First, I transitioned from an engineering role into sales engineering which meant I was meeting new people, running meetings, etc. every day. That exposure made me pretty comfortable with conversation and meeting new people.
Second, and I think more important, is to develop a much greater sense of self-acceptance and comfort. I think a lot of my anxiety was based having some implicit sense that social interaction were performative. I would often approach them with this feeling that I had to do the right thing, say the right thing, leave an impression on them that I designed in my head like being funny, likeable, or smart. Eventually I just learned to accept myself more, let myself say dumb things or make bad jokes. Ultimately you can't control what people think of you, so you may as well just do your thing, and if you aren't happy with your thing then you need to work on that first.
But the wrong level of exposure may lead to an escape and reinforce the problem. So don’t start with e.g. going on stage like you don’t start lifting with 100kg.
Same for unattended anxiety, it reinforces automagically without proper reflection.
It should also be noted that anxiety as a set of sensations and mood isn’t equal to inaction. The mistake people often make is equating it. “I fear so I’m not going there”. Pushing through fear is a fundamental skill. I’d say that anxiety is when you avoid fears instead of avoiding bad situations — there it is born. Exposure is about being exposed.
I’m anxious af if that matters. Just woke up today with another flush. Although it isn’t anywhere near the seemingly unexplainable levels I had two years ago, before researching it.
I know a lot of people with mental illness. Probably more than without, actually. Some are on medication and/or therapy. But all the more functional ones accept it as a part of who they are, and still try to build a life and relationships on top of it. Mental health is just a part of your overall life, alongside physical health, relationships, work and personal goals, etc. Yes, depression can make all of that a lot harder, especially to start. But it can get better, and professionals can help, but sometimes it's also a bit of a chicken and egg situation too in that it can only improve if you force it to, but it's hard to force it to when you're depressed.
Depression sucks, but it doesn't have to define your life forever. Hang in there and keep trying :/
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Edit: my partner had this to add about the social anxiety part: Will yourself to go to events and choose not to feel bad about them, no matter what happens there. Give yourself permission to fuck up and not be charming or funny or anything and just focus on enjoying the event for yourself without worrying about what others might think. Fuck 'em. You're there for you.
It's like the OP said, it's a lot easier when you don't worry about being liked.
Mindfulness also allows you to analyze your anxiety and over time you will realise that your thoughts just aren't right most of the time, you can and should ignore them. Meditation helps training mindfulness (doesn't even need to be done regularly in my experience).
If you can't do these by yourself, seek help from a therapist. CBT is said to work although I have no experience with it.
Social anxiety robbed me from more than 10 years of my life, but now that it's (almost) gone, I feel so free. Best of luck to everyone suffering from it, it does get better.
Putting myself in an uncomfortable situation tends to make it slightly easier the next time, and then a bit better the next time.
I think, for me, the anxiety is the unknown of the situation and what to do or how to act and how people will respond. Getting some reps seems to help.
Second, embrace anxiety. Exit the thought loop of worry people can see your anxiety by saying to yourself, "Y,es it might be visible to others, oh well. Nothing to do but push through it. And who cares. It's reality" You'll be surprised how much anxiety ceases to care about you when you fear it less.
It really was exposure, just putting myself in a public place and having small interactions with those around me. It helps going to the same spot frequently and becoming a regular because then the environment isn’t intimidating. Another big key was not expecting anything out of interactions. Most people you talk to you will never see again and that’s total fine! In fact, it makes it easier to put yourself out there with the right perspective. You have nothing to lose!
It is my understanding that this probably won't be reached for many anyway. After having gone to therapy for 2 years we considered me free from social anxiety. But there are still situations I try to evade or when I blush. But my quality of life skyrocketed and I'm 95% free of symptoms. Your core beliefs won't just go away, you're child hood trauma as well. It's engrained and I think we have to learn to live with it.
