Everyone gets shy sometimes in social situations, but those with social phobia feel extremely uncomfortable in every social situation that they face. A person who has a social phobia would undertake extreme measures to avoid social exposure. It is like taking the symptoms of shyness and amplifying them.

It is noteworthy to point out that social phobia is not merely a behavioral construct. As a disease of the mind, it highlights its existence with the prevalence of symptoms that are clearly physiological in nature. At the lower end of the scale, sufferers have to deal with a high heart rate, shaking and an inability to speak clearly, and the high end of the scale, sufferers additionally may collapse and feel depressed for long periods of time..

Care must be taken to delineate symptoms on a case by case basis. Having one, or even several of the aforementioned symptoms does not mean that someone definitely has social phobia. So, it is important to not self-diagnose, as it is no more than guesswork. A specialist in social phobias on the other hand will have a range of medical tests which will give an answer one way or the other.

A clinical treatment may involve the use of substances, with the intention to normalize possible chemical imbalances in the brain. A clinical treatment however does not guarantee a behavioral response. Normally, a combination of clinical treatment and behavioral techniques works best.

Group therapy which exposes the subject to a smaller and more manageable social setting could be effective in that the individual who is suffering from the disease is exposed to the subset of the triggering factor, in this case to a smaller group of people. Most sufferers are initially very reluctant to talk about their problems in a group environment, but after the first couple of meetings they have made great progress.

Next : Overcoming Social Anxiety Or Social Anxiety Support

When I was a kid, I used to wonder if a person could do magic of some sort (like moving an object with the mind) if one simply believed strongly enough that one did indeed possess the power to do so. I wondered what would happen if I could get myself to truly believe that I could move something with my mind (as opposed to trying haphazardly as an experiment that I expected to fail). Well, it turns out that there is a real application for that same process of building belief. If you believe strongly enough that you are not at risk for feeling anxious in a particular social situation, you will not feel anxious in that situation. Of course, this is very difficulty to pull off in real life, because the tendency of your mind is to focus on the things that you fear. If you keep reading, I’ll explain how you can actually use a belief-shifting method that leads to a temporary, but very rappid, elimination of social anxiety symptoms if done correctly.

Let me explain a little bit about the problem of social anxiety so that you can understand why your expectations play such an important role. The root cause of social anxiety is a genetic temperament that causes you to be highly aware of the thoughts and judgments of other people. Just having social anxiety is normal, as everyone experiences anxiety about how they are perceived once in awhile. However, Social Anxiety Disorder is only diagnosed once the symptoms begin to interfere with your life because of avoidance or intense distress about the symptoms. Ironically, once you develop this intense distress, your expectations begin to work against you in such a way that your symptoms never resolve spontaneously.

Your mind has the tendency to create the things that it expects. This is particularly true when it comes to anxiety. If you expect to feel anxious then your mind begins to create the physiological changes in your body to generate those sensations of anxiety. For example, let’s say that you get a shaky voice every time you want to speak in a meeting or a classroom setting. Because you have a genetic tendency that makes you aware of how others perceive you, you feel anxious when all eyes turn toward you. Because you have had experiences of anxiety in the past, you begin to mentally “watch out” for the anxiety before you even speak up. It’s your mind’s tendency to “watch out” that actually gets you into trouble. It is your fear of developing the social anxiety symptom that causes you to expect the anxiety and therefore create the anxiety before you have even said a word. The anxiety may cause you to avoid speaking up, which leads to a pattern of avoidance that increases the likelihood that your anxiety symptoms will emerge again in the future. The more you avoid, the more your anxiety is reinforced. That’s how our minds work.

