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Understanding what causes social anxiety can give you an amazing insight into how to overcome it. Especially when you learn how social anxiety can be maintained later in life.

This in-depth article will clear up some of the confusion that comes with trying to figure all of this out and help you understand why you feel the way you feel while making it clear as to what the solution is.

My Story

I know how baffling social anxiety can feel…

Questions like:

“Why am I so anxious around others?

Why am I so shy?

Why do I blush so easily?

How did my social anxiety problem start?

Why am I like this?” used to plague my mind.

Over the years, I’ve learned the slew of negative and sometimes extreme emotions that come with a severe case of social anxiety can keep someone in the dark about getting to the root of the issue.

I spent many years turning in circles trying to grasp WHY I was going through this.

For me personally, some of the worse parts of my social anxiety were when I had no idea as to why I was having such awkward, strange and shameful reactions in social situations when others didn’t seem to have the same affliction as me.

This made me feel even worse about myself. I kept wondering if I was broken from the inside out… Was something not correctly working in my brain? Was this awkward behaviour going to continue in social situations for the rest of my life?

These thoughts straight out scared me to death!

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Another thing that made everything worse was searching for answers on the internet…

Terms like “mental disorder” and “mental illness” were popping up everywhere and this convinced me that something was physically wrong with my brain .

To top it off, my family suggested that I go see a psychotherapist to help me deal with this problem and her solution: anti-depressants!

She too had fed me the story that my social anxiety was a result of what she diagnosed as a “chemical imbalance in my brain”.

Needless to say, I fell into a major depressive episode for more than a year after that…

I even became housebound for a 10-month period thinking that nothing I would try could help my situation because my problem was physical in nature…

At that point, even talking to friends or my own family members was producing a level of anxiety so high that I used alcohol almost everytime I would step outside of my front door .

But despite all this, these extremely painful experiences brought me to one of the most important realization of my life; that since the medication solution did not work at ‘fixing’ my brain, maybe the diagnosis was wrong…

This led me on a journey to try and figure out for myself what was really going on.

Instead of blindly accepting what other people told me was the problem, I would research and learn about the real root causes of social anxiety and shyness until I developed a clear blueprint of its mechanics.

To my surprise, what I found was both shocking and intensely liberating .

Shocking because I delved deep into the world of psychiatry and prescription medication and found out that a lot of the information concerning social anxiety (and most of the other so-called “mental illness”) was outdated and disproven.

The so-called “chemical imbalance in the brain” theory wasn’t backed by proof and was used to push drugs onto unsuspecting victims that had been fed the same damaging theories I had been exposed to.

I uncovered that the reason why this “chemical imbalance in the brain” theory was still the main diagnosis given as to why people have social anxiety today was that it was the only way that the medication solution could work.

Think about it… taking medication to “cure” social anxiety only makes sense if the cause is biological in nature (that something is physically wrong with your brain), instead of being environmental (your past experiences, your habits, the choices you make and how you live your life).

I’m no conspiracy theorist and I know this sound kind of cooky… But feel free to see for yourself. Entire websites, documentaries, books and articles were created to expose this very thing.

And liberating because I figured out that the shyness and social anxiety I felt on a daily basis could actually be reversed. I wasn’t stuck like this! You can change if you choose to.

But one of the most important things you can do to overcome social anxiety and shyness is to learn why you have it because it will reveal how to destroy it for good.

Overview

There are 3 main parts to fully understanding how our problem came about. Before we go deeper into it, I want to give you a brief introduction to the 3 parts so that the content can be better understood.

Part 1: Childhood Programming

The childhood programming process encompasses the very first events from your life that laid the path to you developing a social phobia later in life.

These events may be scarce and difficult to pinpoint because most of them probably happened a long time ago and might not have seemed like a big deal at the time.

This programming basically set the foundation for all your future beliefs, principles and “filters” through which you see the world.

Part 2: Getting Sensitized To Social Situations

Part 2 is all about explaining why and how negative social experiences can eventually lead you to feel an elevated level of anxiety in future social situations.

