Well, it starts by facing fear. People usually are shy or socially anxious because they avoid the situations they are uncomfortable in. They run away from fear.
Do you ever:
Try to avoid talking to someone you are shy around? Maybe it’s a co-worker that you make sure to never walk past their office.
Or maybe you avoid someone you are attracted to. If you saw them walking towards you, would you be frantically thinking of ways to not walk past them?
Do you ever keep quiet in group conversations, meetings, or in class because you’re too nervous to speak up? This is another way of avoiding fear. In this case, you are avoiding doing a certain behaviour that scares you.
All of these behaviours do not help your social fears. They only reinforce it and make it worse.
Why? It’s because the process of overcoming shyness or social anxiety is exposure to what you fear. This is not just A way to overcome shyness, it’s THE way. The ONLY way.
How to Overcome Any Fear?
Exposure is the way to overcome any fear. This means you gradually expose yourself to what you fear over and over again until you no longer fear it. In psychology this is called progressive desensitization. You progressively desensitize yourself to what you are afraid of.
Pretty sexy, huh? Now you know why I tell people that overcoming shyness or social anxiety is not a fun activity.
You have to be willing to put yourself into uncomfortable situations that make you nervous and tense. You have to be willing to endure short-term discomfort to live a better life free of fear in the long-term.
Stop Avoiding Fear, It’s Actually a Good Thing
If you don’t have a firm conviction to overcome shyness or social anxiety, then you will run away from the discomfort and fear. This is not the way to change.
Instead, use your willpower to stop avoiding the situations you fear.
Realize that fear is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a good thing.
Fear is a good thing because fear shows you the path to the life you want.
Think about it. All of your deepest desires are fear-ridden. All of the things that you really want to do, whether it’s making new friends, talking to someone you’re attracted to, or becoming okay at public speaking are things you are scared of right now.
If you feel fear, then you know you are doing what’s best for you in the long run.
It’s like the difference between eating junk food and eating healthy. Junk food is ultra -tempting in the moment, just like avoiding fear. On the other hand, the healthy food doesn’t taste as good, but it will benefit you more in the long run, just like facing your fears.
By Sean W Cooper, the author of The Shyness and Social Anxiety System, is an ex-sufferer from social anxiety and shyness. This program is a compilation of his research and effort in overcoming shyness and anxiety.
Sean W Cooper’s Shyness and Anxiety system is a step by step audio course broken down into modules that are easy to access. It teaches you ways to start overcoming your social anxiety and self-doubt. The system utilises cognitive behavioural therapy which explores how feelings and thoughts can drive behaviour.
The Shyness and Social Anxiety system is endorsed by professionals and praised by psychologists due to the way it provides the relevant skills to manage issues of shyness and social anxiety.
Why do social anxiety and depression often occur together? In this post I’ll list what I believe are the top 10 reasons. To find out how to overcome depression due to social anxiety, read on till end of this post.
1. Lack of social connections
Did you know there are psychologists out there who also study “happiness,” not just disorders? What they’ve found is that the quality of your close personal relationships is the most important factor in your happiness:
50 years of happiness research shows that the quantity and quality of a person’s social connections—friendships, relationships with family members, closeness to neighbors, etc.—is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated.
– Christine Carter, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Yes, it’s more important than money, fame, good looks, or even being born in a rich country. Take that, billionaires!
Of course, it does suck to be someone with social anxiety who avoids people and is afraid of closeness or intimacy.
In my experience, depression can make your social avoidance much worse. Why? Because when you feel like crap inside, it totally removes your motivation to socialize. Not only do you feel nervous to talk to people, but now you don’t even have the energy or enthusiasm to even try. Oh, but you still feel that nagging loneliness.
2. People are turned off by your nervous, sad or desperate energy.
Feeling anxious makes it extremely difficult to carry on even a basic conversation.
This is why one of the most common problem I hear from my readers is that they “don’t know what to say” or their “mind goes blank” when talking. It’s hard to talk to people when you have alarm bells going off inside your mind, and your heart is racing, sweat is dripping off you, and your hands are trembling.
