Address fear on an emotional, not just a mental, level. Else you’ll find yourself constantly returning to it. It won’t actually go away. It will keep popping up in important situations in life. It will hold you back in immeasurable ways. It will stake you to the ground and keep you from ever rising any higher.

Emotions are of the body. This is where your attention must go, where you must focus it. This is where the battle is fought and won, in your body, in your subconscious mind, in releasing the emotions that currently imprison you. Freeing the hold of all that tension and fear and frozen emotion, frozen sensation. Flowing again. Feeling alive. Returning to an embodied sense of self.

This is the way past social anxiety.

I’m going to tell you what I wish someone had told me. Don’t waste years of your life masking the problem. Though it may improve things on the surface and help you to survive… it will fundamentally leave you in a deeper mess where the same issues still unconsciously control and steer your life. You’ll wonder why you can’t create any kind of meaningful life or make real progress and feel okay in yourself and it’s because you haven’t addressed your issues, you’ve taken the shortcut of pushing them from view.

This blog is about getting real and cutting the shit. It’s about undergoing a deep change in how you feel. It’s about moving beyond social anxiety and living your life. It’s about doing whatever it takes to free yourself from this curse.

This blog unpacks how I addressed my social anxiety

It’s devastating, to learn your hard work has led nowhere.

Five years into my journey to overcome social anxiety, I experienced that. I had done all this exposure, positive thinking, time in the gym, work on myself. And where it mattered most? I was still anxious and struggling to get along. I couldn’t form relationships, couldn’t comfortably exist in my body, couldn’t easily order a coffee at Starbucks. Everything about my world was still so fragile. I could fake it better and make it seem I was ok on the outside.

But I didn’t feel that way.

I felt insecure.

A reality I spent long trying to deny and push away, as if this would solve it. My strategy to “overcome” social anxiety was to present a confident front to people so the truth of me would stay hidden. Worked temporarily. But long term? It fucked me up being this way and using so much energy to pretend otherwise.

My whole purpose for sharing this is to present another way. It doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to spend the rest of your life “faking it” and feeling tormented. You can skip past all that and do the work to actually change on the inside, feel good. Then you can live with a clear and free conscience.

Just exist.

Who am I

I’m no different than you. I was that highly anxious and insecure guy, for fucking years. I spent all my teens being an awkward/anxious fuckup, few friends, avoiding social situations because they stirred a lot of fear. I was uncomfortable around my own family. I felt worthless. I looked for relief in conventional advice that tells you the only way out of social anxiety is to “face it” and “change your thinking” and “improve your lifestyle”. All of which helped but didn’t scratch the surface of what was going on inside to make me this way. Traveling, moving cities, I tried it all. Nothing got to the heart of it.

I was going to kill myself at 27, after having spent 5 years trying everything in my power to overcome social anxiety and still finding this brick wall in front of me. But I put it off to try one last thing, a 10 day silent meditation retreat. And it was here I found a real solution to this fear inside, a way to actually dismantle it. It turns out the answer was inside me this whole time, under my nose. I had the tools in myself, I just didn’t know the first thing about using them.

I didn’t need a therapist or medication or exposure for the rest of my life in order to manage/be free of social anxiety. Once I learned what was causing my social anxiety and put attention on that, a change happened. My body became a different place to be. Comfortable, secure, safe. Feeling like a real person again.

Human.