If you know social anxiety and you’ve tried a lot (exposure, talking it through, good advice), you probably also know the feeling that none of it holds for long. In this video I walk you through why that is, and how you can work on social anxiety from home using EFT tapping, without having to deliberately put yourself into social situations.
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Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
The phone rings.
And immediately, you don’t want to pick up. You haven’t even looked at the screen yet but something in you is already pulling back.
Your chest tightens. Your shoulders pull up. You stare at the phone and wait for it to stop.
The thought of actually answering of having to say something feels like too much. And you can’t quite explain why.
There’s no specific thought. No clear reason. It’s just there, faster than thinking.
Because what just happened wasn’t your head deciding anything. It was an automatic reaction from your nervous system. It answered for you, before your head got a chance.
You let it ring out. And you tell yourself you’ll deal with it later.
If that’s familiar if that’s exactly what just happens, every single time stay with me. This is just one shape it takes.
Maybe it’s not the phone for you. Maybe it’s walking into a room and not knowing what to say in the first five seconds.
Maybe it’s that moment in a conversation when it goes quiet, and your head just shuts off. Your mind goes blank.
You know you’re supposed to say something and there’s just nothing there.
Or maybe it’s the one that lives underneath all of these. The question that never quite turns off.
Can they tell? Can they see it on me?
And here’s the part that took me the longest to even notice. The social moment itself is only a fraction of it.
You rehearse it for hours sometimes days, sometimes weeks before. You replay it long after.
You’re not just anxious in the room you’re anxious in the car on the way there
in bed the night before, in the shower the next morning.
And for days afterwards, your head keeps going back to it.
What you’ve probably told yourself about all of this goes something like just think more confidently. Just push through.
Just face your fear, over and over, until it gets easier.
Maybe someone said it to you, too. Maybe nobody ever knew enough to say anything. Either way you’ve probably tried those.
The reason that advice didn’t work isn’t because you didn’t try hard enough. It’s because all of it was aimed at the wrong layer.
Your social anxiety doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your body in the part of your nervous system that still treats old moments as if they were happening right now.
That’s why thinking your way out of it has felt like trying to fix a leak by repainting the ceiling.
What I’m going to show you over the next forty minutes or so isn’t another version of “just be braver.” It’s a method that works on the layer underneath.
From your home not as a way of avoiding the world, but as a way of preparing your nervous system first, so that when those situations come, they meet a different version of you.
No miracle promise. Just a step-by-step explanation of why this works when other things didn’t and what to do with that.
Hi, I’m Mirco. Let me tell you how I got here.
I built a course called Social Anxiety Reset because I needed it for myself first.
I was an open, happy kid.
And then small things happened the way they happen to a lot of us. Rejections. Bullying.
Quiet moments that taught me that being around people wasn’t safe.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing you’d put in a book.
But it grew.
Slowly enough that I never recognized it as social anxiety. I just thought that’s the way I am.
By the time I was thirty-three, leaving the house was uncomfortable. Going to work was worse.
I was rehearsing every conversation, every email, every glance.
One day at work it all came apart at once. I had a breakdown.
I quit my job.
And that night, I cried out. To God. To the universe. To whatever was listening.
Please. I can’t do this anymore. Help me.
That same night I came across the work of a man named Sebastiaan van der Schrier. Over a decade of severe social anxiety himself.
He’d tried the standard things talking, journaling, affirmations, mindfulness, forcing himself into social situations and none of them had worked for him either.
He’d found his way out using a refined form of something called EFT, and he’d built a version of it specifically for social anxiety.
I started using his approach.
And today, I am free from social anxiety. I live a life that, ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed was on the menu for me.
That’s the foundation this course is built on. Not theory. Personal experience, plus a method I’m going to walk you through, piece by piece.
Here’s what’s interesting, looking back.
The hardest part of getting free wasn’t learning the technique. The technique is actually simple. The hardest part was a question I had to face partway through that I didn’t see coming.
If the anxiety isn’t who I am then who am I?
We’ll come back to that question. It matters more than it sounds like right now. Hold onto it.
So here’s what I’ll do across the next forty minutes.
I’ll walk you through four moments. Four places where almost everyone with social anxiety hits a wall and stops believing recovery is possible.
Each one is something you’ve probably already said to yourself maybe last week, maybe this morning.
The first.
