HealthyGamerGG - Stop Letting Social Anxiety Control You

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

🎙️ On this episode Dr. K attempts to empower you with effective strategies to break free from the clutches of social anxiety. 🚀 Uncover the secrets to conquer overthinking, embrace non-verbal cues, and activate your senses to disable anxiety's hold on your life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to talk about how to short circuit social anxiety. So if you're struggling with social anxiety, chances are you go into a situation and you're kind of overthinking things. Your mind is producing all of these thoughts like what will people think, what will people like me or not like me? What should I say? What should I not say? Should I speak now? Should I speak later? Should I wait? How do I find an in into the conversation? And so your mind is in kind of overdrive or analytical overdrive. And even if you're able to overcome your social anxiety, right? You can take all those thoughts and all those worries and squash them way down and then like engage in the social conversation. There's still this basic problem because you've got

this inner voice. And so you're fighting against that inner voice in order to overcome it with rationality and analysis and reassurance. Hey, just a quick note. A lot of people will ask us, what do I do next? And that's why we built Dr. Kay's guide. It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years of my experience, both as a monk and as a psychiatrist. And it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs. So if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life, check out the link below. Today, we're going to talk about how to actually disable that inner voice so that you don't have to struggle or fight every time you feel anxious in a social situation. We're actually going to start by looking at how social

communication actually works. And instead of turning to a success story of some kind of person who was very, very shy and then became an alpha chad, we're actually going to turn to the animal kingdom. Because here's the wild thing. Animals don't even know how to talk. They don't, I don't think that they sit there and they struggle with social anxiety in their head and use analysis and watch YouTube videos and like Google things and Wikipedia things. Somehow animals, despite having none of these tools can actually overcome their social anxiety. They're very social creatures. And so if we stop and think about it, what we realize is that animals are using all of these different circuits in their brain. They're using the social circuitry, empathic circuitry. They're reading body language,

tone, things like that. And they're actually able to communicate very effectively. And so what's the problem in today's world? The problem is that we don't use any of those circuits. When we're in a socially anxious situation, what are we actually doing? What's our approach to resolving our social anxiety? It's actually analysis, logic, reassurance, research on the internet. You're watching a video about social anxiety in a room, probably all by yourself or on your phone. This is the way that you approach the problem. And now here's the problem with that is that if we sort of think about what we find socially reassuring, it's actually all of that other stuff. It is that stuff like body language and tone. So today we're going to talk about how to harness that. The other thing

that we've got to touch on is that we tend to think about social anxiety as a psychological problem, right? The place that you feel the suffering is in your head. You have all these thoughts, have all these worries. Maybe your heart is racing some. And so we also send people to like therapists and we sort of think about psychotherapy as a treatment for social anxiety. And if you've got a disorder, that's actually a really good idea. But one of the things that we have to understand is that Anxiety in social situations is not purely a cognitive problem. It's actually a problem of perception and physiology as well. And if we think about how animals become comfortable in social situations,

they use the full suite of their senses. They'll pay attention to body language. They'll pay attention to tone. They'll even make eye contact with each other. And a lot of animals will also use smell. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. How to use smell to overcome your social anxiety. So when you enter into a room, one of the most reassuring things that you can do to disable these parts of your brain is to sniff other human beings.

And to raise your armpit and allow other human beings to sniff you. Actually, we're not going to do that at all. That is a terrible idea. Don't do that, okay? But in actuality, there's a really good principle there, which is that when we utilize our other senses, we can actually disable some of the circuits that cause social anxiety. The next thing that we need to understand is social reassurance. So we feel socially anxious, and that largely comes from the left hemisphere and the cerebral cortices.

This is where all of our hyper thinking comes from. At the same time, we get activation of our amygdala, which is our fear center, which is kind of in a primitive part of the brain. And so the social anxiety picture is really a combination of those two things, hyperanalysis from our higher order brain functions and a primitive fear response. The interesting thing is that social reassurance actually comes from different parts of the brain. It comes from some of our ability to interpret signals and different kinds of perceptions. And so what we really need to do is recruit those parts of the brain.

