For decades, I thought social anxiety was simply part of my personality. Then came a job where the panic attacks started the moment I arrived, and one morning I couldn’t make myself go anymore. In this video, I share how I worked through it with EFT tapping, at home on my laptop and without having to face my fears first. You’ll hear what I did every day, what changed first, and why living with social anxiety for years without help is far more common than you might think.
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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
That morning, I had called in sick. I wasn’t sick in the usual way.
I just couldn’t make myself go to work anymore, because the fear had become too much.
That evening, I begged God for help. Then I searched the internet for anything that might get me out of this.
What I found that night changed my life. And it didn’t ask me to face my fears first.
In this video, I’ll tell you how my social anxiety started, what I did every day to work on it, what changed first, and where I am today.
I’ll also tell you why, later on, I tried some completely different methods, and why I still came back in the end.
Let’s start at the beginning. As a child, I was open and happy.
Then there were small experiences of rejection, and some bullying. But they added up, and the fear grew so slowly that I never saw it as a problem.
It grew over decades. I thought this was simply my personality. I thought I was just that kind of person.
So after my studies, I changed jobs. I thought a new place would make it better. It didn’t, so I changed jobs again.
Looking back, I wasn’t solving anything. I was avoiding the fear by moving away from it.
You might be wondering why someone would live with something like this for so long without doing anything about it. Many people would assume that’s unusual.
In fact, it’s the typical pattern. Social anxiety usually starts in childhood or the teenage years.
And many people with social anxiety never get help for it at all.
Of those who do, half wait sixteen years or longer before they first talk to a doctor, a therapist or a counselor about it. So my story was slow, but it wasn’t strange.
Then came my third job. For as long as I can remember, I’d felt the fear on my way to work.
But now it was extreme from the moment I left the house.
When I arrived, the panic attacks came. And the fear stayed with me for the whole working day.
On top of that, there were moments that are hard to explain.
I felt as if I was standing next to myself, or floating above my body. I wasn’t really me anymore.
And sometimes the world around me looked as if I was seeing it through a thick fog.
There’s a name for moments like these. The first one is called depersonalization, which means you feel cut off from yourself or from your body.
The second one is called derealization, which means the world around you feels unreal.
Both are a known reaction of the body to extreme stress, and they can be part of a panic attack. People with social anxiety often have them in the social situations they fear most.
These episodes usually pass after minutes or hours. And many people find them hard to put into words, just like I do.
After a few weeks of this, I couldn’t go on. One morning, I called in sick.
That’s the evening I told you about at the start of this video. And what I found that night was a course built by a man who had lived with severe social anxiety himself.
He had used a method called EFT and shaped it specifically for social anxiety. EFT is often just called tapping.
In the 1990s, an American named Gary Craig simplified an older tapping method.
With EFT, you tap lightly with your fingertips on certain points on your hand, your face and your upper body.
While you do that, you keep your attention on something that bothers you, like a painful memory or a feeling.
So why would that help with social anxiety? Think of a memory like being laughed at in class.
In my experience, and in the way the course explains it, keeping a memory like that in mind while you tap releases its emotional charge.
Many of the beliefs we carry without noticing are built on memories like this one. Beliefs like “people will judge me.”
When the charge of the memory dissolves, those beliefs lose their hold.
Most people believe that to get over a fear, you have to face it. What may surprise you is that I didn’t have to put myself into a single situation I was afraid of.
I worked at home, at my laptop. And the first changes showed up in my conversations with people.
Not long after that night, I quit that job. I started working with the course every day, for months, at home on my laptop.
Each time, I picked a real experience from my own life. While I was tapping, a pleasant feeling of calm would settle in.
And I could feel the emotion that belonged to a memory get weaker.
The course uses a scale from zero to ten for this. Say you’re working on a memory like being laughed at in class, and at the start it feels like an eight.
As you tap, it might drop to a five, then to a two, and then to zero.
The memory is still there. You still know exactly what happened. But the emotion that came with it is gone.
Researchers have also measured what happens in the body. In one study, people did a single hour of tapping.
Afterwards, their level of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, had dropped by about a quarter.
That was clearly more than in people who had a supportive conversation instead.
For me, the first changes came within the first days. They came just as gradually as the fear once had.
I noticed I was calmer and more confident when I talked to people, and when I was in a group with friends.
Over time, the whole thing simply became easier. So was this just me? Did I simply get lucky?
A team of researchers who had no connection to EFT reviewed the studies on anxiety in 2025.
In every study that compared tapping with getting no help, the people who tapped ended up less anxious.
These studies looked at anxiety in general, not at social anxiety specifically. But they point in the same direction as my own experience.
Once most of my social anxiety was resolved, I wanted to know what else was out there. I tried hypnotherapy, meditation, mindfulness and a few other methods.
They helped too. But none of them went as deep for me as EFT had.
So if they helped, why did they go less deep? When I look back, I see three reasons.
First, I didn’t use them as long or as consistently as I had used EFT.
Second, none of them was aimed at social anxiety. And third, they weren’t as easy to do on my own at home.
At the start of this video, I said I’d tell you why I tried completely different methods and still came back in the end. You’ve heard why I tried them.
I came back to EFT because I had felt in my own body how well it works.
And I came back because I can use it anywhere. I don’t need an appointment or any equipment.
At home, I tap the usual points. When I’m out, I can use finger tapping.
You might think that once something has helped, you’re done. I wasn’t. I kept working on things now and then, and the rest slowly fell away too.
Today, my social anxiety is completely gone. I walk up to people without fear.
I start conversations without thinking about it and without preparing what to say.
I used to be afraid of being judged. Back then, the fear was automatic. Today, the ease is automatic.
Maybe you’re wondering whether working on this at home is just another way of avoiding things. In my experience, it’s the opposite.
The work at home prepares your body, so that social situations become easier when you’re in them.
You also don’t have to believe in it. What counts is that you do it consistently.
And the place to start is the same place I started, at home, with the memories that still carry a charge.
Out of my own experience, I built a course called Social Anxiety Reset. It’s meant to make this path as direct as possible, and you work through it at home, at your own pace.
Think back to that evening at the start of this video, when I couldn’t even make myself go to work.
Today, I walk up to strangers and start talking without thinking about it.
What I believed for decades was my personality turned out to be something I could resolve. I did it with EFT, at home, without having to face my fears first.
If you want to see how you can work through your social anxiety with EFT, step by step and from your own home, watch this video next.
It’s called Working Through Social Anxiety at Home, and I’ve put it right here for you.