Social Anxiety is not the problem

Welcome to Social Anxiety Remedy. The podcast where we show you how to shatter your fear of being judged. I'm your host, Parker, and I'm here to help you get comfortable in social situations so that you can create authentic connections. Each episode will have stories from when I was struggling with my social anxiety and how I eventually overcame it using something called the remedy. I'm going to give you real advice and you're going to hear from someone who's actually been in your shoes before. So get ready to join me in creating meaningful relationships, core confidence in yourself, and peace of mind and social situations. Social anxiety is not the problem. Yes, I'm going to say it again. So you just heard me say that and you're probably thinking to yourself, what the hell are you talking about, Parker? How is my social anxiety not the problem? It's the biggest thorn in my side. It's one of the biggest pains in my life. It's the reason that I don't have x, y, and z of what I actually want. It's the reason I can't feel comfortable in social situations. It's the reason I'm not connecting with people. It's doing all this harm to me. I hate my social anxiety. But I want to explain to you in this video the reason why social anxiety really isn't the problem. And let's identify and find out what the real problem is instead. So I made an Instagram post about this this week and it started a little traction. So I wanted to explain it a little bit more in depth on the podcast because I haven't jumped on one of these in a minute. So what I'm saying here, what I'm saying, anxiety is not the problem. I'm saying that because it's simply a signal. Anxiety is not the problem. It's a signal. One of the things that you've probably heard me talk about in the recent years of running the podcast is like social anxiety is not a disease, right? And the thing is I don't even like to use the word disorder. And the reason is because I want you to imagine right now that you broke your arm. That you broke your arm and then you had to go to the emergency room that you are and you had this immense excruciating pain in your arm. Okay, so that pain, it is not the problem, right? The pain is not actually the problem. The broken arm is the problem. The pain is just a signal that there is a problem. And so what's the broken arm or the broken bone, so to speak, that's giving you your anxiety? Well, it's your self image. It's the way that you actually view yourself. You see, over the years, you've gone through experiences, whether that's past negative social experiences, whether you've learned things from your parents, whether you've learned through things from society, whatever it may be. And now you have a self image about yourself, an identity and beliefs that you relate to yourself. Now, some common beliefs that people with social anxiety tend to have are things like, people are going to negatively judge me. They're going to reject me. Okay, have you ever noticed that maybe right when you're in a social situation or maybe you want to jump into an interesting conversation with people, you start to get all these thoughts that start popping up, thoughts like, oh, they probably don't want to talk to a new person right now. Or, I'm just not interesting enough. I'm just boring, right? Remember what happened last time, Parker? Like remember what happened that time before I don't want to embarrass myself again, just like that. What's going to happen? How am I going to feel? Right? So all these thoughts are kind of like popping up and these are your beliefs. This is the makeup of your identity. Okay? Some more common beliefs are things like, I already mentioned, I'm not interesting. I'm boring. I don't know what to say. I can't connect with people. I have bad social skills. I need to be perfect. I need to make a perfect impression on these people or, you know, something bad is going to happen or I'm just going to absolutely embarrass myself. Okay? And so if you're listening to this podcast, these beliefs are all, you know, too familiar with you, right? And so you've gone through past experiences that have led you to believe things like this. The thing is, and this is so funny once you start to think about it because I want you to like maybe start trying to identify some of these past experiences that led you to believe these things about yourself, that led you to believe that you will always be judged, that you will be rejected, that you're boring, that you're not interesting. And when you really try to get down to it a lot of the times, it's only like two, three, four, five experiences that you can find that led you to believe this about yourself. Just two, three, four, five. I can have those same exact experiences in a social environment in less than a day. And so the thing is, you've stacked up all this evidence or, you know, you perceive, you know, in the wrong light, you perceive that you have all this evidence that this is who you are. Okay? And this has become your belief system. This has become your identity. So yeah, when you have an identity that I'm bad at connecting with people, I just, I'm not interesting. People don't like me. It's YZ and you truly believe that. You truly believe that about yourself. Like even if you're watching this podcast, even if you've searched up social anxiety on Spotify or whatever, like you're starting to have these beliefs about yourself. Of course, you are going to get anxious in a