More and more of us use Facebook these days, and it is a convenient means of exchanging news on a fairly trivial level. However, recent experiences have reminded me that there's no such thing as privacy, once you go online. This especially applies to Facebook.
Hypnotherapy Blog
Social Phobia
In today’s article I’m going to put together the different factors in anxiety, which I’ve discussed in previous articles. I shall use the example of social phobia, which is the fear of social situations and especially meeting new people.
People with this problem, when they find themselves in a social situation, immediately feel the physical symptoms of anxiety. These may include racing heartbeat, sweating, shaking (tremor), quick shallow breathing, nausea, and an urge to run to the toilet caused by speeding up of the intestine’s normal movement. These symptoms appear immediately and automatically without any intervening conscious thought. This is why its hard to stop them just by thinking or arguing with yourself, because the fear appears before you have time for that.
The physical anxiety sets off a train of thought in the mind, which begins by “naming” the sensation as “fear”, rather than “excitement”. When these feelings are labelled as “fear”, they are automatically classed as something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something that might overpower us. So in this example, the person is telling himself “I’m afraid because I’m in this situation.”
This thought immediately switches on the imagination. The person begins to imagine things connected to the situation that he fears. For instance, he might imagine that everyone can see how anxious he is, and that they must be laughing at him or regarding him with absolute contempt. The person’s imagination may leap ahead in time, creating a whole “storyline” of people telling their friends and destroying his reputation.
When this experience happens more than once, it becomes part of the person’s self-image, their own idea of what kind of person they are. They begin to think things like “This is just the may I’m made. I am a fearful, shy, insecure person who will never make friends or have proper relationships”. Actions become habits and habits become character.
Memory also plays its part. When the person is anxious, this immediately triggers memories of all the other times when he felt anxious, and blots out the memory of times when he felt calm and confident.
Finally the person’s beliefs about life generally get drawn into this problem. Many people make unrealistic demands upon themselves, that few people could actually fulfil. They may tell themselves that they should always feel supremely confident in any situation, or that their jokes should always make everybody laugh, or that everyone should find them attractive. These impossible demands cause anxiety and despondency when they cannot be achieved.