The Origins of Your Social Anxiety

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 gonna 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. It is good to be with you. Today we're gonna be talking about the origins of your social anxiety, which I am sure sounds very exciting, but actually it's quite interesting and important. And maybe there's going to be some questions answered in this show that you've been wondering about for quite some time. I'm also going to share some of the biggest insights from the past, as well as some of the biggest pitfalls people have when they're looking back at the origins of social anxiety, some of the unconscious perceptions that you might have that are limiting you, as well as how to see the whole thing so that you are best set to be free, ultimately. And speaking of being free, I wanted to invite you to something that is. That is free, that will also help free you, liberate you. And it is a masterclass that I'm doing in about a week. Ish. That's called the three Golden Keys to Solve Social Anxiety. So, obviously, if you're listening to this show, that's gonna be something that's probably up your alley, and I'd highly recommend you check it out. It's gonna be really in depth. Plus, what's cool about the masterclasses is, I mean, it's focused on me. I'm teaching, but there's a bunch of people in the chat. We do it in zoom. You don't have to be on camera or anything, but you can just. There's a lot of energy and input from the chat and other places, and it just feels, well, very healing to see that you're not alone in this. Intellectually, you might know that, but then to be at something live like that is really powerful. So I would love to invite you to come to that. The easiest way is if you're on my email list, you can sign up for it. I'll be sending emails out about it. So if you're not on my Email list, just go to draziz.coM-R-A z I z.com and you can just sign up directly. If you get the masterclass right there on the homepage, you'll be on my email list and you'll see the invites about the masterclass coming up. So definitely check that out. I think you're gonna get a lot out of that. It's gonna give you some key momentum to really make a shift. And I know we're a little ways away from the end of the year, but not too far. And I really am gonna start inviting you to think about 2025 being radically different than any other year of your life. And that's absolutely possible when you start to break free from this stuff. And what today's episode is about is about the origins of this stuff. Like, what does that have to do with breaking free? Well, a lot of people that I talk with are curious about, maybe even stuck on why do I have this? Where does it come from? I was actually just speaking with a young woman, a girl, she was probably 12 years old, and she was asking me about social anxiety. And I was telling her about it, and. And then she asked me at one point, she's like, why are some people, like, why am I like this? Why are some people just anxious? You know, what's wrong with me, basically? And I said, well, you know, that's a big question. I'm sure there's all kinds of nature and nurture ways to look at it. And I would just say, and I'm one of those people, one of those anxious people. She's like, really? I'm like, yeah, you don't seem anxious. I was like, I know. And my nervous system, my default is towards anxiety, worry. I have a very strong startle response. So if I'm, you know, walking down a street and then a dog barks through a fence or something, I jump out of my skin, you know? So I always joke with Candace like, I'm a nervous creature, right? So I feel like that's kind of part of some of my built in makeup. However, I don't live in social fear anymore. I'm able to do all kinds of things. And I think that's a key thing to take away here. About the origins is they don't define you permanently, and there is value in looking at them. So let's go way back on a journey to the beginning of time when you started to develop social anxiety. You might say, well, why did I develop it? Well, let's just slow down a Minute. Do you remember when you first started to feel or experience social anxiety? Nervousness around people, fear of being judged, holding back, hesitating. Maybe being self critical or ruminating about things is the right way to do it. How should I hold my hands? Should I have said that or not? Maybe obsessing about things. Oh, is this okay? That look okay? Is this okay? Is that look okay? Kind of repetitive thoughts, isolating yourself, right? You might not even feel anxiety directly, but you just choose to stay inside, play a lot of video games, not interact with people. Maybe strong feelings of inferiority, oh, I'm not as good as my sister or my brother. Oh, those, those kids are better than me. And notice how I'm saying kids and I'm referencing stuff when you were young because that's generally where it starts for most people. Most people I talk to starts in the middle school to high school range. Now, depending on what country you're in, you may not have the exact same schooling system as United States, but let's just say the age of like 10 or 11 to 15, 16, somewhere in there is where it begins for people. And there's a variety of factors for that. One is that that's an age that a lot of systems are coming online developmentally in terms of your sense of self and identity. You know, am I likable, do I fit in? Those things start to matter a lot more. And little kids want to fit into grade school kids. And it becomes extremely important as you get into that preteen and teenage years. And there's also a lot of identity forming of how am I