Amber Hollingsworth explains why using alcohol to manage social anxiety is problematic. She describes how alcohol reduces inhibitions unevenly — sometimes making people feel more charismatic while actually impairing social performance — and warns about drinking patterns (drinking early or quickly) that remove needed inhibition. She also explains the physiological rebound effect (alcohol as a CNS depressant leading to increased anxiety after it wears off), the resulting rumination and memory concerns, and points listeners to her YouTube channel for more support.
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When you really want to be social, but you have a lot of social anxiety, alcohol can feel like your new best friend, but sometimes it's less like your best friend and more like your frenemy. Do you often experience social anxiety? Now, the obvious goal here will be to decrease your inhibitions, which we all know alcohol does quite well. In fact, it does it a little too well sometimes. Part of the problem with drinking alcohol to decrease our inhibitions is that alcohol doesn't give us good control over how much we dial back those inhibitions. And. And so sometimes we can really miss the mark. Now, I know that alcohol can make us feel like we're funnier or more charismatic, we're charming, we're more connected with other people. But just because we feel that way doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. For example, a lot of people who have a lot of social anxiety who feel like they're really bad in social situations or that they're not connecting to other people, or that people are thinking weird or negative things about them, when in fact, they're really, actually quite good at connecting to other people, and other people actually really enjoy having them around. But because you feel uncomfortable, you don't think that you are really good at connecting with others. Now, alcohol does the same thing, just in reverse. It can make you feel like you're doing a really good job of those things, but sometimes in reality, it's making you less funny and charming and connective. It's especially more prone to be problematic because you have anxiety. Because we have that anxiety, we want it to go away, and we want it to go away fast. And so we start to either drink really early before the social situation, or we start to drink quickly because we're trying to get that anxiety wall down to connect. And when that happens, sometimes it just hits you like a roc. And then the anxiety wall is gone, but it's all the way gone. We do need a little inhibition. We need a little filter in our lives. One of the other reasons alcohol can really bite you in the butt when you have anxiety is because of the rebound effect from alcohol. Now, most of us know that alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which is what gives us that relaxed, calm, less anxious feeling. But our brain immediately tries to counteract that by producing more anxiety, anxious, uncomfortable feeling, which is why after the alcohol wears off, you feel more anxious, more keyed up, more uncomfortable, compound things even more. Then you have to start thinking about, well, what did I do yesterday? What did I say? And all that social anxiety starts to kick back in even worse than it was before. And then you start analyzing everything you said or you did and you start going over it. And in the worst case situation, you don't even remember what you say or you did. So you start looking at your phone and your social media to try to figure it out. And there's just nothing worse than that feeling of what did I say and do last night? Even if you were more social and likable and all that stuff, you start to tell yourself, well, that was only the alcohol and that wasn't the real me, and so it doesn't count. And deep down inside, you still feel like you don't have those skills or you can't be that way in your natural self. It's a terrible feeling. So if you're using alcohol to help you with your social anxiety, it's important to be very, very careful about it. Now, if you or someone you care about has already gotten yourself sort of trapped in this pattern of using alcohol to alleviate anxiety, but ultimately feeling worse, you can find out more about what to do about it on my YouTube channel called Put the Shovel Down. Social anxiety. But your social anxiety suffer from social anx. You can't talk about social anxiety to someone who has social anxiety.
