are just much bigger than others? People are fucking nuts. Why would I choose to be completely surrounded by them? I live in the city, and I live like a city boy. Always have 1 eye open. Always look behind before you get into or out of your car, dont let a crowd get between you and the door, and all that. Its exhausting. I'm ready for my hermit cabin in the rocky mountains.



Tl;dr courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Man, don't you feel a little agoraphobia sometimes? It has never happened to me, but I know that quite a few people with AS do.

My dream is to live alone in the coutryside and grow my own food or have chickens for eggs and cows for milk. But, maybe it's easier to become a vegetarian, so I save the chickens and the cows. :LOL: The downside is that I would have to live not so far from the city, so the fucking mail-man can give me my drug I buy on the darknet. :ROFLMAO:
 
But you can't take Xanax or any benzo for life, man. Also, benzos are like band-aid patches, you must solve something inside that is what causes that anxiety. That takes years of therapy and exercises like exposure, which I think are quite helpful. As I said above, thanks to some years of therapy and exposure, I now feel A LOT less anxious than when I was 18.

I think you could even say that I am between shy and anxious. I'm not really sure yet. According to my last doctor, I don't suffer from social anxiety, because I am too talkative to have SA. :LOL:
 
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I used to be carefree. Not a worry in the world. I was very outgoing and confident and saw the best in everyone. Made friends fast. Its like i had zero inhibition when i was younger. Loosing my father, shortly after getting hooked on drugs amd booze. Just not the same anymore... It's sad. But i feel like now my 30s im getting back to my ols self I just dont give a fuck what people think as much as i used to. Starting to really count my blessings and try and live my best life . I feel like i had teenage angst through my whole fuckin 20s. Im still getting high as ever. But things are good. Im back to playing music ,got a girl, nice place to live, things are ok with me and me ma. Just me and her everyone else is in capetown ,SA(my place of origin) or in London for work. Was so lonely man ive been through some very dark times and made it through. Now im usally only socially anxious or awkward when im high as gas on the reefer or been up for a week. Lol
 
supersonic89 said:
Man, don't you feel a little agoraphobia sometimes? It has never happened to me, but I know that quite a few people with AS do.

My dream is to live alone in the coutryside and grow my own food or have chickens for eggs and cows for milk. But, maybe it's easier to become a vegetarian, so I save the chickens and the cows. :LOL: The downside is that I would have to live not so far from the city, so the fucking mail-man can give me my drug I buy on the darknet. :ROFLMAO:
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I absolutely identify with many symptoms of agoraphobia. But much like my fear of open water and my fear of heights, they may be irrationally heightened, but they are not irrational fears. I will not swim in open ocean. I will not hang out on a 400 foot cliff. I will not hang out in crowds of people. I see it as a natural protective instinct. And much like those youtube guys who free climb skyscrapers, I dont judge it if ya do feel comfortable in crowds, but I also think you've desensitized yourself to an unlikely but very real danger.

Humans are unpredictable, no judgment, so am I, but if you want to call a healthy boundary between me and the rest of them agoraphobia, then I am king of agoraphobics


P.s. vegetarian is rough but not nearly hard as vegan; not as hard as it seems. Never hurts to re examine your diet.

P.p.s. You'd be surprised how many drugs one can procure without any connection to other people. Plants do a lot of chemistry for us. Basic chemistry isnt as hard as you think.
 
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supersonic89 said:
Hi guys.

Anyone else here on the forum with social anxiety?

How do you live day to day with it? How much has your life affected? Have you developed any problems (eg addiction) because of that? Do you follow any therapy or medication?

Probably very few people or those who are shy about registering or saying it will be posting here. I'm not afraid to say it.

People without social anxiety are also invited to give their opinion. At the end of the day I think we have all felt some level of anxiety or shyness in our lives. :unsure:
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I have had social anxiety since I was born and I’m 24 now and smoking weed makes it worse. I have addictive behaviors but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s just because of my social anxiety. It’s definitely a big part of it though.

I always felt very insecure and felt like I was the dumbest kid in the group or the most weakest and not the funniest. I’ve always had a “serious” face and people always think I’m mad or something. I don’t like confrontation and do anything to avoid any type of interaction like that even if my life were at stake. I also try to avoid situations that can potentially be embarrassing or has the slightest chance of making me feel insecure or just turning out awkward. Ive always let people walk all over me and never stood up for myself. I s-s-stutter a lot. I second guess myself and it is very hard for me to make decisions even for little things that don’t really matter like what I am going to eat for dinner. I overthink everything.

