Comment by mitsche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitsche | Hacker News Reader

I strongly recommend seeing a behavioral therapist. This is exactly the kind of thing they're trained for. It's what I did over a year ago, although for other reasons. It saved me a bunch of time and agony, although therapy can be pretty harsh sometimes as well.

Regarding social anxiety: I was pretty much the same at your age, and I think the reason was simply a severe lack of self-esteem resulting in excessive self-consciousness. One thing that helped me was to realize that everyone is insecure to some degree, and that everyone is at least a bit worried about what other people think about them. Once I had realized that, I tried to make other people feel comfortable around me instead of worrying why I felt so uncomfortable. But this takes practice and time, which is why I still recommend seeing a professional. And when I say it takes time, then I mean that it takes time to to overcome the fear to do the things you're afraid of. Once you've done this a few times (or even just once), change can happen very quickly.

Try to worry less about people thinking of you as "the quiet guy". They probably don't think as much about you as you believe they do. They mostly think about how they appear to others, just more moderately than you (hopefully).

I'm confident that you'll overcome your anxiety sooner or later if you don't just ignore the issue, which you're not doing. So chin up!

"Try to worry less about people thinking of you as "the quiet guy". They probably don't think as much about you as you believe they do. They mostly think about how they appear to others, just more moderately than you (hopefully)."

Upvoted for this. I can't tell you how many life opportunities I've missed or wasted because I'd assumed other people thought a certain way about me, only to find out later they weren't thinking about me at all. While feeling 'ignored' may feel bad, I've come to realize that 99% of the time it's unintentional, and people just focus on themselves. That's it. Unless I give them reason to want to include me in something, such as, by being a good friend, interesting conversation starter, bringer of fun food, whatever the relationship calls for, they'll have no real reason to consider me as opposed to the other 105 things they're juggling in their mind.

Until I got older and started doing my own thing and realizing how much I was forgetting other people - unintentionally - did I realize how unintentional other people were being.

Generally, people aren't thinking anything about you, so quit thinking they're out to get you, hurt you, ignore, you, etc. Not necessarily advice for the OP, just a life lesson learned way too late in life!.

This is one case where seeing the number of upvotes would be valuable. There is a lot of (very well-intentioned) advice on this thread that it gets better with time, etc and while that is probably true, parent's comment is right on the money. Therapy can feel like a weird step to take but it really does work. Cognitive behavioural therapy and exposure therapy helped me deal with my anxiety much more effectively than I ever would have been able to on my own.

What else did the professional tell you that helped? I'd rather just read a blogpost about it than pay per hour :)

I am obviously not mitsche, but this is my experience:

I think it obviously depends on people's personal situations and circumstance. Anxiety in particular often presents in an almost paralyzing manner - being accountable to a therapist in that case is extremely valuable. It's also easy to dismiss certain ideas when reading them that a real live therapist won't let you ignore so easily - for example, I learned breathing and focus exercises that I would have felt silly trying if it weren't for my therapist. Possibly most importantly, a good therapist will understand your condition better than you do, and advise you accordingly. Not all anxiety disorders have the same cause or the same symptoms.

As far as payment goes, there are often cheap or free resources for therapy, especially for university students. For example, I made use of a free clinic run by my school's psychology department, which is open to the public.

What fooandbarify said. Especially: a therapist holds you accountable. He or she will try to keep you focused on things that are unpleasant to keep working on, which is necessary in order to overcome a problematic behavioral pattern, whereas without supervision you might waste a lot of time trying to find shortcuts or esoteric solutions that make you feel good about yourself for some time but ultimately fail to solve your problems (productivity pr0n, anyone?).

And keep in mind that a therapist is also -- to some extent -- an analyst. So he or she might expose things you wouldn't have been able to figure out yourself, either because you're not professionally trained, or because you're part of the problem.

And sorry, there's no such thing as therapy by proxy. It's a very interactive thing.

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