Part 3: What Maintains And Fuels The Problem

In the final part, I’ll show you how the (often unconcious ) actions and behaviours we take in reaction to our feelings of anxiety is actually maintaining and possibly growing the very problem we are trying to get rid of.

Part 1: Childhood Programming

What Is Childhood Programming?

Everybody feels anxious in social situations from time to time.

Don’t believe me? Then consider the fact that North American’s number one fear is the fear of public speaking.

But normal shyness and social anxiety (the one everybody feels from time to time) can transform into a phobia.

Childhood programming is where the first steps are taken for that transformation to take place.

It’s where the seeds of “disordered social anxiety” (the type that destroys someone’s life) are planted.

These seeds may or may not grow into a full-blown social anxiety problem, but it sets the path to make it easier for a social phobia to develop.

Why is that? Why do some people develop a social phobia while others don’t? In order to see how our problem started, we most likely have to travel way back in someone’s life in order to get the full story.

The problem of disordered social anxiety does not just appear out of nowhere at any time. One must have had a past conditioning that shaped his or her view of the world in order to make it more probable to develop a social phobia in the future. This past conditioning is what we call our childhood programming.

It encompasses all of the messages, principles, and “rules” about ourselves, the world and other people , that we inherited as young children from our environment, the people around us and our experiences.

Added Fear Surrounding Social Interactions

Obviously, not everyone’s beliefs, qualms and philosophy about others and how we relate to them will be the same. But what’s important to understand about your childhood programming is that:

Most likely than not, for some reason or another, you learned at a young age that social interactions were ‘dangerous’.

Not dangerous in the sense that you might get killed if you talk to the wrong person…

But dangerous in the sense that you put extra pressure on yourself to please others, perform well and always look your best in front of others.

In other words, your childhood programming set you up to feel added emotional pain towards embarrassment, humiliation, negative social experiences or rejection.

Finding out the exact messages or events that caused you to feel this way may be very difficult to pinpoint since most of them happened when you were just a kid.

But identifying the exact events from your early life that may have caused you to develop disordered social anxiety is NOT crucial to overcoming your phobia .

What is important to understand though is that these events probably influenced you to take part in certain types of behaviours (like avoidance and control behaviours) that would further increase the likelihood of a social phobia to arise later in your life.

This is because although these events may be what started us down this path, they are not what is keeping our social anxiety and shyness at such a high level today.

The way we react when fear and anxiety shows up has a tremendously bigger impact on determining our overall level of anxiety in social situations.

But if you’re completely in the fog about what events may have led you to feel added pain socially, here are 6 common examples.

6 Examples That May Have Pushed Us To Develop Disordered Social Anxiety:

(These examples are in no particular order of importance.)

Getting Bullied

Getting bullied can make us feel unworthy of others and really play on our overall level of confidence.

Sexual Abuse

Being sexually abused can negatively skew our relationship with the people surrounding us. It can also make us feel as if we always have something to hide and leave us afraid of “being exposed”, especially if the abuse is kept a secret.

A higher level of shame is also a common result of being sexually abused.

Parents Divorcing

Feeling guilty for a divorce can impact the way we deal with friends or relationships in the future.

It plays on the individual relationship that we have with the people that are supposed to be our most trusted; our parents. Often, parents will talk in each other’s back and it doesn’t set a very positive example of what a healthy relationship looks like.

Being Raised Far From Human Contact

Having very little human contact can leave someone’s social skills “out of practice” and make it more difficult for somebody to make friends.

Having Overly Critical Parents

Having parents that are always criticizing can create the mindset that one always has to “perform” in order to get love from others. This can lead to making you feel extra nervous in social situations because you always feel judged.

Physical Abuse

This can be extremely damaging since you develop the mindset that nobody can be trusted, even the people that are closest to you.

These were only a few examples to show you how events from our past (even some that seem trivial on the surface) can influence some of our behaviours in the future.

It’s important to understand that the events listed above should NOT be viewed as the sole reason why you have severe social anxiety today …

Many people experienced similar or even worst events without developing such an acute social fear.

