From the time you wake up to the time you fall asleep you will be bombarded with messages from all different sources. It’s interesting to me that depending on your emotions on that particular day a different set of messages will paid atention to by your mind.
To see how easily someone can be influenced by day to day information just watch this video by Derren Brown.
For the sake of simplicity lets take a couple of extremes. First off you wake up and you feel great, you sit at the breakfast table eating and completely miss the section on the news about the world’s latest financial disaster. Then you go off to work you see happy people everywhere and come across friends you haven’t seen in a while. At work you make great progress on the latest project and get commended by you boss. At the end of the day you head home feeling great, a song comes on the radio that reminds you of some happy memory. You get home and you make (or someone else makes) some tasty food. By this point I think you get the picture, you feel good and you pay attention to good things.
Lets assume a groundhog day situation. The same day happens again in everyway except this time your mood is foul. You wake up looking at the clock wondering why you have to get up so damn early. As you prepare breakfast you spill your tea and burn your toast. A report comes on the news about the worlds latest financial crisis and you dwell on how things could ever have gotten this bad. You drive to work and spend the day sluggish and unmotivated missing a number of deadlines. Everywhere there are people that seem to annoy you. At the end of the day you drive home and the chatter of the radio host irritates you. Arriving home you find you still have to make dinner (or wait for it to be prepared).
Here I was trying to demonstrate something. You can have the same set of events but how you view them is going to be determined by your emotions, which, in turn are created by the beliefs you hold. Your brain is essentially a very advanced filtering mechanism driven by your mind.
Now taking this in the context of social anxiety. If you go into any social situation with a set of beliefs and emotions that aren’t suitable, you view of the whole situation changes. Back in the days where I used to suffer from social anxiety, I would approach any social situation from mixtures of dread, panic, fear, anxiety, pressure etc. These days I can still go into the exact same situations but because I’m now looking at the world through curiosity, excitement, fun and openess things turn out totally differently.
By taking control of my own belief system I could make the changes I needed to to see life in the way I desired which didn’t involve any social anxiety at all. This is the hardest part of any personal change process. Getting out of a mentality where you give the world around you the power to change you in any random way that takes place and into a mentality where you use your own mind to create the world around you. After that things become a lot clearer and simpler. What will it take for you to make the decision to take control of your life?
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