Anxiety Self HelpFind helpful information about anxiety.

Do you need some social anxiety help? You can virtually eliminate the last traces of your social anxiety symptoms, even though your genetic predisposition for having social anxiety symptoms cannot be changed with modern medical technology. I know, because I’ve seen people do it. It begins with practice in getting your mind to expect the best instead of fearing the worst.

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