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Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. If you're like me, you might feel a little bit of anxiety in social situations. And you may feel like there's some relief in avoiding social situations. You may have caught yourself like I have in the past thinking, well, I don't actually need sociality 'cause it makes me feel better to avoid it. I like spending time alone. It stresses me out to be around a lot of other people. I do better when I just spend time by myself. But studies show that whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, whether you have social anxiety or not if you're a human, you need social interaction You may doubt this, but the statistics show that loneliness is as dangerous for your health as smoking or obesity. It will actually raise your chances of dying as much as smoking and being obese. So not only does it increase depression, anxiety, anger and other such negative emotions, but it also affects our physical health and thriving. So whether or not we feel like we need it, this is something that we do actually need. Avoiding social interaction may fit, make you feel a little bit better in the short term, but in the long term, this is what happens. Increasing your risk of all cause mortality, increasing depression, anxiety, anger, et cetera. And I'll link these studies in the show notes that show that loneliness is so dangerous, as well as studies that show that people with anxiety tend to have a problem with social connectedness in general. This seems to be really common for people with anxiety, so this is an area that we really do urgently need to work on because science shows us that it is, it is essential for our health to be socially connected, whether in the short term we enjoy it or not. It is something that we need to learn how to navigate better.

So if you feel anxious, if you feel anxiety triggered by being in social situations, then it has to do with the glasses that you are wearing to view sociality. So we've talked before about how stress isn't necessarily bad, there is a healthy response to stress and an unhealthy response to stress. In the media, we tend to hear a one dimensional idea of stress, that stress is bad, but this is not what research shows us. Research on stress in the last 50 years, has really brought out that there is a way to respond to stress that is actually healthy and that will actually increase your ability to perform well. So, as I said a second ago, it has to do with the glasses that you're wearing to view your stress. So research has shown that the type of stress, that stress response that you have, whether healthy or unhealthy, is not actually going to depend on the stressor that you're facing, it depends on the way that you view the stressor, and I'm comparing that to glasses. We don't usually think of our glasses. Those of you who wear them, you don't usually think of them. But they profoundly affect the way that you see the world and the situations that you ex experience. If you change your glasses, then the world will look very different to you. So, what I'm calling glasses is the way that your brain perceives your situation, perceives the stressor. So specifically when we're talking about stress, your brain is trying to measure the demands of the situation in comparison to the resources that it feels like you have access to. And when your brain feels like the resources that you have are not enough for the demands that you're face, and you're going to go into a threat response.

So I'm gonna describe what a threat response looks like in a social situation. See if this describes you. So if you are in a social situation and you are experiencing a threat response, you will feel like you wanna avoid the situation, you wanna feel like you wanna defend yourself from the situation, run away from the situation. So first of all, it's gonna affect the way your motivation, as you are in that situation, what you feel like you want to do. If you're experiencing a threat response in a social situation, you are going to feel anxiety. You're not gonna feel very great about yourself. Your self esteem's gonna be a little bit low. You're going to have feelings of shame and embarrassment. So that's the emotion side of it. As far as your physiology, it will trigger a lot of cortisol being released, which, cortisol as a stress hormone in and of itself isn't bad, but if you have too much of it for too long, it can be really unhealthy. So the, the threat response triggers a, a lot of cortisol. It lowers your cardiac efficiency or the efficiency with which your heart can distribute blood throughout your body. Your blood and oxygen tend to get concentrated in core areas of your body. And this means that there's less blood and oxygen being delivered to your brain. So that means that you can't think as well to be able to respond to conversations, to think of what to say, to think of how to make small talk, to think of how to respond to things that people say to you. And the other thing that happens when you go into a threat response in a social situation is that after it's over, it takes your body a long time to recover from that threat, threat response. Because of the different hormones and the autonomic responses that it triggered, you'll feel exhausted for quite a while after the event. Okay, so that's a social situation in the threat response.
What if when you went into a social situation, even though it's stressful, what if you were able to put on different glasses and have a challenge response? When your brain is able to see that the demands in the situation are not too much for your resources, but that you actually have access to coping resources to meet these demands, then you can go into a challenge response, even though this is a stressful res situation. And what would a challenge response look like in this same social situation? So let's talk first about how it affect your motivation or what you want to do in that situation. So instead of feeling like you wanna avoid the situation or run away from the social social situation, it would make you feel like you wanted to approach the situation. It would make you feel like you had appetite for social interaction. As far as your emotions go, it would make you feel excitement about interacting with people. It would make you feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem be would be up. you'd be more likely to have feelings of confidence than feelings of shame. As far as your physiology in this social situation, it would, it would trigger hormones that are related to thriving and growth. It would increase your, your cardiac efficiency, and it would deliver more blood and oxygen to your brain so that you can think quickly so that you can think of ways to respond and ways to speak to people. You'll be, you'd be able to access your optimal brain performance for thinking of how to interact with people and what to say. And after the situation is over, after the stressor has passed, you would be able to recover quickly from it. It wouldn't take so much out of you. It wouldn't feel so exhausting. You're able to recover to your baseline quickly after the stress. These are just basic profiles of what happens in the challenge response versus the threat response, and I'll, again, I'll link a an article in the show notes that helps you to understand these responses better, how it triggers totally different physiological responses in your body, depending on the glasses that you're using in the stress, depending on how you're, your viewing, your demands and your resources in this social situation.

