Social Anxiety 101

Welcome to Shrink for the shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show and welcome to 2022. Oh, yes, here you are. You made it. Well done. And now, now is an opportunity. Beginning of a year, I think, is a phenomenal reset for you to decide how do I want this year to go? And if you haven't listened to the previous episode, which is all about making 2022 awesome, then be sure to do that. And what I want to start with beginning of this year is to give you what you need to free yourself from social anxiety and step into your life with more confidence than ever before. That's something that you've been learning about and practicing for a while with this show, but I thought I would just refocus us in case you've been listening for a little while or maybe you're brand new and this is a great time to dive right in. You know, what is social anxiety and how do we overcome it? How do you free yourself? So this episode, Social Anxiety 101, is going to be covering what the basics are of social anxiety because so many people don't really know what it is, don't really even understand the term fully and kind of relate to it just by the two words, social anxiety. Like, oh, yeah, I have anxiety socially or around other people. So there you go. But actually, there's a lot more to it. You're gonna discover what it is, where it comes from, what the prognosis is, and all of that in this episode and the next few, I'm gonna share the key strategies to break free, to become a more bold, confident version version of you. If you want to accelerate your growth, you've been listening to the show for a little while or are just starting. And welcome if you are. The fastest way to do that is going to be go to my website. You can just go to draziz.com,-r-a z I z.com and on that page, you can Register for a free mini course, five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence where I guide you step by step with videos. The how to free yourself from Social Anxiety. So I'm going to cover some of it in this show. And if you want the Step by step guide, you can also get that for free from my website. Of course, if you want to take things further this year, you want to step into some coaching. I also offer that and group programs and other things virtual events. We got all kinds of amazing stuff coming up, so I can't wait to share this with you. So go to Drozeeze.com if you want to accelerate your journey Now. Now let's talk about social anxiety. So social anxiety. There's an official disorder, social anxiety disorder in the DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 iteration 5. That's kind of like the psychiatric go to book that houses the most accepted and by insurance reimbursed, often diagnoses. So that's where a lot of people go. That's the frame that a lot of people think in and, and in there. This is how social anxiety disorder is described. These are some of the symptoms according to the DSM. 5. Fear of situations in which you may be judged negatively. Worry about embarrassing or humiliating yourself. Intense fear of interacting or talking with strangers. Fear that others will notice that you look anxious. Fear of physical symptoms that may cause you embarrassment, such as blushing, sweating, trembling or having a shaky voice. Avoidance of doing things or speaking to people out of fear of embarrassment. Avoidance of situations where you might be the center of attention. Anxiety and anticipation of a feared activity or event. Intense fear or anxiety during social situations. Analysis of your performance and identification of flaws in your interactions after social situations and the expectation of the worst possible consequences from a negative experience during a social situation. That one's a doozy. I'm sure you relate to at least some of those. So here's the thing. The first thing you gotta learn about social anxiety is, you know, sometimes people read that and they're like, oh my God, I do those things. Ah, social anxiety disorder. I'm so messed up, right? Here's the thing. Here's the good news. Social anxiety is a human experience. Everyone experiences social anxiety. Every human that you've ever met has experienced social anxiety. Every. No matter how suave they look or, you know, that that successful person or that beautiful person or whoever you really look up to right now, that actor, that movie star, that whatever. Yep, even them experience social anxiety. Now it might be in certain situations, right? It might be situation specific. So you see that person running around on the stage playing the guitar, and you're like, oh, my God, they're so confident. And then you watch them in an interaction where they're not, you know, behind their instrument, and they're, like, having a hard time looking at the person, and they seem shaky and uncomfortable and want to get out of the situation. So everyone experiences social anxiety at some time, and in some situations with certain people, that's a human thing. Now, it becomes problematic when it starts to become in more places or more consistent or more limiting in your life. And what makes it a disorder versus just the pattern of social anxiety? Well, it's really just a matter of degree. So they come up with, I don't know, I could look at something like six of these. I could find the exact number. But usually the DSM will specify, you know, if they experience six or more