Recovery from social anxiety and related conditions

Robert F Mullen
Director/ReChanneling

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The distinction between social anxiety disorder and social anxiety is a matter of severity; reference to one includes the other. The recovery tools and techniques provided apply to comorbid emotional malfunctions including depression, substance abuse, generalized anxiety, and issues of self-esteem and motivation. These malfunctions originate homogeneously, their trajectories differentiated by environment, experience, and the diversity of human thought and behavior.          

“Dr. Mullen is doing impressive work helping the world. He is the pioneer of proactive neuroplasticity utilizing DRNI – deliberate, repetitive, neural information.” – WeVoice (Madrid, Málaga)   

Social anxiety is culturally identifiable by the persistent fear and avoidance of social interaction and performance situations, which causes us to miss the life experiences that connect us with the world.

1. Replace or overwhelm our negative thoughts and behaviors with healthy, productive ones.
2. Restructure: produce rapid, concentrated positive stimulation to offset the abundance of negative information in our brain’s metabolism.
3. Regenerate our self-esteem through mindfulness of our assets.

Coping Strategies and Coping Mechanisms

Coping strategies are the methods or approaches that best execute our three objectives. Coping mechanisms are tools and techniques that implement our coping strategies. The distinctions are important.

For example, to support a response-based strategy, we would utilize cognitive coping mechanisms that focus on our automatic negative thoughts and reduce the influx of our fear and anxiety-provoked chemical hormones. 

A comprehensive recovery program employs multiple strategies sustained by cooperative coping mechanisms. These applications are not rigidly distinct solutions but complementary. One-size-fits-all approaches cannot address the underrated complexity of social anxiety.

Coping mechanisms alleviate our situational fears and anxieties, allowing us to step outside the bullseye and objectively analyze our irrational thoughts and behaviors to respond rationally and productively.

In general terms, coping mechanisms help us cope with stress, anxiety, and other negative emotions. They range from practiced skills in recovery (e.g., grounding, reframing, and rational response) to everyday stress reducers like gardening, journaling, and listening to music. Healthy coping mechanisms are situationally adaptive.

Decompensation

Without coping mechanisms, healthy or otherwise, we can experience decompensation – the inability or unwillingness to generate effective psychological stress response, resulting in personality disturbance or disintegration.

Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are temporary safeguards against situations that challenge our conscious minds. They are ostensibly automatic psychological responses designed to protect us from our fears and anxieties. 

Cognitive distortions are exaggerated or irrational thought patterns that perpetuate our anxiety and depression. They are defense mechanisms that reinforce or justify our toxic behaviors and validate our irrational attitudes, rules, and assumptions. They twist reality, painting an inaccurate picture of the self in the world with others. They interpret experiences through a glass darkly. 

Any process that protects us from our fears, anxieties, and threats to our emotional well-being is a defense mechanism. Some, like avoidance, humor, and isolation, require no explanation. Others, such as compensation and dissociation, have positive applications in recovery. 

Situations 

A situation is a set of circumstances – the facts, conditions, and incidents affecting us at a particular time in a specific place. A feared situation provokes anxieties and apprehensions that negatively impact our activities and relationships. 

Two Types of Situations 

Two types of situations concern us: the anticipated situation and the unexpected one.

Anticipated situations are those that we know, in advance, trigger our fears and anxieties. They can be one-off situations like a job interview or social event. They can be recurring situations like the classroom or our daily work environment.

Knowing our feared situation in advance gives us ample opportunity to devise a structured plan to counter our fears and anxieties. We develop it utilizing situationally focused coping mechanisms in a workshop environment. We practice our plan in non-threatening simulations. This method is called graded exposure or systematic desensitization.

Exposing ourselves to a feared situation without a strategy and functional coping mechanisms is jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In the words of a master of moderation, Benjamin Franklin, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Unexpected situations are those that catch us by surprise – stress-provoking chance encounters such as faulty plumbing, an unexpected guest, or losing a wallet.