We cannot change these events, they happened and they are part of our past.

Yes, some of them may have led us down a collision path with elevated social anxiety, but as you’ll see later, other, more important factors, ultimately dictate how much social anxiety you will feel.

Snowball Effect

Just like the snowball effect (starts as a tiny ball and gets bigger and bigger as time goes on), our social anxiety probably developed in a very similar way:

Our childhood programming created uncertainty around social interactions.

This led us to feel accentuated pain during social fumbles or when experiencing rejection.

This accentuated pain led us to try to further avoid having similar events happen again.

We then started to engage in protective measures (avoidance).

This led to feeling even more anxiety in social situations.

Which led to even more avoidance, creating a vicious cycle of retreat.

This then keeps us in a perpetual state of abnormally high social anxiety.

So now, I want to show you how we get sensitized to social situations.

Part 2: How We Get Sensitized To Social Situations

In part 1, we explored how your past history may have set you up to feel intensified pain when you experience social fumbles, get embarrassed or get rejected.

In this part, I will show you how this added emotional pain can lead us to fear social situations in the future.

Turning Social Fumbles Into Social Catastrophes

Feeling more pain towards rejection and embarrassment leads you to experience what most people would consider “normal social fumbles” as painfully humiliating “social traumas” that leaves you feeling ashamed of yourself.

What someone else might call “a little embarrassing event” is viewed and felt more negatively for you because of your childhood programming.

People with a social phobia are masters at turning everyday normal social situations into a big deal.

What would normally feel like a 4 or 5 on the emotional pain spectrum for most people (1 being very little and 10 being the most), is felt like a 6 or even a 7 for us when we socialize.

Always looking our best and not having others dislike us is important to us since this is what our childhood programmed us to believe.

And it is this heightened scrutiny surrounding social interactions that make us experience social fumbles as social catastrophes.

Your Past Painful Social Experiences Can Leave A “Pain Imprint” On Your Memory That Sensitizes You To Social Situations

Because we are prone to feel a higher level of emotional pain when faced with rejection or social embarrassment due to the atmosphere or events that happened during our childhood, our personal experience of negative social events produces a bigger emotional impact on our brain.

These social incidents/events can act as a “trauma” that leaves a “pain imprint” on your memory that makes you more weary in social situations.

A social trauma is an incident or incidents that caused you lots of emotional pain in the form of embarrassment or humiliation.

Have you ever experienced a situation so embarrassing that you still sometimes think about it even till this day?

I know I have.

Negative situations like these can often feel so bad that they are what caused us to start trying to avoid social situations.

This happens because naturally, we want to keep more deeply humiliating events from happening again in the future.

These socially “traumatizing” events are often some of the most awkward and embarrassing situations that we found ourselves in.

Maybe you blushed or started sweating profusely in front of the class while doing a presentation.

Maybe you “froze” while talking to a guy or girl that you were attracted to.

Whatever the situation was, it’s important to understand that your brain isn’t very good at differencing emotional pain from physical pain. All that it sees is that whatever happened “hurt” you profoundly.

Take the classic example of putting your hand on a hot stove… The physical pain you felt acts as a quick lesson to “NOT DO THAT EVER AGAIN”.

Similarly, when you experience pain (in the form of emotions), your brain quickly internalizes that the lesson is to not repeat what caused the pain … in this case social humiliation.

Another example that can help illustrate this process is when someone develops a phobia of driving after having suffered a car accident.

Although the circumstances and specific events that took place are very different, the mechanics behind the phobia are almost exactly the same.

The person that was involved in the car crash suffered extreme levels of pain (both physically and emotionally) so its only natural for them to feel very weary about getting behind the wheel again.

But a very similar thing happens after experiencing a painfully humiliating social incident; we become weary of having the same thing happen in the future…

The painful social incidents act as a warning that makes you view social situations as dangerous (which triggers your fight or flight response, a.k.a anxiety).

What Is The Fight Or Flight Response? The fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response, refers to a physiological reaction that occurs in the presence of something that is scary. The response is triggered by the release of hormones that prepare your body to either stay and deal with a threat or to run away to safety.



