Okay,
So I wanted to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart as someone who's personally struggled with this quite a bit.
I wanted to make a disclaimer though,
First and foremost,
That I am not a licensed psychologist,
Psychiatrist,
Physician,
Or doctor in any way.
I'm currently in my studies,
However,
I do not have a full degree yet to solicit advice or medication or anything like that in a professional manner.
So if you are somebody who struggles with an anxiety disorder or social anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder or anything like that in any way,
I would first consult your physician or therapist or whoever you are seeing for counsel before me.
This is just a general piece of advice and tips off of someone who personally has struggled with social anxiety disorder.
So with that,
I want to do less of a meditation today and more of a feedback slash advice slash discussion,
One-way discussion on my experience with social anxiety.
I'm somebody who really severely struggled with social anxiety from about 18 to 23 years old and it just progressed worse and worse every single year,
You know,
Struggling with romantic relationships,
With friendships,
With family even.
It was getting so severe that I needed to adopt multiple methods at the time in order to combat it.
So yeah,
I'm going to give just a few pieces of advice that have greatly reduced the levels of anxiety that I go through on a daily basis,
Specifically in social situations.
So number one,
First and foremost,
Is developing a mindfulness or meditation habit.
So whether that's first thing in the morning or at night,
Whatever,
Mindfulness is an important part of loosening the grip of anxiety.
Doesn't matter what the source of that anxiety is,
At the end of the day,
You are simply falling or I was simply falling back into negative thought patterns and being distracted by my own fearful thoughts of anxiety and fear,
Specifically when I was in social situations.
So first and foremost,
Developing a mindfulness habits that helps you get into the flow state.
A lot of people drink or do drugs when they're in social situations,
Just to relax and you don't need to do that.
Developing a mindfulness habit is going to greatly increase your ability to get into a flow state.
So finding maybe a course on insight timer or through somebody else or just a meditation that you like to do ritualistically is going to help a lot.
So number two,
For me personally,
Mindfulness alone is not enough.
I also want to see a cognitive behavioral therapist,
A psychologist.
I did that for about a year and a half because a lot of these thoughts for some of us,
Especially when it comes to self-critical or negative thoughts,
Can really be stemmed from things that happened in our childhood.
And so sometimes meditation alone is not enough to combat the strength of these thoughts.
So I personally went to therapy for about a year to really deal with some of the root causes of these judgmental thoughts I had towards myself.
And my therapist,
Akiya is finding the right clinician,
But he helped me a ton when it came to this particular issue,
Both practically and also just in my own life.
When it came to processing certain emotional traumas or abuse or whatever it was growing up.
So number two is counseling.
Number three is going to be medication.
So for me,
Again,
I'm not going to give advice based on things I haven't experienced.
I had to do all three of these things.
So meditation,
Counseling,
And medication all for about two years or so really played an amazing cocktail kind of role of combating my social anxiety.
So I took,
Based on my psychiatrist diagnosis,
I took Zoloft or Sirtuin,
It's also pronounced as Zoloft,
That that was a tremendous aid to the strength of my anxiety as well.
So there's all kinds of medications for social anxiety disorder.
Like I said,
I'm not somebody who is a practicing physician or psychiatrist.
So if you wanted to take a look at medications,
I would strongly,
Strongly urge you to talk to a psychiatrist or doctor beforehand.
So the combination of these three things all helped in a tremendous way bring my anxiety levels down from maybe 100% to 20,
25%.
And you're never going to completely get rid of your anxiety.
Doesn't matter how high it is.
Anxiety is simply part of the human experience and that's okay.
But it's just learning to relate to it on a different level.
And those three combinations of things really served as amazing training wheels for me at the time of my life to get me to a point where I could be confident and just simply believe I could be confident.
I think a lot of us go through life hopeless even about that,
About having a positive reflection towards ourselves and the self-esteem issue and just learning to be more hopeful about my own life and less cynical.
So I'm currently not on Zoloft.
I'm not really seeing my therapist as frequently as I was.
That being said,
I'm still totally for both of those resources.
But simply having a mindfulness habit every single day has really,
Really helped me quite a bit.
And like I said,
I think those other two things served as great training wheels.
So yeah,
I'm simply like I said,
This is less of a meditation and simply more of a little perspective of someone who's gone through this.
If you are someone with severe social anxiety,
I just want you to know that there is ways to overcome this.
It's not as hopeless as you think.
I would definitely recommend trying one or all three of the resources that I did to get me through it because my levels were very severe.
And so I'm very confident saying that if I can do this,
Other people can do it as well.
So simply just trying to bring more compassion,
Positivity,
And love and hope into the world.
So Namaste.
Thank you for listening.