I bet there’s a catch. I bet I’ll still have to face social situations anyway.
There is a catch. Just not the one you’re thinking of. I’ll show you what it actually is.
The second.
I’ve tried so many things. Therapy. Books. Mindfulness. Pushing myself. None of it worked. Why would this be different?
That’s a fair question. The answer is more interesting than I expected when I first heard it.
The third.
Even if it works, this is going to take forever. And I am running out of forever.
I want to slow down on that one. Because that one isn’t really about time.
And the fourth.
I’m just like this. I can’t change. This is who I am.
That’s the one we come back to at the end. I went through most of these myself and the fourth was my own biggest revelation.
If you stay with me, by the end you’ll know how this actually works, why it’s different from what you’ve already tried, and exactly what to do next if it sounds like a fit for you.
OK. Let’s get into it.
There’s a thought that’s probably been sitting in your head since I told you this works from home without forcing yourself into anything. And it goes something like this.
I bet there’s a catch. I bet I still have to face social situations anyway.
That’s where almost every approach ends up. Some version of: go out there, face the situation, stay until the fear passes.
Maybe you’ve tried that already. And maybe it didn’t work the way it was supposed to.
You’re not wrong to notice that. It’s the pattern almost every approach follows.
That pattern is the dominant approach in modern therapy. It’s called exposure therapy.
And it works for some people. But it asks a lot.
It asks you to push through the exact thing your nervous system is screaming at you to avoid.
And here’s what most people aren’t told.
A lot of people can’t.
The numbers on this are pretty clear. In trauma-focused exposure therapy, around twenty-seven percent of people drop out before completing the protocol.
In real-world clinics outside of research settings that number climbs closer to half.
Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy: thirty-six percent dropout. The exposure approach for obsessive-compulsive symptoms: another thirty-six percent.
The numbers for social anxiety specifically land in the same neighborhood.
That’s not those people failing. It’s the method asking the body to do something it can’t.
The body is doing what it’s designed to do protecting you from what it reads as a threat.
So if you’ve tried versions of this and walked away you’re not weak. You’re not broken. You’re not the only one.
You hit the wall a lot of people hit.
OK. There is a catch. We’ll come back to it. But first let me show you why this approach is built differently from anything you’ve tried.
Picture a table.
And the tabletop that’s the symptom. The phone ringing and you not picking up.
The frozen moment in the conversation. The dread before a meeting.
That’s the tabletop.
Now look at the legs.
The legs are what’s holding the table up.
The legs are everything underneath the symptom small moments from years ago, things you barely remember.
Things you’d never think to label as trauma.
The teacher who singled you out.
The friend group that quietly stopped including you.
The parent who needed you to be smaller than you were.
The classroom moment when everyone laughed and you weren’t sure if it was at you.
Most of these aren’t big events. But each one taught your body something that being seen wasn’t safe.
That being yourself wasn’t enough.
Each of those is a leg. Together, they hold up the symptom.
Now look at what the standard approach asks you to do.
It asks you to push down on the tabletop. To force the symptom down through exposure, repetition and willpower.
And for some people, with enough sessions and enough endurance, the tabletop does come down.
But the legs are still there. So the moment you let go, it springs back up.
The method I’m going to share with you doesn’t push on the tabletop.
It removes the legs.
When the legs go, the table falls on its own.
This isn’t just a metaphor. It’s how the nervous system actually works.
The symptom you’re living with right now is not the problem itself. It’s the visible part of something older.
And here’s the part you might find surprising.
Removing the legs doesn’t happen in the social situation. It happens at home. Quietly. On your own time.
With a method that takes minutes a day and doesn’t ask you to confront anything you’re not ready to confront.
That’s the practice my course walks you through.
A lot of people spend years searching for something that works trying one approach, then another, and finding that none of them shift the thing that matters.
I was fortunate that wasn’t my path. After my breakdown, I found this method right away, and I started using it from home.
The research on tapping-based approaches points in the same direction.
In direct comparisons with cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety conditions, dropout rates for these methods land in the six-to-ten-percent range compared to over a quarter for the talk-and-confront protocols.
The reason isn’t that the method is easier. The reason is that the body isn’t being asked to override itself.
It’s being asked to release the emotional charge in those old moments the legs that have been holding the symptom up.
So back to the suspicion you started with.
There is a catch. But not the one you thought.
