Social Anxiety Medication - Good Idea?

Should you take medication for social anxiety? It's an interesting question. I'm going to answer that in today's video. If you're benefiting from these, then click the little bell notification and the subscribe button in the other order. Subscribe, then the bell, and you'll be able to get these videos on a regular basis to help you grow in your confidence. This is a question I've gotten for a number of people, which is about medication for social anxiety or other challenges they're having with their confidence. And I want to give some thoughts on that today. So first things first. There's actually, it's not all medication is equal when it comes to this. There's many different kinds of medication. I'd say that there's three kinds of major medication that people will take, and then we can talk about other approaches. First things first, you know, people tend to think of medicine and medication as chemicals. That's kind of what the system that we've all grown up in is. You're sick, you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you a prescription, and the prescription is the answer. And always the case is people generally go to an allopathic doctor who prescribes a chemical agent to eliminate the symptom. That's what we think of. So we might want to take a step back and even just think about what is medicine, what is healing, who is a doctor, and what kind of doctor do you want to seek for, what kind of issue? That's a very important thing that I learned, having a lot of chronic health problems, especially a lot of chronic pain when I was younger, to go along with the social anxiety. So, hey, everything was not looking up during those. That decade, but two decades anyway. But here I am now, stronger and better for it, and I want to help you navigate the system maybe better than I did. So I didn't know. I just went to the doctor, and I learned over time that you want to go to certain doctors based upon the challenge that you're facing and based upon what answers they're going to provide to you. So, for example, I'm a doctor, but I'm a doctor in psychology, so I'm not prescribing any medications. And obviously, the answers that I'm going to provide are going to be more mindset, emotion, and behavior. I tend to like that stuff more because I tend to be a little more wary of some of the chemical agents that we can take. So having said that, maybe you want to start to think about, outside of just standard allopathic medicine, what Other kinds of doctors might I see to help me more holistically with social anxiety. So you can work with a doctor of psychology, you know, that's a therapist, right? You can work with a doctor of naturopathic medicine. That can help maybe with your whole system might be in some way out of balance or they're focused on promoting optimal health. You can work with a doctor of chiropractic, especially a network chiropractic doctor. They work with the whole natural guiding intelligence of your body to help your body get to a place of a lot more basically living how you're supposed to live. Right? Very different types. And they're all doctors, it's all medicine. So sometimes we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, get to the real medicine, which means the pill you take. And what I'm trying to highlight in this video is maybe that's your last resort in terms of doctors that you want to seek. Like for me, if I was going to rewind the clock and give Aziz, 14, 13 year old Aziz advice, I'd say first things first, let's get him to a network care doctor. Second thing, let's get him to a naturopath. And third thing, let's get him to a counselor. And my gosh, that would have been a different life. And I'm so grateful I didn't have that because otherwise I wouldn't be here doing what I'm doing and having this fire and this hunger to be to endlessly make a shift for people in their confidence. So I'm so glad things went the way they did. But you don't have to live those same experiences that I did. Okay, now having said all that, let's talk about the pills. Come on, man, get to the good stuff. So there are three kinds of medication that people can be prescribed for social anxiety. One is an ssri selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. There is, and I'll describe what these are in just a second and which ones might be good or bad. Another one is a beta blocker and a third one is a anxiolytic. Those get you high, but those are gonna have a much like a benzodiazepine, for example. Okay, so let's talk about those in reverse order. Your benzodiazepine or your anxiolytic is like Valium. It's going to be something that just suppresses your whole system. It kind of knocks you out, might make you a little woozy, might make you fall asleep. That kind of chemical, that kind of medication is designed to quickly tranquilize anxiety. Let me just real quick say that this is for. I am not a prescribing physician. I'm not a psychiatrist. My background is in clinical psychology. And so this is not to be taken as medical advice, where you should just base what I say and go do it. You need to do your own research and find out what the best path is for you to navigate your own health. So you are in full responsibility from your health. I am a guy on the Internet sharing my perspective. Okay, so your benzodiazepine or anxiolytic is going to quickly numb anxiety. And for the most part, people aren't prescribing that. If someone prescribes that to you, you might want to get a second opinion. It's pretty rare at this point. A lot of the research suggests that that's not a good idea because the anxiety is not resolved in any way. And now the next time you're gonna go do that activity, let's say someone has panic or something before they're gonna go somewhere or do something. They take this. They get all calm. The next time, the panic's gonna be there. So the problem hasn't been solved. It's pure symptom suppression. And the anxiety might be even worse. And then you got. Your whole system is trying to, like, you know, upregulate to manage that. And your new homeostasis might be more anxious. So that one is definitely. I would suggest avoiding that except for a last resort or something like someone who's completely unable to calm themselves. And even then, there are so many better methods to calming yourself, including mindful breathing techniques. More active breathing techniques can be much