Social Anxiety Treatment | CONFIDENCE COACH, DR. AZIZ

Are you curious about social anxiety treatment? How do we fix this? How do we make this better? That's we're gonna find out in this video as well as very specific recommendations that you could do today to really free yourself from social anxiety and become much more comfortable in your own skin, confident, bold, and just you in the world. So first things first. What is social anxiety? So social anxiety is an experience of anxiety related to connections with others. Now who experiences social anxiety? Everybody at some time or another, right? So you're anxious, that means you're nervous or you're afraid, you feel threatened. Related to socializing, connecting, being around people. So it could show up in any situation. That's why I said everybody experiences social anxiety. Now, some people might experience more than others. You might experience it at work and someone else might not experience at work. You might experience only around certain people at work or, or maybe only in your love life or only when it comes to being with certain family members or whatever it is. So it could be everywhere or it could be in just a few places. And every single human on the planet will feel some social anxiety at some situations. Doesn't matter how confident they are. However, when it becomes more problematic is when someone is experiencing social anxiety to a higher degree in a lot of different situations where it starts to debilitate them. That means it starts to limit your capacity. You're not able to speak up, you're not able to progress in your workplace because you're limited by fears or worries about other people are going to think of you. And that is the core hallmark of social anxiety, is there's this strong fear of what are they going to think of me. And trust me, it ain't good. They're going to think poorly of me, they're going to think badly of me. And you know what? On some level, they're right. So now I have to feel bad, right? Because if you didn't agree with that and you thought, yes, so and so might not like me, but hey, I'm awesome, then all of a sudden there's no social anxiety, right? So the anxiety is a fear of what other people are going to think of you and believing it. So where that is and how strong that is is going to determine your level of social anxiety. And when people start to. Now if it's a little bit here and there, people tend to just go about their lives. When it starts to become more severe, more restricted, more limiting, then they start to look up social anxiety treatment. That's probably what brought you here. So in this case, it's limiting your life severely. It's stopping you from doing what you want to do, being who you want to be. Maybe it's causing some of the symptoms. Might be anxiety in the moment, you know, brain fogging up, not working clearly, not able to express yourself, squeezing in your chest, tight throat, tight stomach, heart pounding, sweaty palms. Could be ongoing symptoms before or after an event. And, and that event could just be a date or just asking someone out, or speaking up in a meeting or leading a presentation or anything. Just a normal day could be full of events that cause ongoing anxiety. And then you have more chronic social anxiety. So then you might have stomach issues. You might have more like lingering discomfort in your body and your emotions, more dread leading up to things, more replaying circumstances before and after and overanalyzing. These are all symptoms of social anxiety. So how do we treat this sucker? How do we get rid of this stuff? Well, some of the most common treatments you're going to hear about and sort of the standard approach in a lot of psychology, Western psychology today, is going to be medication and therapy. That's when I learned in graduate school and got my doctorate in clinical psychology, the standard approach was the combination of medical, of psychopharmaceutical intervention combined with empirically validated treatments is the best approach to disorders. I'm a little rusty on that language. I have to go bone up on my graduate school training. So the standard approach, if you see most psychologists, if you see a psychiatrist, a lot of people go see a shrink, right? They see a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, they see somebody for therapy and they say, what do I do? And they say, well, they might not recommend medications. They might just say, let's just do therapy sometimes. They might say, if it's a psychiatrist, if I'm going to say medication and therapy. And that's the typical recommendation. Now, what kind of medications? Typically what they recommend is an ssri, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. That's going to be different than an anxiolytic. An anxiolytic you take, that's like Valium. You take that, that's like having a few stiff drinks, all of a sudden the anxiety's gone. That's typically not pres social anxiety because it's problematic, as you might imagine. You haven't solved anything. You've just numbed out the symptom. So generally people will avoid that. There's some nuance there in terms of they might give you something that can help you perform but not knock away the anxiety. Just the Physical symptoms and anxiety, but we're not going to get into that. The main medication is SSRIs. And then the main approach is to combine that sometimes with nothing, which is a bad idea, to combine that with therapy. And the most common type of therapy that people recommend is cbt, Cognitive behavioral therapy. Why? Because it's one of those empirically supported treatments. It has action steps, it has clear plans. It says, change the way you think about yourself, change your behaviors, and you'll have a new experience. And there's a lot of benefit in that. The behavior side will focus on what's called exposure therapy or often called gradual exposure. That is basically, you expose yourself to the situation. That doesn't mean you flash. Now, hold on a second. You expose yourself to the stuff that makes you