So if you tend to have anxiety in social situations, it means that you tend to wear glasses where you're seeing your demands in the situation as too much for your resources, and that's why your body goes into all of these different physiological responses. That's why you can't think of what to say. That's why you blush. That's why you sweat. That's why you feel ashamed. That's why you don't feel good about yourself. That's why you feel anxiety. That's why you feel like you wanna run away from this social situation. That's why it takes so much out of you and it takes so long for you to recover after the social situation has passed. So what if you could change your response to this type of stress? You simply need to find a way to help your brain to see the demands in these social situations as not quite so scary and your resources as bigger than what you tend to see them.

So this is something that I've struggled with off and on throughout my life, and I'm gonna tell you about three different ways that I have used that have helped me to switch glasses, that have helped me to switch the way that I view the demands in social situations and my resources in social situations. Okay, so these three different ways I would sum, sum them up as the following: to look for connections, to reduce the unknown, and to accept myself kindly.

All right, let me explain. So first of all, look for connections. When I am in social situations where I find that I don't know the people at all, or I don't know them very well, I have started to notice that my thoughts often include things like these people won't like me. They're so different than me. Or I start thinking about different things that I don't like about these people. And this is a telltale sign that I'm in the threat response. How do I know this? Because the threat response motivates you to want to avoid the stressor. These types of thoughts are avoidance- motivation, thoughts. These are thoughts that make me want to defend myself against people or avoid people because I feel like they're some sort of a threat. They won't like me. They're so different than me. I don't like them. So one thing that I have found that helps switch me out of this avoidance motivation and decrease the way that the demands look to me in the situation is to start trying to find ways that I am connected to these people. So first of all, I sometimes give myself a task to find something that I can like about each person in the room. So maybe I will just like the lipstick that somebody's wearing. Maybe I'll just like somebody's shirt. maybe I will like somebody's voice. Maybe I can find that I like somebody's hairstyle. Just trying to find something that I like about them already switches me out of the avoidance mode and into approach mode because when I like someone, it makes me feel like, more like approaching them, right? So giving myself this job to find something even, even if it's really superficial, even if it's tiny. Just try and find something that I like about the people that I'm with.
So since I also find myself thinking often that these people are so different than me, another thing that I try to do to combat that avoidance motivation thought that makes me want to avoid people 'cause they're so different than me and we won't get each other type thing, is to try and find things that we have in common, right? So this became a lot easier for me after I started studying emotion science and I realized that we've all got really similar equipment. We have this emotion generation system where our brains generate emotions based on our appraisals of the situations or, or in other words, based on the way that we are viewing, the glasses that we have on to see the situation. So when I see people experiencing different emotions, I already know, oh yes, I know why they're experiencing that emotion. It's because their brain is answering certain questions in a certain way. We've talked before about how in every situation our brain is basically trying to answer certain questions: how good or bad is this? Whose fault is it and what should I do, or how is this gonna develop? And so I can look at all these people and I can see, oh, the emotions that they're having are a result of their brains answering these different questions. And so understanding that we all have the same type of brain equipment to generate our emotions already helps me to feel like I have a whole lot in common with everybody in the room. And in fact, I have more in common with them than we have different, because we're all from the same ancestors and we all have this similar equipment. So that's the first thing that I have done to help switch out my glasses, to switch out the way that I view the demands in this situation in relation to my resources: to look for connections with the people.

The second thing that I've done that has really helped me is to find ways to reduce the unknown in the social situations. Anytime we're in a situation where we have a lot of unknowns, we're gonna feel like the demands are probably too big for our resources, because if the demands are unknown, then we can't know how big they are, so how can we possibly know if we have the resources to meet them? And so we're more likely to go into anxiety or a threat response because the demands are unmeasured. So therefore they are probably enormous and we probably don't have enough to meet them. But I've found that if I can find ways to reduce the unknowns in the situation, it reduces my perception of the demands, and I don't feel like they're so scary and so overwhelming. So one thing that I do to reduce the unknowns in social situations is, for example, I set a time limit on the time that I'm gonna be there. So I find that I end up having a lot more anxiety in different social situations, whether I'm at a party someone's invited me to, or a church gathering or a networking event, if I don't know how long it's gonna be, but if I've already decided I'm going to stay at this event for one hour or 45 minutes, then that already helps reduce the nebulousness of it. It reduces the unknowns because I know that I'm, I am only going to be here for this amount of time.

Another thing that sometimes helps me to reduce the unknowns in a social situation is to prepare ahead of time different things that I might say in conversation. For example, if I'm going to a birthday party or a networking event where I'm not gonna know people, then it can help me to think ahead of time of two or three topics that I can kind of go to, or dif, two or three questions that I can use to start up conversations or anticipate different topics that different people might talk to me about, and rehearse my responses. Because preparing ahead of times really helps me. when I am in a social situation and I'm already in that threat response, then the blood flow is already getting reduced to my brain and that just makes it a lot harder for me to think of how to start up a conversation, how to make small talk, how to respond to questions that people ask to me. But if I've rehearsed it ahead of time, then it makes it a lot easier. It's a little bit automated. It's easier for me to grab it and say it in the moment. So that helps me to feel more confident going into the social situation because I feel like there's less unknowns.

