How to Conquer Social Anxiety: A Scientific, Step-By-Step Forumla to Overcome Shyness, Break Free From Negative Thinking, and Unlock True Confidence by Avery Hayden

Author:Avery Hayden [Hayden, Avery]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Published: 2017-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Challenge One

A Day Without Screens

The challenge:

Go for an entire day without using your smartphone, internet, or television.

Explanation:

This challenge will show you in a visceral way how dependent you’ve become on your smartphone for coping with daily stress. You can expect that this challenge will be quite uncomfortable. To succeed, you will probably need to put your smartphone out of your eyesight, if you have easy access to your smartphone, your automatic response can easily take over. The fact that this will be so challenging is indicative of the fact that we are addicted to technology, and that we’ve become reliant on it.

Your day without technology may be disproportionally stressful, and it would be easy to think this is because internet use is a good coping mechanism. But it’s almost the opposite. When you take away a source of an addiction, you create a large amount of stress because when you become addicted to something, you become dependent on it to relieve your stress. Once something is an addiction, this reliance on that addiction for stress-relief prevents you from coping with the stress in a healthy way. Addiction based coping doesn’t eliminate the source of the stress, it simply numbs you to it for a time; the underlying stress is still there, and the more you cope with it using your addiction, the worse that underlying stress becomes and the more you rely on your addiction to cope with it.

This symbiotic relationship becomes more and more unhealthy over time. The majority of Americans, especially younger generations, have become dependent on their smartphones as a coping mechanism. The average American spends over 10 hours engaging with electronic media per day. The majority of our waking hours are spent in front of a screen, we have such constant access to electronic media (tv, smartphones, computers), that we’re never forced to deal with negative emotions or stress in any way other than via numbing them out with electronic media.

As you go through your day without electronic media, notice how you feel. And notice how you feel when you get an urge to use your smartphone or your computer. You may find that whenever you feel uncomfortable, you get an urge to cope with that discomfort through technology. If this is the case, it’s a good sign that reducing your internet use would be a good first step to reducing not only your social anxiety but your anxiety and stress in general.

If you limit your access to your smartphone, you won’t be able to so easily avoid social interaction, taking away this unhealthy coping option will make the option of actually interacting with people that much more appealing even when you feel anxious.

If you find that going without electronic media for a day is difficult, it indicates that you may gain a lot of value by going on an electronic media diet. At the very least, this would mean turning off notifications for texts, Facebook messages, etc. At most, this would mean leaving your smartphone

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