Ask HN: How did you overcome social anxiety?

This means saying yes to events and participating as much as possible, even though I personally didn't care for it.

I've learnt a lot about myself (and others) by doing this.

It's the gold standard SSRI for social anxiety for a reason. I've suffered from social anxiety since I was 15 or so, and a tiny pill made it disappear within a month. All of my physical symptoms (shaking, inability to speak, panic attacks, etc) disappeared pretty much immediately. Over the following months, the psychological side of it started to fade too.

Conversations became significantly easier, I started speaking more, making jokes, sharing opinions. I haven't had a chance to do any public speaking but I honestly think I could do it, even in front of a huge crowd, with basically no issues at this point. A year ago I.. I don't know what would have happened if I tried. I'd probably have fainted!

I also lost my severe fear of spiders, which I wasn't expecting, and a variety of other anxieties I wasn't aware I had. Apparently I struggled a bit with crowds and crossing the road. I hadn't been aware of that until suddenly both felt significantly easier.

However, it isn't perfect, and depending on how long you've had issues with social anxiety, there is likely to be work to do. What was left for me was a decade of coping strategies and beliefs that no longer applied or were necessary, and were actively harming me (keeping me isolated, basically) – and that's what the therapy has been helping with. That will take a bit longer, but they're being chipped away at slowly.

There are also side effects. I get some of them. They're not ideal, but they're worth the trade-off for me.

I read a comment similar to this about a year ago and that's why I sought a diagnosis and a prescription. It might not work for you but if you're struggling and you haven't tried it yet, go speak to your doctor or book an appointment for an initial assessment with a psychiatrist. There's really nothing to lose and I wish I'd started on this when I was 20, not when I was 30. I can't imagine where my life, career, relationships, etc, would be if I had...

I'm writing this as someone who was depressed but still tended to joke around people. No one could really tell from the outside.

Depression has many forms*, different durations, different treatments, etc. I am not a psychologist, but I've seen many, and have been through a variety of treatments from talk and CBT to meditation to different drugs, etc. Some days are better than others, some months/years are better than others, etc. Neurochemistry is complex and not just a binary "you are depressed, true/false" :) I think anxiety comes with a lot of nuances too.

You can probably plot these complex feelings by different axes of intensity and such, every few hours and come out with a pretty complex radar graph (random example just for illustration... don't read too much into it: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Radar-chart-pentagon-sha...). Like anything biological and human, it has a lot of variables.

My point is just that everyone experiences their life a bit differently, both from other people and sometimes from themselves moment-to-moment, day-to-day, etc. None of this advice is guaranteed to work for everyone, just like no medication or therapy works for everyone.

But a common thread you see in the comments here is repeated exposure. That works for many people, and is worth a shot if you haven't tried it yet (for anxiety).

For depression, other things like socializing, exercise, food, etc. can all affect it -- cyclically, sometimes the causes and effects flip, etc. Like depression can lead to bad food choices, which then cause further depression in a vicious cycle, etc., whereas exercise can temporarily alleviate depression in many people, which then gives them a bit more energy for more exercise, etc. in a virtuous cycle.

It's just nuanced all around! But again I'm not a psychologist, just a rando on the internet, and there are professionals who can hopefully help. We're just sharing personal anecdotes in the meantime.

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* Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_disorder#Depressive_disor...

But note that different countries can use slightly different criteria for evaluation (like DSM-5 vs ICD-10), and often, self-reported questionnaires are a part of diagnostics and not necessarily totally objective. There's not like a simple blood test. A lot of is vague, subjective, and also depends on the mood of the practitioner themselves, who are also human, and sometimes themselves suffering from mental illness.

IMHO psychology is a pretty young art and we're only recently beginning to understand the brain, the gut, and how it all ties together into mood and affect and maybe personality. There's a long ways to go! Maybe kids a few generations from now will have much better mental health treatment, but for now, it's mostly a matter of statistical clumps of different symptoms and treatments that seem to improve those symptoms (at a POPULATION level, not individual, i.e. no one thing is guaranteed to work for everyone yet).

The short story is that I basically filled in countless CBT sheets, spotting distortions and correcting my thoughts. And at some point it started to sink in.

As an example, one of the distortions I noticed in my thoughts was "should-ing" myself in the foot: "I should be X, they should be Y and world should be Z". And because I'm not X, they are not Y and world is not Z, it's all hopeless". A more realistic though would be something like: "It would be cool if I were X, they were Y and the world would be Z, but right now it's not like that and frankly, so what? The sun is still shining, birds are still flying, so it cannot be all bad, can it?". This might be a trivial example, but if you pile up dozen patterns like that then it starts to make a difference.

The long story is that I didn't know what to do, but I somehow managed to find the "Feeling good" podcast by a big CBT name dr David Burns, started to listen to it, then a friend bought me a book "Feeling great" by the same author (I literally couldn't force myself to buy it, I think because I was afraid that if it doesn't help me then it means I'm a hopeless case, or something like that...) and then I started filling in all those sheets. Sometime later (like a few weeks, maybe 2-3 months), I noticed I feel better, and it was an upwards trajectory since then. I guess at some point I "platoed", but I feel pretty good these days so I don't mind :)

At some point I was also taking pills, but I didn't feel any difference. Whereas filling in those sheets gradually made me feel better and better.

There was also a related anxiety, which I managed to greatly diminish through exposure (it's still there to some extent, but these day I can just acknowledge it and move on). I think the anxiety exposure also helped for depression, as when I learned that most people are really nice, I started to think that maybe things are not that bad and hopeless either?

(Sorry if the whole post is a bit chaotic, it's late here and I admit I didn't bother to edit it too much.. But I hope it's still at least somewhat useful.)