It’s an ancient self-defence mechanism that was passed down by our ancestors in order to help us survive when faced with danger. The term ‘fight-or-flight’ represents the two choices that we often resort to in order to deal with a threat. We can either fight the threat or flee the threat. In either case, the physiological and psychological response to stress prepares the body to react to the danger.

Just like someone that develops a fear of dogs after getting bitten by one, you develop a fear of social situations after getting hurt (emotionally) by one.



Because you have experienced trauma or accentuated pain in social situations before, it is only natural that you will dread those situations in the future.

The pain has been imprinted on your memory for future reference.

This is how we get sensitized to social situations…

Socially anxious people are more sensitive to experiencing humiliation, rejection or embarrassment because we have been hurt by these events in our past.

Anticipation Of New Social Incidents

This “emotional pain imprint” serves to make you aware of an “impending danger” (i.e. future social situations).

You start to equate “social situations” with “dreaded and dangerous possible outcome”.

So the social anxiety that you feel day in and day out is simply your brain trying to protect you.

It finds experiences from your past (especially the ones that hurt you the most) and determines that another social incident is likely to happen unless something is done to deter the perceived threat .

This is where control behaviours come in.

In the next part, ill be showing you how the control behaviours that you use in an attempt to either keep the anxiety at a minimum or prevent another deeply hurtful humiliating events from happening, are actually keeping your anxiety alive and thriving.

Part 3: What Maintains And Fuels The Problem

What Are Control Strategies?

Control strategies, also known as control behaviours, protective measures or escapism tactics, are any actions that you take in order to do one of two things:

Prevent more embarrassing or humiliating events from happening (i.e an awkward situation). Eliminate or decrease your feelings of anxiety.

Here’s a video of me explaining what control behaviours are.



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Note: most of the time, your control strategies have the intended purpose of accomplishing both of these things at the same time.

It’s also important to note that we most often practice these protective measures “in reaction” to something rather than consciously taking action. In other words; these protective measures happen unconsciously.

It’s is an automatic response that our body has conjured up in order to try to protect us from a perceived danger.

“Perceived” is an important word here since the situations we are talking about do not pose an immediate or tangible threat to our lives…

Social situations are perceived as a treat for us because we have been hurt emotionally by them in our past .

Another degradingly humiliating event is what our control strategies seek to prevent and protect us from.

In order to help you know exactly what the heck I’m talking about when I say “control behaviours”, I put together a list of 10 common ones below.

List of 10 commonly used control strategies:

Avoiding answering the phone because it makes you anxious.

Lying to a friend and making up a bogus excuse as to why you cannot attend his birthday.

Taking the long way home on your way from school/work to avoid a crowded area.

Faking an illness as the reason why you cannot show up to work on the day you had a presentation to do.

Avoiding eye contact.

Choosing a career based on social factors (such as if it will require you to do a lot of talking with others).

Drinking alcohol at a social gathering to try and subdue your mounting anxiety.

Asking lots of question during a conversation in order to avoid bringing attention to yourself or having to talk.

Choosing to eat lunch alone rather than with the rest of your coworkers.

Avoiding bright-lite places in an attempt to try and mask a possible blushing episode.

Control Strategies Are The #1 Maintaining Factor Of All Phobias, Including Social Phobia

The truth is that without a doubt in my mind, if you feel excessively shy and/or have a high level of anxiety in social situations, there’s a high chance that you have been consciously or most likely, unconsciously practicing control behaviours.

Control behaviours are the most crucial part in the creation and maintenance of a phobia.

They are the most important determinant of the level of anxiety you feel socially and they are the main reason why phobias thrive and are kept alive.

Control strategies and protective measures are at the root cause of your social anxiety and shyness.

If a fire burning was your social anxiety, control strategies would be the equivalent or pouring tones of gasoline on it.

If you were to stop fueling the fire with the gasoline, the fire would eventually die out…

Your social anxiety is no different. If you can find a way to stop engaging in so many protective measures, your social anxiety will start to die out. (More on this later).

