Fear of Blushing

End Your Fear of Blushing or Excessive Blushing Response. Doctor of Psychology Explains How…

So you have a fear of blushing, or you feel you have an excessive blushing response to all kinds of situations. You are not alone. As a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of individuals with severe, moderate, or barely recognizable social anxiety, I have seen every variation you can imagine when it comes to a fear of showing some sort of physical sign of anxiety (like the fear of blushing). For some people it’s sweating. For some people it’s shaking. For some people it a shaky voice. For others it’s just a fear of “looking dumb.” But for you…it’s the fear that someone is going to notice how much you are blushing and they are going to think you’re weird.

The first thing I want to make you aware of, is that clinical research performed in laboratories with video cameras and unbiased research personnel have found that people who believe they have excessive blushing usually don’t. WHAT?!?. That’s right. People who believe they are blushing every couple of minutes during a conversation that is on video rated their own blushing as being very frequent and very severe, while the independent researcher’s ratings showed no significant elevation in blushing compared with the control group (the group of research participants who reported no fear of excessive blushing whatsoever).

Why is that important for you to know? Well, it’s the starting point for a new paradigm that you need to adopt if you are going to overcome the uncomfortable sensations of excessive blushing (or the fear of blushing). You see, once you become afraid of blushing, you become overly sensitive to the sensations of blushing. Blushing is simply a reflex in which your body opens the capillaries in your face that carry your blood, so the blood is closer to the surface of your skin and more easily seen. It has been hypothesized that it is an instinct designed to show others that they should back off and not give you a hard time about something that you are clearly already bothered by.

But because you are sensitive to the scrutiny of others (because you have more social anxiety traits than the average Joe) your blushing reaction became something that you wanted to hide. You don’t like your body’s automatic instinct to tell people you are feeling embarrassed about something! People with social anxiety generally want to appear calm and collected. If other people know you’re anxious or embarrassed, they might direct negative attention toward you. So you begin to think of blushing as your enemy (mostly at an automatic or unconscious level at first). Gradually, you become very aware of the sensation of blood rushing to those facial capillaries. The more you hate it, the more you watch out for that sensation. You gradually begin to predict which conversation topics might lead to blushing and you start blushing just by thinking about how you hope you don’t start blushing. It just gets worse and worse. Instead of guessing what to do about it, check out what this guy found out in his research of the topic. Please note that I am a compensated affiliate for the product you will see if you click the above link. All commissions received go toward the costs of hosting this free site.

Well, before you go sunburn your face again, or style your hair over your face again, or cancel your next social gathering, consider the following treatment strategy for excessive blushing (or the fear of blushing anyway since you may not blush as much as you think).

Step 1.Decide you will not let blushing or what people think about your excessive blushing ruin your life by causing you to hide out all the time.

Step 2.Keep a journal or log where you rank the degree to which your fear of blushing held you back or made you uncomfortable on a scale of 1-100. Fill in the date and rating number each night before you go to sleep. Put the journal on your pillow so you don’t forget. This step is important, so don’t skip it. You need to see your progress or you will give up too soon.

Step 3.Each night, after your log entry, plan at least three activities for the next day in which you will purposefully try to blush in front of someone. This is called, “paradoxical intent.” It is the best way to beat the cycle by which your fear of something happening becomes the trigger for that thing to happen. By trying to blush on purpose, you will start to undo your hypersensitivity to the feared stimulus. A crucial aspect of this step is that you must start by blushing in front of a friend or someone you trust enough to ask for feedback after the experiment. Don’t tell them ahead of time. After trying to blush in front of them, tell them you are doing and experiment to see just how bad and uncomfortable you are making others feel with all your blushing. Ask them to honestly tell you how awful it was for them when you started blushing and ask them to tell you all the negative thoughts they had about you when you started blushing. What you will find is that they may have noticed (and in many cases they won’t notice because it feels stronger than it is) but they will say that they barely thought about it. They will say something like, “Oh, I wondered for a second if you were blushing, but I really didn’t think much about it because I was telling you something interesting.” Other people aren’t as interested in your excessive blushing as you might think.

Step 4.Give yourself permission to blush all day. Tell yourself that you will never again hide from blushing. Facing your fear will gradually diminish your fear. The hardest part of doing this paradoxical intention stuff is the first three days. Think about it like three days of running through a jungle with no food and no shoes to escape from a foreign prison or something. Your freedom is on the other side of that jungle.

If you need support, find a psychologist who specializes in social anxiety. If you can’t find someone with a social anxiety specialty, at least read the manual put together by a guy who interviewed a bunch of doctors about the subject. His manual is available here (and it costs less than one fifth of a single counseling session with me, so it’s a good deal for people who blush too much). Click here to see it. Please note that I am a compensated affiliate for the product you will see if you click the above link. All commissions received go toward the costs of hosting this free site.

Whatever you do, you owe it to yourself to invest in getting your life back. Psychological research into the process of learning new information suggests that repetition is key. So if you have excessive blushing, click here now for a fear of blushing audio book.

The audio book will not only allow you to gradually consolidate the new techniques and methods for overcoming excessive blushing, it will present you with some very powerful techniques for beating the fear of blushing that I have not gone into in this article. See the description of the audio book that I recommend by clicking here| excessive blushing help

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