Improving Social Anxiety: Is Medication Necessary?

As someone who used to suffer with social anxiety, I tried many different methods of improving the situation, including medication. But in my experience, using medication to deal with social anxiety is a bit like using a shotgun to get rid of ants in your kitchen: it may help with the ant problem (slightly), but the collateral damage will produce a situation that is much worse than what you started with.

Obviously, my experiences in using medication for social anxiety were not very positive. It is true that I did often feel a little "out of it" in social situations, and this led to a slight improvement in my level of anxiety, but the medications also robbed me of much of my personality, and made me feel tired and lethargic a great deal of the time.

For example, I've never really been a "nap person." I tend to have a lot of energy during the day, and if I decided to take an afternoon nap right now, I would probably find it very difficult to get to sleep. But back when I was on social anxiety medication I HAD to take a nap every single day.

Often, I would sleep 10 or more hours at night, and by the time the afternoon rolled around, I would find it impossible to stay awake and need a nap for at least two hours. And even when I could stay awake, I began to feel very tired and apathetic most of the time. I didn't have much energy to do anything -- and I felt too apathetic to even care! Haha

But seriously, the constant tiredness caused by the medication was a major problem for me, and even though my social anxiety situation was improving slightly, at the end of the day, I was basically sleep-walking through my life like some kind of zombie. Not good.

What are theSocial Strategies?

And there were also other side effects and symptoms of the social anxiety medication that profoundly impacted my life. For example, I began to notice that my memory was fading. I had always had a good memory, but after six months on the medications I began struggling to remember people's names, phone numbers, even family member's birthdays and anniversaries.

I think you get the idea: social anxiety medication was barely effective for me, and caused so many other debilitating problems that it really was not worth it. But there was another problem caused by taking the medication -- one that was less obvious to me at the time, but is very clear now: by resorting to medication for the problem, I had elevated it to the status of a "medical condition."

By assuming that my social anxiety was a medical problem, I unknowingly accepted the role of "victim," making me feel that I was powerless to change it. The truth is, I was never powerless over my social anxiety, and neither is anyone else.

Social anxiety is the result of our habits -- particularly our thinking habits. And improving these habits is the only real way to improve social anxiety. When we accept that we are involved in the process of creating the problem, we empower ourselves to do something about it -- to change it.

However, this doesn't mean that you should blame yourself because of the way you feel. Blame has nothing to do with it. We should simply take responsibility for the social anxiety, by recognizing our role in creating it and maintaining it.

When we attempt to use medications for social anxiety, it produces feelings of powerlessness and victimization. This leads to a mindset that social anxiety is something that "happens to us," not "something we are involved in creating." And I can tell you from personal experience that improving social anxiety is practically impossible as long as we feel like a victim.

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