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The Fastest Solution for Social Anxiety Symptoms

Nov 1, 2009 Writing and Speaking

Even though your genetic predisposition for having social anxiety symptoms cannot be changed with modern technology, there are several approaches you can take to eliminate your social anxiety symptoms by changing what you expect to happen when you face social situations that have provoked your anxiety in the past.

As a child, I used to contemplate whether a person would be able to fly or move an object with the mind alone if the person could simply muster the faith that it was possible to do so. I reasoned that it would be easier to have that faith if you could just succeed once are twice. Well, it turns out that there is a real application for that concept of belief as an ally in bringing about change. While we may never move an object with our mind, the impact of our beliefs and expectation on our social anxiety symptoms is enormous. In this article, I would like to teach you how to begin the process of harnessing the power of your expectations.

You won’t understand the solution I am posing unless you first understand the problem. The root cause of social anxiety is an underlying genetic temperament that causes you to be more tuned in to the thoughts and judgments of others. But social anxiety doesn’t turn into Social Anxiety Disorder until a second ingredient is added. The second ingredient is a life story that includes a few incidents involving a fear response to your own anxiety symptoms, followed by avoidance of situations that might cause those same anxiety reactions.

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, 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.

The solution that I am proposing will only work for people who have a fairly high level of introspection (which is the ability to look into your own mind to observe your own thoughts). The solution is to take control of what you expect will happen next. One way to do this is by building up your belief in your own ability to use self-suggestion and mental intentions. I entered into the field of psychology as a skeptic with regard to hypnotic phenomenon, but by the time I was finished with graduate school in psychology I had a very strong faith in the power of unconsciously held expectations to create psychological change. It was spending time working under the tutelage of one of the best hypnosis researchers that changed how I felt about hypnosis. Hypnosis is nothing more than a process of changing what a person expects to happen next. When done by the hypnotist, the person being hypnotized must gradually accept the words of the hypnotist at face value. People who do so are called “good hypnotic subjects.” Other people do not relinquish control of their thoughts and expectations, but they can do hypnosis just as well as the “good hypnotic subjects” by learning self hypnosis, whereby a person uses self-suggestion to change their own thoughts 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 enormous impact of what I just revealed to you. At no point did the American people sit down with a hypnotherapist to receive hypnotic suggestions while in a deep state of trance. Instead, we simply absorbed a new belief system gradually over time that supported an unconscious belief that medications are very powerful. The reason for this is because the drug companies have poured so much money into convincing us that their drugs are powerful. It’s kind of ironic than that drug companies are having a hard time proving that their pills are stronger than a sugar pill, which is one of the FDA’s requirements before a company can bring a drug to the public market. The implication for you, is that you should trust in the power of your expectations, and use those expectations as an ally in your battle against social anxiety symptoms. If you adopt an expectation of being calm and relaxed with fierce intensity, your expectation will have a very powerful effect. You will want to adopt and attitude of blind faith, assuming that you will be relaxed and calm, and seeing yourself feeling that way in your mind’s eye as you progress through any social situation. You don’t want to use “affirmations,” as those are just words floating around in your mind. Instead, use the full power of the hologram of your mind’s eye to see and feel yourself being relaxed in the seconds and minutes coming up.

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.

Take this information and use it. Plan on generating more and more confidence in your ability to use your expectations to create a confident and socially assertive way of responding to all social situations. Don’t start with the most difficult symptoms that you face. Instead, build your strength and faith in the power of your chosen expectations by first using your new skills in situations that only cause a very mild level of social anxiety. For example, if you’re worst fear is that you will blush and people will wonder what is wrong with you, don’t start with that fear. Instead, start with building the expectation that you are going to feel very relaxed and outgoing in your next interaction with someone that you already feel fairly comfortable with. Build gradually towards the fear of the blushing problem, or whatever problem you struggle with the most. Remember, that the key is to use powerful expectation by seeing a picture in your mind of what you expect to come next. The intensity with which you adopt that vision is the point that matters the most in developing this ability. When you see a vision of what you do want in the next few minutes as far as your own personal reaction, adopt the strongly held assumption of absolute certainty that your positive vision will be your reality because of having intended for it to happen.

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.

Dr. Todd Snyder is a clinical psychologist who provides self-help resources to beat social anxiety symptoms at his specialty website: www.socialanxietysecrets.com

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