The social anxiety playbook: Defeat your demons | Big Think

The social anxiety playbook: Defeat your demons
Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo
Learn skills from the world's top minds at Big Think Edge: https://bigth.ink/Edge
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anxiety is normal, but there are situations where your body's fight or flight response can make social interactions overwhelming. Learning to quiet the fear of negative judgment can help you build confidence to better navigate those environments.

One of the first steps, according to Tribute co-founder and CEO Andrew Horn, is to find your authentic voice. By doing things because you actually want to and not for the sake of others, you close the door to social anxiety.

In this video, Horn and other experts including Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy, and Columbia University's Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders Director, Anne Marie Albano, discuss the evolutionary basis for anxiety and share tips for overcoming it through self-affirmation and other proven techniques.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:

ANDREW HORN: So, you've all had that moment where you're at a bar, you're maybe dancing a little bit, moving around. You see someone looking at you out of the corner of your eye and then your movements become a little more constricted. You become a little more in your head and you're worried about what they might think about you. So that's that external motivation. In any moment you can ask yourself, 'Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think people will like it? Am I doing this because I want to or because I think people will like it?' If we're basing it off of the reality that someone else will like it we'll never really know. We open ourselves up for that social anxiety. The fear of negative judgment, the unknown of external validation. So, we can always ask ourselves, 'What do I want to do right now? What is interesting to me? What would feel good to me?' And act off of that to eliminate social anxiety to bring more confidence into our conversations. So, that's how we find our authentic voice and use it. And your authentic voice is a deep down understanding of who you are, what you care about, and what you believe. And it's only when we have that foundational understanding that we're able to bring confidence into social situations. Because if we're not basing our actions off of this internal understanding, we're constantly looking for external validation, for other people to tell us what is cool, what is acceptable, what is appropriate. And if you look at the actual definition of social anxiety it's literally the fear of negative judgment. So again, it's based in that external validation.

AMY CUDDY: In your sort of day-to-day life when you're not facing one of these big challenges you're naturally expressing who you really are because you're not afraid to tell your friends what you care about or show your family who you really are. When you get into those stressful situations the last thing you're thinking about is, 'I need to make sure that I show them exactly who I am.' And so instead showing them who you are becomes very threatening, and that wall goes up and now you can't access those things. Even if you want to you can't access them because you're into kind of fight or flight mode.

ANNE MARIE ALBANO: The fight or flight response evolved to protect us. So there's two components to it. The oldest being the amygdala, which is deep in the brain in the reptilian part of our brain, signals whether we should fight something, flee something, or freeze. When it goes awry is when it's perceiving immediate danger that really isn't there. Somebody's heart starts to race and they think, 'Oh, my goodness. Is something wrong with me?' That's panic, and that can send somebody into a panic attack, which is the clinical manifestation of the fight or flight response. The other thing with anxiety is again, as we evolved and became thinking human beings and started building communities and cities and civilizations, is our brain evolved and there's the cortex. It's within the cortex that we think. It's within that system that we worry. And so we can worry ourselves into states of anxiety where we are fraught and not knowing what to do and we actually get stuck with anxiety, and so we're tense and irritable and upset. Anxiety is perfectly normal. In any form it's perfectly normal. Having your heart racing because somebody is walking behind you and you don't know who it is, is kind of normal. But if you let that happen to you when you're sitting alone at home and you start having panic, then that gets out of control.

HORN: The American Psychological Review just put out a study a couple of years ago and they found out that 60 percent of all people identify as struggling...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/how-to-overcome-social-anxiety