Here’s The Problem With Control Strategies… They Work!

You see, the main reason why control strategies are the most important factor concerning the anxiety you feel in social situations is that they actually work! (for a short while).

What I mean by that is that control behaviours/strategies actually accomplish what they are intended to do; they get rid of your anxiety and they prevent other painfully humiliating social event from happening.

But let me explain why this is actually a bad thing…

Although getting rid of anxiety or escaping a social situation you are afraid of might feel really good for a short time, this feeling of relief is laden with a poison .

The poison is that next time you are faced with a similar situation, your anxiety will be even stronger!

This happens because your brain actually thinks that the positive sense of relief you feel from having your control behaviour accomplish its job means that if you did not use a control behaviour to “save you” from the perceived impending danger, something really humiliating or awkward would have happened.

Said in another way:

Although control behaviours make you feel better in the short term, they actually make your anxiety stronger in the long run because you keep reinforcing the idea that your protective measures prevented another degradingly humiliating social catastrophe… So you become even more afraid of experiencing those events in the future.

You end up believing it was the safety behaviour that prevented the feared outcome from happening.

This is how control behaviours make your anxiety worst over time…

By constantly evading and avoiding social situations that produce anxiety for you, you get addicted to the soothing feeling of relief it produces. While

at the same time not allowing yourself to see that the situations you are avoiding might not be all that bad.

In fact, you are preventing yourself from seeing that most of them can be quite fun and that connecting with others can also be fulfilling.

By perpetually avoiding situations that makes us nervous, we start to believe the stories we tell ourselves:

“Something very awkward would have happened if I went to that party”.

“Luckily, the alcohol made me feel calmer and seem less nervous”.

“It’s a good thing I escaped having to give that presentation, everybody would have laughed at me”.

Our control strategies offer to protect us against imaginary outcomes that did not happen yet, but this only serves to make the feared outcome feel more dangerous each time the “protective” action works.

Recap

To make sure that you fully grasp all of the information that was shared in this post, I created a “cheat-sheet” recap to explain why you are shy more simply.

Childhood Programming

The events, atmosphere, and principles that shaped your childhood all had a part in the way you viewed yourself, the world and others.

Most likely than not, the childhood of people suffering from social phobia programmed them to believe that social situations were dangerous and/or that we always have to “perform well” in order to get approval from others.

This mindset led us to feel accentuated pain during social fumbles or rejection later in life.

Getting Sensitized To Social Situations By Negative Social Experiences

This tendency to accentuate emotional reactions towards social events made us transform what most people see as “simple social fumbles” into “catastrophic social events”.

Because these catastrophic social events are often very emotionally painful, your brain creates a “pain imprint” for future reference and concludes that “social situations are dangerous”.

We then begin to anticipate bad outcomes in all types of social situations and become weary (anxious) as a result.

Your brain is put on alert every time you are around people and your fight or flight response kicks in almost instantaneously.

Control Behaviors Fuel And Maintain Our Social Anxiety

Because we are always “on guard” socially, we develop unconscious actions that seek to;

Keep more painful social experiences from happening again. Get rid of our anxiety at all cost.

These unconscious actions are called control behaviours.

Unfortunately for us, they work… but only for a short while.

They help us relieve the anxiety for a short period of time but actually make us feel more anxiety in social situations in the long term.

This happens because when a control strategy is successful, we feel a fleeting sense of relief and our brain attributes the good feeling to being “saved” from what it considers to be an almost certain social catastrophe if the control strategy had not been there to prevent it.

So naturally, with each successful “rescue”, the same social event will seem more dangerous next time around because we keep reinforcing the idea that our protective measures are what is preventing negative social events from happening.

And that’s how social anxiety is caused…

So what should you do now?

Know that you know the true root cause of your social anxiety problem and understand how control behaviours are keeping it alive, your in a perfect position to know exactly how to overcome it for good.

If you would like to overcome your shyness and social anxiety once and for all, click on this link to discover the real long-term solution: What Is The Very Best Solution To Shyness And Social Anxiety?