of these symptoms, then they qualify. It's kind of an arbitrary distinction. And that's usually about diagnosis and potentially, you know, covering treatment with insurance. So it gets a little bit beyond what is useful for you to free yourself and becomes more about getting in the machinery of the medical system. But, you know, if you experience some of those, then you're experiencing some social anxiety. And my question for you is, where do you experience that? For you, it might be everywhere. It might be specifically in work. It might be in dating and relationships. It might be socially. It might be with friends. It might be out meeting new people. So where do you tend to experience some of these? And to kind of sum these up, if I were to give a. That's kind of like the official list, but if I were to give the, you know, the Cliff Notes version, it's. You are afraid of other people, specifically their judgment. Right. That's what social anxiety is. It's a fear of others. I'm afraid of other people's judgment. And so if you're afraid of other people's judgment and perception of you, which you imagine it's going to be negative, and then all those other symptoms that are listed there just makes sense. It's like a rational pattern that unfolds from an irrational fear. That's a very important thing for you to get. So once you have that fear, once you have that perception, I should say that people's judgments are threatening to me so that I'm scared of them, then everything else makes sense. Of course, you want to avoid situations where you're the center of attention because that means more people could judge you. Of course, you don't want to talk to strangers because those people could judge you. And that's dangerous. Of course you want to avoid speaking up and approaching people because you can get judged and then you feel embarrassed. Of course your voice is shaky and you don't want other people to see that because they're going to judge you even more harshly. Because people's judgments are dangerous. It all comes from this perception that other people are judgmental and that their judgments are dangerous. So where does this come from and what can you do about it? Those are two very important questions. Because what often happens is if you experience this commonly enough, most people experience this starting 10, 11, could be plus or minus a couple years. And how old are you now? 20? 30? 40? 50? 60? 100? Right. And so it's been around for quite a while. And as a result, because it's been around for quite a while and because it's not like if you chopped off your finger or broke your arm or had super intense seizures where you're falling on the ground, it's like completely disrupting your existence, what do you do? You go check it out right away, like, oh my God, I can't drive because I'm having these seizures or my arm is broken, I need to go fix it. I had some little conversation recently with my son where it was a holiday and so all the doctor's offices and everything was closed. And somehow we got on the subject of like, well, what would you do if you broke your arm? And oh, this is what it was. We were talking about the er. I was asking me what the ER was, and so I was explaining it was a place you go for emergencies. And I said something. So I was giving him different scenarios, like, would you go to the er? Would you go to the regular doctor for this one? And I said, what if you broke your arm? And he's like, well, I guess you could just go to the regular doctor for that one. I was like, what if the regular doctor was closed? Would you wait three days with a floppy broken arm? And he laughed. No, you wouldn't. Right? You get it fixed right away. So here's the thing about social anxiety though, is it starts young often, and it's tolerable, it's manageable, it's not completely disrupting and destroying your entire life in this dramatic way where all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, you broke your arm. Let's get you to the doctor, let's do something real quick. So it's kind of under the radar. Maybe the parents notice it and like, oh, you don't have that many friends, or why don't you ask people out on a date? Or, you know, they maybe try to help the kid, but then the kid's like already uncomfortable and embarrassed and feels shame about it and they don't want to talk with anyone about it. And so it just kind of, oh, they're more shy and it's okay and they'll outgrow it. And. And people are often unaware of the hardening of the identity that can occur. Right, because your identity is very malleable when you're young. Who am I? What should I be like? You know how little kids can like change? They can change their clothes or they could change what they like, or they can move to a new city and meet new kids and kind of, they're very flexible in a lot of ways. But then as you get older, as you can see your teenage years, you start to do this, like more solidly identifying with how you see yourself. You discover who you are during those teenage years and by the time you reach your early twenties, it's pretty set. This is who I am. I'm unattractive or I'm attractive, I'm funny or I'm boring, I'm cool or I'm not. I'm an athletic person or I'm not, I'm smart or I'm dumb, I'm good at math or I'm bad at math or whatever your identity is. And so it gets set during these teenage years when social anxiety is the strongest. And not to