How I Significantly Reduced Anticipatory Tension and Anxiety before Socialising.
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You want to stop feeling the anticipatory tension and anxiety as you walk into social interactions.
But anxiety is all you know and social interactions feel like something that will suck for the rest of your life.
By the end of this Procedure, you'll fully understand why you feel this tension and how to start socialising as comfortably as you want to.
Social anxiety can be fixed by returning to now.
Ultimately, if you were present, you'd stop thinking and as long as you had a way to release tension from your body, you could do and say whatever you liked to people. To stop thinking, you need to have less to think about.
To stop thinking and therefore be present, you must practice acknowledging thoughts.
What does it mean to acknowledge a thought? Look at this tweet. Ultimately, a mechanism such as looking a your phone is just your brain trying to escape the present moment where the perceived threat is.
Where do these thoughts come from?
Childhood.
Which then leads to something being perceived as a threat.
Your brain uses thoughts, images and sensations to increase anxiety and tension in your body.
You give into the feelings and possibly avoid the threat.
Therefore, you need to repeatedly expose yourself to the threat to see that it’s not dangerous.
How do you work towards less perceived threats existing in your life, in practice?
Start small. Say hello or good morning to people.
Then add more to the conversation.
Then start getting contacts or Instagram of people you genuinely like.
Then start organising hangouts with multiple people or 1-1.
Then start saying yes to things to try and get into more social situations.
Then start saying things to people in public who you don’t know. Again, can start small like asking about the weather or saying good morning.
Start a sport or join a club or go to some events.
Use The Question Method to talk to people. Ask something that you already know the answer to and don’t add any more to the conversation.
The Question Method is when you walk up to someone and ask a question you already know the answer to. For example:
“Where’s the nearest train station?"
Nearest grocery store
“Where’s the library?”
“You ever had these guy’s dirty chai?” (at a coffee shop)
It doesn’t throw them off guard because it’s a reasonable question. Then you just say thanks.
Start turning The Question Method into full fledged conversation.
Start asking for their contact or Insta if you want.
Start saying whatever comes to mind to people you want to interact with. Be open to conversation with them, but if they’re not into it, whatever. If goes well, ask for their contact or socials.
How do we acknowledge thoughts literally though and be happy despite overthinking?
Acknowledging the thought helps you be present and therefore expose yourself to the threat.
Why?
Since the brain is escaping cowardly, you will be the brave one who stays in the moment.
Acknowledge how?
Identify the story your mind is using (the thoughts) to make you avoid the threat.
Say “Ah, there’s the overthinking story again. I’ve heard it a million times”. Bring your mind back to present.
Or, identify the thought by acknowledging the fact that it’s your mind “escaping” and then bring your mind back to the present.
I just say “escaping” in my head. I call this The Escaping Method
Bring mind back to present moment by focusing on something you see or hear.
As you start to do this, begin meditating at night or morning.
Sustain a meditative practice by implementing a small Associative Habit in the morning or night.
This is a set of habits conducted in the same way and same order.
See here for instructions.
For example, brainstorming your thoughts into a computer note, which is associated with setting up your yoga video for the next morning, which is associated with sitting down to meditate. Habit A, then B, then C.
How do I sustain that?
Do it so that the Associative Habit stack gets reinforced.
What’s meditation actually like?
Just sit in Seiza or Sukhasana - Google these positions.
Allow your thoughts to do whatever you like, but just make sure you stay seated in one of these 2 poses, even if you switch.
The only time you can move besides switching seating positions, is when you’re writing in a journal when you get thoughts that feel like important realisations.
When the thoughts don’t feel like important realisations, which is majority of the time, you’ll stay seated by acknowledging your thoughts as your brain “escaping” the difficulty that is presence.
Remember, all things difficult make you stronger.
Eventually, you’ll have done enough meditation and practice with The Question Method, you’ll have remembered what it’s like to be present and therefore can start shifting your consciousness back to the present without identifying your brain as “escaping” or using any method.
However, you’ll see success in letting go of thoughts first.
The tension that arises due to the thoughts will still be there. Therefore, you’ll be present, but still mentally restricted from doing or saying many things.
The Escaping Method is currently what I’m using to let go of whatever sensation or tension I feel in my body.
To me, this feels proactive and so disrupts my passivity. Passivity is where you’re just letting your body do whatever or think whatever and you don’t have much conscious control.
