In this video Aaron Doughty shares his personal journey from a socially isolated childhood (ages 9‑15) to learning how to manage social anxiety during his teenage years. He explains that anxiety stems from mislabeling the natural feeling of excitement and from seeing oneself as a victim of circumstance. By consciously shifting his internal state, reframing anxiety, and adopting a mindset of self‑amusement, he moves from trying to impress others to expressing his authentic self. He describes practical techniques: deliberately entering a positive internal frame before social events, treating people as extensions of one’s environment, focusing on personal expression rather than external impression, and using humor and spontaneous actions for self‑amusement. Doughty argues that controlling one’s state of being restores personal power, makes anxiety dissipate, and creates contagious positive energy. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to apply these strategies and share the content.
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Welcome back to another video. In this one, I share with you how I overcame the idea of social anxiety, and what I do, I give you some practical realizations that can really change the way that you think about yourself and how you relate to your environment. Now, for me, this was something that I went through just a little bit later than most people in life, and that's simply because of my story of like how I was brought up. But to make a long story short, between the ages of 9 to 15, I lived with very little social interaction other than the idea of school. So between that period in my life, my dad was with, uh, someone that was my ex-stepmom and she was very strict, had a very much like a military type style attitude. And because of that, me and my brother would just kind of like work outside a lot, do a lot of chores. We weren't allowed to really do many extracurricular activities at school. Because of that, there wasn't as much social interaction there, and even when there was, it was a lot more awkward because we're like, what the hell do we relate to? Like, we'd sit around all day with shovels and shit. Like, there's not much to relate to kids that are at home playing, you know, DS3 and all that stuff. And because of that, between that ages of 15 when my dad divorced her, all of a sudden me and my brother— my brother's 3 years younger than me— all of a sudden we had this freedom. We were allowed to go hang out with friends. We were allowed to do extracurricular activities. And one thing I really had to learn between the ages of about 15 to 17 was how to like be in groups and not feel anxiety. And one thing that I went through is I remember that like when I started to make friends and I started to go out more, uh, I remember that friends would invite me to go to like a kickback or like some party and I would just start to feel very anxious. Even if the people that were there were people that I knew of or knew, I would still feel anxious. And for me, I remember one of the switches that made in my mind, one of the realizations I came to was actually when I was at a party with a friend and we were just having a good time. Like we were in amusement, like we were just like doing things that we thought were funny and it was just two of us and there was like the rest of the party was going on. But I realized that when we're in that state and we're just like self-amusing ourselves almost, and regardless of anyone else is in on the joke that we were on, Even if people would walk by and would be like, oh, it's ridiculous, whatever you guys are laughing about, we wouldn't really care because of the state that we were in. So what I really began to understand was that if we could tailor our state or do little things, like what I would do is I would get myself into a certain state to where then the social anxiety would just kind of bounce off or it actually wasn't even there. And that came from understanding that if we go into an environment, understand that we can control how we feel, that the one thing that we have power over is our state of being, what we then begin to do is switch the script. Instead of us being at the effect of our environment, we then become the cause of it simply because we don't see things as happening to us. That's what I learned. Instead of seeing the environment as happening to me, me walking around and trying to fit in with other people, I started to see them kind of blend together. I saw me as a part of the environment and I started to see people as more in my frame of reality rather than me in their frame. Now, if that makes sense. Now, this was ultimately something that I elaborated on years later because that's something that I really hammer down on now is understanding our frame of who we are, how we define ourselves to be, and if we maintain a strong frame, people will mold to the frame that we put. Now, this doesn't mean we need to be egotistical. But what this is saying is that if we understand that we are not a victim of circumstance, that we are not a victim of our environment, we begin to then automatically switch the script for if we're going to feel anxiety in public to knowing that we have control over our state of being, of how we define the situation to be. Now understand also this, the way that I define anxiety more so has to do with putting a negative judgment onto the feeling of excitement. So if I go somewhere, for example, that's a party and I know everybody there, I might feel excited, but that excitement I think is natural when you know that you're about to be around a whole bunch of people or you know that there's unexpected things that could happen. That excitement is a natural byproduct of that, but what happens is that excitement will be there even if you go to a party that you think you're gonna feel