Behavioral reprogramming (overcoming social anxiety) | Hacker News Reader

Behavioral reprogramming (overcoming social anxiety)

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110 pointsnaner15 comments

I asked several psychiatrists if a person with lack of social skills was a mental issue with an example of Tarzan in city. They asked what mental illness that Tarzan had. Tarzan was completely healthy, just didn't meet anyone else. They said no and just offered generic advice to overcoming social issues.

So far, there's no official social training short of the advice: "Go meet people, club, etc."

The reason that this is important is that I believe social therapy is going to get more important as computer use becomes more and more common. These people are going to get exploited through unofficial help resources by social experts.

eg https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Romance_scam

I just wanted you to clarify, how you feel about the methods used in the OP?

OP's condition said it was social anxiety than social awkwardness to which my post was asking for a more overall solution to social issues.

To answer your question, I think his sessions were pretty beneficial but I think missed one thing that I believe therapists should be aware, some socially awkward people are oblivious. There's body language [0], there's ways of talking about or asking for things (don't do it directly sometimes) [1], etc. Some people can't magically overcome that when meeting people but I believe they can learn (at risk of exacerbating their self-consciousness).

[0] How Do You Use Body Language to Read Minds?; http://www.chacha.com/content/infographics/how-do-you-use-bo... (It's said to be inaccurate, I'm not sure either)

[1] RSA Animate - Language as a Window into Human Nature; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

This was a long read but very inspiring. While I don't have social anxiety at the level that he did, I still am anxious in some social environments. It was refreshing to read about someone getting past social anxiety. I'll be using some of the assignments as inspiration for my own life. First assignment, leave the house (I work from home) and talk to a stranger every day.

Reading this from Tajimoto's (the OP) perspective makes everything he's doing seem almost impossible. Maybe it's just me adding my own experiences to the mix, amplified by the storytelling, but I can actually feel the anxiety coming through the story.

The sympathetic nervous system overload is an interesting explanation for the efficacy of the repeated exposure method of "hacking" fear. Can anyone with a medical background comment on the accuracy of this explanation?

I really doubt that that's the reason. It's more like a reverse-conditioning imo. Your subconscious adjusts the "fear level" so to speak by lowering it a little bit every time it notices that the situation is less dangerous than it thought before.

It's amusing to me that the second thing she had him do was sing in front of a crowd. I essentially did the same thing, using karaoke to shed social anxiety. While I certainly wasn't at the level of this guy to begin with, I can guarantee you the first time I ever did karaoke at a bar I was shaking pretty violently, and I had to be extremely drunk to even consider it. Now? I can go up completely sober and really not think twice about it, and the social anxiety I used to feel in most social situations very rarely rears it's head.

If anyone lives in Sydney and wants to get over their social anxiety, email me. I am extremely open minded.

Does anyone understand what the fuck losethos was talking about?

Seems like about half of his comments are nonsense, but the rest are completely sane. He has developed an awesome OS though. http://www.losethos.com/

Maybe it has something to do with this, songs generated randomly (by god), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3463VDQrfQ

Wow... That's some deep stuff. Deep as in "80 cc thorazine". I'd recommend that users who are curios about this turn on showdead.

Aside that, I've had my own demons. I don't know if it's social anxiety or whatever pop-psychology name you classify it. I can give speeches, perform in symphonies and jazz groups, and such. Yet, I feel like the outsider looking in at any group. Even when I received free tickets to GenCon, I felt like an outsider even there.

I also know that people either love me or hate me. There is no in between. I've found that out many years ago, and paid the price of many friends. Hell, even the outcasts shunned me. I do know that somehow, I piss people off (by body language, inflection or something else). The best part is nobody tells me.

They all just leave.

he's bipolar and in a manic phase by the looks of it.

The stuff about actors and psy-op tormentors sounds like some people's politically-tinged conspiracy theories about being "gang-stalked" and constantly harassed by shadowy groups of dozens of strangers (although somehow nobody else ever notices this happening, or we're all supposedly in on it, I can't figure out which).

Oh wow, he's gone well past how he was in the programming subreddit a couple years ago, last I heard from him. He had an intersting OS he'd started, then slowly started getting much more... "abrasive" and less sensical. It eventually degraded into half-ideas about how his OS was proof for god, and lots of "God says to you:" followed by what looks like text generated using some randomness and/or Markov chains or some other procedural methods.

All his comments are homeless-guy rants with some twists--such as, whenever he starts a paragraph with "God says..." the rest is a word list with stochastic length and content; definitely generated by a script.

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