in the group, Am I attractive? Am I desirable or not? Am I popular or not? Am I worthy or not? Am I an interesting person or a boring person? Am I an athletic person? We look into all kinds of things to glom our identity onto. That's why I don't know if you are a parent, you have teenagers or you remember back to your teenage years or you've been around teenagers or something. There is so much identity hunting. What am I going to put my identity on? And you might say, well, adults do that too, and we certainly do, but it's just very noticeable. Adults might be a little more subtle about it. They're like, hey, look at my art in my house. And they don't tell you about it. It's just, you go in their house and you see it on the walls and it's a lot of, you know, pictures of bands and album art or whatever. And they're, you know, they're basically Saying like, hey, I'm identified with whatever band, right? Or types of music. And that's. They're getting some sense of identity from that. Now a teenager will be like, I love this band. I have their shirt. I. If someone else says they suck, I now hate that person. I'll get into a fight about it. Like, this band is the best. I'll kill you, right? There's such a strong need because it's like, I am that band. On some level where we're grasping for something to hold on to, we're trying to formulate that identity. So identity formation is extremely strong during this age. And there's nothing wrong with that. We don't need to stop that. But the problem is when the identity that's formed is partly around or a lot around your social self and social anxiety and your social worthiness, and it's perceived as low or negative or undesirable or unattractive, that's when it gets really problematic. So who has that and why does that happen? Well, what I've seen is a trend of people that generally tend to develop social anxiety might start with some level of just natural within the realm of normal shyness. In clinical psychology, they might call it behavioral inhibition. You're just a little bit more hesitant to jump out and be like, everyone, look at me. Yeah, right. Which is totally within the spectrum of normal. Not everyone is like that, right? Some people are more like that. Some people are less like that. Another factor tends to be a higher level of sensitivity. And that could be both emotional sensitivity or sensory sensitivity. So emotional sensitivity means you might feel feelings more. So humans have a spectrum of how sensitive they are to things. You know, someone might be able more sensitive to light than other people. Someone might have a stronger sense of taste or smell or hearing than someone else. Right there. There's a range here. There's a spectrum, but the same thing for emotions. So some people will feel fear or love or pain or desire all those different feelings. The dial is turned up. And they also might have more sensitivity around sound, around lighting, around noise. And all that comes together to maybe combine with the behavioral inhibition, the shyness. Again, all of this doesn't equal social anxiety at all. However, you have those underpinnings, Then you put someone in an environment, and they might start to make some choices. So middle school, 10, 11, 12 kids might start to determine, what group are you a part of? And do you fit in or do you. Are you cool? It might be more ridiculing or mocking or teasing or even bullying. That's happening both physical or verbal or emotional. And so if you start to get exposed to some of that stuff, and it might be directly right, like someone's bullying you and beating you up or teasing you, that's going to obviously have a significant effect. But even indirectly, you just observe the environment and you're like, whoa, whoa, this is like an ocean full of sharks. I better play it cool, right? And so now you start to develop a heightened. Because you're emotionally aware, you're more empathic, you're more attuned, you're more sensitive, you start to perceive the environment more. Now if you combine that with a home life where there's either, you know, more intense things going on, like drug use or alcohol or verbal abuse, or in a parent with like emotional dysregulation, that's going to turn the dial up. But even I've worked with a lot of people that, you know, they got loving homes. It's just parents that aren't that, they're not as sensitive, they're not as aware. And so they tell the kid, like, just do the thing. Why are you worrying about it so much? Come on, just do it. There's nothing to worry about. Go right. And there's nothing mean or wrong there. It's just maybe not a level of awareness or skill. And so as a result, a lot of people that I work with are kind of left to sort of fend on their own. Fend for themselves is the phrase I was looking for. And then they have to figure it out. And they might, you know, a natural progression into, especially as you get into teenage years, is to not want to tell your parents as many things, Even though it might be very helpful to talk with them. There's kind of a no, I don't want to, you know, a little bit of differentiation. They call it a little bit of separating. Like, I'm not, I'm separate from them. I'm my own person. I'm an adult. Even though you're like 14, did you think you were an adult as a teenager? I look back and it's amazing. Especially when I was like 15, I started driving at 16. In my head I'm like, I'm freaking grown up, man. And it's humorous looking back at a 16 year old and how immature and kid like I was in so many ways. But all of that leads to kind of fending for yourself. Maybe in a challenging environment, either at home or at school, all