Overcoming shyness and social phobia is not easy. If you are going to try and lift the shackles it will require lots of dedication, persistence and thinking. Social anxiety can rear it’s ugly head at parties or other social occasions, when meeting new people at work, or sometimes damagingly at job interviews, where it prevents you expressing your true abilities and perhaps advancing when the less deserving seem to do well.

So what are the best methods for overcoming shyness and social phobia? You can try anti-depressants, but will they cure the root problem and what gets you tense in the first place. Alcohol is hardly a solution either.

Overcoming shyness and social phobia can be difficult because your mind partly knows it isn’t logical to get quite so tense over what should be “trivial” encounters, yet the alarm bells start to ring in the head and the nerves and fear take over. The brain reverts to a primitive “fight or flight” mode at which point reasoning goes out the window.

It all means the best answer lies from a qualified expert who can come up with reasons for your behaviour and devise strategies for overcoming shyness and social phobia. It does require some willingness and persistence to stick with what can sometimes be uncomfortable challenges.

One suggestion

worth trying is visualisation, where you go through what a successful encounter would be like in your mind, running through how you would hope to react and tackle a specific situation. While this may seem odd it can bring feelings of positivity and also preparation. Feeling you have some weapons in your armoury is just one way to start work on overcoming shyness and social phobia.

For a new program to help you with overcoming shyness and social phobia from a qualified psychologist head to Solving Shyness