This method gives me enough awareness of whatever thoughts, feelings, sensations or little fidgets I’m doing to the point that I can let go of it and shift back to the present.
How do you stop thinking?
Stop expecting any particular outcome from the social interaction.
Because this causes you to stay stuck in your head and so you’re more likely to forget how to have conversation, focus too much on your words that you say stupid shit or you don’t have the capacity to ask them questions.
Being stuck in your head stops you being authentic.
Why?
Because you’re trying to guess what words or demeanor the other person wants from you. Therefore, you present an altered version of you.
You try to guess what they want because you want to feel socially included.
You want that because you’ve experienced rejection and don’t like that.
You’ve experienced rejection because you’re human and people reject because of their own reasons. However, you may have been rejected more than most because you’re different.
You’re different because of nature and nurture.
Nurture is how you were raised, which is influenced by the nature and nurture of all those who made up your environment. Nature is your parents and ancestors DNA.
The way you are is not your fault and therefore not bad.
Meaning that people rejecting you through ridicule or harm does not make you a bad person, because you’re intrinsically not bad.
The other person is also not bad because they’re just internally suffering in some way due to their nature and nurture, then expressing that in some way to you.
Therefore, no one is intrinsically bad.
So don’t judge yourself or others for hate, disrespect or rejection. Accept you have the nature or nurture you have and have compassion for the other person’s personal problems.
All we can do is try our best.
This is further supported by the fact that we don’t have control over life fully. Things just happen.
Therefore, outcomes like an awkward interaction or something bigger cannot be prevented with perfect accuracy. We can only choose how we feel when a certain outcome occurs.
Choosing how we feel is about being calm and present.
Being calm is about valuing it and practicing it. Practicing it comes from meditating, being mindful throughout the day and adapting to pressure in activities like Jiu Jitsu.
Valuing calm, you take pride in saying, “I’m the kind of man who’s calm” whenever you get anxious going into something but still commit to it.
Mindful throughout day
Move slower and look at your hand and the objects you interact with. Try to “feel” the people you speak to. I describe it as seeing and hearing them.
Move slower by understanding that since you don’t have control over the exact outcomes of things, there’s no need for you to rush.
Rushing also doesn’t indicate calmness. So you’re not living by your values when you do that.
Doing jiu jitsu: Searching up “Gracie Jiu Jitsu [insert city or country]” Gracie JJ is more focused on street-fighting, rather than on sport competition.
Reach out or just pull up to the place and ask to join.
Keep it up by going only once per week to start, then increasing the days.
Jiu jitsu will put some pressure on you and force you to learn calmness. Plus, you can be calmer when interacting with other men, at night or in public because you’ve learned really solid fundamentals of self-defence.
Fundamental meaning they keep you safe and don’t involve running up and aggressively punching someone. You can submit people without knocking them out or doing something that could result in an assault charge.
Now you can be less on-edge in public which means more presence.
Journal in the mornings or at night.
Buy a physical journal to write in or type on a computer. On a computer, I use RemNote. You can use that, Apple Notes or Notion.
Write whatever words comes to mind. Could be f*ck, sh*t, c*nt or j*zz. Those just came to mind for me.
Gets thoughts out of your head so that you have less stuff to think about during the day.
This means less time in your head and more time in real life.
Means more presence.
Means more exposure to the perceived threats, since they are in the present moment.
Adapting to the perceived threat.
More mental freedom and bliss in the present moment.
Less problems in your life.
In the present moment, painful thoughts or feelings from your past naturally arise to remind you of the things you need to worry about.
The mind says you need to worry about awkwardness and all these things, in order to protect yourself from past pain and rejection happening again.
But there’s no guarantee whatsoever that your worries will stop those painful events happening again.
Plus, the pain you feel from being mentally burdened and restricted by the thoughts and feelings is certain and happens daily.
This comes with a huge opportunity cost. The happiness you could be experiencing in the present moment and also the things you could be doing with your life and your time.
This means there’s joy and impact you could be having on other people that you’re not having. That includes your kids or kids you could’ve had.
Your friends and family are worse off.
Therefore their lives will have more negative energy in them and therefore they suffer opportunity cost as well.
The tension releases as you identify the thought or feeling and allow it to pass by like a cloud. Do this with the intention of slowly shifting back to the present.
This self-induced pain is also worse than the pain that might come from facing these perceived threats.
Now you fully understand why you feel this tension before social interactions and how to start socialising as comfortably as you want to.
Regards,
Riley.
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