Social Anxiety: Overcome Shyness, Stop Anxiety and Change Behaviours

You may have found ways over the years to reduce your anxiety but the shyness and avoidance tendencies remained. So in reality you feel like you have not made any progress. In essence, you are dealing with three separate entities – shyness, anxiety and behaviours and each needs its own management system. The confidence that comes from managing all three creates its own momentum but until that point, it feels like you are taking 3 steps forward and 5 back. If we look at them in turn we can see they come from different points in the body – anxiety is the body’s response to a stress trigger, shyness is really about how you feel about yourself and being in the company of others and the avoidance techniques are automatic responses that the subconscious mind feels are for your benefit.

The power control for shyness and avoidance behaviours is in the subconscious mind and it makes sense that the subconscious mind must be used to make these changes lifelong. You know that being logical makes no difference long-term because the root of the problem is in the subconscious mind. So how do you access the subconscious – through hypnosis. Hypnosis is a concentrated relaxation (the concentration is the change you want to make). In our waking state, the beta state, the conscious mind is on guard, filtering, hearing and seeing what it wants to see and hear and disregarding anything else. As the body relaxes you move into the alpha state which is a consciousness of what is going (rather than the conscious part of the mind) – you can go through the memories and feelings attached to past events and review them in an objective sense and with your adult’s self now determine whether they warrant the control that you have allowed them to have. You are removing the emotional attachment from these memories. As you move into theta, the creative part, the imaginative part of the brain waves, you can see how you want to be now, how you would feel not being social anxious, the positive difference it would make to your life. Also you are aware of any fear of changing that is present and analyze this fear’s concerns. Then with delta these changes are being absorbed into the deep recesses of the subconscious mind. You have to bring all the sense into play, you have to make it real. The subconscious mind does not know the difference between what is real or imagined so this is used for you to rehearse how you want things to be – a comfortable you, feeling relaxed in company. In this way, we are changing the avoidance behaviours. Accepting yourself for as you are and knowing that you are entitled to take up space on this world and be counted. Making the improvements you need to make, being less self conscious and embracing life. But you have to want to change, you have to make the decision to embrace change so that you can be relaxed in the company of others, no matter what goes on. It doesn’t matter what anyone says or does to you, it is only your response that gives it worth.