The catch isn’t that you’ll still have to face social situations. The catch is consistency.
Thirty minutes a day. That’s what the method asks.
Not bravery. Not confrontation. Not forcing your nervous system to take a punch it can’t take.
Just showing up.
And here’s the other part of this. You won’t be working in the dark for months.
The full timeline depends on how severe your anxiety is and how long it’s been there for some people it’s a matter of weeks, for others it’s longer.
But first changes usually show up within the first one to two weeks. You feel the shift early.
In comparative research, the outcomes appear to be better than with conventional approaches in a fraction of the time.
If that’s a catch you can live with keep going.
There’s still a question sitting in the way and it’s a fair one. If you’ve already tried a lot of things, why would this one be any different?
If you’ve stayed with me this far, another question has probably come up. It goes something like this.
I’ve tried so many things already. Therapy. Books. Mindfulness. Pushing myself. None of it worked. Why would this be different?
If you’re asking, it’s because each thing that didn’t work made it a little harder to believe the next one would.
Let me try to give a real answer.
Go back to the table and legs for a moment.
The tabletop is the symptom the dread, the freeze, the avoidance, the replaying.
The legs are everything underneath: the small old moments your nervous system still treats as if they were happening right now.
Now look at what you’ve tried.
Talk therapy most forms of it works at the level of the tabletop.
You sit across from someone, you put words to the symptom, you explore the thoughts about it, you build a more accurate story.
That can be valuable, but the legs underneath stay where they are.
Books do something similar. You read about the symptom, you read about the thoughts that fuel it, you build understanding.
Useful too, but still at the level of thinking.
Mindfulness teaches you to observe the symptom without reacting to create a small space between you and the dread.
That’s a real skill, and given enough time and practice, it can reach deeper than just managing symptoms.
But because mindfulness doesn’t target any specific leg, getting there tends to take much longer.
And pushing yourself the face-your-fear approach we covered in Secret 1 can also work, eventually.
With enough repetitions, the body’s response can settle.
But it works by forcing the system to flood again and again, and as we saw, many people can’t sustain that.
Even for those who can, it’s a much harder and slower route than it needs to be.
None of those approaches failed because you didn’t try hard enough.
They failed because none of them targets a specific leg directly.
They work around the table talking about it, building understanding of it, observing it, sometimes pushing on it.
That’s not their fault.
They just weren’t designed to target specific legs directly. To do that, you need a different kind of tool.
OK. So what is this method actually doing differently?
It has two parts, and they work at the same time.
The first part will feel familiar. You bring your attention to something specific a memory, a moment, or a reaction you can feel in your body right now and you stay with it without pushing it away or analyzing it.
You just hold it in your awareness, the way you would if a therapist asked you to.
That part, on its own, is roughly what talk therapy already does.
The second part is what’s different.
While you’re holding that memory or feeling in your awareness, you gently tap on a small set of specific points on your body spots on the hand, the face, and the upper chest.
These are the same points used in acupressure, now studied in mainstream research labs.
The combination is what matters: holding the memory in your mind while tapping on the points with your body, both at once.
What this combination does based on the research available is release the emotion that was attached to that specific past event.
The memory itself stays (you don’t forget anything), but once the emotion is gone, that leg collapses.
And when enough legs have collapsed, the whole table comes down including the tabletop.
And here’s something you might find surprising the first time you do it.
It takes minutes rather than hours, and there’s no working up to a confrontation.
The shift on a single memory can happen in one sitting.
I want to be careful here, because this is where it would be easy to overclaim.
So let me just say what the research actually shows.
At Stanford’s Pain Management Center, a researcher named Jiang-Ti Kong has been studying acupressure points with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Her work shows that something measurable actually happens in the body when these points are pressed or tapped they’re neither mysterious nor placebo.
A meta-analysis combining fourteen separate studies on this kind of tapping-based method for anxiety found what researchers call a large effect size.
In plain terms, the difference between people who did the method and people who didn’t was substantial, and it was consistent across studies.
You don’t need to take my word for any of this the studies are searchable.
There’s a man who reviewed online programs for social anxiety.
He’d been through a lot of them and had openly flagged some as potential scams in his earlier reviews.
When he tried a structured tapping-based program, he stayed skeptical through the early sessions he’s the kind of person who would have noticed if something wasn’t working.