It has some really great exercises, and it goes from easy to difficult
It’s a pretty good read, but by far the most important thing is to do the exercises
If you want to try to out, google a book summary, find the intro (there are some on GitHub), and follow the 3 suggested exercises in the intro for a couple of days/weeks
That book literally changed my life
There is this list of questions, 10-20 questions depending upon where you get them, the Cognitive Distortion Checklist. These simple questions you ask yourself, and if you answer 'yes' to any of them then you are lying to yourself in your self conversation. And the amazing part about deception, once aware of it that method of deception no longer deceives!
Now, social anxiety is a form of self deception. Your self conversation is exaggerating negative potential outcomes of a social situation while simultaneously minimizing potential positive outcomes of that same social situation. While in truth the negatives are nowhere as strong as your self conversation indicates and the positives are significantly higher.
And this does not just work for social anxiety. This idea, this concept of self auditing one's self conversation is extremely powerful and is how one prepares and manages stressful and critically important activities and decisions. It's a personal revolution everyone needs to have.
In other words, (c)ognitive and (b)ehavioral components of CBT were contradicting each other. And that's where exposure was helpful--it allowed me to behaviorally validate that my cognitive distortions were real.
By which I mean that exposing myself to social interactions when all cells of my body wanted to escape, gradually convinced me about the things you mentioned: that the negatives are nowhere as strong and the positives are much, much higher.
Deconstructing and reconsolidating my early childhood trauma.
I just accepted that social anxiety is a natural part of a human being and went on living my life.
Psychology/CBT says that we have so called "core beliefs"--i.e. convictions we hold, that we're not really aware of as they are embedded deep in our minds.
For instance, if one of our core beliefs is "the world is a bad place and people are hostile", we can by default perceive other people as potential threats and feel anxious/afraid/endangered.
Now, ChatGPT has the system prompt "I'm ChatGTP, ...." that's hidden from us.
IMVHO that system prompt is like a core belief. Or vice versa--our core beliefs are like ChatGPT's system prompts.
And CBT can be thought as sandbox escape/prompt injection. If we find a way to override the system prompt, we can effectively change it!
Of course it's just a shallow analogy, but maybe someone will find it useful!
It's the gold standard SSRI for social anxiety for a reason. I've suffered from social anxiety since I was 15 or so, and a tiny pill made it disappear within a month. All of my physical symptoms (shaking, inability to speak, panic attacks, etc) disappeared pretty much immediately. Over the following months, the psychological side of it started to fade too.
Conversations became significantly easier, I started speaking more, making jokes, sharing opinions. I haven't had a chance to do any public speaking but I honestly think I could do it, even in front of a huge crowd, with basically no issues at this point. A year ago I.. I don't know what would have happened if I tried. I'd probably have fainted!
I also lost my severe fear of spiders, which I wasn't expecting, and a variety of other anxieties I wasn't aware I had. Apparently I struggled a bit with crowds and crossing the road. I hadn't been aware of that until suddenly both felt significantly easier.
However, it isn't perfect, and depending on how long you've had issues with social anxiety, there is likely to be work to do. What was left for me was a decade of coping strategies and beliefs that no longer applied or were necessary, and were actively harming me (keeping me isolated, basically) – and that's what the therapy has been helping with. That will take a bit longer, but they're being chipped away at slowly.
There are also side effects. I get some of them. They're not ideal, but they're worth the trade-off for me.
I read a comment similar to this about a year ago and that's why I sought a diagnosis and a prescription. It might not work for you but if you're struggling and you haven't tried it yet, go speak to your doctor or book an appointment for an initial assessment with a psychiatrist. There's really nothing to lose and I wish I'd started on this when I was 20, not when I was 30. I can't imagine where my life, career, relationships, etc, would be if I had...
Why is this important to you? Are there things you want to do that you feel you cannot because of this anxiety? Do you feel you are missing out things because of this anxiety? What situations cause this anxiety?
Unless you feel you are being negatively impacted by this anxiety, which may be true, you should not be worried or overwhelmed about feeing uneasy in certain situations. Once you can isolate certain areas for improvement you can begin to improve. You can't do everything at once.
Therapy is only the first step to give you the capabilities to allowing you to effectively “expose” yourself to more social situations like many others have already commented.
