About Anxiety

[_BaienatSalman]

Hi, I was diagnosed within anxiety and it affected my social life and I lost my friends because of it, how should I deal with it?!

[Raremoni]

You’re a beautiful person inside and out. Even though I don’t know you, I see you. I have no friends either and im not sure if that’s due to my lack of social skills or my pessimistic energy at times but what I do know is that you have to keep pushing forward until you find better friends. They honestly don’t deserve to be in your life if they can’t accept you and love you for something as common as anxiety in this world especially with a pandemic going on. You deserve better, and when you believe it you’ll find better company.

[designguy]

More than likely you have social anxiety disorder. My suggestion is to find a therapist who specializes in treating social anxiety to help you learn why and how you developed it and new skills and understanding to overcome it. SA is learned distorted maladaptive thinking and behavior that you adopted to protect yourself for whatever reason. There wasn't a specialist near me so used an online course from the socialanxietyinstitute.org/ which helped a lot. I also found the DARE Anxiety book, program and youtube videos very helpful especially for learning how to accept the anxious thoughts and feelings and deal with the common setbacks that occur. Also, those of us with SA typically suffer from low-self-worth and esteem so work on improving that with yourself. There are a lot of online resources for it and one of the programs I like is the Break Free program by Dr Bernadette Sewell.