scared. You stop avoiding, you start confronting, and you're able to improve. Because now instead of avoiding talking to that person, avoiding the social gathering, avoiding speaking up, you start to systematically approach it again and again and again. So those are the standard treatments for social anxiety. You probably have a basic question which is, well, do they work? And which one should I do? And how do I figure this out? Okay, so let me give you now my personal opinion on this stuff. Having studied this for many years, what I just told you is sort of the standard psycho medical model approach. I found that I've drawn benefits from the therapeutic interventions that I've learned. Oftentimes, in my personal experience, they are insufficient to produce radical change. Generally, what some of those approaches can do is produce modest gains to reduce the anxiety, some to where the person gets into a level of functioning okay, so if you want to be functioning okay, then those approaches could work. That's not what I wanted. That's not the game that I'm playing. That's not why I'm here on this fucking planet. Is so we can function okay, and sort of suffer through our lives. Barf. That's not what I wanted for me when I was struggling with tons of social anxiety. That's probably not what you want for yourself. What I wanted is. I didn't have this terminology then, but now I do. I wanted radical and rapid transformation. I wanted to have a whole new experience of life. Not, I'm a person with social anxiety disorder who has now managed it and am okay. I want to feel free. I want to feel expressive. I want to be confident. I don't want to just be like, well, I'm never going to be a confident person, so let me just try to get by. I want to become a confident person. So I had to go beyond the training. In fact, a lot of my graduate training was just the beginning because I was on a personal quest to figure this shit out. And so I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do anything. And so I had a motto very early on that was, whatever it takes and whatever works. I'm going to test anything, no matter what modality, empirically supported or not, I'm going to try it out. Guess who? First on me. And then as time got on, as I started working with clients and I was testing things out with them, let's find out so I can start to see what really works. So here's the thing. The treatment side needs more, I believe, if you want a radical and rapid transformation. So what you're going to need to do is you're going to. Yes, absolutely. Exposure work is a key part of it. I teach that in my programs in Confidence University. I call it your ladder to victory. So I use some of those techniques. They're valuable. They are shown to produce a significant effect. You are going to need to address your perception of yourself. It is low, it is poor, it is negative. You perceive yourself and you have what I would call a limiting or toxic identity. You don't see yourself as capable, loving, worthwhile in some way, shape or form. There's also a component of the way you treat yourself. You have an inner critic that's probably out of control, that's criticizing you, attacking you. And you have a lot of conditioning that told you to be quiet, to be nice, to fly under the radar, and to be pleasing. And until you address those things, you will chronically experience some level of social anxiety, keep coming back. So you have to address those things. You have to rip those. They're like weeds. You got to rip them out by the root or else it's just you chop off the top of the weeds, going to grow back again and again and again and again. So what does that look like? What does that mean? It looks like anytime you need to radically upgrade anything, what do you got to do? My belief is you got to immerse yourself. You have to immerse yourself. That's how I've grown radically in my life. Now, the problem with a lot of people with therapy is it's not immersion. They go once a week or once every other week. They talk for 50 minutes, usually about, you know, what's going on. First of all, general therapy. General sort of like what's going on in your life. And let's help you understand your emotions a little bit more and talk through some stuff that's bothering you that's not gonna do shit. I'm sorry. I just gotta tell you the truth. There's so many people that I've talked to who come into my world after doing this stuff for. I did four years of therapy and five years of this. It's not gonna do anything because it's not targeted, it's not direct, it's not specific. Yes. A little bit of general emotional support. Great. Everyone could benefit from that, right? Talk through some stuff in your life, but you're not gonna radically transform your identity doing that. So what you need is maybe a more targeted protocol, a CBT protocol that's like, okay, we're going to guide you through these steps that's going to be more effective. Still not complete in my book. For radical and rapid transformation. Talking faster and faster. I'm getting all fired up. Hopefully you can feel it, how much I believe in this, how passionate I am about this. And this is one of the reasons why I'm here on this planet, is to help you and others free ourselves from this. Because the worst thing that could happen is someone goes, and finally, after years, is like, oh, I identified. I have social anxiety. Cool, okay, I'm going to look this up. Most people don't say, cool, but they say, at least, phew, I have a name for this thing now. How do I fix this? And then they go talk to their general practitioner. The general practitioner says, here, here's some meds, see you later. And there's no therapy, there's no fault, there's no guidance, there's nothing. You take the meds by themselves for social anxiety, it is going to be just consult your doctor, get their opinion. From what I've seen with a lot of clients, there's some major downsides to that approach. And if you read books like the Emperor's New Drugs and look at some of the more broad research around