BEYOND SHYNESS Read online

  Anxiety becomes negative when you start to avoid the situation that causes it. For example, if I were to stop making public appearances because I didn’t like the physical manifestations of my stress response, or even to make the appearances but allow myself to be distracted by my cold hands or other symptoms—perhaps thinking, “Can they tell my hands are clammy?” “Am I making sense?”—that would be counterproductive. It’s important to me to make these appearances, so I channel my gearing-up anxiety into positive energy.

  Anxiety does not exist to control you. You exist to control it. It is, as I said, a simple fact of life that can be managed. In fact, used properly, it can actually give you an extra boost by heightening your energy and awareness. If you have social anxiety about such things as giving a presentation, speaking up at a meeting, attending a social gathering, initiating plans, developing intimacy in friendships and dating, then learning to manage your anxiety will help. This book will teach you how to channel your anxiety—not how to eliminate it. The twelve chapters delineate a five-step program that essentially works like this:

  Step I: Identify your anxiety symptoms and recognize the ways in which they interfere with your life. Your social fears prevent you from doing things you would like to do (pursue friendships, date, achieve career success). Pinpointing your stress responses and noting what causes them give you the information you need to move on to Step 2.

  Step 2: Set short- and long-term social goals. Having identified the situations you have trouble confronting, you can identify immediate goals to work toward, and start to form a vision of your ideal social self. Goal-setting is a valuable way of letting your imagination offer a reward for your hard work. Next, you will begin to learn skills that can make your dream a reality.

  Step 3: Learn stress management and self-awareness. The techniques outlined in this book will allow you to control your anxiety response and tune in to your own desires and strong points, giving you more to share as you become more comfortable interacting. With your anxiety in check and your self-awareness guiding you toward fulfillment, anxiety becomes positive energy and will be the base of your self-empowerment. Now you are ready to polish your social skills.

  Step 4: Learn or refine social skills. Your fear has diminished, making it possible to refine social skills and enhance your interactive productivity, which will make the difference between social success and failure. Good conversation, active listening, an awareness of what behavior is appropriate—all of these skills will add to your overall social ability and self-empowerment.

  Step 5: Expand and refine your social network. At this point, you are ready to roll. You understand your anxiety, your stress is manageable, and you have learned the finer points of interacting in a positive, productive manner. The final step is to use your community’s resources to create, expand, or refine your social network to best meet your interactive goals. No matter who you are, you can improve your social network to better suit your needs. From here, anything is possible!

  As you follow this program, you will learn to accept that it is okay to have anxiety. What is not okay is to let your anxiety control you.

  Alan, a young man of twenty-two, is typical of the people who have come to me for treatment. Outwardly, he seemed well adjusted and likable. His sense of humor added fun to our sessions, and he was an active conversationalist who was well liked by his peers. If you met him in an informal setting, you would have no idea that an attractive, articulate person like Alan could get nervous or anxious about any social situation. But Alan suffered from the most common social anxiety today: fear of public speaking. He was afraid to stand up in front of a group and talk. For almost four years, he put off taking the public-speaking class that was required for college graduation. By his last semester, however, he knew there was no more avoiding it. He had to take the class or miss out on receiving his degree. Although he was scared, he was also highly motivated to confront his fear and finish his course load.

  At first, Alan experienced a typical anxiety reaction or panic response: His hands got clammy, his heart raced, and he experienced every stutter, every verbal misstep as a huge blunder that no one would ever forget. He would blush, or imagine he was blushing, and then worry about what his classmates thought of him. Sometimes, he would feel a little short of breath and then worry that he would hyperventilate and need to rush from the room. He was intensely aware of all these symptoms of nervousness, though his audience of classmates thought: little of it—they too were nervous about their speaking assignments, and were sympathetic. Alan’s symptoms diminished as he gave more speeches, and watched others make the same mistakes without losing face.

  The sensations that troubled Alan are typical of anxiety sufferers. Also typical is the tendency to avoid what you fear. The possibility of blushing or hyperventilating had become as scary to Alan as giving a speech, and in putting off the class, he was avoiding all these things.

  Alan was not alone. Far from it: Millions of people feel some panic or anxiety symptoms regularly. Sometimes they are mild reactions that are easily connected to a particular situation or event. But in other instances they are more pervasive and more debilitating. The physical sensations may even be severe enough to warrant a visit to the emergency room, where a frustrated anxiety sufferer may be told that there is nothing wrong but stress. But panic symptoms are indeed real. Their cause? An internal mishandling of stress or emotions. What occurs with a panic or anxiety attack is a psychophysiological reaction: a mind-body response. While the body is preparing itself to confront the stressor, the mind is filled with fear and apprehension, with thoughts like “I’m losing control” or “I know I’m going to fail.” Together, the body and mind are overreacting to their own fight-or-flight instincts.

