This post is all about social anxiety and how to overcome it.
Social anxiety can be challenging when all you want is to connect with the people around who, people who care about you. Social anxiety works by encouraging you to question every detail of the social interactions you share with others until you believe they went poorly.
In the moment, social anxiety feels impossible to overcome. But, with the right coping mechanisms before and after social situations, you can get control back over your social life.
As you work through your social anxiety, it’s important to remember that you define your own success. You can be as social or antisocial as you’d like because you’re doing this for your own fulfillment and health.
This post is all about social anxiety and how to overcome it.
BEST SOCIAL ANXIETY TIPS:
1. Practice deep breathing exercises.
The best way to handle a social situation well is to prepare for that situation. Deep breathing is one way to get there. Not only does the practice of self-regulating help you navigate struggles in the moment, it can help you manage the situation before you arrive.
So, you can walk into social situations feeling your best as well as succeeding in the moment. Deep breathing consists of grounding yourself in the moment by taking slow, controlled breaths in and out.
2. Challenge negative thoughts and beliefs.
So much of social anxiety is our brains lying to us about our interactions. We begin to lose any real sense of whether our interactions go as well as we think because we pick them apart unnecessarily.
This is why it’s useful to fight those negative thoughts. Once we notice them pop up, that moment is when we acknowledge that these are not our own thoughts.
While it can be difficult to decipher whether those thoughts are accurate, we can differentiate between our own thoughts and the thoughts that social anxiety gives us. Slowly but surely, we can work to challenge those thoughts and actively disagree with them.
3. Stay in the present moment.
Focusing on the present starts with grounding yourself. You can start by feeling the ground beneath your body: if you’re sitting, notice the way your legs fit into your seat. If you’re standing, feel the ground beneath your feet (you can feel it through your shoes).
Then, you can take in your surrounding one sense at a time. When you get to touch, you can move your fingers around and wiggle your toes. These steps help you to stay in the moment when you’re mind is getting carried away.
4. Start small by gradually exposing yourself to social situations.
Set yourself up for success. This is one of the most important pillars of growth along your mental health journey because, without it, you’re putting yourself into difficult situations without the skills to learn from them.
So, before you get yourself into scary social situations, learn coping mechanisms (like the ones you’ll find in this post!). Practice coping mechanisms so you’re prepared for the moment you’ll need to call on them.
5. Avoid caffeine and other stimulants that can increase anxiety.
When your mind is already moving at a million miles an hour, the last thing you want to do is introduce a substance that will have it going faster. So, avoid caffeine and other stimulants in social situations and before them.
This way you will be able to keep your anxiety in check rather than feel it go through the roof the moment you give your brain something to speed up.
6. Get plenty of sleep and exercise.
It’s cliché to say it, but you need to take care of your basic needs before you can consider how to treat your anxiety. This means getting sleep at night so you can wake up feeling as rested as possible. This also means getting your body moving to feel better during the day.
When you address your basic needs, you’ll be able to focus more on improving your mental health. This way, you can handle stress and anxiety without also worrying about your next meal or taking a nap.
7. Challenge yourself to engage in new social activities.
You can choose how far you go with this. Maybe you want to join a yoga class with a bunch of new people and start a hobby you’ve never tried before. Maybe you want to take a friend with you to a party.
So long as you want to develop a healthier relationship with your social anxiety and learn how to better manage it, you need to challenge yourself. Put yourself in situations that will take you out of your comfort zone, but do it in a way that will also benefit you rather than hurt you.
8. Use humor to help diffuse anxiety-provoking situations.
Odds are you’re already pretty good at this if you have social anxiety because it’s one of the easier coping mechanisms to develop. A lot of times, we do it on accident.
If you’re not confident with your humor, then start small with it. In moments where you’re feeling awkward, you can usually do something as simple as call out the awkward moment with a joke (self-deprecating humor is always better than a joke aimed at hurting someone).
For example, if you go to an event and you’re underdressed, you could make a joke like “I definitely missed the memo here.” The idea is that you bring your anxiety out into the open and unite people around the issue rather than isolating yourself because you’re spiraling over it.
9. Use positive visualization to imagine yourself succeeding.
Positive visualization has a lot to do with manifestation. The idea is simply and, to be clear, it’s not magic. Manifestation works by you saying what you want in some aspect of your life.
By saying it out loud or putting it on a vision board, you will start making decisions to make your life the way you want it without realizing it. Manifestation works the best when you repeatedly remind yourself what you want.
This way, you remind your brain to act like the person who already has your dream life. Like we said, it’s not magic, so you can’t manifest your way out of systemic inequality. But, it gives you the chance to do the most with your circumstances.
Positive visualization acts in a similar way with you imagining a social situation going well so you subconsciously act in ways that help it go well.
10. Set realistic goals for yourself in social situations.
We, at Knockoff Therapy, are goal-oriented people. We know that goals help you create the kind of life you want to live. However, goals can also limit you when you fail to meet them.
Social anxiety is unpredictable and mental health journeys are not linear. So, when you create goals for working through your social anxiety, you need to be compassionate.
While you want to challenge yourself, you also want to create goals that will motivate you without discouraging you from learn how to overcome social anxiety.
11. Practice assertiveness and learn to say no when necessary.
Learn when to say no. If you’re hesitating to respond, you probably want to say no, but some other factor is keeping you from being honest about that.
Regardless, it’s important to prioritize yourself. There’s a place for putting others first, but that should not be your default. Often, social anxiety distorts the way we see others and how much we owe them. So, this is your sign to say no because you deserve it.
12. Try journaling to help process your thoughts and emotions.
Don’t knock it until you try it. Journaling gets the thoughts out of your head and onto the paper so that you can make sense of them. After you’ve been dealing with the same thoughts for so long, you start to think you know them.
Journaling will change the way you see your thoughts. At the very least, you can get them out on paper instead of swirling around in your head and making your anxiety worse.
13. Use a calming activity to relax before or after social situations.
Play your favorite album, take a walk in the sun with the birds chirping, or do some deep breathing. These activities will get you in the right mindset to cope with social anxiety when it comes up.
Coping with social anxiety starts way before the social situation. Let’s be honest: your anxiety starts way before, so this helps you along the social situation journey before, during, and after.
14. Practice self-care.
Take care of yourself. Dealing with mental illness is stressful and challenging. There’s no point in working on your mental health if you don’t take care of your daily needs while you’re doing it. So, slow down and treat yourself.
The more you challenge yourself to explore social situations, the more you’ll have to make special time for you to relax and unwind from the social anxiety. No matter how much you grow, you’ll still be making yourself uncomfortable. So, take care of yourself.
15. Remember that social anxiety is a common and you are not alone.
You are not alone in dealing with anxiety. In fact, while different people experience anxiety differently, there are plenty of people dealing with your same situation around the world.
Social anxiety is treatable, both through attending therapy and through online resources. As long as you want to make progress and work on your relationship with social anxiety, there’s no stopping you. And you should be proud of yourself.