mention, I mean, you know, the ages of 11 through whatever, 16, 17 are pretty. There's a lot of insecurity during that time period anyway. And depending on how much guidance or lack thereof there is from the parents and the family, and you're just kind of being led by peers and pop culture and social media and other things. It's kind of like the blind leading the blind. And it's pretty intense. And so you're very vulnerable. To have this period of natural questioning and discovering your identity is kind of intensified or even preyed upon by advertising and other things that start to plant the seeds of insecurity. Because then they have a consumer for life who's going to buy their face creams and their liposuction procedures and everything else that, that the world can offer you to become better looking and a more desirable, attractive person. You gotta have those right socks and the right shoes and the right face and the right pants and the right shirt. So you got this period of time that is already vulnerable and you come into it and then you start to develop your identity of, I'm not attractive, people don't like me. And those judgments become really scary. This is the origin of social anxiety, by the way, becomes very scary. Usually, people that have social anxiety tend to already be more sensitive or sensitized, more empathic. And this can be both your temperament from birth, but also early experiences in life. You have a parent that's volatile or a parent that is narcissistic or controlling or something you start to pick up. You start to enhance your ability to be empathic, to know what mood they're in, to know how to read them so you know how to adapt, to feel safe in your environment. So all this comes together to where you conclude, usually unconsciously, but sometime during your teenage years. And I'm using that as a general. It might have happened earlier or later for you, but you conclude somewhere in there I am not okay as I am, I am not lovable as I am. And other people are going to see that, and they're going to judge me and they're going to reject me, and they're not going to like me. And so my love is not desirable, my friendship is not desirable, my interests are not worthwhile to other people, and I got to protect myself from their judgments. And then the simplest way to protect yourself from danger. For any animal, what's the simplest way for any organism, whether it's an amoeba or a cat or a kangaroo or a human, what's the simplest and most natural way an animal tries to protect itself? Well, there's three, right? It's fight, flight, or freeze. The most common is flight. In many ways, flight is the least risky. Now, freezing might be the least risky, but there's a high risk with that one, right? Because if you freeze and then the other animal decides to attack, you're very exposed. You're just right there. But if you flee, you can get. You have the highest chance of getting away, and you don't run the risk. If you fight, there's a risk of. This is kind of evolutionary psychology, by the way. These are decisions that your lower brain, your mammalian brain and reptile brain are making for you. But if you fight as an animal, you might win, but there's a high risk that you might lose or you might get damaged in the fight. So the simplest way, the fear system is designed to flee. Now, humans are not necessarily going to, like, someone calls on you in class or someone asks you a question, you're not going to, like, run out of the Room screaming because that can evoke more judgment. So how do you flee as a human? Avoidance. That's how you flee. You literally don't show up to the class or the meeting or the gathering of the thing. You just are completely absent from it. If you're forced to go to it, you will recede, you'll try to avoid, you'll try to hide in plain sight. So I'm not going to speak up, I'm not going to make eye contact, I'm not going to draw attention to myself. I'm just going to fly under the radar. This is the most common form of avoidance. So you have not being there or like literally getting out of the space in a calm, not attention gathering way. I'm sure you've done that one. I'm just gonna go to the bathroom. Yes. Excuse me for a moment. Flee or hide in plain sight. That's like kind of the wallflower, please don't look at me vibe that you put out. And it's a very effective vibe. It's like human camouflage, which you emotionally, physiologically, with your body posture, no eye contact, head down, kind of curled up, smaller body posture. And then emotionally and energetically you're emitting a signal that's like, don't come talk to me. And people don't. It's amazing. You can be extremely in plain sight and just overlooked. And that creates a mixed experience in the person with social anxiety. Right? Because you're like, oh man, no one likes me. I wish people came and talked to me like they came and talked to my friend. But at the same time, you're sending a message out that says, don't go talk to me. Which gets into the sort of the torment of social anxiety, which is like, part of you doesn't want to be in this cage. Part of you wants to be free, part of you wants to connect, part of you wants to be alive. But then you have this other part that's really driving the bus and you unfortunately are a passenger. Up until this point, if social anxiety has been running your life. Not anymore, though. I'm glad you're