How to Conquer Social Anxiety Disorder

The next step involves analyzing, or assessing. This happens immediately after I have taken a good look at the situation. There is one question I always ask myself at this point: Is it real? Thats critical.

The analyze part of it comes from the fact that I must interpret many things after having taken a look around. Is he staring at me, or is he looking past my shoulder at someone, or something, else? Are they laughing at me, or just indulging in some friendly banter within their group. Did he intentionally ignore me, or did he not see me? Did she really end our conversation to go to the washroom - or did she intentionally ditch me? (more…)

The next step in the stare process (Taking a look at my surroundings) involved interacting directly with the outside world. Observing my surroundings as soon as I stopped my obsessive thinking was critical. At this stage, I needed to raise my head and really take a good look at the situation. I always did this within seconds of stopping my runaway thoughts.

I had to make this reality check as soon as possible, because it dislodged me from my own obsessive, introverted world. It shocked me back into reality. (more…)

Bob Parsons, founder of Godaddy.com, has written a very motivational article on his blog. This provides hope to shy people everywhere and demonstrates how anything is possible!

Bob Parsons

Please bear in mind that I am not a professional in any way. The STARE method I came up with is simply something that worked, and still works, to act as a buffer between me and the outside world. It handles all the bad stuff in a very mechanical, though effective, way. Even though I have enjoyed success with this particular coping mechanism, you should not assume that you will derive any benefit from it. The thing to remember is that everyone is different. In fact, my first step in fighting social anxiety was to get professional help. That is the smartest thing I have ever done. (more…)

S.T.A.R.E. is my manual system for dealing with social challenges. It consists of 5 steps and is intended to stop the automatic thoughts and reactions associated with the runaway social anxiety cycle. Having very low self-esteem and zero confidence, I needed this to effectively deal with society. Later, I would begin to depend less and less on this tool as my natural coping abilities developed and grew stronger. (more…)

So I invented this silly technique that has helped me to overcome many social challenges over the past few years. You all know that Im not a trained professional or anything like that, so take what Im going to tell you with a grain of salt. I can only say that this has helped me stop the avalanche of negative thoughts from flooding my mind during social encounters. (more…)

So how does one go about learning social skills? Well, experience would be my best guess. But that just leads back to the old chicken and the egg dilemma. In order to get experience one must get out there and do things, however, without social skills, I couldnt function properly to get that experience. Somehow, I needed a little boost. I needed an alternate route. (more…)

The party didnt go well. That was the understatement of the year! It was definitely one of the worst experiences of my life. Still, I knew that by simply forgetting about it and moving on, I would be missing out. As much as I hated thinking about how poorly I handled things, I realized that the lessons to be learned were worth their weight in gold. (more…)

After a few days of wallowing in self-pity, I began thinking a little more clearly. I also noticed, to my amazement, that I got over the party incident much quicker than normal. Was I imagining things? I mean, if this had happened a few years back, I would have been utterly destroyed - out of action for weeks. But here I was, back to normal in less than two days. Was that a coincidence? (more…)