If You are Extremely Shy, Here Are Some Solutions
By Royane Real
Author of : “How to Overcome Your Shyness and Your Fear of Rejection and Have the Friends and Lovers You've Always Wanted”
Do you ever feel shy? If you do, you have a lot of company.
Research studies have shown that almost everyone feels shy at times, depending on the situation. People who claim they have never experienced shyness make up only about 7% of the population.
For most of us, shyness is embarrassing and mildly uncomfortable, but it usually goes away after a short while. For the majority of the population, shyness is only a mild inconvenience.
However, there are some people for whom shyness is not just an occasional minor experience. For these people, shyness is an intense, overwhelming, and painful condition that they experience almost all the time whenever they are around others.
People who are afflicted with this degree of acute shyness can suffer extreme emotional pain. They may be teased mercilessly by others, or they may end up taking drugs or drinking to try to escape the effects. They may go out of their way to avoid social contact with other people, even if they are extremely lonely.
Such extreme shyness can destroy relationships and careers before they even start.
No matter how smart, qualified, and talented a person may be, most jobs also require some degree of social skill. A person who is too socially awkward, and who is easily embarrassed when interacting with others will probably find their career path very limited.
Many people who suffer from severe shyness never get married, or they may marry someone for whom they are completely unsuited, simply because they are terrified at the ideas of dating.
It has only been in the last couple of decades that psychologists have started to investigate the problem of shyness in people.
In the past, many psychologists used to believe that severe shyness was a type of phobia or a form of neurosis that would require many years of psychoanalysis to cure.
Psychologists used to think they had to dig deep into every hidden corner of a person’s history before the reasons behind a person’s shyness could be discovered.
Only recently have psychiatrists and psychologists begun to look at extreme shyness in a new way.
Researchers and psychologists who study shyness have discovered is that many of their previous beliefs about the causes and treatment of acute shyness were wrong.
The good news is that if you’re very shy, you won’t need years of costly psychoanalysis to get over this problem.
In fact, those types of therapies where you had to spend months on a psychiatrist’s couch talking about what happened to you when you were seven years old have been found to be quite useless in treating shyness.
But there are types of therapies for shyness which can work really well, even on stubborn cases of those people who are extremely shy.
The types of therapy that work best on treating extreme shyness don’t involve wondering where you got your shyness from, and they don’t delve deeply into the past.
The kinds of therapies that are most effective for shy people involve working with the client in the present, teaching the client new ways of thinking, and new ways of behaving.
Two of the most effective therapies for shyness are cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy.
Cognitive therapy helps to teach the shy person how to change their inner thinking and self talk so they are no longer talking to themselves in a negative way.
Behavioral therapy aims at teaching the shy person to experiment with new behaviors, and uses a system of positive reinforcement to reward the desired behavior, and negative reinforcement to discourage the undesired behavior.
In addition to these effective forms of psychotherapy, some types of anti-depressant drugs have also been found to be very helpful for extremely shy people.
Sometimes drug therapy for shyness is used in conjunction with talking therapy, and sometimes the drugs are used on their own.
Even when a person is very committed to learning new methods of overcoming shyness, it will usually take several months for the problem to disappear, although significant improvements may take place in a matter of weeks.
This article on shyness was written by Royane Real, author of the special report “How to Overcome Your Shyness and Your Fear of Rejection and Have the Friends and Lovers You've Always Wanted”
To improve your social life, download it today at http://www.lulu.com/real
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