these sensitivities come together and then some process begins. And the process is you know, I don't think I'm as cool as other people. Some sort of insecurity, some sort of comparison and inferiority. And again, that might be ingrained in from bullying, but it might just be you picking it up and perceiving it. You know, for me, when I was young, I looked around and I started to see, okay, other kids are maybe starting to talk to girls. Girls seem interested in them. I don't see any of that happening for me. I guess I'm not desirable in that way, right? And so what happens is a conclusion is made and choose the unconscious. But the conclusion is, oh, I guess I'm not desirable or I'm not attractive, or I'm not fun or I'm not popular, or people don't want to be my friend, or if people are my friend, maybe they'll turn on me or maybe they'll exclude me, or whatever happens in those experiences starts to create conclusions about yourself. Now, the problem is not the experiences. The problem is the conclusions. Because the experiences, they might be painful, they might have been overwhelming at the time. I mean, some people I work with, there's pretty traumatic stuff they've gone through. And all experiences are temporary. They move through us. You can grow and heal and step fresh into this next moment. Nothing is a permanent, you know, stain on your being or something. It can all be. It's all. It's in the past. But the problem is not the experience. The problem is the conclusion about the experience, which you lock into your identity. Oh, this is how I am, I guess. And then that's just. I can. Once that's installed, that's like a fixture in your house. It could be there as long as the house is 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, I guess I'm not desirable. I guess people want to be my friend. So I'm working with people in their 40s, their 50s, and they, deep down, you know, they don't have the social connections they want. They're professional, they have a family. They have all kinds of people they talk to at work. They're sociable. You know, maybe they do some work with me. They build their social confidence. They can talk to people more. They don't have deep close friends. Why? Well, when you really get down into it and we start to explore, right, there's excuses. I'm too busy and I don't really know about those people. And it's hard to meet people. And I got. Got family and blah, blah, blah. And we start to drill further down and sure enough, there's some Hesitancy, because there's a sense of people don't want to be my friend, I'm not worthy, or they have friends, but they don't share that much with them. They're more the role of the nice person and the helper and the listener and everything. And they support everybody else because deep down they think people don't want to hear about me. It's a burden to people. Right. So these conclusions can last and impact us for our entire lives until we change them. And so the key aspect of this understanding the origin of social anxiety is there is nothing in here about some defect in your DNA that has set something in motion. And people might say, oh, but I have anxiety that runs in my family. Well, there's a lot of interesting aspects to that in that with these conditions, these experiences, they're so much more complex in some ways than purely, let's say, a genetic defect that does run in a family where, you know, every. There's some, there's some measurable thing and some chromosome. And so every X, there's an X percent chance with your offspring that they're, they're going to have this chromosomal defect or something like that that's much more measurable when it comes to these things. I mean, they're like psychosocial, environmental upbringing. And so things that tend to run in families are also like, well, the patterns are passed down. So you have a parent who has social anxiety, and they are directly and indirectly permeating the environment with messages about like, oh, look at those people. You observe your parents, they don't talk to people. You go over as a little kid and talk to somebody and they say, oh, come back. Don't bother those people. You're bothering those people. Right, so how much of that is from the, you know, the genes versus the environment? And, you know, we're not going to get to a huge debate about that. But just to highlight that it's not some very simple gene that we can just point to and basically genetic determinism is dead. It's not like the gene just sets everything in motion like a clockwork machine and you're doomed to live out your DNA's code. That's a very outdated idea. The whole field of epigenetics has really turned that on its head that we're. It's way more complex than that. And so that's the good news, because it's absolutely changeable. These conclusions lead to certain patterns of behavior. If I don't think I'm attractive, then I'm not going to go talk to that pretty lady. I know that one very well because that's how I carry that one out for a long time. And so how do we change this? And that's what I love about this understanding of the origins is it's absolutely changeable. So what the key thing to look at is, like, what are the conclusions? What are the stories? I have to use the term stories. What are the stories that you have about yourself that may have started when you were young? In fact, we're just gonna turn this into choose your own adventure action step right now. Time for action. Action, action. I have a couple options for your action step for today's episode. The first one is just for you to reflect a little bit on what. What were the origins for me? When did I start to feel that? And