How to deal with anxiety when it makes you unable to speak?
Hello,
I’m a 24 year old female. I have social anxiety that has destroyed my life, and now I’m trying to undo the damage. My biggest problem is that I really hate it when anxiety takes over whenever I’m trying to talk to people. What bothers me the most about that is me losing the ability to speak properly to the point where I'm unable to say one coherent sentence which embarrasses me and makes me want to go back to isolating myself.
How to deal with that?
@braveMelon3438
I suffer from many forms of anxiety including social anxiety. For me it is when i have to speak to a group. I sweat, shake, and loose the ability to speak. All my doctors have said the only way to deal with this is through exposure.
Yes, getting accustomed to it by doing it. This has to be done incrementally. If you can speak to a therapist for help. It would be hard to do without guidance.
I have social anxiety too. If I try to talk to more than about two people at the same time it freaks me out even if it’s just my family or friends. I can’t think clearly when multiple people are looking at me. I think it’s gotten a little bit better the older I get (I’m 33) because I’ve realized that nobody is actually judging me. People don’t care nearly as much as we think they do. Most people are too busy thinking about what’s going on internally with themselves to be actually paying that much attention. I don’t know if I’m saying this clearly but what I’m trying to say is that I’ve realized that people are not actually as focused on me as I’m scared they are. There’s no need for me to freak out like I do. I don’t know if you’ve seen Schitt’s Creek but I think Alexis explained it really well to David when he was trying to get his drivers license. Lol
@braveMelon3438 G'day, I've got pretty bad anxiety, it's still pretty bad but a few years back I couldn't take public transport, go to shops, couldn't really do anything.
I concur with peoples advice around exposure, find yourself a reason to go outside and at least interact with one person a week. For me it was to get cigarettes although obviously don't do that if you're not a smoker.
Also a few other things:
- everyone is weird in public, it's just easy to be so worried about how weird we are that we don't notice how weird everyone else is
- I once drunkenly stumbled into and knocked down a display shelf in a large public store at ~10 in the morning on a weekday, I came back to apologize a couple days later and the person I spoke too, who was watching when it happened gave me a puzzled look like she'd never seen me before in her life.
Hope that helps, or you at least get a small laugh from my anecdote
