Saying no to an invitation brings relief for a moment, and then the next one feels heavier. In this video, you’ll see why avoiding keeps social anxiety going, what you’re really avoiding underneath, and why accepting the feeling is not the same as giving up. You’ll also see how EFT tapping builds acceptance right into the process, so you can begin at home, at your own pace.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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
A friend texts you: would you like to come to dinner on Friday?
Your stomach tightens. You picture the moment everyone looks at you and you can’t think of anything to say.
So you send a quick excuse. For a moment, there’s relief. On Sunday, another invitation comes in, and it feels heavier than the first.
But what if that relief is part of the reason it feels heavier?
In this video, you’ll see why avoiding keeps social anxiety going, and why the way out doesn’t mean forcing yourself to every dinner.
There’s also an old story from Tibet about a hermit who came home and found his cave full of demons.
What he finally did to get rid of them is the opposite of what most of us try. I’ll tell you how it ends a bit later.
Saying no to that dinner felt like protection. And when we can’t avoid a situation, we go, but push the feeling down.
We say little, avoid eye contact, and hope nobody notices how tense we are.
What may surprise you is what one study found. Strangers met for a conversation, and at one point, it turned personal.
When people tried to push unwanted feelings away while opening up, their anxiety tended to rise over the rest of the conversation.
Pushing the feeling away doesn’t protect you. It keeps the anxiety going.
Avoiding situations altogether has a cost too. One large study followed about three thousand young people in Germany for ten years.
For most of them, social anxiety didn’t simply fade on its own. And one of the things that predicted it would stay was strong avoidance.
So does this mean you have to force yourself into every situation you fear? No. Because underneath avoiding situations, there’s another kind of avoidance. And that’s where real change can begin.
What made you send that excuse? It was the feeling you knew would come: the tight stomach, the racing heart, the dry mouth.
We don’t mainly avoid situations. We avoid the feeling that would come up there.
In my course, I describe it like this: on its own, an emotion is just a passing sensation.
Like a wave, it rises and falls. The problem is not the emotion itself but what happens next.
The mind attaches a meaning to it. “I felt shame when they laughed at me” becomes “I am someone who gets laughed at.”
This happens automatically, often without us noticing, and it makes us flinch away from the feeling.
And when we flinch, the wave can’t rise and fall. It gets stuck. A feeling that gets stuck is stored, together with its meaning.
Each time it happens again, the meaning grows stronger and shapes how we see the next situation. That’s the cycle, and it’s why the next invitation feels heavier.
The Australian doctor Claire Weekes saw this decades ago, and she knew it from her own life.
In her twenties, she had a racing heart and was diagnosed with tuberculosis without clear evidence.
During six months in a sanatorium outside Sydney, her fear of her own heartbeat grew stronger.
Later, writing about nervous fear and panic, she described two fears. The first comes on its own, like a reflex.
The second starts the moment we flinch from the first one. It sounds like “Oh no, what if…”. She explained that this second fear is what keeps the first one going.
Think of the invitation: first the tight stomach, then the “Oh no, what if…”.
For years, I avoided like this without noticing. I didn’t know it was social anxiety. I just thought that was the way I was.
But doesn’t pushing the feeling down at least make it hurt less? In one study, people who struggled with anxiety or low mood watched an upsetting film.
Some were asked to hold their feelings back, others to let them be there.
During the film, both groups felt equally upset. Pushing the feeling away didn’t make it hurt less.
But the people who pushed it away had faster heartbeats, while the hearts of those who let it be slowed down.
And afterwards, those who let it be felt better sooner. The feeling is still there, and the cycle keeps running.
If pushing the feeling away doesn’t help, the alternative is to accept it. But you might be thinking: if I accept my anxiety, haven’t I given up?
The story of Steven Hayes points the other way. In 1978, Hayes was twenty-nine and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
During a department meeting, he wanted to say something. Everyone turned to look at him, and nothing came out.
Maybe you know that moment. For Hayes, it was his first panic attack.
Over the next two years, the attacks grew more frequent. By 1980, he could barely give his lectures, and he avoided elevators, cinemas and restaurants.
One night, lying on the carpet, he wanted to call an ambulance.
He didn’t make the call. Instead, he made himself a promise: he would stop running away from himself.
For him, that meant turning toward what he felt. That wasn’t giving up. It was his turning point.
In 2006, TIME magazine reported that he hadn’t had a panic attack in a decade and that he had risen to the top of his field.
So what does accepting mean in a real moment? It means noticing the feeling and letting it be there, even when everything in you wants to flinch away.
You don’t hide it or push it down, and you don’t need to find the meaning behind it first.
When you do that, the wave can rise and fall again, without anything sticking to it.
This works in the moment itself, because the cycle gets no new fuel. In that moment, the feeling loses its grip.
The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh compared anger to a crying baby, and I find it fits fear too.
A mother picks the baby up and holds it. That alone brings relief, even before she knows what’s wrong.
You can hold your fear the same way, and the holding itself is what helps.
There’s also a side effect. Holding the baby lets her find out what’s wrong, and a feeling you let be there can show you where to look.
In the course, everyday triggers lead you to the old experiences worth working on.
For me, it started when I realized I had social anxiety. Then I could accept it: notice my triggers and let the feelings come. That’s what made the work possible.
You might be wondering whether this is just mindfulness. Mindfulness is one way to practice it: you pay calm attention to whatever you feel and let it be there.
That works deeply, but it takes time, because it doesn’t aim at the specific memories behind your social anxiety.
The method in my course does. It’s called EFT, but it’s often just called tapping.
While you tap on points on your face and body, you turn toward the feeling that is still attached to one specific experience, like the day the class laughed at your answer.
As you tap, the emotional charge of that moment dissolves. That charge is what got stuck back then.
Accepting is built right into it. The opening sentence names the feeling and pairs it with acceptance: “Even though I feel ashamed hearing them laugh, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
And while you tap, the course asks you to let the feeling be there instead of pushing it away.
The more you allow it, the more effectively the tapping can do its work.
Earlier, I mentioned a hermit whose cave was full of demons. His name is Milarepa. The demons were sleeping in his bed.
He tried to teach them, and they stayed. He ran at them in anger, and they laughed.
Finally, he sat down and said something like: “I’m not leaving, and it looks like you aren’t either. So let’s live here together.”
At that, the demons left, all except one, the most terrifying of them.
So Milarepa put his head into its mouth, and the last one was gone too.
So where does courage fit in? Many people think it means forcing yourself into the situations you fear.
For me, it meant something else: looking at the feeling I had avoided for years without knowing it.
Going into situations isn’t wrong, and it can help, especially when you let the feeling be there.
But lasting change comes from releasing the charge of the old moments underneath.
With the course, you start at home, without putting yourself in situations that overwhelm you.
Then you widen your comfort zone at your own pace, and find out along the way which situations and triggers you still want to work on.
And this reaches far beyond social anxiety. Stepping outside your comfort zone can bring up a new, normal nervousness, the kind most people feel with something unknown.
You can meet it the same way, and any other feeling you’ve been pushing away.
Think back to the dinner invitation from the start. Now imagine it arrives again.
This time, before you type anything, you notice the feeling and let it be there for a moment.
Whether you say yes or no is still up to you. We don’t avoid situations as much as we avoid feelings.
And when a feeling is allowed to be there, the cycle loses its fuel.
The old moments underneath are where lasting change happens. In Working Through Social Anxiety at Home, I show you how to release their charge, one at a time, from your own home. You’ll find it right here.