Knowing how to respond effectively to unexpected situations is like playing bridge. We know what’s in our hand (our coping mechanisms) but don’t know which card to play until we see the others on the table. Accordingly, we assemble our emergency preparedness kit – a variety of practiced coping mechanisms proven subjectively effective.

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Associated Fears and Corresponding ANTs

Automatic negative thoughts are immediate, involuntary expressions of our fears and anxieties. These thoughts can occur in advance of, during, or after a feared situation. ANTs are terse emotional responses, unbased upon reason or deliberation. They are the unpleasant expressions of our negative self-beliefs that define who we are, who we think we are, and who we think others think we are. 

Alleviating Our Symptoms

Coping mechanisms are valuable tools in the recovery process. Their role is to offset the negative stimuli within the situation, allowing us to de-stress and reframe our responses.

We develop and practice detailed coping mechanisms in a workshop environment. Introspection, collective activities, and graded exposure are helpful to the client in determining the mechanisms that are most individually effective and adaptable.

Know the Enemy

Did you ever try to talk to someone about your social anxiety? It’s hard. Like it’s some alien disease or something. Nobody gets it. That is why we are reluctant to disclose it. Many of us deliberately choose to remain ignorant of SAD’s destructive capabilities. Others pretend it doesn’t exist or ignore it, hoping it will disappear or no one will notice. Our resistance is a significant impediment to our recovery.

It is disconcerting how many affected clients are unfamiliar with SAD’s causes, symptoms, and impact. The information is readily available. When we have the sniffles, we dash to the internet and familiarize ourselves with every snake oil remedy known to civilization. Nevertheless, despite experiencing social anxiety for decades, it remains as mysterious to some as the mating habits of the Loch Ness Monster. 

It is essential to know the symptoms of our condition and how they impact us. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, our chances of recovery are negligible if we neither know the enemy nor ourself. It is pointless to assemble a puzzle if the pieces are missing.

There are multiple ways to mitigate the anxiety of negative triggers. Three of the more effective are grounding, positive reframing, and rational response.

Grounding

Grounding is turning attention from our anxiety-provoking thoughts, memories, and worries by refocusing on our presence in the present moment. Whenever we feel anxious or stressed, we can use grounding techniques to distract ourselves from the emotional stress of the situation. This research-based strategy helps us mitigate our fears and automatic negative thoughts. When we find ourselves in moments of stress or panic, grounding techniques can help our body relax and return to our physical presence.

One of the most common grounding techniques is the 5-4-3-2-1 technique, which grounds us to the moment by accentuating one or more of our five senses. We deliberately focus on objects, sounds, smells, tastes, and our tactile contact. Doing so alleviates our emotional distress by distracting or diverting our anxiety.

Reframing

Our brain’s metabolism is overwhelmed with negativity. In addition to the lifetime negative trajectory associated with social anxiety, humans are hard-wired with a negativity bias, meaning we respond to negative things over positive ones. 

Social anxiety and low self-esteem sustain themselves through our negative self-appraisal. 

Positive reframing is turning a negative perspective into a positive one. By reframing, we identify our triggers and self-esteem issues and change how we respond to them. There are always multiple perspectives to any situation. While we cannot control everything that happens, we can control how we react and respond. 

One example of reframing is viewing a problem or issue as a challenge or opportunity. We reframe an argument by looking at it from the other’s perspective. In a snowstorm, we can either be housebound and despondent or take the sleds and ice skates out of the closet. Experts agree that positive reframing is critical for emotional well-being. 

Unhappiness, disillusionment, anxiety, pejorative self-appraisal, and all the other adversities in our lives negatively impact our self-esteem. Positivity regenerates it. It is as simple as that. 

Rational Response

Our automatic response to everything is an emotional one. To compensate negative emotions, we address them rationally. A rational response is a logical, self-affirming counter to our fears, apprehensions, and ANTs. 

