Posted by hgi698 on June 21, 2006, at 22:20:38
In reply to Re: Modafinil + clonazepam for social anxiety? » jedi, posted by zeugma on June 21, 2006, at 4:57:19
Hi i am a newbie here and i think you answered one of my first posts. I am 22 year old male who has suffered from extreme social anxiety. During high school i think i could be classified as avoidant personality disorder which is basically the most extreme sort of social anxiety there is. I totally avoided most contact with any person. It got really bad by my senior year in high school. I had extreme anxiety, i could barely talk on the phone, had no friends etc. In college I drank with people for the first time and it completely change my personality from completely shy and inhibited to an extrovert. People liked me much better when i was drunk, i was like a different person. Anyway by my second year in college i began to realized why i was shy. Before college i was afraid to show any kind of emotions, i spoke in a monotone voice and must have appeared to be very boring. I also had constant negative thoughts about my inadequacy. So alcohol showed me a door that i was just a tweak away from being a socialite. In my sophomore year i started to make changes in the way i acted around people. Like 90 percent of communication is nonverbal, so i tried to give more intonation, smile more, be more expressive. Pretending to be interesting. I looked at how successful people acted and also the way I acted on alcohol. So acting this way breaks the cycle of the negative feedback loop. People actually respond to you when you "pretend" to be more outgoing. Before I actually thought that showing no emotions would help me make friends. So eventually this "acting" becomes more natural, you gain more confidence and become more social. The next step in this process is to think back on your day, only about all the good things that happen, even if they seem small. For a person with social anxiety you tend to think that everything you say is stupid or that people are much more socially competent than you are when they really aren't. You have to realize in a social situation that there is a lot of interpretation going on. People who are very confident may interpret a remark from a person differently than a person who has social anxiety. A social phobe might think it was a put down, while the confident person would think it was just a joke. So don't think about everything wrong you did in the day, just think about all the things that went right. It sounds simple, but it does work. So anyway these are several things which i have learned. I get back to you on more things you can do. Drugs help too.
poster:hgi698
thread:659095
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060617/msgs/659975.html