“Just Relax” doesn’t work for Social anxiety symptoms
What is the best way to feel relaxed at a social gathering? What strategy can you employ when anxiety rears its ugly head? In the past, you probably tried to force yourself to calm down. You focused all your attention on shoving the panicked emotions down from the surface, but still your palms sweated, your heart raced, and your hand trembled. Why didn’t it work? If using all your brainpower and might couldn’t relax you, what can?
Certainly trying to will yourself calm doesn’t work. Just think about it. How effective is it when someone else tells you to calm down or relax? In my experience it generally doesn’t work. It’s not like the person is pointing out something you don’t already know. If you could relax, you would, so giving the command to do so usually just infuriates you all the more. So what can you do?
I want to share with you a strategy that will help you overcome any situation in which you feel social anxiety. It is actually a very simple secret, but if put into practice, it is very powerful and quite easy. The trick is that you have to move your focus from yourself to others. Often we are so caught up in our own inner drama, stuck in a repeating tape of negative thoughts that play over and over in our heads that we do not engage with others. We are so concerned about what others think of us, about how we appear, and what we are doing wrong, that we are focused solely on ourselves. The more we focus on our shortcomings, our fears, our anxieties, the bigger and more formidable they seem. So what can we do to break this cycle?
The strategy I’m going to suggest that will help you relax in social situations is to focus on others. This sounds deceptively simple but please suspend your disbelief for just a moment. Think of little children. If they get upset, one of the quickest ways to make them calm is to distract them by focusing their attention on something else. They quickly forget the cause of their distress and become absorbed in the next activity. You can do the same thing for yourself when it comes to social anxiety. All you have to do is begin to focus on others and your anxiety will melt away.
What is a specific strategy to accomplish this? I’d suggest having some questions prepared that you could ask anyone at anytime. Once you begin to find out what is going on for someone else, you tend to become absorbed in their story. You become present for them, and ready to help in any way you can. This naturally distracts you from yourself, and as your thoughts move away from yourself, your anxiety dissipates. You simply exercise your innate selflessness and relinquish self-centered, self-absorbed thoughts.
Action Step: Think of a time in the past when you were relaxed around others. What were you doing? What were you talking about?
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