We first identify the fear-provoking. Where are we when we feel anxious or apprehensive, and what activities are involved? What are we thinking? What might we be doing? Who and what do we avoid because of these insecure feelings?

We then unpack the associated fears and anxieties. We ask ourselves the following: What is problematic about the situation? How do I feel (physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually)? What is my specific concern or worry? What is the worst thing that could happen to me? What might happen to me?

The next step is unmasking our corresponding automatic negative thoughts, e.g., “I am incompetent.” “No one will talk to me.” “I will do something stupid.” “I am a loser.” 

Examining and analyzing this information allows us to generate rational responses.

As we progress in recovery, grounding, reframing, and rational response become habitual and automatic.

Remember, fears are irrational. Predicting what is going to happen is a fool’s errand. We are not fortune-tellers. Believing we know the thoughts and perspectives of others is absurd unless we’re mind readers. They are cognitive distortions.

Seek Progress, Not Perfection

SAD persons worry about their performance before and during a situation and obsess about the outcome long after. We fear criticism and negative appraisal. We set unreasonable expectations to compensate for our perceptions of incompetence and inadequacy, and then we beat ourselves up when our expectations are unmet. Perfectionism is not the desire to do well but the need to be faultless. Anything less is unsatisfactory. Perfectionism and social anxiety have a parallel relationship. 

Recovery, however, is a life’s work in progress. There is no absolute cure for social anxiety, but with work and over time, we experience a dramatic and exponential alleviation of our symptoms. The key is progress over perfection.

Set Reasonable Expectations

An expectation, by definition, is a firm belief that something will take place in the future. When we set an expectation, we invest a fervid interest in its outcome. What happens in the likelihood that our expectations are unmet? Because we have a vested interest, we are psychologically attached to the outcome. Fixed In our minds, we see it as a reality. When it does not go our way, the general response is one of disappointment.

Experts describe the reaction to disappointment as a form of sadness – an expression of desperation or grief due to loss. While it is true that we cannot lose what we have not acquired, fixing the expectation in our mind makes it real and visceral. Loss leads to depression, self-loathing, and other traits associated with perfectionism and social anxiety. 

Engender Joy and Laughter

The endorphins and chemical hormones transmitted by positive emotions dramatically enhance our psychological well-being. Joy and laughter counteract anxiety and defuse anger, resentment, and shame. They strengthen our immune system, boost energy levels, and enhance memory and concentration. When we smile and laugh, the influx of our fear and anxiety-provoking hormones decreases. Finding humor in stressful situations reframes our perspective and takes the edge off our anxiety. It provides a sense of shared comradery and community, which helps counter our fear and avoidance of intimacy and social events, improving our physiological and psychological health.  

Remember, You Are Not Alone

Roughly 124 million U.S. adults and adolescents experience anxiety disorders. 60% of those have depression, and many resort to substance abuse. Persons experiencing SAD are too preoccupied with their center of attention to seek us out for judgment or criticism. Roughly two of five people in any situation are experiencing anxiety. So, when we worry and stress during a social event, we are in good company. Social anxiety is common, universal, and indiscriminate. We are never alone.

GENERAL COPING STRATEGIES

Controlled Breathing

Controlled breathing reduces stress, increases our mental awareness, and boosts our immune system. Scientific studies show that this simple grounding technique helps relieve symptoms associated with anxiety, depression, and other stress-related conditions. The grounding distracts from negative stimuli by focusing on the present through our body and senses. It helps us manage our NTs and reactions.

Our vagus nerve manages our heart rate, digestion, and nervous system. It also manages our fight-or-flight response. Science tells us that the simplest way to manipulate our vagus nerve is to practice controlled breathing, which decreases the flow of cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine while releasing mood and memory-enhancing chemical hormones like GABA, glutamate, and serotonin.

Positive Personal Affirmations

Positive personal affirmations are self-motivating and empowering statements that help us focus on goals, challenge negative, self-defeating beliefs, and reprogram our subconscious minds. We drastically underestimate the significance and effectiveness of PPAs because we don’t appreciate the neuroscience behind them. 