As a clinical psychologist, some of the most fascinating research that I have ever sifted through was bundled into a book called, The Psychology of Action. The book describes the powerful tendency for our minds to act on what we see in our visual thoughts about the future. Research studies that were carefully designed to determine what causes people to take the actions that they take revealed how powerful our expectations are. And those expectations are most highly linked to the mental visualizations that occur in the holograms of our brain. Are you beginning to understand why the process of “watching out” for a recurrence of symptoms ends up creating the symptoms that you dread? Don’t get down on yourself about this. Realize that this is simply a part of what it means to be a person with a socially anxious temperament. You have a built in tendency to monitor how you come across to others. In some situations, this is a great advantage, but when it comes to feeling calm and enjoying social settings, this personality trait sometimes builds up too much momentum in our lives and our tendency to self-monitor becomes a huge 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.

You have already begun to increase your faith in the power of your own expectations and self-suggestion. You did so simply by reading this article in which a clinical psychologist emphasizes just how powerful your expectations really are. Now I’m going to offer you a new exercise to practice with for increasing your faith in the power of your expectations. What I would like for you to do is to increase the amount that your mouth salivates simply by imagining yourself biting into a lemon. In time you will learn to be able to do this simply by expecting that your mouth will salivate, but when you are first learning, you need to use visualization in the hologram of your thoughts. To do this, imagine the bright nubbly skin of a fresh yellow lemon. Imagine that you are cutting that lemon in half and see the squirts of juice as you cut the lemon. Pick up one half of that lemon and smell the citrus scent. Now cut that half of a lemon into two pieces. Pick up one of the imaginary quarter wedges of the lemon and look at it. See it vividly in your mind’s eye. Now imagine as vividly as you can the experience of biting into that lemon and feeling that juice run between your teeth and over your gums and tongue. Taste the lemon flavor and notice how your mouth may actually pucker up just a little bit as it begins to salivate more.

The release of extra saliva helps with the proper digestion of certain foods such as citrus fruit. In this situation, all you did was imagine, and your body responded. Your body tends to react to the things that are experienced in the hologram of your mind as if they were actually happening now. If your body response is strong enough to create saliva in your mouth, imagine what happens on the micro level of neurotransmitters in the brain when you imagine fearful events or feelings of well being and self confidence. Now you are beginning to understand why expectations create such powerful self-fulfilling prophecies.

Put this information to use. Spend some time developing your confidence in your ability to use your expectations to create confidence and a socially assertive way of responding in every single social situation you encounter. Start with the easiest social situations and practice feeling confident and relaxed by imagination and expectation (not by forcing it to happen with willpower). You will want to build up your faith by having success in the easy situations first. Trying to not think of the feared expectation will not work. Rather, you have to flood your thoughts with the powerful expectation of what you do want. Only by increasing the intensity with which you see what you do want in the hologram of your mind’s eye will you succeed at forgetting about things that you fear. Work on adopting the strongly held assumption of absolute certainty that you are a calm person who stays relaxed in all social situations no matter what.

By rapidly growing your faith in your faith (that is, your ability to trust your self-suggestion and adopt it as reality), you become very powerful in altering your experience of life. You should realize, however, that social anxiety symptoms are very powerful and will take a significant degree of effort to overcome completely. The reason why I say this method is the fastest method for overcoming social anxiety symptoms is because when a person adopts an extremely powerful expectation for a positive outcome, the effect on social anxiety symptoms is profound and immediate. So the practice time that you put in will be about increasing the percentage of times that you are able to build faith strong enough to create your expectation. If you find that you can only pull this off 10% of the time, that’s great, but billed on this to try to reach for 90% of the time. Any positive change you make in your thoughts about approaching anxiety rather than hiding from it will be useful in your battle against the symptoms of specific social phobias or social anxiety disorder as a whole.

Dr. Snyder is a clinical psychologist who specializes in social anxiety issues. He provides excellent social anxiety help at his website: www.socialanxietysecrets.com

This morning I had a friend call up asking for help with a Wedding Speech, I told him, “Let me help you overcome this fear, because I don’t want you to screw up at my wedding.” Of course it was all tongue in cheek.

