Hiding in the bathroom at work is one of the quietest signs of social anxiety. I did it for decades, along with skipping lectures and turning down invitations, and I thought it was simply my personality. This video goes through the places it shows up, what your body is doing while it happens, and where tapping (EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques) comes in as something you can start at home, at your own pace.
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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
You’ve been in the work bathroom for nine minutes. Nothing is wrong.
You just needed everyone to stop looking at you for a while.
If that’s you, you’ve probably decided you’re just an introvert.
I told myself the same thing for years. But your body doesn’t lock a door because you enjoy your own company.
It locks the door because it has learned to treat the people out there as a danger.
I did this for years. Work bathrooms.
University bathrooms. Bathrooms at parties I had asked to be invited to.
I was thirty-three when I found out it had a name. And that getting out of it had almost nothing to do with forcing myself back out there.
So let’s go through the signs most people miss, what your body is actually doing when this happens, and one thing you can do the next time you’re in there with the door locked.
This doesn’t only happen in bathrooms. I had a few other places, and none of them looked like hiding.
Maybe one or two of them are yours.
The lunch break. You eat alone.
The phone is out before you sit down and the headphones are on by the second bite.
You call it needing your quiet time.
Walking up to a table that already has people at it is the part you cannot do.
The lecture. You’re standing outside the hall and you’re four minutes late. You turn around.
You spend the hour in a shopping centre, or you just go home. You tell yourself you read the slides better on your own anyway.
Opening that door and having sixty heads turn is the part you cannot do.
The edge of the room. At a party or a work event, you find your spot and you keep it.
You stand close enough to look included.
You stand far enough out that nobody hands you the conversation. You tell yourself you’re just the quiet one at these things.
You do as little as possible all evening, because anything you do could be looked at. There’s a name for this one. It’s called a safety behaviour. Something that makes the evening survivable and keeps you out of it at the same time.
The invitation. A party, a family dinner, a friend who wants to meet up.
You know within a second that you’re not going. Then you spend the rest of the day building the reason.
Too much on at work. Not feeling great. Something already in the calendar. You tell yourself you’re just tired this week.
And when they cancel first, that’s the best you’ve felt in days. Every one of these works. You get relief, so you do it again.
And each time you do, the part of you that decided people are dangerous collects one more piece of evidence that it was right.
As a small child I was outgoing and happy.
I went up to people without thinking about it.
Then some things happened early on, physical and emotional, and I came out of them with a quiet conclusion. The world wasn’t safe, and neither were the people in it.
Rejection and bullying at school added to that. Every year it took a little more room. There was no single day when this started.
It got a little worse every year. I adjusted every year, so I never saw it move.
By thirty-three I was arranging my whole week around avoiding people. I still thought that was my personality.
Outside the house was uncomfortable. Work was worse.
Then one day at work it stopped working at all. I had a breakdown and I quit my job.
That same night I found the work of a man called Sebastiaan van der Schrier. Something in it landed, and that was the beginning of the turn.
Most people who live with this don’t call it anxiety. They say they’re shy.
Always have been. Some of them can’t remember a time before it.
Ten years is the average wait before someone asks for help.
People wait that long while feeling it every single day.
You feel the tension days before the meeting, and you go over what you said for hours afterwards.
You feel all of it, and you still file it under your personality, because nobody has ever told you it could be anything else.
If any of this sounds like your life, you now have a name for what you’ve been living with.
Nobody sets out to change something they believe is just their personality. So this is where it starts.
Something happens. Someone laughs at you in class.
The shame hits you in the body, and on its own it would be gone in a matter of seconds.
Then your mind puts a meaning on it. I felt ashamed when they laughed becomes I’m someone people laugh at.
Repeat that often enough and the meaning hardens into a belief that runs in the background.
And that belief tells your body what to watch out for.
So the body does its job. It fires the emergency system that was built for real danger.
That system is called fight, flight or freeze. Your heart races, your head empties, your throat closes. All of that in a meeting room where nothing is happening.
Your body can’t tell the difference between a threat and a conversation. It only responds to what it has been told to watch out for.
The standard advice is to face it.
Put yourself in the situation, again and again, until it loses its power.
For some people that works.
If you have tried it and it only showed you how bad it can get, that does not mean you failed at it.
It asks a lot of people though. You walk straight into the thing you want to run from, and then you do it again.
That takes a while to pay off, and some people stop before it does.
The old experiences underneath are still sitting there.
They carry a charge, and as long as they do, your body keeps reading that room the same way.
What worked for me was tapping. The full name is Emotional Freedom Techniques, usually shortened to E F T.
You tap with your fingertips on specific points on the body while you hold a subject in your mind.
There are no needles and no equipment involved. The whole set of points takes a few minutes to learn. I could start with it at home, on my own, and that made it something I actually kept doing.
You don’t have to believe in it for it to do anything. Some of the people most convinced by it now started out sceptical. I did too.
And there is a version of it made for exactly that moment, in there with the door locked.
That version has a name. It’s called Toilet Tapping. You leave the situation for a few minutes.
You find somewhere private and you tap until your system settles.
You’re already in the right place for it. It’s an emergency method. You use it where it happens, in the moment it happens. Then you go back out.
Toilet Tapping is the emergency version. You aim it at what you feel in that moment.
The core work uses the same tapping and aims it somewhere else. You take one old experience at a time, and you tap until it stops carrying a charge.
When enough of them are clear, the belief has nothing left holding it up. And your body stops reading the room as dangerous.
That part happens at home. On your own, at your own pace.
Nothing in it asks you to walk into a situation before you’re ready.
You do that work first, and social situations get easier afterwards.
If you have a diagnosed condition, or if there is serious trauma in your past, please do not work through it on your own.
Find someone qualified to go through it with you.
You were not imagining it, and you were not making a fuss about nothing. What you have been living with has a name, and people work their way out of it.
I can’t diagnose you and I’m not trying to. But you can only work on something once you know what it is.
Remember the nine minutes in the bathroom?
Next time you’re in there, you know what’s happening to you.
If you want to know how you work your way out of this from home, at your own pace, that’s the video right here.
It’s the one I’d watch next.
It’s the method I built into my course, and the video stands on its own.