Providing all the neural benefits of positive reinforcement, our PPAs self-describe who and what we aspire to be in our emotional development. PPAs are rational, reasonable, possible, positive, unconditional, problem-focused, brief, and in first-person present or future time. Think of PPA’s as aspirations or self-fulfilling prophecies that, through deliberate repetition, help replace our abundance of negative neural information with healthy, productive input.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)

PMR is another grounding technique. We progressively relax our muscle groups, beginning with the lower extremities and extending to the forehead. Like controlled breathing, there are long and short applications. Abbreviated PMR takes less than a minute and can be executed surreptitiously during a situation. This coping mechanism relieves the discomforting muscle tension aggravated by stress. It also reduces the influx of our fear and anxiety-provoking hormones while momentarily distracting us from our negative thoughts and reactions.

Slow Talk

Our anxiety often compels us to mumble or rush our words under pressure. Slow talk is deliberately speaking slowly and calmly. It slows our physiological responses, alleviates rapid heartbeat, and lowers our blood pressure. It is also helpful to incorporate the 5-second rule, i.e., pause any response for five thoughtful seconds. Not only does this coping mechanism moderate the flow of cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress-provoking hormones, but it also presents the appearance of someone considerate and confident.

Affirmative Visualization

An affirmative visualization is a positive outcome scenario we mentally create by imagining or visualizing it. All information passes through our brain’s thalamus, which makes no distinction between inner and outer realities. Whether we visualize doing something or actually do it, we stimulate the same regions of our neural network. Visualizing raising our left hand is, to our brain, the same thing as physically raising our left hand.

Affirmative visualization activates our dopaminergic-reward system, decreasing the neurotransmissions of anxiety and fear-provoking hormones and accelerating and consolidating the beneficial ones. When we visualize, our brain generates alpha waves, which can reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Research shows that visualizing a situation in advance improves our mental and physical aptitude. We consciously source information that will enhance our performance outcomes, dramatically improving the likelihood of success in the actual situation. IT also produces the same neural benefits as any other form of proactive neuroplasticity, i.e., the deliberate, repetitive neural input of positive information.

Character Focus

Focusing on our character strengths, virtues, attributes, and achievements channels our emotional angst to mental deliberation, mitigating our fears, anxieties and corresponding ANTs. It supports the regeneration of our self-esteem as we rebuild our latent self-qualities. By manifesting our character strengths and achievements, we reframe our perspective, empowering our asset awareness and generating renewed self-confidence. 

Distractions/Diversions 

Distractions are mental grounding techniques that engage our focus when confronted by anxiety. Also called directed attention, we focus our attention on a sensory target (i.e. sight, tactile, sound, smell, and taste) to supersede moments of stress and discomfort in our feared situation. Snapping a rubber band on our wrist to momentarily ground our attention is a prime example of a tactile distraction.

Diversions are activities that fulfill the same function (e.g., initiating small talk or humming a song to yourself.) A diversion rechannels the stress of a situational fear or anxiety into a diversionary tactic. These physical diversions and mental distractions temporarily alleviate our fears and anxieties and help manage our negative thoughts and reactions.

Persona

Our body language represents roughly sixty percent of communication. Ten percent is words, and thirty percent is sounds (sighing, laughing, moaning). Persona is the social face we present to our exposure situation, designed to make a positive impression while concealing the nature of our social anxiety. Developing personas is vital to preparing for and adapting to multiple exposure situations.

Our persona establishes our body language. It determines how we carry ourselves, the timbre of our voice, our attitude, and the clothes and shoes we wear (boots, sneakers, high heels). It reflects our character strengths best suited for the situation. (The actor, Paul Newman, allegedly crafted his characters by initially determining their walk and posture.) 