those things, the gains, if any, are going to be extremely modest on scales that measure anxiety or depression when it comes to these medications. So it's not like you take that and your social anxiety is gone. Maybe you have some potential capacity to manage emotion better, maybe not. There's side effect profiles to pay attention to. So you know, that's not the route that you'd want to go. Unless you really are actively radically working on this and then you want that as an adjunct. And that's a whole other conversation we can talk about at some point. But what is Actively working on it look like it looks like immersion. You got to immerse yourself. You got to be hungry for this if you want a real change in your life. So what does immersion look like? Immersion looks like you're able to be, you know, interacting. Let me just tell you about a program that I run. So I created a group program. And this isn't a sales pitch for the program, but this is just because I'm like, what's going to work the best? I started doing one on one therapy with people as a clinical psychologist and I said, okay, I can do better. Then I started doing one on one coaching with people and changed the model I was doing and making it more effective. And I was like, okay, so that could be better. And then there's a crow outside who's very actively involved. He's as fired up as I am. I don't know if you can hear him. And then I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to create something even better. And so I started systematically building the ultimate like transform social anxiety and niceness into bold authenticity, confidence and power. And I said, the secret is going to be immersion. So here's what this program looks like. Each week you are immersed with a group of people that studying, learning, practicing, doing this stuff every single week for two hours. Then on top of that, every day you're getting a text message with a video teaching you something for two or three minutes. Then on top of that there's study stuff that you can be learning from. You can be getting specific guidance on how to speak up. Then on top of that you have someone else in the program you're interacting with to make sure that you're doing the stuff that you want to do. And on top of that, you're setting quarterly targets. This is what I want to focus on for this next quarter. This is the deliverable. This is what I'm going to do by X and everybody. I'm holding myself accountable here and I'm helping you hold me accountable as well. So many therapists, the client doesn't do anything and they're like, well, I don't want to make you feel bad. I'm a super nicey nicey person myself, so I haven't done that work but so I'm not going to be able to hold you accountable to do it. So you know what, let's just talk about what's coming up. I heard this again and again from clients. They're like, it's almost like we didn't even Have a session before. There's no continuity, there's no progression. You need to be knowing what you're doing next to build on this thing. And then on top of that, as part of the program, there's longer immersions. We'll do half day workshops. I do 3 day online or live events where you're immersed in this stuff again and again. And that, that's how you change your identity. That is how you radically treat social anxiety. And I don't just mean treat it, I mean resolve it, solve it. The first book I wrote was called the Solution to Social Anxiety, not How to Manage Social Anxiety for the Rest of youf Life with Drugs and Therapy. The Solution to Social Anxiety. And anyone who tells you, hey, you know, this is something you're gonna have for the rest of your life, it's a genetic condition, you're gonna take these meds, like back away, back away. That person's deep in the system, they've been mind controlled, right? Liberation is possible. You can radically transform this. Social anxiety can be a thing of the past. And remember, I started this video with yes, everyone feels social anxiety. I still feel social anxiety sometimes in some situations. But there's huge periods, days, weeks go by where I don't feel that. And I'm actually constantly seeking it out. I'm looking for the edge. What's going to make me anxious, what's going to make me uncomfortable because I flipped the script. That's a whole other part of the treatment is you got to flip the script on anxiety and discomfort and say, I'm going to seek this out. I could go on and on. Obviously I could teach this stuff I do for a year and beyond. So what are you learning from this? Hopefully you're learning some specific key details about what approaches you want to use. And my biggest hope is that you leave this with a sense of certainty, of possibility that you can change this. And hopefully this is shaking something inside of you that sort of settled or tolerated something for too long and you're done. You're going to make a shift, you're going to make a change, you're going to improve your life now and finally make it what you want. So, and of course, if you're interested to find out about the programs that I run, those are through an application, through an invitation, I only make sure that people are really good fits for it. So not everyone can get involved. But if you are drawn to it, absolutely take the next step and see. Because if it's a good fit, I only take people in that I know we're going to produce a radical change for. So if it's a good fit for you, then you can move forward fast. You want to find out about that? Go to draziz.com, Dr. A ziz.com click down below in the description as well. And you can go to the coaching page on my website and apply for that and find out all about the details of that. And the key thing to take away here is radical and rapid change is possible for you. So share down below in the comments. What are you learning? What's standing out to you? What are you inspired about? What changes are you going to make? And let's all lift each other up together until we speak again. We have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.