social anxiety around or even if you go in public, for example, That feeling of anxiety is just a negative definition onto that label of excitement. So it's a misinterpretation of a feeling that we have, and because we affect our energy based upon how we think about ourselves and how we define ourselves to be, we then impose a feeling onto it that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So what we can learn how to do is not to disidentify identify the feelings we have with negative connotations or negative definitions that don't necessarily serve who we are. And one simple way of doing that is to reframe what that feeling is, is to reframe what it means for you to go out in public altogether, for you to go to a party. That's when I started to enjoy parties, which is instead of seeing me as an effect or like the victim of circumstance and me trying to fit in, I started to see myself in a higher light, to accept myself for who I am. And the more that I did that, the more that I detached from what people think because I was believing more in myself. I was having more intention on expressing myself than impressing people in another way. So it's about expression, not impression. Do not try to impress. Do not try to give people a perspective about who you are. Simply understand that you were to express your inner being of who you are. You will express the ideas that you want to talk about, and as you begin to do that, you'll find that people begin to mold to that frame of perception that you have, to that frame of how you define yourself to be. The key, or I guess the trick, is that most of us go into, you know, social interactions and we impress a frame onto other people. We give our power away because we are saying to our environment that I am a victim of circumstance. I am a victim to whatever happens in this environment. And because of that, we get emotionally thrown around with how we feel because we are constantly being in different environments. We are constantly having new levels of stimulation. Then we get caught up in our head and we don't know necessarily how to act because we are getting immersed in our thinking rather than actually being. And one of the simplest ways to transcend that is to simply go into what is called self Amusement. Now for me, self-amusement is one of my favorite things to do. Self-amusement is simply doing something because you want to do it regardless of what anybody else thinks. Now this is something that I do, uh, if I am going to work, for example, I work a sales job. So if I go in for the day and I feel a little bit like I'm not loose, I'll just start doing things for my own self-amusement. I might say random things. I might push myself to I express myself in different ways just to get out of my bubble of trying to be correct about everything and like put on a certain persona of I'm this like confident salesman. The more that I realize I do that, the more that I set up a false perimeter, a false identity for who I am, the more that I end up like it almost brings me down because I'm trying so hard to maintain an identity of something that doesn't really exist. So instead of impression, I focus on expression. Now realize that if you switch the flip and go from being a victim of circumstance to all of a sudden understanding that you are a part of your environment, that everything is a reflection of what you define it to be, you then automatically begin to gain your power back because instead of feeling anxiety, you can redefine that feeling of excitement. You can define it as excitement even if that negative judgment starts to come in, you can catch it. And as you begin to observe it, you begin to switch the flip, and you might find that that excitement begins to build inside your chest. That's what happened for me. Now when I go to parties, if I go out in public, if I'm talking to other people that I don't know and I need to like, you know, connect with them, what I do is I focus first on self-amusement. I focus on being in my own frame. I focus on What can I do to make myself feel better now and how can I share my energy? I see people as an extension of my environment, not as separate from me, but as an extension. When I see people, I think about them in terms of everyone is my friend. I am collaborating with my environment and because I come at it from that frame, they begin to mold to that reality, to that definition that I have, and I find that that social anxiety goes away anyways. So remember, some easy ways to get out of feeling social anxiety is to first off let go of all the definitions of what you think that feeling is. Let go of how you define yourself to be, thinking that you need to be anything different than what you feel like expressing about yourself. And you'll notice that I said expressing about yourself, not impressing yourself. Because of that, you can learn how to express yourself in powerful ways you can learn how to be the cause of your environment, not at the effect. And because of that, you will then be controlling your state of being. You will be in self-amusement and you will find that you then develop an ecology of positive emotion because your energy literally becomes contagious. You have power over one thing in your life and that is your state of being. That is your own mind. You can take control of that by taking control of how you feel. Feeling transcends intellectual ideas. Feeling transcends being in your head. If you learn how to feel, if you learn how to be, if you learn how to be light about things, to have self-amusement, to have fun, I promise you social anxiety will be a thing of your past. So that's it for today. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. Feel free to like this video if you liked it. Share it if you found it of value, and I'll see you guys on the next vid. All right, peace, much love.