here, glad you're listening to this show because you can become the captain of your ship and you can change all of this, which is prognosis, which we'll be talking about in just a few minutes here. Okay, so you're hiding in plain sight. There is a third strategy for avoidance that's slightly more sophisticated than leaving the room or being just silent and shut down. And this is the please response. So for humans, it's fight, flight, freeze or please. There's a fourth one. This is kind of a sophisticated thing and I suppose other animals can do this as well. If you think about dominance hierarchies and pack animals and other things. But for humans, what you do is you do engage. You might still be passive in your engagement. You can go a couple different directions. You could be like kind of the wallflower, not very open, but if someone does come talk to you, you're very pleasing and nice. Or you can even take it one step further and be kind of outgoingly pleasing and nice. It's kind of like an offensive strategy, but you're still being very defended and avoidant in your interaction. How are you doing that? What are you defending yourself from and what are you avoiding? You're defending yourself from real connection with others, real authenticity, real expressiveness, really being you. And you're being avoidant of conflict, confrontation, saying anything that might upset the other person, sharing your interests, perhaps even sharing anything about you that's not totally safe and like, you know, generic and vanilla and bland. Maybe you're not sharing about your passions or you're not sharing about your controversial ideas, or you're not even sharing about your life very much. You're just keeping the conversation focused on them, like, oh, tell me more. Oh, that's so interesting. And you're pretending to be, maybe you really are, but you're really playing it up, interested in the other person and the intention is for them to be pleased by you and say, wow, what a nice guy, what a nice girl. That person was so nice. They were so focused on me, they were so attentive to me. I really appreciate them. And that's why I say this strategy is more sophisticated because it does take a level of social and emotional intelligence to pull this off. Because people do like when you focus on them, people do like your interest and your attention. So it's not a terrible approach. It's just, it's not going to create real connection. You're still anxious underneath and it's not really serving you and being, you know, confident, free and authentically you. And ultimately it doesn't lead to. It might work in like a short term social interaction or the first couple conversations, but it doesn't lead to thriving relationships because you can't build a relationship on that foundation because it's false. You are still avoiding, you're still hiding, you're still armored, you're still guarded. You just look more open and look more ready for connection. But you're not if you're running that nice person pattern. So how many people have this, by the way, if you're wondering, and then what's the prognosis? So this one's a little hard to really get accurate numbers on because there's information about social anxiety disorder. Well, first of all, how do they even know what the populations the numbers are for any issue? Right? Well, they don't. They estimate. Right. Just. It's kind of like polls for politics. Like, how do you know how many? Are you talking to every human in the country? No, you're getting a sample, and you're running some extrapolation based upon that to estimate for the population. And the estimates vary, kind of give you a ballpark, but it's in the 7 to 10% range, which, if you think about it, is a lot. That's a lot of humans. This, by the way, is according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And we got. I'm just looking at the numbers right now in the age range of 18 to 29 within the last year. This is from early 2000s. So this is older. I bet it's higher now. In fact, I have another study I'm in reference that indicates that it might be quite a bit higher. 9.1% of people basically in their late teens, early 20s, or all throughout their 20s would qualify for social anxiety disorder. Just under 9% for people in their 30s to mid-40s and people in their 50s, it's about 7%. So a little bit lower in the 50s. So that's like. Would qualify for full criteria of social anxiety disorder. Right. So how many other people maybe don't have all six enough for those symptoms that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, but still have a fair amount of social anxiety at work, but it doesn't qualify as, like, intense anxiety everywhere. So they don't have technically social anxiety disorder, but they do experience social anxiety. Now, what percentage of the population are you getting into? Here's the thing. It gets crazier. So there was a research study that was done. I'm gonna pull it up right now in 2020. Now, 2020 is an interesting year, isn't it? Do you think with everything that was going on, including the social distancing and the lockdowns and everything, which, depending upon where you are in the world, are still happening, do you think social anxiety went down? People got more kumbaya and happy and confident, or did everything hit the fan? Well, we know that divorce rates increased. We know alcoholism and other addictions spiked. No different in