Tips on how to decrease social anxiety-- add your own!

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1. Look at the person long and hard. Find flaws that they have and imagine them having an embarrassing moment. For example, if they're fat, imagine what they would look like naked.

2. Carry a weapon and look them up and down for weapons. If they don't seem to have a weapon (other than maybe a little pocket knife) then you might feel a lot safer around them.

3. Realize that they piss and s**t like everyone else.

I find that whenever I'm inebriated, I find my social anxiety just evaporates into nothing. The downside is alcohol and my psych meds do not like each other. Which is why I can never drink too much or too frequently. *sigh*

get drunk

Unfortunately, getting drunk is not a viable long-term solution to social anxiety. Or to anything, really. Now that I think of it, there probably isn't a 1-size-fits-all practical solution to social anxiety. We all deal with it in our own way, on our own time.

Stay away from people.

Smoke a bomber joint

Remember that they're probably nervous about saying the wrong thing too.

Getting drunk doesn't alway work with me (i can become hypervigilant ), but it seems to work with some wine.

I have a way to defuse social anxiety in a situation that is socially unhealthy for me... I write Top Ten lists, about what is bothering me.

Top Ten Lists, to me, are like pop-culture Haiku. Each sentence is independent of the others, and each contains a framing of social behavior. So it's quite difficult to do, in a mind that has difficulty with allocentrism (recognizing a third person viewpoint) and relating dissonant social impressions. As a form of therapy, it helps me connect fragments of social impressions that don't make sense to me in a dysfunctional or socially abusive situation, and then get a bird's eye view of the whole.

The first Top Ten list I wrote about a dysfunctional/abusive social conflict situation was "Dr. Dennis Healy's Top Ten Ways To Get Busted by Your Research Assistant Having An Affair With Her Skanky Psycho Girlfriend". Onto that list, I piled all the cognitive dissonant social frames. e.g.:

10. Hire an Asperger research assistant who will meticulously piece together any behavior of yours she observes but doesn't understand.

Then it goes on to explain how he was showing up for meeting reeking like the skanky girlfriends weird dog-and-fungus smelling house, acting angry every time I stopped taking her calls, letting the woman micromanage my project with him, how she was telling me things like he thought his wife was stupid... etc. The list is a chain of the snapshots of impropriety and dysfunction that he and she imposed on the project.

But in capturing all the stupidity and dysfunction in different snapshots of my experience with those two, and summing it up, I got a clear picture of the fragments of dysfunctional behavior that combined in the situation. Something that I had never been able to do before. The top ten list (the first I ever wrote) became, after I wrote it, a clear set of behavior fragments that showed me that these two were low people each engaged in crummy, desperate behavior with each other. That was something I was never able to do, looking at my admirable, respected professor, despite the fact that I separately had these fragments of bad social behavior snapshots of his sitting in my memory hopper unprocessed. In some way, that first top ten list was like a Helen Keller moment that allowed me to see how a picture of someone's character can emerge as a collage of atomic snapshots of their different behaviors over time. After I wrote the top ten list, I could clearly see through him more clearly.

In my experience, I start developing a lot of social anxiety in a situation where there are unhealthy things building, that I can't get any conscious grip on, even though I can see disparate fragments of things that seem wrong and don't make sense.

With these Top Ten lists, I can now "write up" a murky social situation, forcing myself to aggregate all the cognitively dissonant pieces of strange behaviors, and after I do write it up, I can not only get some insight as to what the bigger picture is (i.e. what is going on or what is going wrong), but I feel LESS SOCIAL ANXIETY.

I have concluded that a lot of social anxiety, i.e. actual anxiety attacks, I get in sleazy or dysfunctional social situations, is due to a sense of disorientation, cluelessness and lack of control over my destiny.

Finally, the top ten lists are basically an arsenal of snappy comebacks and defenses. My professor's girlfriend was very verbally abusive, picking at me psychologically all the time. If I had made up a top ten list about her earlier, I would have had snappy comebacks for her, like how she kept a leather miniskirt and thigh high stockings in a grocery bag at work for those quick meetings with her Craigslist men, or I'd tell the guys at work that she always fought with that she had a coat made of 101 Dalmations in her closet (she was very Cruella De Vil).

So as a social situation dissection and perspective tool, the Top Ten Lists have become very useful to me. Invaluable, really.

Hope this helps.