  Let’s consider situations you may be avoiding because they cause a fight-or-flight anxiety reaction. Below are some possibilities:

  Interaction with an authority figure

  Giving a presentation at work

  Eating in public

  Speaking in front of a group

  Taking interactive responsibility at work

  Signing a check or other document in front of someone

  Talking on the telephone

  Talking to someone you don’t know

  Talking to someone you do know (outside the family)

  Making social plans with someone (outside the family)

  Going on a date

  Using a public bathroom

  Going to a party

  Going to a singles-oriented event or program

  Interacting with people at work

  Waiting in line

  Sitting in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room

  Being examined by a doctor or dentist

  Going to the theater

  Going to a restaurant

  Maintaining eye contact when talking to someone

  Going to any public place

  Taking public transportation

  Other

  Are some of these situations stressful for you? Go back over the list, checking off the ones that apply to you. As you check them off, think about the degree to which your fear hampers your social life. And if you recognize a situation that you actively avoid because you find it too stressful—say, you never use a public bathroom at all because you’re “too shy” or it makes you anxious—make note of that, too.

  Now that you’ve given some thought to the situations that cause anxiety, let’s examine the particular symptoms of your anxiety. We will look at physical symptoms—what your body does when you feel anxious—and thought patterns—what thoughts bother you when you feel anxious. Use Charts 1 and 2 (pp. 23 and 24) to rank these symptoms in terms of frequency (whether they occur twice a month or as often as once a day), severity (whether they cause you minor discomfort or absolute panic), and the degree to which they interfere with your social life (not at all or significantly). The last category is very important, since it will help you to determine to just what extent your social anxi
ety disables you. The rankings in that category should be interpreted as follows:

  1. Not at all. If you choose this answer, you usually experience no discomfort whatsoever when the thought or feeling in question arises. You may experience the symptom, but you are fully able to continue what you are doing (talking to an acquaintance, addressing a group, working with your supervisor, and so on) without becoming distracted or trying to leave the situation.

  2. A little. If a symptom interferes a little, it may occasionally cause you to lose your train of thought, or to falter or hesitate during conversation. Still, you find ways to compensate, and your interaction is not inhibited to a noticeable extent. You continue to interact with others on a regular basis, and none of your symptoms causes you to avoid interacting completely.

  3. Moderately. A symptom that moderately interferes with interaction would be one that occasionally keeps you from doing something you would like to do (such as approach and speak to a stranger at a party) or are required to do (make a cold sales call on a prospective client). You are uncomfortable enough with the symptom at least to consider whether encountering it is worth the anxiety involved.

  4. Significantly. For social anxiety symptoms to affect significantly the degree to which you interact, they must have caused you to develop the habit of avoiding the situations that cause them, whether by procrastination or merely by passive participation (such as attending a meeting without contributing anything). While you don’t avoid all interaction, you probably try to stay out of it when you can, and spend a great deal of time negatively evaluating those interactions you do have. This may cause others to view you as aloof or distracted in conversation.

  5. Severe to the point of incapacity. This is where social phobia comes in. We’ll talk more about that in Chapter 4, but for now, understand that for social anxiety to become a phobia, it must be so severe that you avoid the situation that causes the anxiety whenever possible, even when it means forgoing a promotion or spending all your free time in total solitude. At this stage, you fear your symptoms just as much as you fear the interaction.

  Now take several minutes to go through each list of symptoms, using the rankings to determine how much each plays a role in your current daily life.

  Chart 1: Physical Anxiety Profile

  What does your body do when you feel anxious or nervous?

  Frequency

  Severity

  Social Life Interference

  1 = Never

  1 = No problem at all

  1 = Not at all

  2 = 2 times a month or less

  2 = Minor discomfort but you can manage it

  2 = A little

  3 = 1 or 2 times a week

  3 = Noticeably uncomfortable

  3 = Moderately

  4 = 3 times a week but not daily

  4 = Severe

  4 = Significantly

  5 = 1 or more times daily

  5 = Absolute panic; feels out of control

  5 = Severe to the point of incapacity

  a) Shortness of breath

  b) Accelerated heartbeat

  c) Sweating

  d) Dizziness or faintness

  e) Nausea or abdominal stress

  f) Choking

  g) Depersonalization—feeling of unreality, being “outside yourself”

  h) Tingling or numbness

  i) Flushes or chills

  j) Voice quivering or shaking

  k) Sweaty palms

  l) Cold hands

  m) Your mind going blank

  n) Twitches, tics, or spasms

  o) Lump in throat

  p) Stuttering

  q) Difficulty concentrating

  r) Other

  Total Scores:

  * * *

  Remember, there is a wide range of what is considered normal, and even feeling slightly nervous or keyed up is within that normal range. The goal is not avoiding anxiety but managing it, getting it under control. Whatever your anxiety level, by following the steps in this self-help plan and adapting them to your needs, you can empower yourself to interact more effectively. Later, you will do these indexes again. It is important to realize that your progress will be based on relativity. As you compare previous indexes to the most current one, look not only at totals but also at the individual categories and their frequency, severity, and degree of interactive interference.

  Chart 2: Mental Anxiety Profile

  What thoughts recur when you are anxious or nervous?

  Frequency

  Severity

  Social Life Interference

  1 = Never

  1 = No problem at all

  1 = Not at all

  2 = 2 times a month or less

  2 = Minor discomfort but you can manage it

  2 = A little

  3 = 1 or 2 times a week

  3 = Noticeably uncomfortable

  3 = Moderately

  4 = 3 times a week but not daily

  4 = Severe

  4 = Significantly

  5 = 1 or more times daily

  5 = Absolute panic; feels out of control

  5 = Severe to the point of incapacity

  a) What will people think of me?

  b) Am I good enough?

  c) Am I dressed okay?

  d) How do I look?

  e) I’m going to embarrass myself.

  f) People can tell I’m nervous.

  g) People can tell what I’m thinking.

  h) I’m going to lose control.

  i) I’m going to have to run from the room.

  j) What will I say?

  k) I’m ugly.

  l) If they knew me, they wouldn’t like me.

  m) I always do the wrong thing.

  n) They can see I’m different.

  o) They can see I’m lonely.

  p) They can see I don’t belong.

  q) I can’t.

  r) They all have more than I do.

  s) I always screw up.

  t) I don’t know what to say.

  u) Other

  Total Scores:

  * * *

  To help you make general sense of your ratings, let me use as examples two people who have come to me for treatment. Each experienced different extremes of anxiety—Shelly was highly functioning but unfulfilled professionally, while Adam was incapacitated by fear on all fronts. Whereas Alan, our earlier example, a relatively high-functioning person with severe anxiety about a specific situation (public speaking), was somewhere in the middle, the two people introduced here were at opposite poles when compared to the norm: Shelly was high-functioning, and Adam was low-functioning. Understanding their perspectives may help you to gauge your own level of anxiety.

  Shelly: At thirty-five, Shelly was an associate with a small law firm. She and her husband enjoyed socializing with friends and neighbors in the suburb where they lived, and often entertained at home. Shelly was not anxious or inhibited in purely social situations, and often hosted gatherings herself. At work, however, she did experience a slight degree of anxiety when it came to initiating projects or accepting responsibility. Her interactive inhibition—resistance to asking for help or doing things on her own—was preventing her from being made partner. How did social anxiety interfere with productivity at work? For Shelly, the safety of her position, with its predictable duties and conservative style of dress, was reassuring when she joined the firm right out of law school. But in order to get ahead at the firm, Shelly needed to do more than conform to the social system that existed at work. She had to go beyond meeting assignments and seek out new solutions and challenges.

  Instead, though, Shelly waited for her supervisor to give his opinion on the cases assigned to her. Usually, her hesitancy to make decisions or take action on her own caused her to procrastinate—a bad habit that was hard to conceal as deadlines came and went. She didn’t realize that action relieves anxiety. Instead, she feared the outcome of the risks she had to take in speaking her mind. She was unwilling to endur
e the pain of anxiety these risks would entail. Even when she had ideas of her own, she was extremely hesitant to express them, assuming that they were off-base or, as she said, “Somebody else would have made the same points already.” Shelly’s thinking was skewed: The firm hired her because they recognized capability and potential. Her training and experience were valuable to them, so some more initiative on her part would only have increased her value and could have netted her the partnership she hardly dared dream about. Perhaps more important, even if her ideas were rejected, the outcome would not have been devastating. No one is right 100 percent of the time or always says or does exactly the right thing. Shelly would not have been fired for thinking aloud as part of a problem-solving team.

  Shelly’s interactive inhibition had another cost as well. In performing the same duties the same way, without the experience of taking a risk that might pay off, of following a case start to finish, of meeting new challenges, she had dug herself into a rut. Her limited self-esteem was self-perpetuating, and the result was a lack of fulfillment. It’s true she was successful in many ways, but without the confidence to move forward without being anxious about interacting, she did not feel successful.