In my particular case I can’t even talk to my own family that I live with. I don’t have conversations with them or make jokes or smile or anything. Not because I hate them but because I am so stuck now that it just feels too uncomfortable to step out of my comfort zone to do that.

There was a point in my life where I felt like I was growing out of it but something always ends up pulling me back down to my old ways of thinking. Smoking weed and wax and stuff is a major thing that has really made it hard for me to move past it. Every time I manage to not smoke or drink for a certain amount of time then I am able to conquer these problems a lot more easier and I become more confident and less nervous around people. But it seems as if smoking weed and taking edibles and not taking care of myself has really stunted my psychological growth and it just intensified the insecurities and the anxieties I already had.

Social anxiety causes a lot of tension in your body and in your mind. You can’t express your true self if you have social anxiety and that causes a lot of unique problems. You feel stuck and trapped inside your own mind and like you are not able to do as much as other people can and you feel inadequate or boring. And you look around and you feel like you are a small person in a world of giants. You develop sensitivities to certain things and certain situations and you can appear very fragile and you can feel very powerless and not in control of a lot of things and things can seem super exaggerated or more drastic than they are. And people feel like they have to walk on eggshells around you which I hate. Even though I know they mean well and I wouldn’t be able to handle it anyways if they were just themselves cracking jokes and stuff.

I don’t take medication for it but I do have counseling every week. But to be honest I don’t really buy into the whole diagnosis/prescription/clinical aspect of it all. I believe all mental illness can be cured internally through working out traumas and resistant behaviors and through spirituality. Everything else is just a short term facade and doesn’t provide any real cure. We know how to cure ourselves and we know the things we have to do in order for us to feel better and to have better lives. We just give in to stubbornness and we are not willing to look at the source of the illness itself so we look for external practical scientific solutions that are provided to us through organizations that only care about economic and monetary maintenance.

However there are people who are in worse situations than I am and they have full on panic attacks and stuff so obviously medication has its uses and can help people but that doesn’t negate the fact that even the most sick person can be healed by opening themselves up to another way of viewing life and health and nature rather than the standard clinical view that tells you that you have to rely on medication for virtually your whole life and that you might never heal from certain illnesses like schizophrenia.

Social anxiety is like a prelude to these more severe illnesses. It’s all on one giant spectrum but you see similarities with certain symptoms between people who just have social anxiety and people who have something like schizophrenia or some kind of psychosis. I would compare it to weed and psychedelics. Social anxiety is like weed and you will catch a glimpse of this larger world but you will not fully go into it. Psychedelics like acid and shrooms and stuff is like schizophrenia and you are just in that world with all its craziness. Although it’s weird how it seems that weed has a higher rate of causing schizophrenia more than acid or shrooms or something like that. Maybe it’s just the consistency since people weed a lot more frequently than they do hallucinogens. Or maybe I am just uneducated.

But anyways the point that I was trying to make was that you can develop social anxiety and then develop something like schizophrenia later on because it’s on an extra dimensional elevator or like a scale that that you descend down into because of your negative thoughts and actions and also negative stuff that happens around you and causes you to feel stress and extreme anxiety or depressions. It’s not just something that is limited to the physical brain it is a red zone. Toxicity from the lower levels of the earth. But anyways I’ve probably went on for too long like always so I’ll just stop right there.
 
jaxs0 said:
Holly shit! I seriously had to check I didn't write that! I'm overwhelmed by reading your post. Especially the last part! I find what people have to say EXTREMELY UNINTERESTING. It's very exhausting pretending I care. It's even more exhausting when I feel I suck at pretending I care. How are you supposed to contribute to the give and take when whatever your contribution is, can only be developed through genuine care, but you don't care. You do care to socialize, but you don't care for this particular detail,
which somehow all of it.

Also I have this thing in my hand that can pretty much tell me things that are tailor made to my interests. How can you possibly beat that?