The challenge is that in the society that we live in today, those parts of the brain tend to get shut off. And I'll give you all just a really simple example. So let's say I walk into a party and I'm feeling really anxious. what are the signals that I could perceive that would make me feel relaxed? If I saw other people looking at me and smiling at me and like waving me over, they're like, hey, look, it's Dr. Kay. Dr. Kay is here. Awesome.

Like, hey, man, thanks for coming. They can say all of those things, but I don't even need them to say it. If I walk in and I see other people and they smile and they wave me over, that will be socially reassuring. I may feel like I'm on the spotlight for a split second, but it'll feel very. reassuring. And this is the problem is what do we do when we walk into a party and we feel socially anxious? We pull out our phones and we start looking at our phone and now our perceptions are locked into here. And if my perception is locked into here, how am I going to get all of those socially reassuring

signals? How am I going to see that people, despite being near me, their body language is relaxed or excited or that they're smiling or they're trying to make eye contact? What all I'm going to do is I'm going to be kind of locked in over here. And as my perceptions are locked in over here, I don't get any of that reassuring feedback. So the empathic circuits of my brain aren't receiving the kind of information that they need. So we have these parts of the brain called, for example, the visual association cortex. This is the part of our brain that when we get visual stimuli attaches meaning to it. So, like, I can look at things and my, the visual cortex kind of processes information, but then the meaning attached to that information.

So, for example, like, if I come into my house and there's a bouquet of my favorite flowers there, that means something to me because those are my favorite flowers. And then I'm going to feel loved and cared for, and I'll relax a little bit more. So the visual association cortex is really, really important for helping us feel reassured. The problem is that nowadays, we're always on our phone, so we literally don't turn now. that on. And that voice inside you that feels very, very, very socially anxious, that voice is actually disarmed by some of these parts of the brain like the visual association cortex. So if we want to short circuit our social anxiety, what we really need to do is recruit these other parts of the brain and sort of really think about from a physiologic standpoint,

how we can disable social anxiety. So there are going to be three things that we can do. The first thing that we're going to do is actually stand up straight and roll our shoulders back and breathe very slowly and especially slow exhalation. So this does a couple of things. So when we feel socially anxious, our adrenaline is going to be higher. As our adrenaline is going to be higher, it changes our pattern of breathing. And that adrenaline is actually going to make us feel more panicked. So from a physiologic standpoint, we need to take a step back, roll your shoulders back. and there's a really simple exercise that I'll give people,

which is try to crack an egg with your shoulder blades. So imagine that there's like an egg and then you're sticking it between your shoulder blades and you're kind of rolling your shoulders back a little bit to crack it. You don't have to hold it like that. You don't have to like walk into like a room like walking like this. But sort of do that a little bit to counteract that kind of hunched cell phone posture. Okay.

So once you sort of do that, you're going to raise your head up. So you're going to sort of adopt a more open posture instead of like hunched and defensive. And then the other thing that that's going to do is sort of expand your lungs from a mechanical standpoint. And as you expand your lungs from a mechanical standpoint, you can take in sort of slow deep breaths, but especially slow exhalation is really important. It'll physiologically disable that adrenaline. And as we disable the adrenaline, we'll start to feel more relaxed.

Our amygdala will start to shut off. And so as our amygdala shuts off, that voice inside you that is worried will start to to actually get short-circuited. So that's number one. So shoulders back, head up high, and take especially deep breaths with long exhalations. Now that we have our shoulders back and head straight, the second thing that we're going to do is make eye contact.

Now, this may terrify you because if you're feeling a lot of social anxiety, the whole point is to avoid eye contact. You don't know what people think and you're like just over here and you don't want to make eye contact. And it feels really terrifying to make eye contact. The problem is that without eye contact, our visual association cortex cannot get any reassuring stimuli, right? Like, we don't have any reason to be reassured because we're blocking out those messages.

