The older you get, the easier it becomes. You realize that everybody struggles in some way. Everybody carries something. And you start to see it. And you also realize that most reactions and stuff people say are not about you. It's about them.
Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#32Learn to accept failing socially. That may be mumbling and being incoherent when talking to someone at the water cooler and needing to repeat yourself. That might be freezing when doing a presentation and needing to reference your notes. That may be saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and offending someone and needing to backtrack later or deal with the consequences. Learn that failing is an okay outcome for these things.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#33A public speaking class. Public speaking is terrifying for most people, not just those with social anxiety. But it's a very learnable skill. Mastering it (or even getting half-way good) is like gaining a superpower. Suddenly you can do things mere mortals can't. You become the person that volunteers to lead the presentation, and so on. For me, this led to a mental reframe where I wasn't so much a socially anxious person as I was merely unpracticed/unskilled at certain social interactions.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#34I don't think you ever fully do. But, brute force. Putting myself in an uncomfortable situation tends to make it slightly easier the next time, and then a bit better the next time. I think, for me, the anxiety is the unknown of the situation and what to do or how to act and how people will respond. Getting some reps seems to help.
YMMV with this approach. For some people (myself included) and for some reason or the other, anxiety can increase with repeated exposure. Talking or perhaps writing about the experience after it happens might help combat this effect.
In my case the increased anxiety was basically rumination--constant, repetitive thinking whether I looked good in the eyes of the people I talked to, etc.
It was basically trying to retroactively control other people's thoughts with the power of my mind.
I still experience it, but it's far less frequent these days. And writing about it helps, just as you wrote, as then I can "escape" the loop in my head.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#35There was a related thread recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301414 (Show HN: I made a 30-day social anxiety challenge). I can't vouch for the challenge, but many comments there were helpful IMHO.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#36I learned about Cognitive Distortions: the $400 word phrase for "playing yourself", also called "lying to yourself in your self conversation."
There is this list of questions, 10-20 questions depending upon where you get them, the Cognitive Distortion Checklist. These simple questions you ask yourself, and if you answer 'yes' to any of them then you are lying to yourself in your self conversation. And the amazing part about deception, once aware of it that method of deception no longer deceives!
Now, social anxiety is a form of self deception. Your self conversation is exaggerating negative potential outcomes of a social situation while simultaneously minimizing potential positive outcomes of that same social situation. While in truth the negatives are nowhere as strong as your self conversation indicates and the positives are significantly higher.
And this does not just work for social anxiety. This idea, this concept of self auditing one's self conversation is extremely powerful and is how one prepares and manages stressful and critically important activities and decisions. It's a personal revolution everyone needs to have.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#37For me, it was a combination of two things. First, I transitioned from an engineering role into sales engineering which meant I was meeting new people, running meetings, etc. every day. That exposure made me pretty comfortable with conversation and meeting new people. Second, and I think more important, is to develop a much greater sense of self-acceptance and comfort. I think a lot of my anxiety was based having som…
this reads like “depressed people should just stop being depressed”
Exposure is a known counter to anxiety though. The comment doesn’t say “just stop being anxious”, it says “just try and then reflect on how bad it actually was”. It will be bad, but not as bad as your anxiety screamed. The first question therapists ask is “what’s the worst that can happen, in your opinion?”. Even the hypothetical answer is usually much less catastrophic that the feeling itself.
But the wrong level of exposure may lead to an escape and reinforce the problem. So don’t start with e.g. going on stage like you don’t start lifting with 100kg.
Same for unattended anxiety, it reinforces automagically without proper reflection.
It should also be noted that anxiety as a set of sensations and mood isn’t equal to inaction. The mistake people often make is equating it. “I fear so I’m not going there”. Pushing through fear is a fundamental skill. I’d say that anxiety is when you avoid fears instead of avoiding bad situations — there it is born. Exposure is about being exposed.
I’m anxious af if that matters. Just woke up today with another flush. Although it isn’t anywhere near the seemingly unexplainable levels I had two years ago, before researching it.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#38I learned about Cognitive Distortions: the $400 word phrase for "playing yourself", also called "lying to yourself in your self conversation." There is this list of questions, 10-20 questions depending upon where you get them, the Cognitive Distortion Checklist. These simple questions you ask yourself, and if you answer 'yes' to any of them then you are lying to yourself in your self conversation. And the amazing par…
For me the hard part was to convince myself that the distortions were actually real. I mean, on paper I could see there were distortions in my thinking, but my guts were still telling me that "those people are out there to get me".
In other words, (c)ognitive and (b)ehavioral components of CBT were contradicting each other. And that's where exposure was helpful--it allowed me to behaviorally validate that my cognitive distortions were real.
By which I mean that exposing myself to social interactions when all cells of my body wanted to escape, gradually convinced me about the things you mentioned: that the negatives are nowhere as strong and the positives are much, much higher.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#39Depending on the social situation, a hard drink can be an effective way to loosen up. Sip it slowly enough to maintain a slight reduction in inhibition, enough to quell the most blatant bouts of anxiety, but not enough to get buzzed.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?
#40Depending on the social situation, a hard drink can be an effective way to loosen up. Sip it slowly enough to maintain a slight reduction in inhibition, enough to quell the most blatant bouts of anxiety, but not enough to get buzzed.
This is terrible advice