social situation. Okay? Let me explain what anxiety is. Anxiety is simply there to protect you. Okay? Your belief systems right now, like your identity in your self image, it's essentially relaying all this data and all this information to your anxiety. Okay? So anxiety back in the day, right? Back with our ancestors. It was something that was a real gift and it kept us alive. Okay? When you saw a saber tooth tiger, you better damn well want your anxiety to kick in to have that adrenaline, that extra adrenaline, that fight or flight response. So you had the best chance of surviving, right? You had a belief system because you saw from past experiences or you learned from your tribe members or whatever, the saber tooth tigers or bad, the day were dangerous, right? And so because of that, because you had those beliefs, your anxiety triggered whenever you saw something like that. Now the same thing is happening right now for you in social situations. You kind of misidentified the danger. Social situations for you, your body right now, it can't, your nervous system, it can't really tell the difference between that saber tooth tiger or a social situation. Okay? Over the years, your identity, your self image, it's trained your nervous system to give you all of this anxiety when you're in these situations. Now what I want you to believe and think about right now is what if I had different beliefs? What if I really truly could just like change my self image with the snap of the finger? Okay? So I want you to think about this right now. What if you really believed this about yourself? You can pretend for a second. I know you might not believe this about yourself right now. You pretend that right now you can be just loved, you can be accepted, you can be the person you want to be just as you are right now. Like just as you are right now, you don't have to do shit, you don't have to do anything. You can be loved and accepted by the people that you want to be accepted and loved by. You don't have to do anything. Okay? You don't have to be perfect because everyone experiences awkward moments and it's fine. Okay? You have to have this perfect persona, you don't have to put on this mask because just you being who you are right now, it's so valuable to others. It's so inherently valuable. You have so much value that it doesn't matter what you do. People will discard what you do. It doesn't matter. You're so valuable as you are right now. You're great at connecting with people. You have incredible social skills. Now what this is probably starting to do if you can get into this state of pretending that this is how I feel right now Parker is you'll start to feel a little bit lighter. You'll start to feel a little bit more carefree. If you're in conversations and you're in this state right now, you're non-defensive, you're non-reactive, things don't have the same negative value to you. Things don't mean the same to you because you value yourself so highly. It's like if I were to go up to you and right now I'm sorry for all the people with blue hair but it's going to make sense in one second. Let's just say that I went up to you and I said, "You know I hate your blue hair. I just cannot stand your blue hair dude." What's going to happen is you're probably going to be confused. You're not going to have a triggered response of anger, of insecurity, of anxiety because you don't have blue hair right now. But the thing is when you're going through situations right now in your social life, your beliefs about yourself, like your self-image, is so negative, is so bad that any little thing that happens to you, you perceive that these things are just the end of the world. You perceive that like just stupid, simple shit that people might do when they're not even thinking of you that that's completely directed towards you. Like art your perception and your lens of viewing reality is so absolutely skewed because of your current self-image. If you had those great positive beliefs about yourself, please subscribe to our channel. yourself like I said and you had that you know feeling of being light and feeling of being carefree then any any outside type of influence that you that that happens to you any type of like social experience that people might say is negative it literally has no negative effect on you because you value yourself so strongly it's as if somebody went up to you and said yo I hate your blue hair it's like okay cool like okay yeah that's that's fine cool and instead of responsing it's instead of having a response of like no my blue hair is cool I thought my blue hair is cool I swear I swear and having all this type of reaction that we usually normally have in social situations right to try to defend ourselves instead it's like yeah that's cool that's funny so anyways well all right it just doesn't trigger your emotions the same it doesn't trigger your anxiety because your belief systems is just like yeah my blue hair is like the coolest thing in the world I love it it's dope like everybody likes it if one person says that thing it has no effect on you okay so I'm using this as an example obviously it's kind of portray it easier but this is what can happen once you start to build these these new beliefs about yourself and this new self image so the point of this episode the point of this podcast is really to just get the point across where everybody's trying to get rid of the wrong thing everybody's trying to get rid of their anxiety everybody