What he wrote afterwards was simple. He didn’t say everything was solved.
He said something had moved that hadn’t moved before, and that the program was worth what he paid for it.
I share that because if you’ve been burned by promises before, that’s the kind of person worth hearing from someone who started out doubting and changed his mind anyway, rather than someone who came in already wanting to believe.
So back to where we started.
I’ve tried so many things. Why would this be different?
It’s different because it works directly and specifically on the legs themselves, using both attention and the body rather than working around them through talking, observation, or repeated activation.
That doesn’t make it a magic key it makes it the tool that was missing.
But having the right tool isn’t the same as knowing how long it’ll take.
And if you’ve been carrying this a long time, that’s the next thing standing in the way.
How long is this going to take?
I want to give you a real answer especially if you’ve been carrying this a long time.
So let me give you the honest answer, the way I’d want to hear it.
How long it takes depends on how severe your anxiety is and how long you’ve had it. Nobody can give you an exact date.
But there’s one thing the research and the experience are clear about. You’ll feel changes much sooner than you might expect.
First changes usually show up within the first one to two weeks of consistent practice.
That matters because when you’ve been carrying something for a long time, a promise about some distant future doesn’t help. You need to notice something happening now, so you know you’re on the right path.
There’s one more thing about how this works that becomes important now.
Back to the table. Each leg holds a specific old memory.
When you work directly on one leg, the emotion attached to it is released, and the leg comes down. We covered that in Secret 2.
But here’s the part that surprised me when I first ran into it.
When you take down one leg, neighboring legs often weaken at the same time even ones you haven’t worked on directly.
The legs are related. Many of them feed into the same themes: not safe, not enough, not loved.
So when one of them dissolves, the others lose some of their grip too.
In EFT, this is called the generalization effect in simple terms, the work compounds.
What that means practically is that you don’t have to find and dissolve every single leg one by one.
You work on the ones that are most charged, and the others tend to lose their weight along the way.
That’s why the work compounds not because you’ve gotten faster, but because the legs that remain are easier to bring down or collapse on their own once the main ones are gone.
If I had to describe what the experience actually feels like, here’s what I’d say.
At the start, you don’t have your own evidence yet.
You’re doing the practice thirty minutes a day, working through specific past experiences, one at a time.
Social Anxiety Reset is built around exactly that work.
Then somewhere in the first one or two weeks, you start noticing moments where something is different.
A situation that would normally have made you tense doesn’t quite.
A memory you usually flinch from has lost some of its pull.
These moments may be small at first.
But they count, because they’re the first pieces of evidence that you can shift this.
After that, the changes pick up, because each piece of work makes the next one easier.
A lot of people spend years searching for something that works I was fortunate that wasn’t my path.
I found this method when I was at a low point, and I started right away.
I felt the first small shifts within the first two weeks.
That was enough to keep going.
Each one was small but real, and the next came faster than the last.
That’s the part I want you to know, in case you’re skeptical right now.
You don’t need months of belief just give it two weeks. After that, the evidence is your own.
So back to the question.
How long does this take?
The answer is shorter than you’ve probably feared. The early weeks will feel like work, and the first evidence shows up in those same weeks not in some distant future.
When the legs start coming down, something else happens.
A question shows up underneath one you didn’t expect. A question about who you are when the anxiety isn’t running things.
The form that question takes is something like this.
I’m just like this. I can’t change. This is who I am.
This isn’t really a question about the method. It’s a statement about you.
The anxiety came on slowly enough that you never met it as a problem. It just became how things are. How you are.
When you’ve lived with this for years or decades there’s no real distance left between you and it. It just feels like you.
That’s not a flaw in your thinking your nervous system has logged thousands of moments where being seen wasn’t safe, where speaking up didn’t go well, where reaching out didn’t land.
Of course you concluded “this is just who I am.” Anyone would.
You probably noticed early on that certain things were hard for you. Speaking up in a group. Meeting new people. Being looked at.
But you didn’t see that as social anxiety. You saw it as how you are. It looked like personality, not like a condition.
And once you see it that way, there’s no reason to question it. It’s just you.
Let me ask you a question.
What if what feels like you what feels like the real, settled, unchangeable you isn’t actually you?
What if it’s your history, settled into your body?
That’s not a wordgame. Let me show you what I mean.