What’s worse, the sadness and depression you feel from loneliness turns people off even more. It makes you give off this subtle needy and desperate vibe, which to other people feels like a black hole of negative energy. When I was most depressed, I felt like I sucked the fun and energy out of the conversation just by opening my mouth.
3. Feeling “different” instead of belonging to a tribe.
Similar to point #1, it feels great when you feel like you’ve found “your people”:
People who have similar viewpoints, interests and goals to you.
People who you can have shared experiences with.
People who you can totally feel free to be yourself around.
Unfortunately, most people with social anxiety feel “different,” out of place, like you don’t really fit in with any group of people you’ve met.
I know this feeling all too well. While most guys in school were talking about dumb stuff like who their favourite hockey player was… I was wondering why they cared so much about hockey in the first place.
I’m lucky now to have found my own “tribe” of people I can easily connect to (generally people who are interested in psychology, online business, self-development, travel.) But it would have been impossible to find them with social anxiety.
Some studies have found that childhood experiences of not fitting in or being excluded can lead to social anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.
4. Can’t find a significant other.
Having a girlfriend, boyfriend, a companion… this is one of the big reasons why people come learn from me and invest in my courses.
Actually, relationships don’t always lead to happiness. They’re not always sunshine and roses. They often include conflict, jealously and heartbreak. And lonely people overlook the fact that the most depressed people in the world are usually the ones who have just broken up… luckily that type of depression lifts within a few weeks normally.
Yet despite the negatives, having someone to share the little moments of life with is something that gives many people a great feeling of being understood, loved and significant. I believe nobody should have to suffer being unwillingly single for years or a lifetime, but many people with social anxiety do.
5. Can’t pursue your desired career.
What’s a good job for someone with social anxiety? Computer programmer? Maybe a video editor? Yet even these jobs nowadays require a lots of collaboration and talking to people. Unless you’re going to be a truck driver or park ranger, you can’t really escape needing conversation skills in most jobs.
It’s simply a fact: If you aren’t confident, if you aren’t assertive, and if even the word “teamwork” makes your heart start to beat a little faster… then you’re probably going to be struggle getting the career you truly deserve.
To not getting the raise or promotion you want because you’re scared to ask for it,
To being too nervous at the interview to get a job in the first place!
…I would bet social anxiety costs many people tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime in their professional life.
6. Boredom and nothing to do.
Alone and aimlessly browsing the internet. That describes way too much of my high school and college life. Here’s a fact: when you don’t have friends to do things with, you usually don’t have many interesting things to do.
So you spend a lot of time doing things just to stay busy and distracted, things that ultimately feel unfulfilling and empty. For me this included video games, browsing random websites, etc. Jumping from distraction to distraction fills the time, but it your life doesn’t feel meaningful, and over time this erodes your self-esteem even more.
7. Negative thoughts about self.
Feeling insecure about yourself is extremely common for social anxiety sufferers. You may believe that you’re ugly, that you’re secretly a loser, that people closely judge every little thing you say, etc.
(This is in fact one of the core causes of social anxiety: you feel like you are “flawed” in some way, so you’re constantly nervous and worried about other people “noticing” this flaw and rejecting you.)
I’m sure it’s easy to see how the same types of thoughts that make you feel socially anxious can also make you feel depressed.
I’ve yet to see another course about shyness or social anxiety talk about this, but I consider it crucially important…
When you perceive your social status or rank to be LOW, that’s when you start being “shy” or “socially anxious.” In psychology this idea is called “social rank theory.”
Let me explain. Take a look at these 3 common symptoms of shyness:
Weak eye contact,
Talking quietly and timidly,
Being afraid to be assertive.
Think about what someone acting this way is really communicating. If a scientist saw a chimpanzee acting this way in the wild, he would label it as… submissive! And that’s where a lot of low social confidence comes from: a deep unconscious belief in other people being higher social status and more socially dominant than you. If you can overcome this feeling of inferiority, then you will find it easy to stop acting submissive & shy.