social anxiety. So this was A study published in PLOS One, which is an online journal in 2020. And in this study, they surveyed 6,825. Remember, I said that that's how they do these studies. They survey a certain percentage of people. Kind of a random sampling, and then extrapolate. But out of these 6,800 people age 16 to 29. So again, this is a younger demographic, half men and half women, from seven different countries, including the United States, Thailand, Russia, Indonesia, China, and Brazil. Over. In this study, over one third of the people, a full 36%, met full criteria for social anxiety disorder. Interestingly, though, about 18% of the people, when they asked them, do you have social anxiety? They said no. But then when you looked at their assessment, a lot of them did. This is exactly what I'm talking about. People don't know. People don't know the criteria. They might have an idea that this is. No, I'm just, like, messed up and people don't like me. Right? So, okay, I know this is a long episode, but we're gonna get into the prognosis, and then I'm excited to tell you about some upcoming episodes where you're gonna learn how to break free from all this. But I hope this is useful for you. I hope this one helps you see, like, wow, you're not alone. I mean, this is not a you problem. This is a we problem. This is a human problem. And it's only increasing as people have less contact with other people, more opportunity. It is so easy to avoid now, isn't it? You don't have to leave your house. You can get groceries delivered to you. You can do all your meetings online with your camera off. You know, maybe you do go into a workpl, and then you're still experiencing that. But, man, social stuff, you can do more things online. You can get more and more and more opportunities to naturally avoid, because that's the direction that society is going. For better or worse. That's just the way it is. You may like it, you may not like it. I have mixed feelings about the expansion of humans into the digital age and the exponential age and the metaverse and all that stuff. But that's how it is. And so it's easier and easier to avoid. And social anxiety is the highest it's ever been in terms of however long humans have been recording it. So you're not alone. And here's the best part. This is my favorite part of the episode. You're not doomed, because here's why. What's the prognosis for Social anxiety disorder. Here's the thing. Social anxiety disorder is not ingrained in your genesis. It is not part of your DNA. It is not biological. It's not in your blood system. It's a mental emotional pattern. You could probably throw energetic in there too. And behavioral. There's behaviors you do or don't do, like avoidance, there's mental perceptions, Am I liked or good enough? All that identity stuff. There's emotions like fear that you try to avoid and get away from. And there's an energetic pattern of basically closedness, closed offness to life, to intimacy, to others. And you can change all of those. That's what I specialize in. That's what I do every day. That's what I help people in, week in, week out. My mastermind programs and my live events and everything. This isn't theoretical. This is extremely practical. I've dedicated my life to studying this and helping eradicate social anxiety. I got my work cut out for me. I'm rolling up my sleeves right now as we talk. Let's go. So what's the prognosis? Well, here's the problem. Remember I said earlier in the episode that if you broke your arm or you had seizures or something, you'd go get treatment right away. And with social anxiety, it's not that bad, or people overlook it, or their parents dismiss it, or they feel shame or whatever and gets buried and explained away and ignored. And so people don't go get treatment. Typically the average is over 10 years before people do. Here's the other problem, though. What is the treatment? Because it's not like, look, if you go, if your arm is broken and you go to the doctor, generally you're going to get a pretty good outcome from that. It might depend a little bit on how severe the break is. And if it's a shatter, it might require a lot more specialized skill sets and you could have a more variable outcome there. But standard arm break, go to a standard doctor, they can pretty much get it set, get it casted up and you're okay. You have a pretty good outcome from that, right? What about with social anxiety? Not so it is a wide range of outcomes in terms of what you experience. It depends on who do you see. Is that therapist aware of social anxiety beyond like, oh, yeah, I treat, I treat. If you look at like therapy listings, by the way, what do therapists say? They treat everything. Well, I treat depression, I treat anxiety, I treat relationship problems, I treat alcoholism, addiction, I treat, you know, bipolar and other mental health conditions. You got an eating disorder I can treat that too. Why do therapists do that? Because they are looking to have the widest net possible. It's a business model. No offense. I'm not saying that they can't help people with things. Some therapists are extraordinary, others are not. And that's nothing against therapists. That's true for your mechanic and your hairstylist and your washing machine repair man, too. Or woman. No, don't need to be sexist there. I'm sure there's lots of washing machine repair women listening who are like, how