It’s truly amazing the power of mindfulness has had in my life.
Not only for overcoming social anxiety, but in ALL areas of my life.
This is exactly why I’m such a proponent of the mindful approach to overcoming social anxiety and to living one’s life.
It’s really that profound and powerful as a “social anxiety cure“, as it were.
But you see, mindfulness isn’t a “technique”. It’s a way of living.
Even when I teach mindfulness methods via exercises, it’s all to cultivate mindfulness as a new way of thinking, breathing, moving, sitting, standing, walking…being.
This is hard to understand conceptually, that is until you discover how to experience mindfulness on a regular basis so that social anxiety no longer has a hold on you.
The mind is very, very powerful, as you well know by now as someone with social anxiety; someone who has a hard time getting control of your mind and your social phobia.
But the way in which we use our mind is the key to whether we live under the umbrella of stress, anxiety, depression (insert your negative state here) or with overall happiness, joy, gratitude and contentment.
Often times you’ll hear people say “you just need to get out of your head!” This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Certainly you shouldn’t be only living in your head, but these approaches attempt to dumb down your mind, which is just another form of psychological repression.
What needs to happen is to re-integrate the mind with the emotions and body in a entirely new way.
This is the basis of the mindful approach to living.
The way we’ve been taught to use our minds in the West, tends to be a method of “all in the head”, analysis-paralysis thinking, break-fix, conquer and succeed, achieve, do more and more until you’re worn out and then you’ll be happy.
This is the unskillful use of the mind for well-being. It has many terms such as: fighting mind, negative mind, negative committee, busy mind, mind chatter, caught in my head, automatic negative thinking, the list goes on and on, insert your own term here.
This way of thinking in which most of us have been raised and bought into, is a flawed model of how to use the mind for living a low-stress life and for living from a place of happiness, unfortunately.
But luckily with mindfulness at the foundations of a new life, you can train yourself into a much better mode of operation that acts naturally as a social anxiety cure, and also to treat the related anxiety and depression.
It doesn’t mean you won’t feel anxiety at times, or sad or angry – that is simply part of being human.
But plenty of psychological research show that allowing our reactions to be as they are, frees us up from them behaviorally, and depotentiates the neural pathways that continue generating a miserable state of living, aka social anxiety.
So if mindfulness is not a technique, then what is it?
Mindfulness is a way to use your mind that includes all of your experience, and accepts you as you are in the moment.
It accepts what’s happening in your environment and around you, and is a total integration of your mind, body and emotions as it were.
You are synchronized in a way, that even though you’ll get thrown off center, you come back to center quickly and deal with whatever comes your way, internally or externally.
Mindfulness is a way of where you become much more still internally, develop true internal power (instead of seeking outside validation/control/power), and become far more relaxed into yourself than you ever imagined.
If you want to learn some methods to start practicing mindfulness and go for the real deal social anxiety cure, I’ve got a free video series on social anxiety recovery right here, which includes mindfulness practices along with suggestions for doing exposure therapy and more.
To get on the fast track in retraining your mind and body away from social anxiety and into the life you desire; including mindfulness, belief work, creating your new life story, doing exposure therapy, retraining your breathing, learning how to truly self-accept, and loads more…then check out the Dissolve Social Anxiety home-recovery program.
It’s a lot of work for sure, but if you do it, your life will drastically change for the better.
