If you’re someone who suffers from social anxiety, it can be difficult to manage anxiety in public. However, there are some strategies that you can use to help bring your crippling anxiety down a notch or two. One way that people combat their social anxiety is by using guided meditation.
Why Guided Meditation For Social Anxiety Works So Well
Guided meditation is a great way to help lower your social anxiety. The reason you can use meditation in the first place is that it helps you to focus on one thing. When you’re meditating, you’re telling your mind to just focus on one thought or emotion, and then letting it go. This works very well for people with social anxiety because they tend to worry about everything that could happen in a given situation. By focusing on a single thing, they can relax and focus more on their breathing, which will actually make them feel so much better.
There are very few guided meditation exercises that are specifically designed for social anxiety disorder patients; however, there are some that can be tailored for them anyway.
How does it do this? In a similar way that some medications may help reduce anxiety, guided meditations can also help calm a person who is suffering from persistent thoughts and fears about what other people are thinking of them.
There is a psychological term for this. It’s called cognitive restructuring and it involves taking your negative thoughts about certain situations and asking yourself if they are really true. Most of the time, they aren’t. For example, if you are worried that people are judging you, ask yourself if you really believe that they are. Then, go over to the people that you think are judging you and ask them directly how they feel about it.
Guided meditations can also help you to relax and leave your mind at rest. When your mind is at rest, it’s possible that you’ll be able to see things from a little bit different perspective, one that isn’t clouded by fear or anxiety. This is the purpose of guided meditation for social anxiety — it helps people take their minds off of the worry and fear that their social anxiety is causing them.
How To Use Guided Meditation For Social Anxiety
If you’re interested in trying out guided meditation as a way to manage social anxiety, there are some steps that you can take in order to make it as effective as possible.
1. Make sure that you have a quiet place to lay or sit down. It doesn’t have to be in your bedroom or anything, but it’s a good place to start.
2. Pick out a guided meditation from YouTube that you’d like to listen to. There are plenty of them on YouTube, so you should be able to find one that works for your particular situation and state of mind at the moment. The best ones come with instructions on how long they need to be listened to before they start working, so take note of those instructions.
3. Listen to the audio file while laying down or sitting in your quiet space, moving your body in a way that helps you to relax as much as possible.
5. Repeat this step every day for a few minutes until you feel that it is working for you.
One of the best ways to manage your social anxiety is through the use of cognitive restructuring and guided meditation. The combination of these two things helps reduce anxiety and allows people to be at ease when they are out in public, meeting new people and speaking with friends and family members. Both cognitive restructuring and guided meditation have a lot in common with psychological therapies because all they do is help a person to turn their negative thinking into something positive, one emotion at a time.
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