I talk a lot about this in my System, in the chapter called “Value & The Social Hierarchy”. What I didn’t realize when I created my course was that this same belief of inferiority / low status also leads to depression. That’s what this study found:
This study explores the associations between shame, depression and social anxiety from the perspective of social rank theory. Social rank theory argues that emotions and moods are significantly influenced by the perceptions of one’s social status/rank; that is the degree to which one feels inferior to others and looked down on. A common outcome of such perceptions is submissive behaviour. […]
Results confirm that shame, social anxiety and depression (but not guilt) are highly related to feeling inferior and to submissive behaviour.
– Study by Paul Gilbert: The Relationship of Shame, Social Anxiety and Depression: The Role of the Evaluation of Social Rank
9. Feeling ignored and invisible
Have you ever heard the saying that “you only exist in relationship to other people”? I think there’s some deep truth to it.
There have been periods of my life when I’ve been a huge loner, basically a hermit. I avoided making friends, and rarely talked to family. And it felt really strange. Like my existence felt less real when I didn’t interact with people for a long time. I started to wonder if I was losing my personality the more I stayed alone. I felt like I was fading away.
I can definitely see how some old people who are isolated start to go crazy, because I could feel it happening to me. And maybe this is why people fall in love… they need to feel like at least one other person in the world SEES them fully. Not feeling like other people KNOW and understand you really is depressing.
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. – Carl Jung
And lastly…
10. No plan or hope of getting better.
The longer you stay stuck with social anxiety, the less you feel in control of your life.
And the longer you are deprived of relationships, the harder it becomes to dig yourself out of the hole. It can feel so comforting to try to push your desires for friends, for a romantic relationship to the back of your mind as you focus on other hobbies.
But every once in a while, maybe on your birthday, you realize that another year of your life slipped by. Without much improvement.
That life event that was supposed to change your life: moving away to college, graduating or getting a job… it came and went and you’re still the same person. And sometimes you lay awake at night feeling like you’re wasting precious time you’ll never ever get back.
Now THAT’S the part of social anxiety which is the most depressing in my opinion.
Yet this type of thinking is also what finally motivated me to overcome my own social anxiety and now teach others as well.
If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it’s this: You are not alone. The same struggles, challenges and frustrations you face every day are ones common to most people with social anxiety.
By Sean W Cooper, the author of The Shyness and Social Anxiety System, is an ex-sufferer from social anxiety and shyness. This program is a compilation of his research and effort in overcoming shyness and anxiety.
Sean W Cooper’s Shyness and Anxiety system is a step by step audio course broken down into modules that are easy to access. It teaches you ways to start overcoming your social anxiety and self-doubt. The system utilises cognitive behavioural therapy which explores how feelings and thoughts can drive behaviour.
The Shyness and Social Anxiety system is endorsed by professionals and praised by psychologists due to the way it provides the relevant skills to manage issues of shyness and social anxiety.
Unclog Arteries Without Medication and Reduce Cholesterol Fast – Does Exercise Really Prevent Death?
The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which appeared in the journal JAMA in 2018, proposed one of two ideal programs: either a weekly total of 150 minutes of light to moderate aerobic exercise combined with two strength training sessions, or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise combined with two strength training sessions.
But till now, there has been little scientific scrutiny of these specific guidelines.
This is the gap that the new study intended to fill. And the results were quite surprising.
The authors of the new study decided to examine whether adherence to these two exercise schedules was associated with a reduction in death from all causes and death from eight specific causes: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, lower respiratory tract diseases, pneumonia and flu, kidney diseases, and accidents and injuries.
They first consulted the National Health Interview Surveys from 1997 to 2014 in which people reported their weekly aerobic and muscle strengthening activities.
They then compared this data with information obtained from the National Death Index records that stretched across nine years.
Overall, the authors used the information that 479,856 people provided and categorized the results into four groups: insufficient activity, aerobic activity only, muscle strengthening only, and both types of activities according to the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.
Unsurprisingly, only 16 percent (or 76,384) of the participants met the exercise guidelines, and 59,819 of them died during the study period.
Compared to participants who engaged in insufficient exercise, those who did sufficient muscle strengthening activity had an 11 percent lower risk of all-causes death, and those who performed sufficient aerobic activity had reduced their risk of all-causes death by 29 percent.
