How to overcome social anxiety:
1.) Develop a psychological framework that will eliminate your current triggers and prevent you from picking up new triggers in the future. A framework you can use is below.
2.) Uncover and eliminate known and unconscious anxiety triggers, limiting beliefs, and fears that socially impact you. We will expand the number of triggers and fears we cover using research and your input.
Root cause limiting beliefs you may have to dismantle:
The psychological framework you can use to overcome social anxiety:
The framework:
- In every situation you’re in, focus solely on the objective at hand. Note that some people may not have this level of focus, which you can turn to your advantage because these people likely don’t “have their eye on the prize” and are distracted.
- Decide whether you think our creator designed us to be filled with or free of anxiety. If you agree that we aren’t designed to experience much anxiety, then you can build faith that living without anxiety is what our creator wants. This faith is required to start eliminating your anxiety.
- Address why, in some scenarios, you may think that someone else’s opinion is ever more important than your own.
- If you find it difficult to correct people’s false assumptions or worldviews when doing so would make you more comfortable and at peace, analyze why. In some cases, you may unknowingly be viewing someone else’s peace as more important than your own.
- To find out the best way to interact with people and generally live, use the law of Fair exchange unless you come up with another framework to govern how you interact with others and the world.
- When possible, choose to only be in environments that evaluate others primarily on merit(your skills and abilities) so that you don’t have to play social games you don’t want to.
- Recognize and remember that the emotions/thoughts of others from your actions and behaviors may not have any impact on personal goals you genuinely care about. Thoughts or emotions that don’t impact your goals can often be ignored with little consequence.
- Thoughts people have are often unrelated or of no value to the objective at hand if you’re in an environment of meritocracy.
- You may use anxiety as a reminder about things you dislike or want to avoid while forgetting that you can instead choose to be cautious (to different degrees) and careful without being anxious. Read about the anxiety paradox to learn more.