And this is the problem is when we don't actually have information or experience or data, our brain is left working with the analytical portion. So this is essentially like theory crafting without ever playing a game. So you're sitting there and you're not actually getting any data, you're not getting any information, and your brain is going through 6,000 iterations to try to theory craft your way to success. But I'm sure that you all know, like, you can't theory craft your way to the top of a ladder. You can't watch porn to the point of like theory crafting to be good at sex. You can't watch like movies and suddenly become like an amazing human being.

Theory crafting only gets you so far. And the basic problem with social anxiety is that all we're left with is our analytical portion because we're not actually receiving data. So we want to make eye contact. We don't want to make eye contact for very long. A lot of people are wondering like, okay, how long should I make eye contact? What I would sort of recommend is if you're in a social situation, you make eye contact for one second at a time and then you move on to something else.

And a really simple way to do this is that if you're part of a conversation, you just look at whoever is talking, okay? And when someone is talking, what they're going to be doing is automatically making eye contact with everyone around them. So you want really brief periods of eye contact. If you're in a one-on-one conversation, you don't want to stand directly across from them. You usually actually ideally want to be at like a 45-degree angle. So you can kind of look over at them while they're talking, and then you can look to like a neutral situation.

And you want to sort of do this for like a one-second period so it doesn't feel overly excessive. And you may sort of struggle with this a little bit at the beginning. You don't have to count. It'll actually feel natural. And your body and brain will actually like take over on its own. So how long you want to look over here? okay, you're saying this? Oh, that's really interesting. As you speak, you can kind of like look to a neutral location, okay? The third thing that we're going to do is smile. So smiling is really,

really, really important. The reason that smiling is important is when I smile at someone else, they smile at me. This is just natural empathic mirroring, right? So if I go like this, right, what are you doing? Chances are if you're watching this, you're smiling too. And it's cool how that works. And so let's think about that from a social anxiety perspective. When I smile at someone else and they smile at me and I am keeping eye contact, what does that do for my visual association cortex? It relaxes me because, hey, this person actually likes me. I'm starting to receive this kind of data. Now, smiling can also be pretty terrifying because, like, we're not kind of used to it. And so what I would recommend is you do these three things in neutral social situations to get some practice.

This is like a 30 second kind of bit. If even, this is a 15 second practice where, let's say you walk into a store, shoulders back, head up high, make eye contact with like the person that you're ordering the sandwich from, you smile, hey, how are you doing today? Or, hey, how's it going today? I'd like to get a sandwich. And that's it. You just practice that for like 10 seconds.

What was that? Five seconds? And so you do that practice for like five, 10, you know, 15 times. It doesn't really cost you very much. There are no consequences, right? because your socially anxious brain is like, what are they going to think? Who cares what they think? You're never going to see them again.

Practice these things a couple of times. And as you practice them, then you can start to institute them in a social situation. And as you start to institute them, you are actually going to take like 90% of your brain, which is what animals have and how they're able to maintain healthy social situations without language, without analysis, without Google, without even Dr. K. oh my God, how do these like prides of lions and like packs of wolves? How can they socialize? Even ant colonies.

They don't have any of the stuff. And yet they're able to form healthy social societies. And that's because we're not using all of these gigantic parts of our brain because we're like literally staring at our phone the whole time. So if you want to sort of be more socially reassured, what you need to start doing is start utilizing these parts of the brain. And the more that you can do that, the better off you're going to be. There's one last thing that I want to leave with y'all is that when we smile, we're also not talking about smiling for a long time, okay?

So, like, here's like, what we want to do is like flash a smile. So we want to go like this. We want to go, hey, that's a fake one. So let me try a real one. Hey, how's it going today? Right? That's a little bit fake. But instead, we don't want to do like this kind of smile.

Like, hi, how are you doing today? Right? So we don't want long smile. Smile for like a second or two. Flash a smile and then sort of cut it out, okay? And so let us know how this works for you. Feel free to like, comment, or subscribe. And let us know in the comments like,

does this work for you, not work for you? Practice it for a while and let other people know, hey, this is complete BS. It's not working. And then we'll go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something else.