Even better, the risk of all-causes death of those who performed both types of activity according to the guidelines managed to reduce their all-causes death risk by 40 percent.
The surprise wasn’t that exercising helps, but rather, it was just how much exercising helps.
But exercising is only one piece of the puzzle. Here are more tips on avoiding the diseases addressed in the study:
A study in the latest edition of the Journal of Nutrition analyzed the effects on cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin resistance of substituting lean beef for some of the carbohydrates in a healthful American diet.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that American adults obtain no more than 20 percent of their daily energy from protein; for Americans, daily protein sources are most often animal products.
According to these guidelines, the bulk of Americans’ energy needs should be satisfied with carbohydrates because animal products, which can be rich in saturated fat, may cause high cholesterol and diabetes.
But because lean beef actually contains fairly little saturated fat, a team of researchers decided to establish what would happen if lean beef were added to a relatively healthful American diet in the place of carbohydrates.
Their subjects were 7 men and 26 women with an average age of 44.4 years; all were overweight or obese, with an average body mass index of 31.3 kg/m2. The subjects had all been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome or prediabetes, but those with excessively high cholesteroland blood pressure were excluded.
They split them into two groups:
1. A group who ate the conventional diet recommended by the USDA (the “USDA-CON group”). They obtained 16–18 percent of their daily energy from protein and 52–58 percent from carbohydrates.
2. A group who replaced some of the carbohydrates of the USDA-recommended diet with 150 grams (5.21 ounces) of lean beef (the “USDA-LB group”).
Each group consumed its diet for seven days, after which the subjects were told to resume their normal diets for 14 days. The groups then swapped and ate the other group’s original diet for another seven days.
Before and after each seven-day dietary period, the scientists tested the subjects’ cholesterol, triglycerides (blood fats), blood pressure, insulin resistance, and a marker of inflammation called C-reactive protein.
The two diets did not differ in any of these heart disease and diabetes risk factors, meaning that the substitution of lean beef for carbohydrates makes no difference when it comes to heart diseaseand diabetes risk for people who are already overweight/obese and prediabetic.
This should be good news for people who love lean meat; this finding basically means that they can eat two servings of it per day. This excludes fat and processed meats like ham, bacon, sausages, and mincemeat.
The study lasted over a short period of one week and didn’t reveal anything about the long-term effects of eating lean meat, but the study did show that cutting out carbohydrates did nothing to improve type 2 diabetes and other health factors.
Unclog Arteries Without Medication and Reduce Cholesterol Fast – The “Heart-Friendly” Vitamin You Should STOP Taking IMMEDIATELY!
We need to talk. There is a vitamin that just about everyone says is great for your cardiovascular health. Even most respected natural health experts agree on the wonders of this vitamin.
But in reality, this vitamin can damage your cardiovascular system—severely—by hardening your blood vessels, for example, along with all the resulting complications.
Most unfortunate of all is that half of all patients over 60 are strongly encouraged to stock up on this vitamin.
The investigation group from Johns Hopkins Medical School looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2001 to 2006, which collected data from 15,000 participants.
None of the survey participants had cardiovascular-related conditions, but rather, all had fairly low amounts of vitamin D.
The results of the survey brought to light an interesting connection between vitamin D levels and CRP, a known marker for cardiovascular inflammation associated with stiffening of blood vessels.
Researchers found that study participants who had what were considered “normal” levels of vitamin D had significantly lower levels of inflammation.
However, the researchers also discovered that any additional increase of vitamin D in blood levels was related to a significantly heightened risk for CRP (a marker of cardiovascular inflammation).
Nevertheless, it is important to understand that vitamin D is crucial to our cardiovascular health, and many studies proved that optimum vitamin D levels reduce the risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, and even reduce mortality.
However, there can be too much of a good thing, and vitamin D supplements may pose unnecessary health risks to people.
Health care providers should be aware of the potential risks of overloading on vitamin D and recommend the vitamin only when there is an obvious need for it.
Remember that the best source of vitamin D is sunshine. A daily walk outside for at least 20 minutes in the morning will ensure that you have the optimal levels of vitamin D in your system.
And you can never overdose on vitamin D from sunlight; your body will just stop absorbing it.
