THOUGHTS THAT WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOUR SUCCESS IN BATTLING SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER
The first book that I ever read on the impact of the mind on our lives was Normal Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking. I was sixteen years old. The impact on my social anxiety symptoms was profound, for reasons I did not understand at the time. As a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of social anxiety disorder, I now understand exactly what happened. I’d like to share a few very useful bits of information about that with you. Use this information and it will change your life.
I had yet to face some of the most debilitating social anxiety symptoms at that point in my life, but I had the generalized form of social anxiety in addition to stage fright. The symptoms were severe enough to inhibit my social life to a significant degree in some settings. The message of Peale’s book is essentially, “Find thoughts that change how you feel, and then saturate your mind with those thoughts through repetition.” The secondary message of the book was essentially, “You can do amazing things if you unleash the full potential of your mind by purposefully choosing your thoughts.”
These messages carry more power than you would think (if they take root in your mind and live there). Let me explain why. Social Anxiety usually involves a lot of self-conscious thoughts, like, “I feel like everyone stares at me when I enter a room and I don’t want to look up and make eye contact because it feels awkward.” This self-conscious feeling is a symptom of being a person with a high degree of mind-sight. The feeling leads to a thought or a series of thoughts that end up perpetuating the feeling so that a rolling snow-ball effect begins with thoughts and feelings spiraling into sensations of worsening anxiety. This worsening anxiety, of course, leads to the all-too-common reaction of avoidance, which also makes the symptoms worse over time due to the increased self-consciousness that we feel when finally forced to face an infrequent event or situation that we are dreading.
So the realization that repeated thoughts have a big impact on how we feel is obvious on the negative side. It’s not so obvious on the positive side because we rarely persist long enough with new thoughts to see the powerful impact it can have on our feelings (like feelings of confidence). On the negative side, fear causes us to automatically focus on negative thoughts for long periods of time. On the positive side, there is no such intrinsic motivation. So what are you going to do about it? I go into detail on what to do about it in the Social Anxiety Secrets e-book and accompanying self-motivation audio MP3, but to get you started, write one empowering thoughts on a piece of paper and put it in your pocket (or buy a new keychain that will remind you to rehearse the positive thought in your mind).
The second message of Peale’s book was, “You can do amazing things if you unleash the full potential of your mind by purposefully choosing your thoughts.” What does that have to do with social anxiety disorder, and why did it help me as a socially anxious teen? The reason has a lot to do with how the mind’s thought-stream works. Our thoughts work by association. So if you say toothpaste, I will have thoughts that relate to that word, like, “Oh yeah, I’ve got that dentist appointment coming up, “ or I might just get a mental picture of my ragged toothbrush sitting in the my bathroom cabinet at home. The point is, the mind flows from one thought to another based on associations. So, if I start to think about what I can do with my mind if I train it to focus on things I want more of in my life, guess what kinds of thoughts start to dominate my thinking? That’s right, positive thoughts that inspire me and make me happy (which coincidentally are the kinds of thoughts that increase social confidence and decrease self-consciousness to a mild degree by themselves).
The impact of thinking about positive possibilities, the hopeful “what if…” of my dreams can lead to a phenomenon in which my mind becomes too crowded with excited positive thoughts, leaving less room for the dominating fearful thoughts that lead to the snowball effect of social anxiety disorder. I know this is a vague concept, not nearly as powerful as the focused thought-restructuring that I teach in the Social Anxiety Secrets system, but the impact really can be very powerful. Spend some time thinking about how you could put these ideas to use for yourself. And if you’re at a point in your life where you have recognized that beating social anxiety symptoms will be a very important investment that will pay off for the rest of your life, consider purchasing your copy of the Social Anxiety Secrets System by clicking here. Whatever you do, live with passionate courage and live to the fullest each moment of your life.
Be Courageous!
Dr. Todd Snyder
