My Experiences with Overcoming Social Anxiety This semester the problem in my life that I chose to focus on is an aspect of my social anxiety that has kept me from doing some of the things I have wanted to do in my life by preventing me from even starting into motion the actions needed to achieve those things. More directly, the problem is rooted in my apprehension when starting a social interactions. My goal this semester was to increase my willingness to initiate social interactions by increasing the number of social interactions and decreasing my anxiety within those exchanges. While the problem itself stayed pretty much the same, my thoughts on and solutions to this problem certainly did evolve as I learned more about the problem and myself.
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I called this the “just do it” approach since that is pretty much what the solution is. Basically whenever I feel anxious in a situation where I want to interact with someone I should muster courage, not think, and just do it. This seemed like a decent thought as many of the books and articles attribute at least a part of social anxiety to a lack of self-confidence. This plan quickly failed as it was clear to me that I was not able to keep myself doing this. My brain kept making excuses as to why I shouldn’t start an interaction that eventually out reasoned any will I had of continuing this solution. Throughtout its duration the test proved to be somewhat successful, while it did manage to increases my number of interactions to around 4 per week, my anxiety level during these interactions only slightly dropped to around a 7. It was time for new plan of …show more content…
This led me back to the drawing board to revise this solution and come up with a better one that fixed some of these issues. The new solution I came up with did indeed fix the issues that the first had and came about after I looked deeper into myself to find a reason for why I might have been so apprehensive about these interactions to begin with. Growing up, my father worked late and my mother, who was usually around, was not the best parent in the world. She was almost always in a bad mood and rarely took interest in me. Often she would tell me to play in my room to get me out of her way, and any time I would ask or tell her something she would either angrily reject my question or statement or reply with a calm somewhat uninterested standard phrase like ”that’s nice”, “I don’t know”, or “not right now”. I am just realizing now how few times I actually talked to her where I started the conversation. Even when I won first at the UIL Computer Science state meet, I didn’t even tell her until the next day when she asked me about how we did. Here’s an analogy I can up with to describe the situation that I felt like I was in. Imagine you are in a room alone and the room has only one door. On the other side of the door is something you want, but when you try to open the door there is an eighty percent chance that the doorknob shocks you and the door does not open. Either you can brave the shocks until
I called this the “just do it” approach since that is pretty much what the solution is. Basically whenever I feel anxious in a situation where I want to interact with someone I should muster courage, not think, and just do it. This seemed like a decent thought as many of the books and articles attribute at least a part of social anxiety to a lack of self-confidence. This plan quickly failed as it was clear to me that I was not able to keep myself doing this. My brain kept making excuses as to why I shouldn’t start an interaction that eventually out reasoned any will I had of continuing this solution. Throughtout its duration the test proved to be somewhat successful, while it did manage to increases my number of interactions to around 4 per week, my anxiety level during these interactions only slightly dropped to around a 7. It was time for new plan of …show more content…
This led me back to the drawing board to revise this solution and come up with a better one that fixed some of these issues. The new solution I came up with did indeed fix the issues that the first had and came about after I looked deeper into myself to find a reason for why I might have been so apprehensive about these interactions to begin with. Growing up, my father worked late and my mother, who was usually around, was not the best parent in the world. She was almost always in a bad mood and rarely took interest in me. Often she would tell me to play in my room to get me out of her way, and any time I would ask or tell her something she would either angrily reject my question or statement or reply with a calm somewhat uninterested standard phrase like ”that’s nice”, “I don’t know”, or “not right now”. I am just realizing now how few times I actually talked to her where I started the conversation. Even when I won first at the UIL Computer Science state meet, I didn’t even tell her until the next day when she asked me about how we did. Here’s an analogy I can up with to describe the situation that I felt like I was in. Imagine you are in a room alone and the room has only one door. On the other side of the door is something you want, but when you try to open the door there is an eighty percent chance that the doorknob shocks you and the door does not open. Either you can brave the shocks until