Long-Term Anxiety Relief
Deliberate Practice Is The Only Long-term Solution to Social Anxiety Symptoms
If you have had social anxiety symptoms for long, I’m sure you have tried a number of different quick tricks and techniques to try to overcome the symptoms. While some of these tricks may have been somewhat helpful at temporarily reducing the amount of stress and panic you experience in social situations, you wouldn’t be reading this article if the problem had been resolved. The purpose of this article is to explain why deliberate practice is a necessary ingredient in the formula for long term change. You will learn what deliberate practice is and how to specifically apply it to the goal of long-term relief from social anxiety symptoms.
Deliberate practice is different from what most people think of as practice. For most people, the idea of practice conjures up an image of someone actively engaged in some activity without an audience. So a violinist practicing for her performance might be playing one of the musical pieces that she is going to perform at some later point in time. Deliberate practice goes one step beyond this. Deliberate practice means you are engaging in an extreme version of practicing that involves targeted work on areas of weakness that you have identified. Deliberate practice is hard work and mentally exhausting because it usually does not involve the pleasant experience of simply doing what you would normally do, minus the audience. So, for the violinist, this form of practice might mean going over and over a sequence of notes that has caused her to stumble in the past. This form of practice is less enjoyable than simply playing the piece through. This form of practice is also much more powerful and effective at perfecting her performance than simply playing the piece all the way through. What in the world does this have to do with social anxiety? Keep reading.
For most people who experience social anxiety symptoms, the painful emotional and physiological experiences show up intermittently rather than on a constant basis. It’s not that the symptoms are unpredictable, as they do follow a fairly predictable pattern, with worsening symptoms at very specific social situations. The reason I call them intermittent symptoms is because you don’t have the symptoms when watching your favorite sitcom in a room by yourself. Most people do make some form of effort to fight back against their social anxiety symptoms at some point in their life. When the social anxiety reaches the point of becoming a social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, almost everyone makes an attempt to get rid of the symptoms.
Unfortunately, our instincts for how to get rid of the symptoms do not serve us well. The primary instinct is to avoid certain situations that have triggered the social anxiety symptoms or social phobia symptoms in the past. Because this gives us a temporary relief with decreased symptoms, the avoidance is reinforcing, meaning you have been rewarded for avoidance. The problem with this scenario is that avoidance has been proven to increase the number of incidences of, and severity of, social anxiety symptoms over the long term. Avoidance is your enemy even though it feels good at the moment.
The other major mistake that your instinctual approach will bring is an attempt to tackle your biggest problem first, in its entirety (this is assuming you overcame the avoidance problem to some extent). But step back and take a look at this approach for a moment. Imagine that a 12-year-old violinist with hopes of becoming one of the world’s greatest soloists came to you for advice. She tells you there’s a magnificent piece of music that she would like to be able to play for an audience. Would you tell her to go play that piece all at once in front of an audience as the first step? If not, then what would you advise her? Wouldn’t you advise her something along the lines of identify small chunks of the music and practice them deliberately and with intense concentration until you have a significant amount of success with that chunk. Then move onto the next chunk and continue to procede in this manner until you can play the entire piece. Only then should you begin to play the piece all the way through. Even once you play the piece all the way through, spend at least 50% of your practice time on deliberate practice with the specific portions of that piece that are most difficult to play.
Learning how to turn the battle with your social anxiety into small chunks that you can practice and master is much more difficult. But the whole point of this article is to raise your awareness of the importance of doing so, and to encourage you by letting you know that other people have succeeded in facing their social anxiety symptoms using this method. The Social Anxiety Secrets System
was designed specifically to address the difficulty that people have with chunking their social anxiety symptoms and maintaining the motivation needed to engage in a form of deliberate practice. By helping you to tap into the powerful reservoirs of energy and motivation that you have to be a person free of social anxiety symptoms, the Social Anxiety Secrets System guides you into a highly effective plan of attack to eliminate the vast majority of your social anxiety symptoms.
Whatever you do, don’t give up, and don’t do what you and most other people have been doing for many years, which is to wait until a crescendo of emotional pain when your social anxiety symptoms cramp your life once again only to develop a temporary resolve to do something about it with no real results. I’m challenging you to reach for a better life. I’m challenging you to use deliberate practice to go after your social anxiety symptoms and whittle them down to something that you can stomp on instead of flee. Take action for long-term results.
Live With Courage and Discipline! Dr. Todd Snyder