I also went on an SSRI a few years ago which I swore off for a decade+. It’s been huge for me, something I wish I had been more open-minded about a lot early. Even with therapy and tons of exposure therapy, I still had crippling social anxiety. With medication, I feel… normal.
This means saying yes to events and participating as much as possible, even though I personally didn't care for it.
I've learnt a lot about myself (and others) by doing this.
I joined Toastmasters as a “hail Mary” and spent about a decade as a regular member.
I ended up serving as President of multiple clubs, Area Governor managing five clubs, and even started the very first Toastmasters club on my university’s campus.
Toastmasters helped me get most of the way there, but even with a decade of what was essentially exposure therapy, I still faced moments of uncontrollable panic in a lot of social/presentation situations.
I went on an SSRI a few years ago and take a sliver of Propranolol before big presentations at work. Toastmasters helped me get 75% there—the meds take me the rest of the way.
As an impressionable kid (~14 y/o) being taugh so much by such competent people instilled in me confidence in my skills and myself. The social anxiety was soon gone and after 5 years of that school I have a very good friend group who share my interests and I will cherish until I die.
TLDR: Be confident in yourself and what you can do.
1) Age: I don't think I can overstate how much of a difference this makes in terms of not just your own emotional maturity, but also that of the people around you. It was much harder for me in high school and early college than later in life. In my late 30s now, and my friends groups just have zero drama and are mutually supportive as best as we can be. Just waiting can make it better, slowly over time.
2) Dating (usually online) and suffering through a shit ton of rejections in my early 20s, but still doing it over and over, just to meet more and different kinds of people. It hurt a lot at first but eventually it got to the point where I could walk away and say "OK, thanks for the transparency and the fun dinner! Best of luck in your search". It always stings a little, but you get over it and hopefully learn a little from it.
3) Forcing myself to try new things, with new people, across many swaths of society. I line danced with wannabe cowboys (and some real ones), sat in on city council planning meetings, planted trees, volunteered at nonprofits, attended Navy environmental reviews, joined a Wiccan meetup, went salsa dancing at the Mexican restaurants, joined a swim club, went rock climbing, rode my bike to a naked campfire, work-traded at a yoga studio, worked at different jobs from coding to farming to trailbuilding, played D&D with friends, went to house parties, did karaoke sober, joined dinner groups and dance groups with older people, played video games with frat kids... all in a few years. (Didn't get much homework done, heh.) For contrast, in years past I also spent the better part of a year as a depressed and suicidal teenager, at home, with almost zero human contact. I had to put in very deliberate effort, not being a natural extrovert, very shy and with a poor command of spoken English at the time.
4) All of the above, combined, led me to the most important development: making and keeping awesome friends. I have only three friends who code, and dozens more from different walks of life. They added so much warmth and comfort and love and acceptance to my life, especially the women who I had platonic relationships with (it is possible! and yes feelings can happen, but you just deal with them maturely and fairly for both parties).
Eventually you meet enough people and spend enough time with them to learn the best, most liberating lesson of them all: You're just not that special :) And that's totally okay! We all have our hang ups and fuck ups, and have made our share of mistakes. Try to love and forgive and understand other points of view, put yourself in their shoes, etc. and eventually the rest just kinda fall into place. Eventually you start to realize that everyone else is equally, if not more, anxious about one or more things in their lives. Even people I once imagined were social butterflies had hangups I thought were really silly but seriously scared them. And as much as I've grown, there are still situations that would make me super anxious.
Now, most of the above only really applies if you're relatively within the norms (however you define them) of society. I have friends who are on the spectrum to various degrees, for example, and it's much harder for some of them. They also cope in other, non-social ways that don't work for me. I can't speak more to that because I haven't lived through it.
But in general, just facing your discomforts one by one, repeatedly, and trying to learn from each one. FEEL each one and accept it and grow from it. It's not easy, but do what you can, and it'll be worth it however far you get!
'How did you overcome social anxiety?'
to strangers and to myself.
