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Comment by InfiniteRand | Hacker News Reader

One of the frustrating things I have found about my social anxiety is that it seems to reset every time I take a break from being socially active. There have been periods of my life where I spent every other week traveling and talking to people, but put me at home for a month or two, my anxiety is as bad as it ever was.

The simple common sense solution is to maintain regular relationships, make it a habit of calling people, but that’s where my depression makes things rough.

It’s annoying, I am not saying my life is particularly difficult, especially compared to others, I have family, friends and a good career, but this stuff in my head does get annoying sometimes

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I totally relate to this and it's one of the reasons I try to force myself to go out every day (e.g the office). I don't want to let the anxiety tyrant to grow. Also, being in my mid thirties, I've realised that I've been drinking alcohol since my early twenties (nothing crazy, just a few pints of beer every now and then) not because I like the feeling of being drunk, but because I hate the feeling of being anxious and alcohol, at least for me, acts as a solid anti-anxiety drug. Anxiety sucks because it affects critical aspects of my life (social life, sex, perceptions about life itself etc)

It's a complex and annoying problem, because if I go to the GP, I might end up taking pills and I really don't want that. The alternative is to go to a phycologist but, as with restaurants, it's better to get a recommended one and I haven't got any where I live.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I partially mentioned this in my other answer ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38302927 )--personally I found a big help in the "Feeling good" podcast and then "Feeling great" book (an older book "Feeling good" by the same author would also work). It's basically a variant of CBT, served in a digestible way.

So if you don't want to start with pills, and you don't have a good recommendation for a psychologist, maybe you could try with a book, a podcast or something like that? (And I don't necessarily mean "Feeling good", that's just the one I can recommend myself.)

I really appreciate the time you took for writing this and I'll definitely have a look to this Podcast you mentioned!

Many therapists will work on line. If you are only dealing with social anxiety, and not a lot of comorbidities (like ADHD etc.), online might be fine.

Might be better than nothing in any case.

Thanks for this recommendation. I'll search for information about this.

Thank you for sharing that, I can relate to that.

I did really well until Covid hit and now I feel like all my progress has been reset. It is just so much harder when you know it is something you have to maintain all your live or you will lose it instead of something you can just solve once and for all.

Plus, I have the paradoxical form for social anxiety where I am mostly nervous around close friends and the like while I don't really care about presenting to total strangers. So I can easily be read as cold and arrogant because the anxiety is less obvious. Plus maintaining relationships isn't exactly my strength.

I try very hard to always schedule at least one social interaction a day.

It doesn’t always work but it definitely helps avoid that reset that you are referring to.

I wonder if it's the mind having lifelong expectations of social interactions going bad (why did it learn that?), and dismissing the plenty of events where "See, it didn't blow up in your face!".

I also wonder if the programming could be changed by some sort of conscious learning...

One thing I picked up somewhere, is that some people remember social situations with a far more negative spin than others and/or simply remember more of the negative interactions, and a way to counter that is to make notes while it's fresh in your mind. At least for a while.

It was really eye-opening for me to do this for a while, as even just writing down social interactions both led to discovering while writing it down that I'd probably misread situations as less positive than they were and forced me to pay closer attention to things I didn't use to during interactions.

But the biggest help was really just driving home how rare negative interactions were, and how little they mattered, relative to the rest, and also how much less they matter when you actually notice more of the good ones.

That's what CBT tries to do. Treatment for social anxiety typically uses a CBT process of both exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring: where you learn to replace negative thoughts, especially dysfunctional ones like "this person will hate me", with neutral "this person might hate me, but so what" or positive ones.

I'm over simplifying, CBT has a bunch of other techniques as well.

I can completely relate to your experience, as I experience pretty much the same thing.. To counteract that I try to expose myself to social interactions on purpose, on a regular basis.

The good news is that I noticed a "positive twist"--when I'm back to being anxious after a longer break from meeting people, my legs no longer shake! Which is a very measurable quantity, because I remember that a few years ago I had difficulties standing up at times..

In other words, I would say my experience is a sine wave, but trending up. Does this sound familiar to you, or do you observe a different function (so to speak) yourself?

Yeah, I thought I had "cured" myself of social anxiety using similar exposure techniques and then covid hit and, well, suddenly things were (are) difficult again.

you're likely not exposing yourself to the root cause of your social anxiety and are only doing practical exposure therapy to symptoms rather than the root causes. here it really depends what the crux is for you personally.

just as an example that may not even apply to you: if you are fundamentally afraid in new and unfamiliar social circumstances because you're fearing whatever type of reasonable or unreasonable/irrational outcome, then just exposing yourself to a series of specific social interaction types will likely not fix that root fear and only allow you to adapt to those specific circumstances.

what you would need to do instead is actively construct a list of situations that are as different as possible from each other, each having uncertainty for you in different ways, and then find ways to expose yourself to many of them as well as as many combinations of their good and bad outcomes in your head as possible, in an incremental way (because diving in naked / cold turkey strategy can not only be ineffective but even further traumatizing in exposure therapy).

I very much relate, I also feel like I have friends and family that care about me, but the anxiousness keeps coming back from time to time. It's hard to beat it completely.

The same thing happened for your handwriting, remember the first day at school after the summer break.

Same case for me.

I’ve started to view it as a muscle that can atrophy or get stronger.

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