dare you? How dare you, sir? Right? So every profession has a bell curve. Imagine a bell, right? It kind of curves up, peaks in the middle and goes back down. Like, imagine like a wave, right? Goes up and down. That is a statistical phenomenon that in any population, if you measure any metric, there's going to be this. Generally following a bell curve shape, human height, the most, the highest number of people are whatever, five, eight, five, nine, six. I don't know what is the average? It depends on the country, right? But something like that, maybe it's shorter than that. I don't know. And then you have, you know, if you go one standard deviation or want to amount out to like 6 foot 1 or 5 foot 5 or 5 foot 6 or whatever, there's a lot fewer of those people. And you go another one out. This is, let's say for men, right? And you go further out to 5, 1 and 6, 4. And I understand if you're like in Europe, you're like, what numbers is he saying? 43 meters per hectare. I don't know, man. But, you know, the shorter people, there's fewer really short people and fewer really tall people. You have less and less. This is true also for the skill set of a surgeon or the skill set of a therapist. The capacity to produce change in their clients for a therapist. And a lot of them are gonna be average, A lot of them are gonna be slightly below average, and a lot of them are gonna be slightly above average. And they're like a generalist. I help everyone with everything. Like, would you, if you wanted to get a surgery, like a specific. A heart surgery, and you go to someone and like, what do you do? Like, well, what kind of surgery do you need? That sounds like Dr. Nick from the Simpsons, if you remember that guy. I haven't seen the Simpsons in a couple years. I understand it's still running, though. That's amazing. Show goes on forever. But I loved that show when I was a kid, in my teen, teen years, I'd say 11 to 18, something like that. I watched it non stop. That's where my incredible sense of humor comes from. First Calvin and Hobbes and then the Simpsons and then Futurama. That's the mwah, the trifecta. But Anyway, so that's Dr. Nick, right? If not familiar with the character in the show, he's like this kind of. There's the Dr. Hibbert, I think his name is, is like the town doctor. He's kind of like in the hospital and just sort of the legitimate doctor. And Dr. Nick's the illegitimate doctor who does all kind of shady stuff and his qualifications are suspect. Anyway, Dr. Nick is like, I'll do whatever surgery you want, right? And it's like, imagine that. You're like, I need a heart surgery. The guy's like, what do you need? I can do foot surgery, I can do back surgery, I can do heart surgery, I can do brain surgery. What do you want? You'll be like, I don't know about that. Maybe I'd go with the guy or the gal who just does heart surgeries, right? Because they have specialized in that. And I personally would want to get help from someone who has mastered the area that I want to get help from. That's by the way, how I interface with everything. Whether it's any some sort of facet of medicine or coaching or business development or repairing something in my house or whatever. It's like I want to go to people who specialize in that same thing. We have a Subaru for one of our cars. And so I take that to a place that specializes in dealing with Subarus. Why? Because they know their shit. Because that's what I want to have them focus on. Right? Okay. So when someone goes in for treatment, they can get a wide range of skill and specialty and knowledge. And look, someone that doesn't have specialized knowledge, it's not like they can't help you at all with social anxiety. It's just not going to be that transformational. They can help you, give you some emotional support. You know, if they're CBT oriented, which stands for cognitive behavioral therapy, might say you need to challenge your negative thinking. And that can be very useful. You know, they might say you need to do some exposure. Also very useful. It can be helpful. My background, my training was in cognitive behavioral therapy. Acceptance and commitment therapy. These are very action solution focused therapy. I was really drawn to the action oriented, solution oriented approaches. But you could find someone who is like, we need to do super amount of depth work and talk about Your childhood endlessly. And there's a place for that in certain kinds of therapeutic approaches. But it's not going to be the solution to solving social anxiety. Having more understanding of the past and explaining things about your parents and stuff is not going to change that. You're not going to all of a sudden not feel anxious around your boss or at work, or speak up more, ask out someone for a date like, it just doesn't happen. And here's the other minefield. How does this person perceive diagnoses? Because someone goes in to try to get help, and the person's like, ah, you have social anxiety disorder. And they tend to perceive people as fixed. This is one of the most sad things, unfortunately, out there. And this is where this is true in a lot of medicine. There's a dark side to medicine, which is what are called iatrogenic effects. That's where you go in for healing. And you actually get worse by going in. If you go in, you get labeled with diagnosis that they on some level believe is kind of fixed. And then you believe that