However, if you are not sure if you lack or have too much of this vitamin, talk to your physician and ask for a blood test to determine your vitamin D levels.
The generally accepted recommended blood levels of vitamin D are 50–70 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml).
However, if you do need to supplement with vitamin D, at least make sure that you are using vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) and NOT Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol). Vitamin D3 is the same type of vitamin D as produced in our bodies in response to sunshine, while vitamin D2 is a synthetic form of vitamin D that is typically prescribed by doctors.
This post is from the Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy Program. It was created by Scott Davis. Because he once suffered from high cholesterol, so much so that he even had a severe heart attack. This is what essentially led him to finding healthier alternatives to conventional medication. Oxidized Cholesterol Strategy is a unique online program that provides you with all the information you need to regain control of your cholesterol levels and health, as a whole.
4 Reasons Highly Intelligent People Are Often Socially Inept
If you’re still reading this post, then you probably consider yourself more intelligent than average man or woman. Maybe you excelled in school or you couldn’t understand why all your classmates were only interested in pop music and celebrities… when you mostly cared more about exploring the world deeply with your mind.
At this point in your life, your smart mind has probably given you many advantages over others. It’s probably helped you out in school, maybe landing a degree, performing well at your job, and so on.
However, this smart mind can be worse than useless when it comes to…
Your Social Skills and Confidence
For most of my life, it was hard for me to imagine how my smart mind could ever hurt my chances for success, but this is one of those situations.
So I’ve put together this short list of ways your intelligence makes you FAIL in social situations… and what to do about it.
1. They Seek Information Instead of Developing Skills
My dad was a welder for many years, and do you know how he learned? Through practice. Doing something over and over again is what allows you to develop a skill.
Sure, there’s some basic training you NEED to go through, but to go from being bad to good in a skill… you’ll have to put in the time and effort.
Yet there’s a lot of socially inept people who don’t treat social skills in this way.
Instead they look for the one last magic piece of information that will solve all their problems. Like looking for a fool proof conversation starter that will work every time in any situation. (This doesn’t exist.)
Social skills are just that… SKILLS.
They’re not social INFORMATION.
They’re not social THEORIES.
They’re social SKILLS.
And you don’t get them by THINKING about them, you get them by GETTING them. This means you’ll learn more by in one hour of actually getting out of the house and talking to people than you will in ten hours of “education”.
You get better by doing, by practicing at least a few times a week.
2. They Think Too Much
Do you ever notice how so many people out there who are extremely confident and socialize effortlessly also happen to be…
Downright stupid!
And the people who are really smart may be unsure of what to say, or afraid of opening their mouth to make a fool of themselves. Oh, what a backwards world we live in!
Let’s think about this:
Why can people who SUCK at thinking, reasoning and logic… be total MASTERS when it comes to socializing? And why do you find it so difficult to make conversation confidently when you probably “deserve” to do so more than those idiots?
It’s because being social and contributing to a conversation is not a problem to be solved by thinking. It’s more about an energetic and spontaneous expression of how you’re feeling.
I took some improv theater classes for a few months. This is a type of theater that is totally spontaneous… all the actors/students have no scripts… they just blurt out the first thing that comes into their head.
This situation seems like a nightmare for a smart and shy person… but you should really try it out sometimes even if it seems scary.
The biggest lesson I learned from those classes was to rely more on speaking from my GUT feeling and instinct instead of trying to carefully plan and think through everything I said.
If you can’t think of what to say, you probably go on thinking and thinking and thinking. Racking your brain to come up with some good and interesting conversation topic to talk about.
Never realizing that THINKING TOO MUCH is the main reason you have a problem speaking up more to begin with!
3. They Psych Themselves Out
Some psychologists have called the mind a “simulation machine.” Your mind is designed to remember the past or simulate the future to help you survive in life.
If you can imagine yourself dying after walking off the 10th storey of a building, you probably won’t step off the edge, will you?
Well, smart people take this FUTURE SIMULATING and RISK AVOIDING nature of the brain way too far sometimes.
How? By coming up with all of the reasons why everything WON’T WORK when it comes to social situations.