I think when people socialize, it's not so much what is being said that they are interested in but rather the whole interaction and the dynamics of it. Me? I'm stuck on the verbals.
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I think you must be right, because I’ve watched a lot of conversations and they talk about the stupidest shit but they seem really into it and enthusiastic. I can’t fake that enthusiasm. I feel like there should be a “point” to communicating too... like a reason or an end goal... I guess their end goal is just to be seen, acknowledged and validated. It seems so... indiscriminate too. Like they don’t care who they talk to as long as it’s *someone*... I only get the urge to talk to someone if they look interesting to me... like maybe they have a band shirt on that I like. But that rarely ever happens.

I wouldn’t stress as much over it if it wasn’t for the fact people take socialising really seriously and judge you on it which matters in places like the workplace. Whyyyyy can’t people be more chill and just let people beee without the pressure to socialise... I don’t want to come off as intimidating, I just wanna chill with my own thoughts. If I have a particularly good one I might share it (rare), or if they have one I’m happy to hear. Just not about the weather and your children pls....

Guess that makes me a bad person.
 
LordOfThisWorld said:
I was at my Christmas party and felt like I was going to freeze when I had to walk to the bathroom felt like everyone kept looking at me.
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That bad is brother? I think my therapist had and I don't have social anxiety because I've never felt that everyone is looking at me.

Not even tramadol helped you at all?
 
RedRum OG said:
I live in the city, and I live like a city boy. Always have 1 eye open. Always look behind before you get into or out of your car, dont let a crowd get between you and the door, and all that. Its exhausting. I'm ready for my hermit cabin in the rocky mountains.
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I feel that. I grew up here, love it in a lot of ways, but it's a fucking zoo and I've always been a bush man/city man hybrid....I'm kind of getting over the crowds and how hectic it all is and ready to move to somewhere quiet.
I've done all I can in the city by insisting on living right up against the lake aka as close to the edge of the city/nature as possible without going the other ways and ending up in some subdivision adjacent to farm land.
 
supersonic89 said:
That bad is brother? I think my therapist had and I don't have social anxiety because I've never felt that everyone is looking at me.

Not even tramadol helped you at all?
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Yes that bad. No I don’t take Tramadol during the week only on Friday or Saturday.
 
It's not easy to maintain not getting high on a regular basis. And it makes sense because you're brain is all about "okay I won't make me happy because I'm getting happy from the outside"
 
On and off had substantial experinces with severe social anxiety.
My way of dealing with it is to recognize your part to play in it.
A mental health disorder like an anxiety disorder does not exist without the participation of the individual experiencing it. Unlike some mental health disorders, anxiety disorders are heavily dependent on the behaviour of the individual. People say you are what you eat. Well with social anxiety and other disorders, you are how you behave. It's hard to accept at first because it's very easy to assume the role of victim and simply sink into the identity of someone suffering with something that exists seperate to themselves. In the process ownership of the core issues are denied. It's you not me. It's them not me. It's because of my past. It's because of work. It's because of this, that, whatever. While all these reasons may have genuine parts to play, we are forgetting the person in the driving seat. If we assume this position, we are helpless, we are self defeating, we are easily distracted from dealing with things using our own resources, our fates are already set out for us and we have no part to play in defining ourselves in this lifetime.

In a sense it's all about personal responsibility and especially about understanding your own behaviour. Self acceptance is also a critical part to play because social anxiety, for me anyway, contained A LOT of content relating to my past and that linked in with how I saw myself which as you can guess linked in with my mental health, emotional health, relationships, outlook on life etc. I found there's always something I can be doing to understand my relationship to my social anxiety. In that process I discovered it's not the actual relationship with my social anxiety that matters. No, it's the relationship to myself. My relationship to myself defines how I interact with the external world, and of course, myself. This then creates the substrate for all other experiences, such as social anxiety.
It's not something outside of my control because I'am the one in charge of myself. Social anxiety starts and ends with me. It's a product of how I see things, how I process things, what I believe, how I choose to react/respond, what my values are, my relationship to others and the world ie my perceptions etc. It also involves my past experiences which has a lot to do with imagery that stored in memory. Studies prove our memories are linked to emotions, which is why they tend to have such significant meaning to us. If my past experiences involve heavy emotional attachment to particular memories and then these memories are stirred up and perhaps they are negative? Hello anxiety my old friend! Past experiences also come with elaborate belief systems too; how we navigate the world, and how did do back then. With social anxiety our memories and beliefs are usually attached to negative experiences whereby we perceive some sort of invalidation, isolation, rejection, abandonment. When we experience things today and our anxiety begins to peak, we resort back to how we experienced things in the past. Result? Hello anxiety my old friend, again!