more calming. And then, as well as other forms of behavior and other things can help shift rather than such an extreme way to suppress the anxiety. Okay, Number two would be the beta blockers. So beta blockers are really interesting. They don't actually make you feel a whole lot less anxious. What they do is they suppress the physical symptoms of anxiety. So I've had some clients that will take these where, let's say they're going to give a presentation, and they want to be cool, they want to be calm, they want to be confident. They can take a beta blocker, and what that does is that suppresses the rapid heart rate and the squeezing in the throat and the sweating palms. It just knocks all that out. And I had a client that was really into that. He had this, like, monthly meeting. He had to present to this big, you know, the whole company, like 500 people. And he would get really nervous he'd take a beta blocker, and he's like, I perform great on the beta blocker, so I'm never going to stop taking it. And I was like, great. And that's how I generally feel about medication. Like, I'm not here to tell you what to do and what not to do. And I'm here to help you navigate life on your terms. And, you know, if a little beta blocker here and there helps this guy, I thought, fine. That's great. For me, personally, I've always had this sense of. But I want to be free. I want to, like, what's going on, that I'm anxious to talk to this group of 500 people. Is there a way that I can, like, unlock something where talking to that group. Because here's what I believe about anxiety. If you're scared to do it, if you can unlock it, it might be one of the greatest experiences of your life. That's what I found with public speaking. Right. Used to be utterly, utterly terrified. Now if I do it, I love it. I feel charged, I feel excited, I feel energized. I would not want to miss out on that. And, you know, if he's taking a beta blocker to get through it, it's unlikely he's gonna be like, I'm gonna seek this out and do it a ton and unlock it in my life. That's just what I want to do. You can decide what's right for you. So that could be an option if you just want to get through a little bit of public speaking here and there. You know, I don't know, but are you gonna take a beta blocker? Every time you go on a date, it starts to have diminishing returns. And after you take it, you can't exercise for a certain period of time because it's suppressing. It's doing something to your heart where it's like, suppressing your whole system. So be mindful of that one. And then the third One is the SSRIs, which in my graduate program are sort of touted as, like, SSRIs are the answer to everything. And there's a lot of research out there that's actually much more mixed about SSRIs and their effectiveness for different things. Are they effective for social anxiety? The answer is kind of like the same thing for mild to moderate depression. Eh, depends on who you talk to. Some people would hate me for saying that and say it's blasphemy. And, of course, they're the greatest things since sliced bread and if you read other people, actually, if you factor in all the research that's been done on them, not just the studies that have been submitted to the FDA by the drug companies themselves, the gains are modest at best and often no better than placebo. And a lot of tests, a lot of results. So again, people, I feel like, take that because they want, hope, they want, like something's going to help me. And usually the effect of it is the placebo, often for a lot of people, and there's a lot of side effects and people downplay the side effects. But you can have side effects of sexual libido changes. You can have more kind of more dark thoughts, you know, suicidal thoughts can emerge. You can have just simple physiological discomforts and changes and weight problems. I mean, so again, I'd be very mindful of jumping down that road. And, and often what I see happen is people get desperate, they feel hopeful that it's gonna do something, they take it for a while, there's a little boost from the placebo effect that then dissolves and then they're trying to get off it six months later. That's often what I've seen with clients. So what I generally recommend is what else can we do to help that situation? What else can you do to promote more confidence, more calmness in your nervous system, a resetting of, of your, of how you see yourself and how you see life? A much more holistic approach and a much more long term approach. And if you're going to get the belief effect, the placebo effect can also be called the belief effect. What if you get it from something else? Like this breathing technique's really going to help me out and it probably will. And then you believe it and then you start doing it more. And it actually does. I mean, the idea that we want to change our brain chemistry with a chemical agent, yes, but everything can change your brain chemistry. Breathing patterns can change your brain chemistry. Immersion in cold can change your brain chemistry. Exercise, I mean, everything does, every stimulus can do that. So the question is, what do you want to start with? What do you want to approach it with? And again, I'm not against pharmaceutical medications. I was on, I took a pharmaceutical medication for almost 20 years for chronic pain. And now I'm completely off of all that stuff because I realized that there's better ways and I was always looking for a way to get off that stuff. So that's my own personal philosophy. It's obviously biased in that way. But if any of this stuff speaks to you, I just encourage you to really open your mind and look at what's out there and see what options there are. And if you want to go further with this, then check out my podcast Shrink for the Shy Guy. I have lots of interviews with different kinds of doctors and different people talking about chronic pain and how we can shift our whole experience of physical and emotional pain without medication. And again, just enter into my world and you'll find tons of resources because that's always what I'm looking towards. Alright, well this was a long one and if you made it to the end, good for you. Well done. You get a gold star on that one. Make sure you've subscribed if you haven't already and please share in the comments below what you found most valuable from this video and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.