The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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People with social anxiety, how have you managed to cope or manage it? I've had it since 12 years old, I'm 25 now. The biggest impact for me has come from consistent sleep and exercise. Went from having hard time calling customer support and going to public places with a lot of people to having a slightly increased heartbeat when talking to people I'm not familiar with. I've also tried meditation, but couldn't stay consistent with it. I know some people swear by CBT, thinking of trying it out next.
Exposure therapy, lots of it. Public speaking in my case.
And lots of meditation. Including a guided style of meditation called Ideal Parent Figure. It can help you emotionally reconsolidate the difficult memories of episodes/life situations that contributed to your developing the anxiety.
Yeah I do plenty of that in my daily life, but I think I need to do something more out of the ordinary, maybe take an improv class.
That sounds interesting, thanks. Especially considering I attribute my social anxiety issues to one of the parents being extremely neurotic in my youth...
Check out https://www.attachmentrepair.com
He's a good teacher of IPF (calls it "perfect nurturer" though due to some copyright issue).
Hey, just want to say big thank you for mentioning Ideal Parent Figure. As I was researching it, I stumbled upon EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy) and tried a virtual session last night. It's most likely a placebo effect, but I've had 0 social anxiety symptoms today. It was probably my first time feeling like this in my whole adult life. Will continue with it and see how it goes.
Oh wow, that's wonderful. :)
I did some EMDR too, and it was helpful. I should have mentioned it. But I'm glad you found it anyway!
Btw, what I've found is that some stress can be tied up in more general "concept situations" and not just specific episodic memories. What I mean is, the pattern can be something like "this will be a big challenge in my life" or "this happens around lunch time" rather than the very specific like "holding x presentation at work".
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