DEALING WITH SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Self-consciousness is one of the more painful symptoms of social anxiety and shyness. It feels like you are acutely aware of everything you say and do and that people are watching every move you make and analyzing you closely for mistakes. You might start losing concentration on what someone is saying and then your attention just locks on the awareness that this is occuring and you become hyperaware of this happening and your anxiety starts to snowball from there.
The problem of becoming self-conscious is one reason why exposure alone has trouble working because self-consciousness helps fuel social anxiety and once attention locks onto yourself or what's going on inside of you, you no longer are paying attention to the outside and will therefore see the situation as a complete disaster even if it went good. This is why when undertaking cbt it is highly recommended in reducing this problem first before undertaking
behavioural work.
The first way to help do this is the next time you are around people simply become curious about what they are doing or saying. This will help force your attention away from yourself. Here is a mini-experiment you can do right now to help you get more in-touch with your attention and awareness. If you are at your computer, notice the mouse. Your attention will switch to the mouse. Hold it there for 10 seconds, then move it to the letter O, then hold it there for 10 seconds. I find noticing something about the mouse and letter such as how grey or white it is for example seems to help attention stay on it. Now switch your attention to your thumb and notice the subtle sensation you feel once your thumb is targeted by your attention. It may start to feel warm, tingly, or even start to feel like it is pulsing after a while. See how once attention switches onto a bodily sensation it starts to grow. This is what happens in social anxiety. Your blushing feels HUGE but may only be minor or no more than how much you see others blush when they do. Thats because human nerve ending is something like 1000 times more sensitive than the visual sense.
Of course, the best way to control self-consciousness is to build up some very basic concentration. Pick some object in your room and just gaze at it and then notice your awareness of that object and concentrate on the awareness of the object. I found this way of concentrating much easier than trying to just focus on the object all by itself. Try this for perhaps 3 minutes, then the next day 4 minutes all the way up to 10 minutes. Then test out this skill when you are around others. See how much you can focus your attention away from yourself. You will need this skill when undertaking the next phase in overcoming social anxiety.
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DROPPING SAFETY BEHAVIOURS
Second problem to deal with before you engage in behavioural work is safety behaviours. These are the things you do that you feel you need to in order to protect yourself from potential embarrassment and humiliation. You may give one word answers, rehearse what you say, fiddling with things while talking or listening to others, doing things that you think will gain approval, let others talk for you, drink alcohol before a situation, keep your head or eyes down, ignoring others who you see want to speak to you, keeping near someone you know, use anger to keep others away, not talking about your weekend etc. You will have your own personal ones which you must identify and then decide to get rid of. Keeping them will only keep the problem of social anxiety and shyness going because you will believe nothing happened because you did the thing you felt you needed to do.
Try to come up with as many safety behaviours as you can and write the feared situation down as well. For example:
Feared situation: walking to the shop
Safety behaviour: wearing my best clothes, shaving, brushing hair very neat
Feared situation: working in the front garden when neighbours are outside
Safety behaviour: waiting till they go inside
Feared situation: paying for things at the checkout
Safety behaviour: keeping head down, not saying "goodbye"
Feared situation: being around attractive members of the opposite sex
Safety behaviour: keeping quiet
To help you identify your own safety behaviours ask yourself these questions:
What do I do to avoid looking stupid or foolish in front of others ?
What do I do to avoid unwanted attention from others ?
Whenever I feel anxious or threatened what is the first thing I think of doing ?
What do I do to make sure I do not make mistakes in front of others ?
What do I do to hide my problem of anxiety or shyness or any percieved weakness or inadequacy from others ?
Once you have identified your safety behaviours the next thing to do is practice dropping these behaviours. Alright, this is how we are going to go about it. You will need your book or computer. There are 5 steps involved.
1. You are going to write the feared situation down. This is simply the situation that you are afraid of and resort to using safety behaviours. Write what you do when in this situation.
2. Then you will predict what you think will happen. What is the worst thing you are afraid that will happen ? You need to be specific and make sure the fear is able to be observed. What will people do to confirm this fear ?
3. Next comes the experiment in which you will try to find out if your fears come true. How do you do this ? You need to come up with a way to do things differently. In the above examples, when walking to the shop you must decide to not wear your best clothes, not shave and keep your hair a bit messy. You are dropping your safety behaviours. Remember, sse the attentional focus when you feel you are going inside your own head and becoming self-conscious.
4. What actually happened when you dropped your safety behaviours ? Did your prediction come true ? You need to stick with what really happened. If you became anxious and begun to conclude that people were staring and judging you that would most likely be false because social anxiety tends to do that.
5. Then finally write down your conclusions. What did you learn from the experiment ? What did it mean to you ? Using the example, you might learn that others don't even bother a single bit with what you look like and that the fear was all imagined.
Here is how you write it down on paper.
Situation: Looking my best when going out to the shop
Prediction: People will be disgusted with me and will move away
Experiment: Just wear casual clothes
Outcome: I felt self-conscious but nobody even seemed bothered by how I looked
Conclusion: People are not concerned with what others wear and that scrubbing up to go to the shop is entirely unnecessary because people don't really care about it.
Of course, on some rare occasions the things you fear actually happen. This is especially so if you make an advance on someone you are attracted to. You get rejected. Being socially anxious can make rejection especially painful because it is taken personally or as a sign of inadequacy or inferiority. The way to deal with such negative outcomes is to ask yourself the same question you did when trying to find your negative thoughts back when you were learning about the mood diary. This will help you stop ruminating and pinpoint the reason you felt so bad after getting the reaction from others you feared.
Learning to drop safety behaviours will help build up confidence and will help you become more natural in social situation because you will no longer be bound by your safety behaviours which serve to keep you locked in rigid patterns of doing things.