The reality is, there are millions of people immobilized by this fear; the world’s number one Phobia, second to death. People would rather die than speak in public! People find that hilarious, but for those suffering, the torment and physical symptoms are very real. I can testify for that, I was once a bag of nerves, now I comfortably deliver speeches to very large audiences and love every second of it. Individuals with this fear tend to say to themselves:

“What if people judge me or reject me? What if I end up panicking? What if someone can tell how nervous I am? What if I forget what to say? What if the audience knows more than I do about the subject? What if I blush?”

If I said to you Dont think of the color red what do you think about? Red of course. If you think about what you dont want i.e panicking, you tend to end up inducing that state within yourself. Your phobia is a learned response. It is a process that you have to go through in order to feel the thing you call anxiety. The process itself is simple enough. My last clients I treated had unbearable levels of anxiety when they had to speak to people in social or business presentations. Those limitations are no longer there.

How could this be?

If a person breaks their leg. Medical professionals don’t just stand around analyzing how the person broke the leg; they just put it in a cast and let the person heal. Instead of dwelling on the past and analyzing how and why they are afraid to speak in front of an audience I help them change their thought pattern. I find it heartless to drag people through all those times they felt bad just to analyze how and when there issues began to arise.

Instead, I do something different. I always explain that whatever they were doing is irrelevant. My explanation replaces their phobia with a clear positive image of how they want to come across when delivering their speech, I use NLPs fast phobia cure to break negative past memories, and go on to ensure the persons attention is focused on feeling well and not over rationalizing the whole process. By the end of my session they are actually excited about giving their speech and deliver very well.

My methods I lead my clients in replace their phobia with a clear positive image of how they want to come across when delivering their speech, I use NLPs fast phobia cure to break negative past memories, and go on to ensure the persons attention is focused on feeling well and not over rationalizing their speech and performance. By the end of my session they are actually excited about giving their speech and deliver very well.

Follow these easy steps and begin to improve your performance immediately:

1) Make a solid decision to never again give in to this fear, never avoid the situations

2) Control your physiology (your breathing your body posture) – act as if you are confident.

3) Turn your inner critic (negative self chatter) into a positive uplifting voice – an inner coach.

4) Remember past successes even if they are not related to speaking publicly, the very act of doing this will make you feel uplifted.

5) Think only of the best possible scenarios. Like an athlete visualize the outcome and having performed really well.

6) For more ingrained fears source an expert in NLP/Hypnosis combined.

For more information on how please go to http://www.dominicknight.co.uk

Dominic Knight is Europes leading Mind Strategist a Master Trainer in Hypnosis and NLP based in World Renowned Harley Street. His website at http://www.dominicknight.co.uk offers simple yet powerful techniques for overcoming your limitations in record speed.

There is not a person in the world that lays in bed at night hoping they will experience an anxiety attack at some point in their life. Unfortunately, these kinds of things do happen and they can ultimately take over your life. In order to stop anxiety attacks from happening to you, here are five questions you will want to ask yourself.

- Are you facing too many responsibilities? Stress is perhaps the number one cause for anxiety attacks occurring. There is no question that overloading yourself with responsibilities and tasks to take care of can take a toll on you. Do yourself a favor and spread out the number of responsibilities you decide to take on. Not only will it allow you to take a breather from time to time, but you will find yourself working far more efficiently.

- Do you need a helping hand? There is nothing wrong with asking for help. No matter what it is you need help with, do not be afraid. There is always someone there to support you and lend a helping hand if you ask. The last thing you want to do is be too proud to ask for assistance from a friend or family member. Lighten your load and let someone assist you. Just like they say there is no such thing as a stupid question, well the same goes when you are silent about something that needs to be talked about.

- Do receive emotional support? Every human needs emotional support to reinforce they are doing fine and are on the right path. It is very difficult to always face the constant stresses that arise on a day to day basis. This is where it is extremely important you have someone to talk to. In order to stop anxiety attacks from happening to you, find someone that you can count on when times get tough.

