If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you first read “The psychological root cause of anxiety” before consuming the below solution. It’ll take less than 1min.
You may have multiple reasons why this triggers your anxiety but at the core you may knowingly or unknowingly believe that anytime you’re laughed at, regardless of why, that’s “bad.” Because of this thinking, you may unknowingly think that you should be anxious whenever you’re laughed at or that being laughed at is something you should avoid at any cost. The anxiety is an unconscious strategy to motivate yourself to do whatever you think is needed to avoid being laughed at. We call this, the anxiety paradox.
To eliminate or overcome this trigger, you have to figure out the “deep in your psyche” reason(s) why you view being laughed at as a problem. Some people try to find people they know or think are sensitive to being laughed at and proceed to laugh at them simply to make them feel bad. One key In overcoming this trigger is to to think about what your personal goal(s) are in situations you’re laughed at. If being laughed at has no impact on your goal(s), then although it’s undesirable, there is likely no benefit to seeing someone laugh at you as unacceptable.
If you think being laughed at may impact your ability to get something you want, we recommend you think deeply about whether that is true. Our article “Getting what you want” can help you think through that. If it’s true that being laughed at may impact getting what you want, then it may be worthwhile to ensure that what you say you want is actually what you want. If it is, you may want to reflect on whether the environment or people you’re engaging with to get what you want is the proper fit for you.
Eliminating the trigger
Ultimately, you have to be ok with people laughing at you regardless of why they’re laughing at you. If you aren’t okay with this, your body will register being laughed at regardless of the circumstance as something to trigger anxiety in your body for.
If you’re finding it difficult to accept that to overcome or get rid of this trigger you have to acknowledge that despite disliking it and not wanting it to happen, it’s ok if it does happen, then you probably have 1 or more reasons (likely unconscious and unique to you) why you think being laughed at is unacceptable or something you should be anxious about.
To address this, you will have to uncover these reasons so they are out in plain sight. Uncovering these reasons alone may dissolve the trigger. In other cases, uncovering these reasons will reveal what happened to you (likely in the past) that led to you labeling this trigger/situation as something to be anxious about.
You can use our resource (recommended reads section below) for eliminating an anxiety trigger to help you uncover why being laughed at triggers your anxiety and rewire your brain so the trigger disappears.
Recommended reads for overcoming social anxiety (link)
There’s more
If you struggle with low self-esteem, self-consciousness, low self-worth, or low self-confidence we encourage you to view our self-help solutions for these and other common psychological challenges.
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