thinks that anxiety is such a bad thing and you're like you're fearing your anxiety so much stop fearing your anxiety your anxiety is only there to protect you if you saw that saber to tiger if you saw like a bear charging you in the woods guys you want your anxiety if there's a real life like dangerous situation you want your anxiety okay so stop fearing the anxiety what you need to start fearing is you need to start fearing the negative self image that you've created for yourself okay once I kind of started to make that small reframe it made me it helped me believe that like I was more in control of how I felt and more in control of my anxiety than I ever really imagined okay this simple reframe was so absolutely powerful and it needs to be made for every single person okay it's one of the first things that you need to understand because everybody's trying to get rid of the wrong thing so if you truly believe that you were valuable just as you are right now you didn't have to do anything like just you being you like the anxious person that you think you are right now or the person with bad social skills that can't connect with people let's throw that out the window pretend for a second that even if your past experiences were still true even if you still had the same past that you just simply believed that you were good enough that you were worthy that you had value that no matter like just for being you you didn't have to be perfect everybody has these awkward situations you just have inherent intense value to give to the world you are interesting when you're in conversations when you're in social situations everything feels so much more lighter it's like if things become almost like a comedy at least that's the way that I like to describe it and you just feel this lightness like imagine speaking to people when you're feeling like this if you actually believe these things about yourself you'd connect with people you finally be the person you've always wanted to be in social situations but here's the thing this feeling that you might have right now it's fleeting this feeling is absolutely going to go away and it's going to go away because you don't really believe this about yourself yet you don't really have this self image things are going to go away a couple minutes down the line you're going to go back to normal and neck and social experiences are going to trigger your same emotions your same anxiety you're going to get in your head you're going to start overthinking and so the one thing that I want you to take out of this episode is first stop fearing the anxiety start fearing the self image that you created for yourself because now when you notice all this negative self talk that you have you can say holy shit like I'm the one that's actually controlling this let's start treating myself a little bit better if I start treating myself better then you know the world is kind of a mirror the world accepts the judgment that you place on yourself other people will start treating you better get an I'll go I'll start getting into that in later episodes so that's that's the first one start fearing your actual self image and the way that you speak to yourself and the way that you view yourself okay kids that's the thing that needs to be feared not anxiety you've been trying to get rid of the wrong thing this whole time and then number two is that we need to start creating new beliefs you need to start creating a new self image of yourself because if you can do that the anxiety will not even be present anymore instead of trying to go up to that conversation where you think it's interesting and you want to join that that social circle you want to join that friendship and um instead of getting all those thoughts all that chaos in your mind all those things popping up or it's like no Parker you're not good enough no what were they going to think of you what do you look what do you look like right now I should probably go to the bathroom and check myself in the mirror I should probably do this this that and then right when you go up you're going to continue to get all these thoughts thoughts thoughts thoughts imagine if it was just quiet imagine if inside of your mind it was simply still so thinking about the past instead of thinking about the future it was just presents maybe able to be so more so much more authentic and that's what people crave so what people crave to be around this fun passionate carefree side of you or you're non-defensive in all these you know minor details that that could happen in social situations you really value yourself when you value yourself other people start to value you too so guys this was my first podcast back in a minute I've been doing a lot of or I'm starting to do much more stuff in terms of like daily tips on my email list on Instagram so Instagram is probably the best place for you guys to follow me right now and I'm excited to get back at this and help you guys out as much as possible so hope you enjoyed I'll see you in the next one thank you so much for taking the time out to listen to the podcast my biggest goal is to know that this episode helped with your anxiety if it did I'd love it if you could leave me review or even just let me know on Instagram how much you enjoyed this episode if you're looking for more support beyond the podcast and want to know how you can work with me and join my coaching program and send me a message on Instagram at Social anxiety remedy [BLANK_AUDIO]