Remember the table. The tabletop is the symptom. The legs are the old emotionally charged memories that hold the symptom up.
Now we go one layer deeper.
What you’ve been calling you the anxious one, the quiet one, the one who freezes that’s the table. The whole table.
The legs are the experiences you didn’t choose.
The classroom moment you got laughed at. The friend group that quietly closed. The parent who needed you smaller. The teacher who singled you out.
None of those experiences were you choosing them. They happened to you. And your body learned from them.
But the whole table is made of something. It’s made of wood.
The wood is who you actually are. Your real personality.
What’s there in every piece of the construction, right now and what was there before the construction was ever built.
A table isn’t the wood. A table is what the wood was made into.
Constructions can be taken apart. The wood doesn’t disappear when they are. It just goes back to being wood.
Research points the same way.
Social anxiety isn’t the same thing as shyness or introversion. Those are personality traits parts of who you are.
Social anxiety is a layer that gets built on top of whoever you already are.
There’s a Swedish study on people with social anxiety that looked at their underlying personality.
If social anxiety and introversion were the same thing, you’d expect everyone with social anxiety to be introverted. That’s not what they found.
The personality underneath stays itself, whatever it is. Introverted or extraverted, quiet or outgoing the anxiety sits on top of who you are.
So: this isn’t who you are. It’s a layer over you.
There’s also a meta-analysis covering over two hundred intervention studies looking at whether personality traits actually change in adulthood.
The classical view was that they don’t. The data showed they do. And the largest changes happened in people with anxiety disorders.
What you’ve been calling “just how I am” is exactly the kind of thing that’s been observed to shift.
You weren’t born like this. You were made like this. And the brain that was made like this stays plastic.
Hearing this for the first time, something might sting a little. If this was always solvable should I have figured it out myself?
No. And here’s why.
You can’t take apart something you think is you.
As long as the anxiety felt like your personality and not like something separate from you, there was nothing to take apart. You were just being yourself.
And no one ever showed you that the anxiety wasn’t you. That your real personality was there the whole time. Without that, there was nothing to work on.
That’s not your fault.
For a long time, what I called “me” was the anxious one. The one who hesitated, who didn’t speak up, who stayed quiet. That was just how I was.
As the work moved things, slowly something else came forward.
The way I’d always been when no one was watching, when the stakes were low, when I forgot to monitor myself that was still there. It had always been there. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
What had been on top of it for years started lifting.
And what I’d been calling “me” turned out to be the construction, not the wood.
The anxiety isn’t who you are. It’s the construction. The wood is still there.
When the anxiety lifts, you don’t disappear. You arrive.
You’re not gone when the social anxiety is gone. You’re only fully here then.
That’s what the work is for. Not making yourself into someone new just letting the construction come down
so the wood underneath gets to show up.
Thirty minutes a day. One leg at a time.
That’s why I built the course.
It’s called Social Anxiety Reset. It’s something you do on your own, from home, in your own time.
There are no live sessions or group calls you don’t have to put yourself in front of anyone before you’re ready.
Working from home isn’t about avoiding the world. It’s about preparing yourself first, so social situations feel calmer when you’re in them
and so you find yourself naturally wanting to be part of social life again.
The course is built around four steps.
Step 1 Emergency Methods. Practical tools you can use in real-world situations to take the edge off anxiety as it arises.
Step 2 EFT Beliefs. Most people come in with doubts about whether EFT can really do anything for them. Step 2 uses EFT itself to clear those doubts.
Step 3 Specific Events. You go after the most charged memories from your past, one at a time, releasing the emotional charge on each.
The legs come down, and the beliefs they hold up start losing their grip.
Step 4 Social Anxiety Beliefs. Some layers don’t surface until the obvious ones are gone.
Step 4 goes after the subtler beliefs that remain and clears them systematically.
Do you remember the phone ringing? Chest tight, shoulders pulled up
you staring at the screen, waiting for it to stop.
Now imagine it again. The phone rings. Your body doesn’t lock up.
You look at the screen, and the decision now is yours and no longer your body’s.
Thank you for watching, and for staying with me through all of this.
If you think this course is right for you, things can change.
You don’t dread social situations anymore.
The hours of rehearsing and replaying are gone.
You feel like yourself the person who’s been there all along.
You can find the course in the description.
Whatever you decide, I wish you all the best and a limitless social future free of social anxiety.
Take care.