Another way that I have worked on reducing the unknowns in the situation is to be aware of the goals that I have as I go into a social situation and make sure that I'm choosing goals that are within my control. So I've noticed as I've really paid attention, that a lot of times goals that I have as I'm going into a social situation include being able to impress other people, being able to come across as interesting or confident or any of those things. But that's not something that I can really control because I don't, I can't control how someone else is going to perceive me, and so that's going to have a lot of unknowns and make me really anxious. But if instead I can go into a social situation with a, a really concrete goal that I have control over, like I am going to try and engage with at least three people and really make an effort to understand who they are and where they're coming from, that's something that I can control, 'cause it's something that doesn't depend on another person. I can do that. And so that reduces uncertainty. So these are different ways to that I've used to reduce the unknown, right? To set a time limit, to prepare things I'm gonna say ahead of time, and to set goals that I can control in the situation. Be aware of my goals, and steer clear from the goals that I can't control.

The third thing that I found that helps me is to accept myself kindly. So it used to be I would go into social situations sometimes, and I would start blushing, or I would sweat. And then somebody would comment about the fact that I'm blushing, and I'm so embarrassed. and I'm feeling so critical of myself at the fact that I'm feeling anxious. And so I've got this self critic really going at myself on top of all of the anxiety that I'm feeling from the social situation. So not only am I feeling attacked from without, but I'm also feeling attacked from within. But we've talked before about how beneficial it is to accept your anxiety, to just embrace it, to just be okay with it, and how this really turns off the struggle switch. Because when you, a lot of times what keeps anxiety high is trying to keep it low. So if I, instead of struggling against the fact that I get sweaty hands and I blush and I don't know how to stand and I don't know what to do with my hands in the social situations, instead of feeling critical of myself that I feel this way, if instead I just watch myself through the social situation in the way that I would watch one of my kids or one of my friends, I would just be mindful of the fact that this situation was hard for them and I would be cheering for them trying to make it through the situation. I wouldn't be critical of the fact that they're blushing or sweating. I would just be trying to accept them with compassion. I would see what they're up against and what they're trying to do. So that's one thing that I have found helps me is just to go into the situation already trying to be okay with the fact that I'm gonna feel and look awkward. I'm just gonna observe myself with com, with compassion. We've talked before about trying to think of yourself not as a cloud, but as the sky. So a lot of times we feel anxious and we identify with the anxiety saying, I am anxious, rather than saying, I have an anxious feeling. So that's like saying, I am this cloud of anxiety, rather than identifying yourself with the sky who is watching this cloud pass through it. So I try to have that sky perspective where I see the, the cloud of anxiety passing through me. I recognize that I'm blushing or that I'm sweating, or that I'm feeling anxious or that I don't know what to say or what I just said sounded weird, and I don't know how to hold my hands, and I don't know if I should put them in my pockets or put them on my waist, but it doesn't overwhelm me because as I observe it in this way, sort of from a distance as if I'm the sky and watching this cloud of anxiety pass through me, I realize that it doesn't define me. It's just something that I'm experiencing and it's not, it becomes something that's not overwhelming and unmeasured because there's part of me that can observe myself feeling this discomfort. This experience of anxiety isn't the sum total of all of my experience. It's not all of my awareness, because I'm able to be aware of watching myself go through it.

So those are the three things that I have done to try and switch out my glasses and see my resources and demands differently in social situations, to look for connections with other people, to reduce the unknowns and to accept myself kindly. These three things help reduce that sense of threat because they bring down the demands and make them look way less scary to where my resources can actually meet them. And then I am more often able to get into a challenge response where I can actually have these beneficial effects, physiological effects where my performance in this social situation can be facilitated because the blood flow to my brain is actually increased, and the hormones, there's special hormones released to help me to meet the stressor and helps me to feel like meeting it, feel like approaching these people and feel excited to approach these people.

So there is actually a way to switch your stress response in social situations and in all kinds of stressful situations. It has to do with the glasses with which you are seeing the situation, the way that you view your demands versus your resources. And if you can find a way to make your resources look more robust to your brain and makee the demands look less scary, then you will have a chance to switch out your glasses and be able to see your demands and resources as on par with each other.

Well, once you understand the principle that it's about your demands and your resources, then you can experiment with other ways to try and help your brain to switch the way that it sees your resources in relation to your demands. There are limitless numbers of strategies to help your brain to switch the way that you view your demands and resources, and thus the way that you deal with stress. Understanding the principle of how it works helps you to experiment and come up with new strategies even.

But I just wanted to tell you about these three different strategies that I use, that I have used. See if they might help you to understand how to use similar strategies for yourself in social situations where you are feeling anxiety. So that's what I have for you today. Thanks so much for listening, and have a good week.