How to use CBT to get rid of social anxiety?:
Working Backwards:
First, decide the outcomes that you want. Like say, getting a girlfriend. But we are not gonna hinge on outcomes. Outcomes are flimsy and fragile and they are not in our control. We’re only gonna use them to get a sense of direction.
So, now, based on the outcomes that you want, figure out what kind of behaviors you need to exhibit to get to those outcomes. (This is still not deep enough though). You will only be able to enact certain behaviors autonomously and consistently over long periods of time if you ARE a certain type of a person.
So, we come down to identity. To get rid of social anxiety, what you need to do is become someone else. But what does it even mean to become? What constitutes an identity?
An identity is essentially your core beliefs. Core beliefs are absolute statements that you believe about yourself, about others, and about the world. They are very very deeply embedded thoughts in the unreachable recesses of your mind, but they do rule your life without you consciously knowing about it.
They are what keeps you in the same vicious cycles of not being able to change, despite your surface-level thoughts yearning for change. Core beliefs are very very very strong, and they are very very very emotionally charged, and they distort the way you see reality.
So, the ultimate goal, is to change your core beliefs to be aligned with your desired outcomes.
So, basically, to change your identity towards a certain direction, you need to:
Challenge core beliefs that are getting in the way of forming that new identity.
Strengthen new core beliefs that are aligned with your desired identity.
So, how do we challenge or strengthen core beliefs? Through evidence.
For every misaligned core belief, you need to come up with evidence that contradicts that core belief.
For every aligned core belief, you need to come up with evidence that strengthens that core belief.
Evidence: (1) Gathering & (2) Scrutinizing:
IMPORTANT: Remember, your current core-beliefs are distorting your view of reality, so you are, at the moment going to tend to avoid evidence that doesn’t sit well with your current destructive core beliefs, and you are subconsciously going to push it away, and at the same time you are going to ignore solid evidence that would help you build a newer more confident identity by fighting against it subconsciously.
That’s why it’s important to not just (1) go out there looking for evidence but also to (2) put it under immense scrutiny to build a more realistic and helpful view of reality.
This is one of the biggest mistake people trying to get rid of social anxiety make. They think that getting rid of fear just means keep facing scarier and scarier situations.
NO. It’s more about realizing that reality is not that scary in the first place. You need to remember the end goal — that is, building very strong and positive core beliefs, for which you need to register reality in your mind. Your goal is not to build delusional confidence, your goal is to get rid of delusional under-confidence. (core beliefs).
So, if you just focus on facing your fears, and not on facing your fears fully, (by dropping your fake front), and you don’t pay attention to what’s happening around you, and you don’t scrutinize your thoughts thoroughly, you are never gonna be able to build good evidence for shaping your core beliefs, no matter how many socially scary situations you put yourself in. It needs to be both. Put yourself in socially scary situations to collect evidence, and then scrutinize and actually REGISTER that evidence in your brain (and in a written-down list, perhaps) towards the goal of re-shaping your belief system.
So, how do you gather such evidence? To repeat, it’s essentially a matter of:
Putting yourself in situations where you might find it.
Being ruthless and objective like a lawyer, and only admitting evidence after making it go through immense scrutiny. Which essentially means — NOT assuming your thoughts and core beliefs to automatically be true.
Here are the tools that will help you optimally gather and scrutinize such evidence, to support or challenge the core beliefs you want to build or destroy:
(1). behavioral experiments to make an environment where the evidence we want is going to occur and so we can test our negative/positive predictions that our core-beliefs are making:
avoidance: We need to overcome our avoidance, get out of our homes, and go do something that nudges our core beliefs in the right direction.
stepladders: Sometimes doing BEs is very difficult because these things are very emotionally charged, so we use the so called BE stepladders where we start with something easier and slowly work our way up.
safety behaviors: We also need to remember to not use safety behaviors which are subtle forms of avoidance and don’t allow us to fully challenge our distorted thinking.
(2). apart from putting ourselves in situations where we’re likely to see useful evidence for making our cases, we need to make sure we are collecting that evidence well enough, and also that we are scrutinizing it well enough:
attention focusing — to the situation at hand instead of staying in our brain and ruminating on negative thoughts. This allows us to cope better by grounding us to reality, and also helps us look at evidence more realistically since we are paying attention at the situation instead of letting the cognitive distortions in our head dictate to us what’s real and what’s not.
thought challenging — do not assume just because you have a thought it’s true. challenge its validity. ask yourself, “would it hold up in court?” do I actually have concrete evidence? thoughts are just another culmination of your core beliefs. In your day-to-day situations, you can use this to build a more balanced picture of reality, it will help you face your fears easier, help you gather evidence better, help you cope better, and deal with setbacks better. If you start seeing a pattern over time in your thoughts journal, or if you start digging deeper into the negative thoughts, you will arrive at core beliefs behind those thoughts that you can also challenge.
Action Plan: *(most important)*
There’s no exact sequence or chronology in which you have to do these things as one might affect the other and vice versa at any point in time. For example, you can come up with a core belief you want to challenge right off the bat. Or, maybe, you are doing behavioral experiments and you see a theme of reoccurring negative thoughts which you then tie to a negative core-belief that you can then challenge.
So, while there’s no exact sequence to it, try to do these things:
Things to write down: (never-ending tasks):
(1). list your positive and negative core beliefs that you want to strengthen and challenge and list evidence points below them as and when you find them — whether from your past, present, or future.
(2). journal your evidence gathering toolkits:
behavioral experiments. any time you do something you’re socially scared of, write down what actually happened to contradict your negative predictions with reality. this will help you keep track of all the evidence you need to strengthen/challenge any core beliefs you want to.
thought challenging. within this journal you can also challenge your thoughts. so, for example, if you did or are going to do a BE, and you’re having negative thoughts write them down. then try to refute them with concrete realistic thinking. remember to pay attention to the task at hand when doing behavioral experiments.
(TODO): how does thought challenging exactly fit into this???
Things to just keep in mind: (come up with a list of ideas to do these things):
remember to overcome avoidance, just getting out of your house with just the ability to look at potential people you can talk to is enough. don’t overthink.
make sure to use stepladders to make a behavioral experiment easier so that you don’t get too scared and totally avoid.
make sure to drop safety behaviors to immerse yourself and test your fears fully and uninhibitedly.