it's fixed now. You're actually worse off because now you have a name for it. But it's also, what something's wrong with you, and you kind of believe this is the way that you are, or that you're always gonna have to deal with this. You always have to overcome this, and now you have a story to explain why you're so messed up. And this does not just happen in social anxiety. This can happen with chronic pain conditions and all kinds of things as well. So that is unfortunately why a lot of people don't get treatment. If they do, they don't necessarily get the results that they want. And I can't. Pretty much everyone that I work with has tried therapy in some way, shape or form. Not every single person, but I'd say a good 90%, sometimes years of therapy, and they've made some progress or they have some insight or more emotional awareness or something, but they're not free. And that's the game that I was playing. That's the game that I am playing. And the reason I play that game is because I myself know social anxiety inside and out, because I lived it for so many years. And I wasn't like, wow, I sure hope I can manage my social anxiety disorder for the rest of my life. It was like, how do I get rid of this shit? I gotta be more free. I want to be more expressive, I want to be more alive. I want to date, I want to put myself out there. I Want to grow, I want to live. I want to live. And so as I pursued that, and here is my secret sauce, willingness to do whatever it takes, whatever works, and whatever it takes is my motto. And so I was open and have been open for since the very beginning to anything and everything that could help. So some people kind of came into the therapy world like, okay, teach us what's out there. And in our training it was very like, we're going to be empirically focused and here's the four treatments that you should use. Nothing else, everything else is bad and people bought it. And me, I was like, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's not throw anything out here, guys. Like, could it help me with my social anxiety? Because I'll do it. What do you want me, you want me to eat gravel? Is that going to work? I was just really open minded. I did some stuff that was unhelpful or not the most useful. But man, I've done a lot of things that were radically transformative. So I'd be willing to do any sort of behavioral intervention. I did embarrassment, inoculation. I put myself in situations that made me feel very uncomfortable. I would try all kinds of mental techniques, emotional techniques, breathing techniques, all disciplines from yoga to meditation to psychedelics to whatever, whatever it takes, whatever works. And as a result, I've been able to find that there is a pathway to liberation, to feel more free, more you, more relaxed, more comfortable. To heal that core wound of I'm not enough and I can't share who I am. To really transform into being an alive, free, open version of you. And look, that's not an end state. That's a constantly evolving state. There's always another level of openness and expressiveness and expansion and confidence, of course, but you can reach like a terminal velocity where you can break free of that gravity of that old pattern where you just don't see yourself as having social anxiety disorder anymore. And it's just like, oh, yeah, sometimes I feel social anxiety, but most of the time, dominant state is relaxed, confident. I know that I'm awesome. I like who I am, and I'm just focused on my life. I'm focused on doing what I enjoy and doing work that's meaningful and being around people that I love and achieving and reaching for, stretching myself to see what I can do in the world and really thriving in my life. That's the prognosis, if you're willing to do whatever it takes. And the next upcoming episodes, I'm going to be sharing some of the strategies of what to do and what it takes, including facing your fear, which is a big one. And I can't wait to share that with you. So thanks for being with me on this extended episode. We got one more thing to do before we complete though, right, which is your action step. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step for this episode is going to be reflective. I want you to look at your own history and your own life. When to social anxiety? Where did it begin for you? When did it start? When did you first start to notice it? And then what conclusions did you make about yourself, about the permanence of it? Or do you have something wrong with you? Or do you have this for life? What are your perceptions after you've heard all this stuff in this episode? What is your own specific story with it? Where did it start? What do you perceive as the prognosis for you? And look, if there's any place that perceives it as permanent or I've tried things and it didn't work and it's not possible for me and I invite you to just observe that, maybe start to question that. Just say, is that really true? Is that really true? You don't need to force anything. You don't need to jam a new belief in there. Just become curious and question. Because as you do that, you might start to find that maybe something else is possible. Something better than you could even imagine. Beautiful. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you are awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeem. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.

Sam.