If you tend to avoid social situations because of the anxiety they cause, you might be able to make yourself feel more comfortable around others by doing nice things for the people around you.
Photo by Lili Vieira de Carvalho.
A recent study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, and led by Dr. Jennifer Trew and Professor Lynn Alden, suggests that performing acts of kindness reduced the participants’ fears of rejection. Reducing that fear made it easier for those participants to put themselves in social situations and interact with others. Trew explains:
Acts of kindness may help to counter negative social expectations by promoting more positive perceptions and expectations of a person’s social environment. It helps to reduce their levels of social anxiety and, in turn, makes them less likely to want to avoid social situations.
Essentially, if you do nice things for the people around you, you worry less about those people creating negative social interactions; which in turn, can make you feel more confident about being around people in general. It never hurts to be nice to others, but it might help with your social anxiety too. You can learn more about the study at the link below.
See also: How Being Humble, Kind And Calm Will Make Your Life Easier
Kindness reduces avoidance goals in socially anxious individuals [Motivation and Emotion via PsyBlog]
Comments
3 responses to “Reduce Your Social Anxiety By Performing Acts Of Kindness”
Sounds like Leonard’s advice to Sheldon. Be nice to others. But why not using a raygun or simple clone oneself? Why should you want to be social? To gain something like be liked or loved? Ins’t it exactly this fear not to be liked and loved which makes them stay home? We should go back to tea-dance and provide more social activities in real live to bring them together, don’t you think?
It requires more to cure social anxiety than simple acts of kindness. I agree that acts of kindness can be a good “lesson” in developing or training social skills but to truly overcome social anxiety you need a therapy or a great program. From my experience the Social Reprogramming Method has been proven to work wonders when it comes to curing social anxiety sufferers. Other than that I think any kind of social interaction can be helpful to reduce social anxiety to some degree.
Anxiety is tougher to fight without drugs, but that is definitely the way to go. I battled Anxiety for years, and I am so grateful that I managed to fight that demon off. Things like the steamspoils system taught me the perspective of other sufferers on how I should start trying alternative methods. I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve learned, but a major part of It was committing myself to finding a solution that was long lasting. Natural processes are the most effective and long-lasting methods to defeat it.
I’ve suffered from anxiety, depression and panic attacks for as long as I can remember, at one point was so bad that I was spending all my day contemplating suicide and the part that angered me the most was the fact that I couldn’t sleep and the severe insomnia almost drove me mad. Only a couple months ago I come across a review about a program called the Thought Elevators program it contains some meditation techniques that helped me to get rid of depression, now I fell more confident, happy and for the first time in many years I can say that I am happy to be alive.