I experience something that triggers the potential for me to get anxious. I may naturally run to assume a particular pathway to deal with it, this links in well with what neuroscience says about neural pathways in our brain and how we from a young age establish circuits in the brain that become our default way of processing things. If I have severe anxiety disorder I can probably say with a high degree of confidence this pathway is no doubt dysfunctional. The definition by which we look at mental health disorders is based mainly on dysfunctional behaviour. You could say dysfunctional behaviour is a less than optimal way of behaving in regards to how we as humans ensure our health and wellbeing. Therefore my way of dealing with whatever triggers my leaning towards experiencing anxiety is going to be detrimental because the foundations of my are... you guessed it! They don't work.

So what does work? Seeing things differently I found. And then BEING different. Taking part in the experience also works, instead of running away from it. With social anxiety (and I've seen some great memes in this topic!) I find myself trying to run away a lot. If I look down, avoid eye contact, prevent people from connecting with me etc the problem goes away. But does it? No. Otherwise my social anxiety would be cured by now! So another approach is needed. An approach that puts me in the driving seat. Now I can be present and experience what I'm experiencing.

This is where it gets tricky because in order to do this I must trust myself. If I'm feeling like my a*s is about to fall out while I'm talking to someone I'm interested in engaging with, it's going to be difficult to process this AND the person I want to talk to. I have to trust myself that I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm experiencing anxiety and lots of what I'm experiencing involves past experiences, and that I don't need to run away and escape my discomfort, the fundamental existence of my being is sound and I will not evaropate into nothingness. This is where self love, self care, self esteem, self respect and pretty much my entire life and the choices I make and the values/principles I stand by come in. Because if I have something I believe in and I know fundamentally what I believe is right and I know that I'm doing everything in my power to bring myself closer to who I really want to be and become, and that I have proof in that I have overcome things in the past, I have a good relationship with myself, I love myself, I care more than enough about myself to not hurt myself and self destruct - why shouldn't being present with this other person when I'm about to have a severe social anxiety episode be enough? It's like with children that are loved, they grow up to feel good in themselves and to navigate the world with confidence and a sense of freedom and innocence because their belief in themselves, the belief their parents had, family, friends etc has been more than enough. So why not now? It's no different with yourself. You must give yourself what you need deep down and what will help you to find peace, acceptance and grounding. You must seek to become all that you perceive is missing in those situations when you get really anxious.

This is where the critical element of personal responsibility and radical acceptance comes in. Accepting the issues are present is the first part. Tieing them together with past experiences is another. Understanding the basis for the core issues another, this is where learning (a huge part of the process) comes in. And the personal responsibility present to put all this together and then understand is it only you who can take all this and walk through the door you've been potentially been struggling to walk through all your life. Accepting your part to play in it all. Refusing to see your social anxiety as a disease that exists seperate to yourself and will only be cured when it happens to disappear one day never to come back again. Taking ownership of your life and understanding how all aspects of your life right now is determining the overall health and wellbeing of you right now.

I still struggle. I'm a self taught high school drop-out student therapist of many years seeking to get qualified. It's tough sometimes. Social anxiety may never go away completely and depending on exposure to trauma/re-traumatization and other life events, it will be present in varying degrees. From my understanding and studies, social anxiety is a product of early development whereby our environments were invalidating in some way or another and we learned to adapt to these environments, potentially without the correct support, and now we continue to practice these coping mechanisms even though they are based, like mentioned above, on dysfunctional foundations. If this is true, trauma may indeed be involved as could many other significant experiences and depending on how these are present will determine whether our symptoms are pronounced or perhaps not so much. Even if social anxiety is present, the work done on the underlying core issues themselves will aid in the reducion of social anxiety symptoms, in my opinion.
 
Was very shy when I was young because my mom made us move all the time so the anxiety of always having to make new friends really fucked me up when I was young. College was awesome it was the most social I have ever been in my life. Now that I have my own family I find myself going back to my old ways. It’s not so much that I’m anti-social or have anxiety about talking to people, I’m just simply not interested in small talk. I hate it. I have my long time friends who have always been there and I just really am not interested in meeting anyone new.
 
I developed several addictions to drugs because of my social anxiety, opioids, coca, alcohol, benzos, but I tried everything I could not have before I started with them, and it didn't work, so I settle for living like this until the end.
 
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