The Fastest Solution for Social Anxiety Symptoms

Your genetics cause you to be vulnerable to the excessive awareness of how other people are perceiving you. That is the underlying root cause of social anxiety. While you cannot change this underlying genetic vulnerability to developing social anxiety symptoms, you can eliminate the symptoms of anxiety that emerge from certain social situations by using the power of expectations and self suggestion. This article will provide you with some social anxiety help that can make a big difference if you learn to harness the power of your expectations.

As a child I remember thinking about magic and wondering if a person could do something magical (like moving an object with the mind alone) if one simply believed strongly enough that it was possible to do so. I thought that if I could get myself to believe that the object would move simply by my mind focusing on the idea of moving it, my chances would be better than if I tried without the belief that it would actually happen. While this sort of magic does not exist, another kind of magic really does exist. It turns out that there are several very real applications for the idea that belief yields results. If you believe strongly that you are about to feel anxious as you approach a particular social situation, you will feel anxious in that situation because you have trained your mind to follow through with what expects, especially when it comes to fear reactions. However, if you believe strongly enough that you are not at risk for feeling anxiety, you will not feel anxiety. If you are wondering whether or not this is true, let me prove it to you by asking you to consider whether or not you would begin to have any sort of panic-like social anxiety symptoms or even the subtle self-conscious type symptoms if you were to give a little speech to yourself in the mirror with no one watching. The only difference between the situations that create your social anxiety reactions and those that do not is your beliefs and expectations about what will happen next. If you believed that people were watching you, but they were really holographic projections, your social anxiety symptoms would still surface because you believed that you are being watched and so your mind begins to think about how your social anxiety symptoms will likely follow. Similarly, if you are giving your speech in front of the mirror, thinking that you are alone (when in reality a group of your friends had gathered quietly behind you) you would not feel the subtle social anxiety symptoms or the panicky reactions to giving a speech. Keep reading, because I would like to explain how you can actually use a belief shifting method that leads to a temporary but rapid elimination of social anxiety symptoms.

The solution I am proposing for your symptoms will be much easier to understand if you first develop a deeper understanding of the problem that you are facing. The root cause of your problem is a genetic predisposition that causes you to be more tuned in to the thoughts, feelings, and facial expressions of other people. This root cause does not necessarily mean you'll have Social Anxiety Disorder. The disorder part only becomes true when a second to ingredient is added. I'm talking about a life story that includes several incidents that involve a strong fear response to your own anxiety symptoms, followed by the development of a pattern of avoidance of situations that could cause you those same anxiety reactions. In other words, the second ingredient is that you develop a fear of your own fear reaction. You learn that you do not like feeling anxious and so your mind identifies that feeling as something to be avoided.

Let's say, for example, that you have a specific social anxiety symptom that emerges, like a shaky voice every time you want to speak up in a meeting or in a classroom setting. Your tendency to be aware of how this makes you come across to others is going to cause you to "watch out" for that same problem in the future. But in this situation, it's your mind's tendency to "watch out" that it going to get you into trouble. You see, your fear of developing the social anxiety symptom is triggered when you find yourself in a similar situation to those that have caused the symptom to emerge in the past. Once you begin to watch for the symptom, your mind ends up creating it because of how our minds work.

As a clinical psychologist, I had to read a lot of research while I was in graduate school. Since then I've probably read 10 times the amount of research, but my favorite research studies are still the ones I read during graduate school about the psychology of taking action. What research findings describe is a tendency for people to take action on the things that they expect. The thing that we expect to happen tends to be the thing that we mentally visualize in our mind's eye. So for example, if I picture myself being assertive as I walk up to return a defective item at a retail store, I am far more likely to find that my instincts and automatic reactions follow through with being assertive. However, if I imagine myself feeling anxious and avoiding eye contact as I walk up to the teller, that becomes far more likely to be my reality. What we see in our mind's eye creates a template that guides the action we take in the moments following those visualizations. That's why the process of "watching out" for a recurrence of social anxiety symptoms ends up creating the symptoms that you fear. It's a very problematic cycle that tends to escalate social anxiety symptoms into a very severe problem.

