Exposure Therapy for Social Anxiety: How To Do It Right

You're about to discover the most proven way to eliminate social anxiety and build social confidence. It's called gradual exposure. It's a form of behavioral therapy that was developed in clinical psychology to help people radically reduce any type of phobia. I'm going to share all the ins and outs with you in this video. All the pitfalls that you got to watch out for and how to do it properly to radically boost your social confidence and free yourself from social anxiety. I'm Dr. Aziz. I'm the founder of the center for Social Confidence and author of multiple books on confidence, including the Solution to Social Anxiety, in which I lay out a roadmap for gradual exposure. So let me share more about how it works and how you can use it to shift your life. And if you're benefiting from this video or other videos of mine, make sure you click down below to give it a thumbs up and subscribe so you can watch more of these as they come out. So gradual exposure is two things, right? Gradual and exposure. Let's talk about the exposure part first. Exposure means, you know, exposure to what, right? No, it doesn't mean like exposing yourself in a trench coat. It's exposing yourself, bringing yourself to. Showing yourself to what? The thing that scares you. Anything that scares you. This was originally developed for any sort of phobia treatment. So, like imagine a fear of spiders, right? Ultimately, for someone to be no longer free of a fear of spiders, they have to ultimately be exposed to spiders. And it's the same thing for social anxiety. Why does that work? Well, it turns out that your nervous system has a fear response to something, and it can be conditioned in. So you can get afraid of a spider even though that spider might not actually hurt you. The fear response is separated from the actual danger. And that's a very important thing we're going to come back to when it comes to social anxiety. But in your nervous system, in your mind, it's not whether it's real danger or not, it's just fear. And fear is like, get out of here. And the stronger the fear is, the more that takes over and you just gotta get outta there. It doesn't matter if rationally, intellectually, you know, the spider's not gonna hurt me, or other people's judgments aren't gonna hurt me in the case of social anxiety. So exposure, what it does is it gives your body an opportunity to be in proximity to the stimulus, the scary thing, many, many times. And then the next time you do it, your body says, I'm gonna die. And Then you don't die. And eventually, over time, your body's like, oh, oh, I guess we're not going to die. I guess spiders are fine. And then it's gone or radically diminished. And so the fear doesn't really stop you in any way. So the same thing goes for social anxiety. What is the fear when it comes to social anxiety? Well, in this case, you might say, well, the fear is social, right? Other people, actually, the fear is of the negative judgment or dislike from other people. It's unlikely if you have social anxiety that you're afraid to, like, feel. Walk down a street or go to a grocery store because there's people there. No, it's interacting with the people. Maybe someone might judge me. Especially interacting with certain people that I find attractive or intimidating or whatever. What you're afraid of is their judgment. Well, you need to expose yourself to people and do things that are interacting with people where someone might judge you. And then you realize that there's a judgment. Oh, I didn't die. Oh. Talking to people is safe. Approaching people is safe. Asking a question is safe. We'll talk at the end of the video about if you really want to turn the heat up, how to shift things in a radical way. And you can really actually expose yourself specifically to judgment. But you don't have to. For gradual exposure, you want to start with the most benign small stimulus. All right, so in the case of spiders, you don't just put a tarantula on someone's face. You show them a picture of a small spider from far away. It's mild social anxiety. You say, hey, let's walk down a street and say hi to people. That's usually a starting point. When I work with people now, that might seem like too much. If it does and you dial it back and you say, how about you call a Best Buy and say, hey, what are your store hours today? Or any other store like that, Whatever it is, is. I've dialed it back as far, even further. For some people, wherever is. You start with a stimulus that is maybe a little uncomfortable, but not overwhelming. And then, guess what? Here's the biggest pitfall a lot of people make with this kind of stuff. They don't dial it back far enough. They try to go do something that's overwhelming, and they do it, like, once or twice. And none of that stuff's gonna work. Instead, you need to dial it back to where it's more comfortable. It doesn't mean it's no discomfort, but it's just some discomfort. On a scale of 1 to 10, try to do stuff in like the 3 to 4 range. And then you do it again and again and again. Think of it like a form of fitness. So you do it like times in a week and then the next week you do it three times again. My sound is going to take forever. Well, what else are you doing avoiding it for your whole life? I mean, you got time, it's only a couple of weeks we're talking about. And then you can build to the next thing. And is amazing how much the things that seem absolutely terrifying when you stay in this process over time become more and more accessible. So once you've done something like saying hi to people, it's called friendly greetings, then maybe you move up to another level where you say something like a friendly compliment to someone. It's a little bit more vulnerable, a little more connecting. I call this the drive by compliment. So some of you walk by someone say, hey, nice shoe shoes. And you keep going, right? It's a little bit more exposure. You keep working your way up until you're approaching somebody to start a conversation. And you keep working your way from there to where you're able to do anything ultimately in your life. And I've used this to go from being afraid to talk to people I didn't know or start conversations or speak to groups, to being able to speak to large audiences live or virtual, to leading my own events, to approaching people, approaching groups of people, approaching groups of women that I found attractive, to getting dates, getting phone numbers, to ultimately being with my wife that I'm with. So you can use this all the way up the spectrum in any area of life. It's amazing how universal it applies. And if you want a guided, structured approach on how to do gradual exposure, you're going to want to check out my program, Confidence University, which you can find down in the description. Below is a link and it's a series of four courses that guide you to create your own map in gradual exposure. I call it your ladder to victory because you climb it to victory and you got one for social mastery, your social life, dating mastery, career and general core confidence. And you can use those structured approaches to take out the guesswork. It's done for you. You just follow along step by step and you'll have a massive pathway to power to build your confidence. So click down below if you want to do that. I did say I was going to end this video with if you really want to turn the heat up. Because remember I said with social anxiety, the fear is not just a fear of people. It's a fear of being judged. So the fastest way to expose yourself to eliminate the fear is going to go be judged on purpose. So how do you do this? Well, it's called embarrassment inoculation. And embarrassment inoculation is you go to a public place and you intentionally do something embarrassing. Now, I don't mean socially aggressive or you're hur people or whatever, but I mean, you do something silly. You dance on the street corner with no music, you sing a song, you do push ups in a busy area and maybe make some grunting noises, right? It's silly stuff. People will look at you and you realize that you don't die. If you're ready to try that one, I highly recommend it. Also not at all necessary. You can start right down where it's most manageable and work your way up either. Works fantastically so Share down below in the comments. Have you tried gradual exposure? What other questions do you have for about this so I can for future videos make sure I address those and I hope this serves you until we speak again. May have the courage to who you are and to know on a deep level at your awesome.