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Self-consciousness is one of the more painful symptoms of social anxiety and shyness. It feels like you are acutely aware of everything you say and do and that people are watching every move you make and analyzing you closely for mistakes. You might start losing concentration on what someone is saying and then your attention just locks on the awareness that this is occuring and you become hyperaware of this happening and your anxiety starts to snowball from there.
The problem of becoming self-conscious is one reason why exposure alone has trouble working because self-consciousness helps fuel social anxiety and once attention locks onto yourself or what's going on inside of you, you no longer are paying attention to the outside and will therefore see the situation as a complete disaster even if it went good. This is why when undertaking cbt it is highly recommended in reducing this problem first before undertaking
behavioural work.
The first way to help do this is the next time you are around people simply become curious about what they are doing or saying. This will help force your attention away from yourself. Here is a mini-experiment you can do right now to help you get more in-touch with your attention and awareness. If you are at your computer, notice the mouse. Your attention will switch to the mouse. Hold it there for 10 seconds, then move it to the letter O, then hold it there for 10 seconds. I find noticing something about the mouse and letter such as how grey or white it is for example seems to help attention stay on it. Now switch your attention to your thumb and notice the subtle sensation you feel once your thumb is targeted by your attention. It may start to feel warm, tingly, or even start to feel like it is pulsing after a while. See how once attention switches onto a bodily sensation it starts to grow. This is what happens in social anxiety. Your blushing feels HUGE but may only be minor or no more than how much you see others blush when they do. Thats because human nerve ending is something like 1000 times more sensitive than the visual sense.
Of course, the best way to control self-consciousness is to build up some very basic concentration. Pick some object in your room and just gaze at it and then notice your awareness of that object and concentrate on the awareness of the object. I found this way of concentrating much easier than trying to just focus on the object all by itself. Try this for perhaps 3 minutes, then the next day 4 minutes all the way up to 10 minutes. Then test out this skill when you are around others. See how much you can focus your attention away from yourself. You will need this skill when undertaking the next phase in overcoming social anxiety.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
DROPPING SAFETY BEHAVIOURS
Second problem to deal with before you engage in behavioural work is safety behaviours. These are the things you do that you feel you need to in order to protect yourself from potential embarrassment and humiliation. You may give one word answers, rehearse what you say, fiddling with things while talking or listening to others, doing things that you think will gain approval, let others talk for you, drink alcohol before a situation, keep your head or eyes down, ignoring others who you see want to speak to you, keeping near someone you know, use anger to keep others away, not talking about your weekend etc. You will have your own personal ones which you must identify and then decide to get rid of. Keeping them will only keep the problem of social anxiety and shyness going because you will believe nothing happened because you did the thing you felt you needed to do.
Try to come up with as many safety behaviours as you can and write the feared situation down as well. For example:
Feared situation: walking to the shop
Safety behaviour: wearing my best clothes, shaving, brushing hair very neat
Feared situation: working in the front garden when neighbours are outside
Safety behaviour: waiting till they go inside
Feared situation: paying for things at the checkout
Safety behaviour: keeping head down, not saying "goodbye"
Feared situation: being around attractive members of the opposite sex
Safety behaviour: keeping quiet
To help you identify your own safety behaviours ask yourself these questions:
What do I do to avoid looking stupid or foolish in front of others ?
What do I do to avoid unwanted attention from others ?
Whenever I feel anxious or threatened what is the first thing I think of doing ?
What do I do to make sure I do not make mistakes in front of others ?
What do I do to hide my problem of anxiety or shyness or any percieved weakness or inadequacy from others ?
Once you have identified your safety behaviours the next thing to do is practice dropping these behaviours. Alright, this is how we are going to go about it. You will need your book or computer. There are 5 steps involved.
1. You are going to write the feared situation down. This is simply the situation that you are afraid of and resort to using safety behaviours. Write what you do when in this situation.
2. Then you will predict what you think will happen. What is the worst thing you are afraid that will happen ? You need to be specific and make sure the fear is able to be observed. What will people do to confirm this fear ?
3. Next comes the experiment in which you will try to find out if your fears come true. How do you do this ? You need to come up with a way to do things differently. In the above examples, when walking to the shop you must decide to not wear your best clothes, not shave and keep your hair a bit messy. You are dropping your safety behaviours. Remember, sse the attentional focus when you feel you are going inside your own head and becoming self-conscious.
4. What actually happened when you dropped your safety behaviours ? Did your prediction come true ? You need to stick with what really happened. If you became anxious and begun to conclude that people were staring and judging you that would most likely be false because social anxiety tends to do that.
5. Then finally write down your conclusions. What did you learn from the experiment ? What did it mean to you ? Using the example, you might learn that others don't even bother a single bit with what you look like and that the fear was all imagined.
Here is how you write it down on paper.
Situation: Looking my best when going out to the shop
Prediction: People will be disgusted with me and will move away
Experiment: Just wear casual clothes
Outcome: I felt self-conscious but nobody even seemed bothered by how I looked
Conclusion: People are not concerned with what others wear and that scrubbing up to go to the shop is entirely unnecessary because people don't really care about it.
Of course, on some rare occasions the things you fear actually happen. This is especially so if you make an advance on someone you are attracted to. You get rejected. Being socially anxious can make rejection especially painful because it is taken personally or as a sign of inadequacy or inferiority. The way to deal with such negative outcomes is to ask yourself the same question you did when trying to find your negative thoughts back when you were learning about the mood diary. This will help you stop ruminating and pinpoint the reason you felt so bad after getting the reaction from others you feared.
Learning to drop safety behaviours will help build up confidence and will help you become more natural in social situation because you will no longer be bound by your safety behaviours which serve to keep you locked in rigid patterns of doing things.
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