- Is fun in your agenda? No matter how busy your schedule is, it is vital you make time for some fun and entertainment. Loosening up and having a good time can release a great deal of pressure and completely eliminate any bottled up emotions you may be carrying around. Whether it is going out to watch a comedy, going to a bar with some friends or simply taking a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon, find something that you enjoy that can help you take your mind off of things.

- Are you taking care of your body? The final question you need to ask yourself in order to stop anxiety attacks from becoming a frequent problem in your life is whether or not you are taking care of your body. This entails getting enough sleep, exercising three to four times a week, eating right, and having some fun. While you certainly need to get your work done, taking care of your body is even more important.

Anxiety disorder is the third most common psychiatric disorder after alcohol abuse and depression. There are many ways to treat the disorder, with the most common being social anxiety disorder medication. It is important to know how these medications work and how they can affect their users.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors

The gentlest type of social anxiety disorder medication contains what is called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors increase the levels of serotonin in the brain, making the user feel happier and calmer. Some well-known name brands that use SSRIs are Prozac and Zoloft. The side effects of SSRIs can include headaches, dry mouth, nausea, irritability, and loss of appetite, problems sleeping, drowsiness, weight gain, shaking hands, diarrhea, and sleepiness. These are all annoying side effects, but none of them should be life threatening.

Benzodiazepines

Benzodiazepines are minor tranquilizers or psychoactive drugs that are social anxiety disorder medications that slow down the body’s nervous system, giving it an all-over calm. These drugs are usually only used as a quick acting, short term solutions to symptoms. One major side effect of these drugs are that they can be addictive, so they should only be taken as prescribed by a doctor. Other side effects can include drowsiness, fatigue, slurred speech, weakness, memory loss, blurred vision and lightheadedness.

Antidepressants

Antidepressants are social anxiety disorder medications that affect the neurotransmitters in the brain. The side effects can vary depending on what antidepressant is used. One major side effect of all antidepressants is the susceptibility to suicide. The FDA has put out a warning on all antidepressants. Anyone taking them may be more susceptible to suicide, especially when they start to take them or when their dosage is changed.

Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are very powerful antidepressant social anxiety disorder medications that have very dangerous side effects. These drugs can be toxic when combined with certain other drugs and foods. These should be avoided unless all other forms of treatment have failed.

Beta-Blockers

Beta-blockers, which are used to control high blood pressure, are sometimes used as social anxiety disorder medications. These can be taken in low doses before a time when the patient believes they will have an attack. The common side effects are fatigue, nightmares, diarrhea, hypotension, nausea, cold extremities, abnormal vision, heart failure, insomnia, heart block, bronchospasm, erectile dysfunction, decreased concentration, dizziness, bradycardia, hallucinations, depression, sexual dysfunction, and dyspnea.

Long Term

Treatment with social anxiety disorder medications is long-term. A patient should expect to take the medication for at least a year. The treatment could be longer depending on the severity of the patient’s condition and if the patient is also receiving any non-medication social anxiety disorder treatment.

More Articles about Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment

Social anxiety disorder which is also known as social phobia, is defined as an overwhelming and disabling fear of scrutiny, embarrassment, or humiliation of everyday social situations, and leads to avoiding potentially pleasurable and meaningful situations or activities. . Most people experience some shyness or nervousness in certain social or work situations, but for someone with social anxiety disorder, the anxiety is so extreme that it can become debilitating.

Social anxiety disorder is characterized by the following symptoms:

• Intense worry for days or even weeks before an upcoming social situation.
• Extreme fear of being judged by others, especially people you don’t know.
• Excessive self-consciousness and anxiety in everyday social situations.
• Fear that you’ll act in ways that that will embarrass or humiliate yourself.
• Avoidance of social situations to a degree that limits your activities and causes disruptions to your daily life.

Unlike other anxiety disorders, which affect one gender more than the other, or one age group more than another. Social anxiety disorder is a problem that equally affect both men and women. Adolescents and young adults are particularly phone to the disorder as they often are unsure of themselves around others and are concerned with image and conformity.