Here's what I propose as a solution that will only be useful to people who have enough introspection (the ability to look into your own mind to observe your thoughts). You need to take control of what you expect will happen next. One of the ways to do this is to build your faith in your ability to use mental intentions and self-suggestion. If you had seen some of the things I have seen done with hypnosis and self hypnosis, you would already have a pretty strong faith in your ability to use auto-suggestion (meaning suggestions you give to yourself with the intention of adopting them as truth on a conscious and unconscious level). I entered into the field of psychology as a skeptic regarding hypnotic phenomenon. After spending some time under the tutelage of one of the country's best hypnosis researchers and experts, I am now among those who look in awe at the mind's incredible ability to respond to suggestion and expectations.

Most people think about hypnosis as something involving a hypnotist and a hypnotic subject. In reality, all hypnosis is self hypnosis, even if you have a hypnotist guiding you through the process of using self-suggestion. You don't even need to deeply relax into a trance-like state for the power of hypnotic suggestion to be in effect. As an example, recent research findings have revealed that our society as a whole has been hypnotized, in a way, by commercials. What I am referring to is the profound impact that drug company commercials have had on the power of the placebo response. The placebo response is more powerful now than it was 15 years ago. In other words, taking a sugar pill in a research study now causes improvements in symptoms that are much stronger than they used to be. Why in the world would that happen? The answer is that people's expectations have changed regarding the power of drugs. They have changed so much, in fact, that the effect size (a statistical measure of power) has increased by 20% for placebo response in general during the past decade. People respond more strongly to a sugar pill these days than they used to.

Consider the implications of what I just told you. There was never a point when Western society as a whole sat down with a hipnotherapist who was going to change their expectations about how powerful medications are. Rather, people simply absorbed a new belief system over time. What I'm trying to get you to do is to reach for expectations that your social anxiety symptoms will not surface. To do this, you must build your faith in the power of your chosen expectations rather than pouring all your mental energy into "watching out" for the symptoms that you fear. If you adopt the expectation that your social anxiety symptoms have disappeared, and you do so with fierce intensity, you will not need to monitor whether or not those symptoms actually disappear. Rather, you will simply adopt an attitude of blind faith, assuming that your expectation will become reality. If you can learn to pull this off, you can virtually eliminate social anxiety symptoms.

Now try participating in the following experiment that is designed to show you that you can consciously manipulate your mind and body by purposefully generating expectations. Read the paragraph through and then go back and try it with all of your concentration. Imagine a bright yellow lemon with nubbly skin sitting on a small white plate in front of you. Pick up the little knife next to it and cut the lemon in half. Now cut one half into quarters as you watch the spurts of juice from the act of slicing the lemon. Pick up a quarter wedge and bite into it and notice how you begin to salivate a little more as you imagine sour lemon juice running over your tongue and puckering your mouth. Your mouth is salivating because of imagining biting into a lemon. In other words, your body is producing saliva to begin the digestive process for the citric acid that it believes is in your mouth or will be shortly. Your body responds to what you expect will happen next. You can manipulate what your body expects to happen next by using the hologram of your mind to imagine.

Did you notice your mouth salivating a little more even on your first try on this exercise? That is because of the power of your expectation created by the visualization that you have in your mind. Your body is actually trying to digest what it believes to be citric acid in your mouth. That is why you salivated more than normal. If your body will create that much saliva simply because of an expectation, imagine what can be possible on the micro level of neurotransmitters in your brain that cause you to feel calm or anxious in reaction to your expectations.

Now put this information to work for you. Don't start with the most difficult and problematic symptoms. Instead, begin with building your confidence by practicing a general feeling of confidence by imagining how it feels in the mind and body when you are confident. Practice walking around with that confidence based on nothing but the power of your intention and imagination. Once you begin to have some success with that for a few days, pick a fairly easy anxiety symptom to challenge. Try to get a lot of practice in a short period of time with the same kind of social situation so that you can learn what works best for getting yourself into a relaxed and confident state of mind before you enter the situation. Then rely on pure intensity of the focus of your mind to bring your mind to a state of expecting to feel cool, calm, and relaxed. Treat any emerging anxiety reaction as nothing but a momentary phenomenon that can be ignored since you expect to feel calm, happy, and relaxed for the rest of the day.

This is the fastest way to overcome social anxiety simply because you can use it today and see a huge change by tomorrow. That doesn't mean that you can use it and then drop it and live without symptoms for the rest of your life. The degree to which you succeed in eliminating all symptoms is dependent on the sustained mental focus you put on developing a new way of thinking. You will eventually become what you think yourself to be. Start today. Become the person you have imagined.