We all have multiple personas. We present ourselves differently depending upon the context of the situation, e.g., a sports event versus an interview for a job, a funeral versus a wedding, or a family dinner versus a hoedown. Our personas are ostensibly unconscious – they reflect the environment. Deliberately crafting our persona is an essential learned skill that can dramatically alleviate the stress of a situation.

Persona is an extension of the Social Psychology of Dress, which is concerned with how our dress appearance affects our behavior and that of others toward us. Our outward appearance expresses our internal vision of who we want to present. Persona is more than appearance. It is attitude and performance.

Personas are not other selves distinct from who we are but different aspects of our personality. To analogize, all the clothes in our wardrobe belong to us, but we choose an outfit for a specific occasion to appeal to our sense of self. The same pattern of thought-driven choice establishes our persona. 

Projected Positive Outcome

Our projected positive outcome is the reasonable expectations we set for our feared situation. We already know the projected negative outcome if we capitulate to our ANTs. Therefore, we rationally respond by setting reasonable expectations. A projected positive outcome is rational, practical, and doable to ensure success. For example, being immediately hired with a fantastic salary at a networking event is not a reasonable expectation. Making an initial and fruitful contact is an effective projected positive outcome.

Purpose

Purpose is the primary motivation behind our exposure to a situation. What do we seek or hope to accomplish? Why are we exposing ourselves? If our feared situation is the barbershop or beauty salon (not uncommon sources of anxiety), it is reasonable to consider that our purpose might be to get our hair cut or styled comfortably. Our purpose is a subjective determination. 

Attending a social event offers multiple purposes, e.g., networking, carousing, making friends, and seeking an intimate relationship. However, maintaining numerous purposes reduces the probability of success, leading to disappointment and self-recrimination. Therefore, we set a reasonable expectation a focus on the principal purpose. To paraphrase a Russian proverb: if you chase two pigs, you have less chance of catching either one.

Small Talk 

Small talk is an Informal greeting, comment, or conversation – discourse absent any functional topic of discussion or transaction. In essence, it is polite, non-confrontational verbal interaction meant to acknowledge presence and or open channels of further communication. This activity is not as easy as it appears for those experiencing social anxiety. In interactive workshop activities, graded exposure defines the parameters and establishes the comfort zone critical to successful small talk. 

SUDS Rating and Projected SUDS Rating 

The Subjective Units of Distress Scale ranges from 0 to 100, measuring the severity of our situational stress. Additionally, it allows us to set reasonable expectations of success. We evaluate what level of distress we anticipate in our feared situation (SUDS Rating) and what we project it will be upon its successful completion (Projected SUDS Rating). Again, we set reasonable expectations. A moderate projected SUDS rating will offer the probability of a successful venture. For example, if our SUDS rating of distress for making a presentation is 80, a reasonable projected SUDS rating might be 70 or 75. Projecting a 10 SUDS rating would imply that we expect a standing ovation and a national speaking tour. It’s possible, but it is an unreasonable expectation.

Coping Mechanisms for Everyday Stress

Anything that alleviates stress qualifies as a coping mechanism. From listening to music to tending a garden, coping mechanisms are as numerous and varied as individual experience and imagination. 

To iterate, some will work for us, and others we will discard. Some will work sometimes and not at other times. Many are general activities like exercise, meditation, and creativity. Examples of coping mechanisms for everyday stress include:

• Arts and Crafts:
• DIY
• Music 
• Creative Pursuits
• Connecting with nature 
• Hobbies
• Personal Time
• Physical Activity
• Body Relaxation
• Self-Empowering Activities

Coping mechanisms are tools and techniques with a wide range of uses. They assist in moderating our situational fears, anxieties, and ANTs. They temporarily allow us to step outside the bullseye so that we can objectively analyze our thoughts and behaviors and react and respond rationally and productively. They also help us cope with everyday stress and other negative emotions.

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Committing to recovery is one of the hardest things you will ever do.
It takes enormous courage and the realization that you are of value,
consequential, and deserving of happiness.