How to overcome social anxiety:
1.) Develop a psychological framework that will eliminate your current triggers and prevent you from acquiring new ones 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.
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 use 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 often required to eliminate/reduce your anxiety.
- Address why, in some scenarios, you may think that someone else’s opinion (a human just like you) 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, consider using 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 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.
- The thoughts people have are often unrelated or of no value to the objective at hand if you’re in an environment of meritocracy.
- Check if you use anxiety as a way to remind yourself about things you dislike or want to avoid. You may be overlooking the fact that you can be cautious (to the degree you’d like) and careful without being anxious. To understand this more, you can read the anxiety paradox.