You may use your amazing creative imagination to vividly imagine all the horrific way you will fail. And you figure out every little way something could go wrong.
For example, maybe there’s a girl you want to ask out on a date. But then your mind imagines you creating an awkward silence after you say “Hi”… And you imagine her saying “No”… and then her telling everyone else in the world about what a loser and a creep you are… and then you have to see her every day still and try to avoid feeling super awkward.
Are you getting the picture here?
Imagining the worst that can happen causes you to not even try. You probably avoid a lot of parties, conversations and social situations for fear of the worst happening… all thanks to your smart mind which has made you see all the “risks.”
Now, if you’ve thought something through and come up with a good reason why it would fail, it makes sense to not do it, right?
I mean, why would you want to do things that are going to fail?
Because shy and socially anxious people have a tendency to OVERESTIMATE. You waaaay overestimate the probability that something bad will happen, and you overestimate the consequences if something bad did happen.
Usually, failure is not as big a deal as your mind makes it out to be. You ask a girl out, she says no… and life goes on. You feel bad about it for a few days, and within 2 weeks you no longer really remember it much. And beyond that…
The little failures are necessary to improve your skills. Failing in one conversation is not nearly as bad as the consequences of avoiding taking risks in general… this is what lead to ULTIMATE FAILURE.
4. They Can’t Deal with Fear and Other Emotions
An intelligent person’s strength is often their logic, which means their weakness is emotions.
When it comes to dealing with emotions… a lot of smart people (guys especially) become totally uncomfortable and frozen. Maybe they start to repress or run away from the emotions… especially the bad ones like fear. Fear of being rejected, fear of opening up and connecting with others, and so on.
Many people would rather DIE in lonely isolation than admit that they don’t know how to deal with their emotions… or, GOD FORBID, ask for help!
Hey, I went for YEARS like this. I know what it’s like. But the reality is that anyone can learn to handle and even MASTER their emotions (even fear)…if they just take the time and effort to learn HOW to do it.
If this is you, then do yourself a big favor… take the time. Take the effort. Don’t worry about whether someone else will look down on you for studying “self-help.” What matters is you doing the things that YOU need to do FOR YOU.
I think the reason why I’m so fascinated with “The Socially Inept Genius Puzzle” is because I had to struggle with all of these issues for a lot of years of my life.
Now, I’m not saying that I’m the smartest guy on the planet… Yet it always bothered the hell out of me that even though I was so good at figuring things out… …I couldn’t figure out what I was missing when it came to being good at conversations and social skills like other people.
Something tells me that you know what I’m talking about.
Well, after beating my head against the wall for a few years… trying all kinds of crazy stuff… I finally got the bright idea to start studying people who were “naturally” good socially.
By carefully studying what the “naturals” did and said in conversations… and learning how their minds worked… I began to realize that social skills weren’t LOGICAL at all.
I was doing many things in a fundamentally wrong way, and the more I tried to “fix” my problems, the less progress I made. Much of what I learned was very tough for me to accept… because my logical brain just didn’t want to buy into it.
It’s like that quote that goes:
“You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking which created it.”
That’s what becoming more confident and skilled socially is like. It took me quite a long time, but I continued to learn, test, and refine what I was learning until I personally figured out how to overcome shyness and social anxiety…
I learned how to become confident and talkative whenever and wherever…
I learned how to build a social circle of friends from scratch…
And once I got this area of my own life together, I decided to start helping other shy and socially anxious people get this area of THEIR lives together. In fact, I created a whole system to help you do it.
By Sean W Cooper, the author of The Shyness and Social Anxiety System, is an ex-sufferer from social anxiety and shyness. This program is a compilation of his research and effort in overcoming shyness and anxiety.
Sean W Cooper’s Shyness and Anxiety system is a step by step audio course broken down into modules that are easy to access. It teaches you ways to start overcoming your social anxiety and self-doubt. The system utilises cognitive behavioural therapy which explores how feelings and thoughts can drive behaviour.
The Shyness and Social Anxiety system is endorsed by professionals and praised by psychologists due to the way it provides the relevant skills to manage issues of shyness and social anxiety.