what were some of the conclusions I was making about the world? And look, you don't have to nail it. You might not be like, I don't. Was it, what, this or that? I don't know if it's this or that. Just what might it be? Maybe I concluded I'm not attractive. For me, I concluded I was ugly. And I don't know if I ever used that term, but that's kind of how I saw myself. A lot of these conclusions are not. You never verbalize them to anyone. You might have, but a lot of them I never said to anybody. You know, another conclusion that I came to is if you dance or do anything like that, people will ridicule you and make fun of you. So never do it. Right? So there's certain behaviors you learn not to do, or maybe you tried to play a certain sport and you weren't great at it, and people made fun of you or an instrument or singing, and you're like, whoop, never do that again. Right? So what are some of the conclusions that you came to? And take a moment. Take a trip down memory lane into your middle school days. 10, 11, 12. Your high school days, 13, 14, 15, 16. And I know it might be uncomfortable. There was a chunk of my life where I never really wanted to think about those periods because they were very painful when I thought about them. But this isn't about wallowing in the past. This is about you being really curious, like a detective. When I work with clients, I call it a targeted strike. You know, when I work with people, we don't spend five years turning over every stone of your childhood from neonatal to age three. You know, you got to go to a Freudian analyst for that. But I Am saying, hey, these things do the past did set the stage for a lot of things. So we can go back there and look at it. But specifically what. What are the conclusions that I came to? And if you feel painful emotions as you do it, that's okay. Just let yourself feel it. Know that this might be part of healing it as opposed to suppressing everything. The other option for your action step, or the part two, if you want to see it that way, would be these conclusions that you came to ask yourself, who? How did I learn that? Who taught me that? Did I just come up with that conclusion? Or did so and so say that to me? You'd be amazed how many people I work with who someone said something to them, maybe in even an offhand way or a teasing way or a ridiculing way. Maybe they weren't even teasing them. Maybe they were trying to be kind or who knows what. Maybe someone said something and you interpreted it in a certain way, whatever. But maybe, you know, for me, one of the things I learned is I have these ugly dark circles under my eyes. That was part of what made me ugly, right in my mind when I was young. Where did I learn that? Who specifically told me that? And what I think about it, I think of. I can think of three incidences, three that combined to teach me that that's it. And that was locked in place for the entirety of my social anxiety. Most intense social anxiety pace for at least so about a decade crazy. And then maybe a little time after that to more thoroughly unwind it. Even though I really started to overcome my social anxiety, where I basically realized, like, okay, these circles around my eyes aren't, like, limiting my social options. I can still have friends and date. That's cool. But I still felt some sense of like, oh, but they're ugly, right? So it took a even little longer after that to overcome that. But the three incidences were. I looked in a magazine when I was waiting at a Supercuts when I was 11 years old, and it was some stupid, like, Us Weekly or something. I never would have picked up a magazine like that if I hadn't been waiting around for a haircut, a Supercuts. And I flip it open and there's an ad for some product to put on your eyes. And it says, are you tired of those raccoon eyes? And it shows someone with like, you know, dark circles under her eyes. And I was like, oh, oh, are those ugly? And then there was a moment where an older brother, one of my friends, like, directly bullied or made fun of me about it only once, though, directly. But it was very intense. It was a very intense moment that caused a lot of pain. And I write about this in the very first chapter of On My Own side, where I talk about. I ask the readers the question, when did you turn on yourself? So that's a. If you're curious about that, go check out that book On My Own side. You can get it on on Amazon or Audible. And then the third time was the most innocuous moment in the world. I was coming to a party in high school, which I didn't go to too many of. And right when I walked in the door, Katie, a girl in high school, like, greeted us. And then she said, whoa, you got really dark circles under your eyes. Are you tired? And that was it. You know, she didn't like pick on me or any. She's just curious. And I'd already had the growing insecurity. So when I heard that, you know, destroyed all my confidence for that party, oh my God, I obsessed about that so much. My eyes and the circles under my eyes for years. So much unnecessary suffering. And you're probably doing the same with your own versions of unnecessary suffering. So let's end that now. And if you want support in doing that, definitely come to my free masterclass three Golden Keys to Solve Social Anxiety. Check it out on my email list. I will also have a link down below at Shrink for the Shy Guy for this episode for you to register for the masterclass as well. So I'd love to support you there 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. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. 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 socialconfidencecenter.com.