In order to be happy, you have to be able to meet your needs. And though this can be tricky for most people, social anxiety and or generalized anxiety disorder makes it really difficult to meet your own needs. This is because your thoughts and feelings are always focused inward. And because your thoughts are always on how you feel or what other people may think of you, it’s really difficult to form relationships that work.
- Happiness and social anxiety do not mix
- Not being open and honest about your anxiety creates a barrier to forming relationships and being happy in life
- Your thoughts hold the key to your happiness
- The action is always the cure for lack of happiness as is being ready to face your insecurities.
Honesty is always the best policy
This isn’t the only reason why you will find it incredibly difficult to be happy if you have social anxiety, another reason is that you will not be able to be open or honest about what you’re going through, how you feel, what you think, and why you do what you do.
Part of the reason for this is because you lack awareness about why you do what you do. And this isn’t just you, by the way, it’s most people, but social anxiety makes you feel ashamed, self-conscious, and awkward enough to avoid being open and honest about what you’re going through, and this presents a barrier for most people to get through.
The main problem is that if you were able to be open and honest, this helping you to form great relationships with others, you would feel like you are being judged because of what you said to that person. So of course feeling that you’re being judged, will not allow you to do the very thing that allows most of us do have good relationships, and that is to communicate openly and honestly.
A problem shared ….
The other problem is that when you start to talk about your problem, or how you feeling a situation, it increases your paranoia. Here lies the issue. The main way to overcome or better manage your anxiety is to be able to face your fears. But the order to be able to face your fears, you need the help and support of others. In order to be able to get the help and support of others, you need to feel that you not be judged.
You can see the dilemma here then, can you not?
So why is it so hard to let others know what you’re going through?
Part of the difficulty lies in thinking that what you think about yourself you think others are thinking about you. And this starts with the fact that if you have social anxiety, your self-esteem will be incredibly low. Low self-esteem means that you’ll have a low opinion of yourself. And you reason that if you think these things about yourself then other people will think these things about you also, these things typically being something negative about who you are.
Basically, you project onto others what you think about yourself, and other people’s behavior is then used as proof that what you think about yourself is what they think about you. So you can never get away from the fact that you believe other people’s negative judgments of you as being true.
I’ll be happy when…
Something else you may not have thought about is the fact that your happiness is contingent with how other people to use. Of course, we all desire to be treated fine. And very few of us would feel good about ourselves if we were treated badly on a consistent basis. But because of low self-esteem or a low opinion of yourself, you place your happiness in the hands of other people, in how they treat you. So if someone treats you well you can feel good about yourself, but if they treat you badly then that is further proof that you aren’t good enough at some level.
Do you like yourself?
What can also happen as a result of this, is that you will need and the inordinate amount of reassurance from others about your likeability, although the ability and most people are not able to give you that, simply because you won’t believe them.
As you can see, this makes it really difficult for you to boost your self-esteem from what other people say to you, but it’s really easy to lower your self-esteem from how you perceive your being treated.
Another aspect of this problem is that you don’t like yourself. This may sound cheesy or new age but to like and love yourself is key to developing high self-esteem, high levels of confidence, and happiness.
Odds are that if I were to ask you to tell me what you like about yourself you would immediately think of all the things you don’t like about yourself and find it really difficult to verbalize what you actually do like about yourself. And again, this is key to having enough self-esteem to be able to be happy in life.
This is how you can be happy
And that’s what this is all about. Being happy requires that you acknowledge certain good things about you, or should I say have a more balanced view of yourself, in relation to other people, your abilities, your status, your likeability, and your love-ability.
When this is in place you can be happy.
And it’s interesting to note that if you were to ask somebody else who had social anxiety when they could be happy, they would invariably say that they could only be happy when situations or people were different to how they are now.
Having read this far, you understand that social anxiety makes it almost impossible for you to be happy, because your paranoia, your worry, your fear, and your inability to make decent relationships, and sustainable over the long term, in a healthy way, are all the things you need, to be happy.
But it’s not all bad news.
If you read between the lines, you’ll understand that the best way for you to be happy, is to actively do something about your anxiety and/or social anxiety. It really doesn’t matter how big or small step, as long as you are consistently taking some form of action toward achieving more balance within yourself and your perception and then your life.
This could be as simple as understanding that you, or should I say your thoughts, are at the crux of the problem, so sort out your faulty thinking and you will be on your way to being as happy as you can and want to be in your life.
Let’s be no how you get on.