Other people just talk, while you check every sentence before you say it, and by the time it is ready, the conversation has already moved on. This video explains why social contact feels like a constant struggle for you: subconscious beliefs trigger the fight, flight or freeze response, and that costs you far more energy than it costs the people around you. The ability to have a good conversation is already there in you, and the pattern that blocks it has a name: social anxiety.
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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 are sitting at dinner with a group of people, and the conversation moves quickly from one person to the next.
By the time you have put your sentence together in your head, the group has already moved on, so you smile along with the others and say nothing.
If you know this moment, you have probably told yourself that talking comes easily to everyone else and that something is wrong with you.
The reason this costs you so much strength lies in something that runs automatically inside you, and the others at that dinner do not have to fight against it.
I lived with this myself, and the method I use today works directly with the body.
In the next few minutes, you will see what happens in these moments and why they cost you so much more energy than they cost other people.
Someone asks you a question, or there is a moment in the conversation where it would be natural for you to say something, and you do not know what to say.
You look for something to contribute, and at the same time you are afraid that whatever you say will be the wrong thing. So you check every possible sentence before you say it out loud.
You ask yourself whether it is too boring, too strange or too personal, and while you are still checking, the conversation continues without you.
While you are talking with other people, the same thoughts keep repeating in your mind, and they run automatically without you choosing them. These thoughts turn your attention inward, toward yourself.
You pay attention to how you are sitting, how your voice sounds and how tense your body feels,
and you keep finding things that seem to prove that something in this conversation is going wrong.
Each of these things makes the repeating thoughts stronger, and the stronger thoughts turn even more of your attention toward yourself.
This process takes up all of the space your thinking needs, so a new thought about what is happening in the conversation cannot form at all.
Your body becomes tense and still, and your mind stays occupied and blocked.
The process holds you in this rigid state and keeps you from being present in the moment.
You can hear that the others are still talking, and you are unable to follow what they are saying or to join the conversation again.
Alongside all of this, you carry a fear that the people around you can see how anxious you are.
You are afraid that it shows on your face, in your voice or in the way you move.
When you smile, you feel the corners of your mouth twitch, and you feel the fear become stronger in that moment.
You would like to laugh freely and enjoy the time with these people, and you are unable to do it.
The joy you feel in their company stays weaker than you want it to be.
When someone gives you a polite smile, you return it without much difficulty.
When someone laughs out of real joy, it is much harder for you to share that joy with them, and your own smile becomes something you do to be polite.
You cannot open up to the people around you, and you cannot relax in their company, because a part of you stays alert and watchful the entire time.
Underneath all of this lies the fear of being made fun of. You are afraid that if you show more of who you are, someone will laugh at you or make you look ridiculous.
So you hold back what you think and what you feel, and you keep a large part of yourself hidden from the people you are with.
In a group, you do not want to be the center of attention.
You would prefer to stay invisible, and when attention turns toward you, everything in you wants it to move on to someone else as quickly as possible.
You are always the quietest person in the group. Other people speak up, share their thoughts and tell their stories, and you mostly listen.
In these moments, you have the feeling that you have nothing to contribute.
When you think about saying something, it feels as if your words would add nothing of value to the conversation, so you keep them to yourself.
You also find yourself standing at the edge of the group or sitting in the place where you are least involved.
Staying quiet and staying at the edge of a group happen automatically, because they protect you.
You do not make a decision to become quiet, and the protection starts on its own before you have time to think about it.
Being together with other people exhausts you, even when you like the people you are with.
The longer the contact lasts, the more exhausted you become, and by the end of a long evening you can barely keep your attention on the people in front of you.
When the situation has ended, your mind continues to work on it. This can happen consciously, for example on the way home or later in bed,
when you think about what you said, about what you did not say and about everything that might have gone wrong.
It can also happen subconsciously, which means that your mind keeps working on the situation without you being aware of it.
In both ways, your mind goes through certain moments again and again and looks for the mistake you might have made.
After this kind of contact, you need days with as little contact as possible, so that your body can recover.
During these days, you keep your contact with other people to a minimum, because your body needs that time to come back to a calm state.
When you look at other people, it seems so easy for them. They seem to enjoy being with others in a way that you cannot imagine for yourself.
They always seem to know what to say next, and they manage to be funny while the conversation is still happening.
When you watch them, you probably conclude that they have a skill that you are missing.
Research has found very little evidence that people who experience contact in this way lack the ability to have a conversation.
When they feel calm, they are able to talk, listen and respond in the same way as anyone else. The difficulties appear mainly in the moments when the anxiety is present.
This means that the ability to have a good conversation is already there in you.
You use it in the moments when you feel safe and relaxed with someone.
When you think back on a conversation, you judge it much more harshly than the person you talked with judges it.
So if the ability is already there, the question is what blocks it in exactly those moments when you want to use it.
You probably know the thoughts that come up in these moments. They tell you that you are not funny enough, not eloquent enough, not confident enough and not interesting enough. And they add that nobody really wants to talk to you anyway.
These thoughts are beliefs, and they run automatically in your subconscious mind, even when you are not consciously thinking them.
Beneath all of them lies one belief that you rarely say out loud, which is the belief that you are worth less than everyone else.
Your mind learned these beliefs from your own experiences. When something painful happened, often early in life, your mind drew a conclusion about who you are. Similar experiences repeated that conclusion until it became a firm belief.
Whenever a social situation connects with one of these beliefs, your system classifies the situation as dangerous.
It then activates the fight, flight or freeze response, which is the body’s built in protection against threats.
Your body reacts as if you were facing a real danger, even though you are sitting in a conversation.
This reaction explains the blocked thinking in a conversation, the need to hide what you feel, the quietness in a group and the exhaustion afterwards.
In the moments when you could not think clearly, these beliefs were occupying your mind.
They held your body in that rigid state and kept you from being present in the moment.
Research on conversations has found that after talking with someone, people underestimate how much the other person liked them.
At the same time, you have already been in countless social situations where nothing bad happened, and the beliefs are still there.
Both facts show that the beliefs are stored at a deeper level than what you know and what you have experienced.
That is why knowledge alone does not change how a social situation feels to you.
This pattern has a name, and the name is social anxiety. It is not your personality, and nothing is wrong with you.
What runs automatically inside you are the subconscious beliefs about who you are and what you are worth.
The other people in the conversation do not have to fight against them, and you have to fight against them in every conversation you have.
Think back to the dinner from the beginning, where you were putting a sentence together in your head.
At that moment, subconscious beliefs such as the belief that you are not interesting enough or that you are worth less than the others were occupying your mind, and the fight, flight or freeze response was running.
That is why it took you so long to form the sentence, and by the time it was ready, the conversation had already moved on.
It makes sense that contact with other people feels like a constant struggle for you.
Beliefs like these were learned, and beliefs that were learned can be worked on.
If you want to see how to work on these beliefs from home, step by step, watch this video next.
It shows a method that works on the level beneath the symptoms and prepares you first, without having to force yourself into difficult situations, so that social situations can feel calmer to you later on.