What has your experience been like in working with social anxiety admist the busyiness of life?

It’s been an interesting experience.

I’m no stranger to keeping a journal, be it personal or in blog form, but I don’t think I have often written so much and with such intensity about one topic.  I’ve found that a lot of what is drawn out is familiar and expected, dissections of the moments I am most anxious, but no small amount has taken me by surprise.  I’ve devoted a good chunk to going over how I got along with my best friend growing up.

It seems from my experience that anxious people tend to self-censor, always conscious of what might be thought of them.  What is suprising is to find just deeply ingrained this is.  Even while writing angry rants in a computer file that is password protected and never going to be seen by anyone but me, I find myself getting nervous and wanting to hold back if I hit territory that might make me sound bad.  I can’t shake the fear of how embarrassing it would be to be found out as mean, selfish or attention craving.

It builds up like acclimation.  I get better at plowing through, start to flow for awhile, then hit a weird moment and have to redouble the effort.  And it is all strangely obscenity laced.

Every night, after writing, I feel good, relieved and relaxed.  Perhaps anxious thoughts and feelings need somewhere to go.  It’s not as if you can unthink or unfeel them.

I don’t know if this writing is going to be long range helpful, but it is certainly beneficial in the short term.

The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering —ours and that which is all around us— everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem
to be.

We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other’s pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment.

At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it —a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in —for all of us and send out relief to all of us.

(For more info on tonglen see these articles: Changing Pain into Compassion, The Practice of Tonglen.)

There are several ways to tonglen and one way to do it is to first remind myself to do it! It is so easy to forget and not be mindful, especially in a high stress situation like a social event. So just reminding ourselves that during this event I am going to notice my fear and anxiety is a good start. Then once I notice it, I start to become aware of my breathing and I begin to focus on all the other people around me. I breath in deeply and take in the suffering (fear and anxiety perhaps or suffering in general) of others and breath out healing and peace. If it becomes difficult to do this I just try to breath and accept the anxiety in myself. Sometimes I may to myself to someone close “may you be happy, joyful, loving and peaceful” as I breath out lovingkindness to others.

I used tonglen the other day while shopping in a crowded mall. I had made a purchase and the salesperson was wrapping the gift for me so I had to stand and wait for a while. I felt myself becoming very self-conscious, wondering if others were staring at me and I noticed my breathing became very shallow. I then decided to practice tonglen and started with the salesperson, then with everyone in that particular store and then the entire mall breathing in their suffering and exhaling lovingkindness. I did tonglen for myself as well to break the automatic negative thought cycle and to be more mindful of my breathing. It really helped physically and mentally to do this and my anxiety decreased. It was still there of course but just not so intense and not so overwhelming. I believe it also is a great way to increase our compassion and lessen our self-centeredness.

So give it a try sometime and if there are those who practice tonglen now please share you experiences as well.

That’s the beauty of our body-mind: it will try it’s hardest to hold everything together and keep us moving, no matter what. So, while we may look at these quirks with frustration and dislike, they are helping us. The problem is that they have also solidified and are obstacles to enjoying life at a higher level than is currently possible and so we must investigate them, change, and create healthier ways of being. Should we simply try to “stop our quirks”, first off we probably won’t succeed because, as I’ve said, they are serving a purpose and your psyche will take care of you by keeping them in place, and this will simply leave us feeling discouraged. Secondly, and most importantly, when these are not in place the causes of them still are. In other words, you may stop an avoidance behavior but your fear is still present. What will happen then? Besides probably feeling even more anxious we will simply develop another quirk. Instead we must simultaneously work on stopping these quirks, understand how they arise, and develop healthier habits.

As an example, rather than stopping the avoidance behavior of not attending a social gathering I push myself to go, but still I have the fear of what may happen at the event, which is fueled by an irrational thought pattern, “I will do something stupid and people will think I’m weird.” And maybe I even force myself to be a “social butterfly” rather than my normal behavior which is to avoid conversation. But given that I still have that thought pattern and I have not created any different way of approaching these situations I am almost certain to experience disappointment and anxiety. But, an alternative is to realize that I have this thought pattern, to challenge and examine it, and to develop a more accurate thought, and based on that I attend the event with a new understanding and behavior supported by that understanding. Even better would be to have a way to process things afterwards, say if I do experience anxiety. This is a much healthier and ultimately successful approach then simply “stopping a behavior”.

The first is a mantra: slow and steady progress.

Any time I get to worrying about some goal, or working through a difficult project, I used to remind myself that the only way through is slow and steady progress.  I remind myself that I don’t have to finish everything at once.  I remind myself that if I work steadily eventually that will build into real progress, no matter how slowly I work, or how little progress it feels like I make each day.  That steady progress accumulates over time and eventually it becomes a solid foundation and the task does not seem so monumental.  Which ties in nicely to second part.

I don’t remember where I heard this, but it is a fairly common idea from motivational philosophies, I believe.  Whenever you measure progress it is better to look backward rather than forward.  Always gauge how you are doing based on where you were rather than where you want to be.  It is easy to look at where you would like to be and despair at how you are not there.  But if you look back instead, you can focus on how things have gotten better.

Looking forward, I see how far off the goal of not being at the whim of anxiety seems.  But looking backward I can see how I have progressed.  Not but a year ago, I didn’t even have a good conceptual handle on what was going on.  I’d mostly just beat myself up for anxious thoughts and wonder what the hell made me so pathetic.  Now I see clearly what is going on and I’ve gotten a much better perspective on my problems.  That in itself is worth celebrating.

And none of it felt monumental at the time.  It was gained through slow and steady progress.  I can never remind myself of that enough.

Two aspects of physical environments that I take note of are the size of the room and how many people are there. For me this comes up specifically in my educational experiences. Personally, I prefer small classes in small rooms because of the intimacy it affords the learning experience. As for my social anxiety, it prefers large classrooms and lots of people so that I can get lost in the mix, and so I feel “safer”.
Even though I truly prefer small classes, I experience more anxiety in them and if weren’t aware of this I might avoid them completely and miss out on wonderful opportunities, plus I’d put myself in situations that I really don’t like (big classes). So, with this awareness I instead am trying to focus on what’s happening for me when I get anxious in those small classes and go from there. Of course this would change if I were giving a presentation in which case my personal preferences don’t change, but I would most certainly avoid the large class. So, we have to be cautious of how it is we are making our choices and acting.

This is just one example. And even with the physical environment there are many other factors such as lighting, colors, smells, etc. The point is simply to look at your life and develop a strong awareness of what you really want and see how you might be avoiding that, and then to generate the courage to find out what is behind all of that.

What are your preferences for physical environments? What other areas of life do you notice discrepancies between your personal preferences and your social anxiety preferences?

One way to explore this is to take a piece of paper and on the left side, list vertically different areas and aspects of life, such as social gatherings, hobbies, physical environment, interests, etc. Divide the paper into two columns, labeling one “Personal Preferences” and the other “Social Anxiety Preferences”. In the personal column describe what is ideal from your own preferences, free from anxiety. In the social anxiety column describe what your anxiety wants in respect to those different areas of life. Take note of the differences and similarities between the two columns, your personal preferences and what you do when you are social anxious.

What realizations and feelings arise when you compare the two? What other areas could be listed?