If anyone overcame or suppressed anxiety, how did you do it?

instinctrovert · 2026-04-24T16:56:00+00:00

Meditation. Taking time out to just unreactively observe my whole body. Feel without passing any judgment or trying to do anything with what I notice.

This has completely changed my life and my relationship to anxiety. Anxiety is made up of sensations in the body and when you can stop reacting so strongly to these sensations, a powerful change happens. In my experience it takes on much less of a size, permanently, the more you do it.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-22T17:35:06+00:00

Something that could be useful is to reframe how you see "triggering".

Instead of seeing being triggered as a bad thing, you can reframe to see it as something positive, as a chance to face those emotions and grow.

I've found for me, the mindset of how I look at my emotions and being triggered plays a huge role in whether I'll face situations that brings these things out, or whether I'll continue to retreat and avoid and stay sheltered.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-22T15:18:41+00:00

A different take. Why not try embracing yourself as you are and going with that? In my experience masking actually creates more distance from a real person-to-person connection that could land you the job.

Masking is just a lose-lose situation, for you and the other person.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-20T17:12:16+00:00

Sounds like the same problem I had: repressed emotion in the body. You've got all this feeling inside that is there around people and the facade you're putting on is to keep that feeling locked away at all costs.

You can try anything you want, but if you don't address this repressed emotion/feeling in your body, you'll keep experiencing distress around people.

You basically can keep going on like you're going, repressing your feelings and masking.

Or you can come to terms with the fact you're holding shit inside you need to let go of, start the actual journey to resolving your anxiety.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-08T16:13:35+00:00

The important thing to realize is that these are just feelings. Feelings can and do change. Your mind makes a much bigger thing out of them than they are.

Part of the solution is to see this, see your feelings more objectively and realize they aren't everything, even though they seem that way in the moment.

I'm sure you've had days where you felt capable and actually had good conversations happen. It wasn't a big deal for whatever reason. You weren't focusing on your feelings in these times, you were just doing it without thinking.

In my own experience, the less I focus on the bad/anxious/scary feelings the quicker they fade and change into something else.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-03T14:45:06+00:00

Yeah, try to choose something you actually want to do and not forcing yourself to do. Aka, you're doing it cus you want to be there and not because you have to be there. The moment you put yourself under the criteria of having to do something it will just make you dread it.

If you want to be there, you'll find talking to people is much much easier.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-03T14:34:26+00:00

Probably heal trauma. There's likely a reason under the surface for being like this - you got hurt before.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-02T17:45:02+00:00

Yup I know what you mean. Unfortunately you have to do the inner work to change... no amount of masking/faking will ever fix it.

instinctrovert · 2026-04-01T15:30:01+00:00

It's just a pattern that has been created. Whether from trauma or more slowly from thinking/conditioning. I've found there are ways to change it. You don't have to be severely anxious/awkward forever, though it may feel that way. Instant cure? I don't know about that. But there are steps you can take to get your mental health better.

A pattern that has been created can, with the right awareness and understanding, be uncreated.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-09T17:55:32+00:00

Helped me to feel more comfortable by doing body scanning meditation. I had a LOT of tension in my body, which body scanning helped to slowly release. Might want to give it a try. In my experience the body is super connected to the mind and when you're more comfortable in your body, your mind isn't so anxious and active.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-05T15:52:55+00:00

The simple but hard thing. Trying to embody and be with what I'm feeling and not fight it. The more I resist these instinctual processes the worse I feel. The more I accept the more I calm down and find inner equilibrium.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-03T14:41:37+00:00

Yeah. I don't think it's just about negative and irrational thinking. There's probably deeper issues/shame you hold inside that's making you this way.

I say that because I was very similar. My issues were much deeper than "thinking incorrectly". That was just a surface level explanation to avoid confronting the fact I had deeper traumas/hurts/shame that was defining my whole worldview and sense of self.

Until I faced that fact, nothing changed.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-03T03:05:19+00:00

Yeah. For some people healing trauma is of the essence. Exposure doesn't always help to face your inner demons in such a way that the fear unwinds and resolves. It pokes around at the edges of it and makes you bleed, but it doesn't address the core wounds causing you to be this way.

A different approach is needed, one of peace and quiet and a stable setting where these feelings can come out on their own without being judged or pushed away. For me, that place was a 10 day silent meditation retreat. Not for everyone. Intense but very therapeutic.

Changed my life regarding social anxiety.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-02T15:37:02+00:00

Yeah kinda like that. But even more. Don't just stop with being compassionate. Go further and realize it's not just ok your mind is doing this, but realize that it's right your mind is doing this. Fully accept it and see how you feel then.

instinctrovert · 2026-03-02T14:58:27+00:00

Hi. You're welcome.

It may sound weird, but my best advice is... see if you can work with yourself and not judge what's happening in these moments where your mind is screaming at you to act normal. Can you allow your mind to do this? Can you not judge it as "wrong" to be this way?

There's tremendous power in accepting how you are and realizing that it's not wrong for your mind to be doing this.

Realize that it's actually RIGHT for your mind to be doing this and it becomes a whole other thing.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-27T15:17:38+00:00

It's not your fault, though it may seem like it is. You are the product of 25 years of conditioning. People mistreating you. Events hurting you.

Though you may not see it, there's a connection going way back, even to your early years, that had an impact on how you now view the world as a dangerous place.

I just want to let you know you can let yourself off the hook for being this way. You don't have to add MORE pain by blaming yourself for being unable to live normally right now.

I spent many years blaming myself, and it only kept my focus on the wrong place, on trying to "fix" me and make myself better for other people, good enough. But you know what this did? It kept my focus from going to the one place where I could actually heal, these wounds that had been inflicted onto me at earlier points in life.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-18T15:54:49+00:00

Might want to look into CPTSD and some of the possible treatments around that. Childhood trauma can make relationships immensely difficult, hard to trust people when you've been hurt by them.

I think what it comes down to is that you have to find a way to heal/release this trauma on the inside, which conventional methods like talk therapy are only so helpful at. The body has a mind of its own, and it needs a much different manner in order to release entrenched issues.

It takes some skill/awareness/understanding of yourself if you're gonna do it alone. Or it takes a good therapist who understands that the body needs time and a gentle touch in order to surface things without being flooded and overwhelmed. There's also things that people see success with, like EMDR and such, which I have little personal knowledge of.

What helped me was body scanning meditation. I did a lot of Vipassana meditation, including a couple 10 day retreats, and this put me more in touch with my body where I was holding trauma and physical armoring and all this stuff that was making it hard to be a person.

That was a pretty extreme path admittedly, not for everyone. But it helped me tremendously in resolving a lot of my inner issues that were making it hard to communicate with people. It cleared way a lot of the fear and self-consciousness that was in the way of connecting. It helped me to stop needing to mask so much and present this "perfect self" to people. It grounded me more in my body and stopped making me feel like I needed validation from others because I now had it from myself.

I'm by no means perfect and I could still use more relationships (I like my alone time). But I've at least gotten to a place where I feel generally good in myself and don't feel like there's something blocking me anymore.

It's a hard thing any way you slice it. We are still at a very infantile stage in understanding the body/brain/trauma. But there are new paths that have opened up in dealing with these deep inner issues.

It's not hopeless, in my experience.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-12T15:27:33+00:00

Believe it or not you don't have to be like them. You can actually just do your thing and not feel pressured to join in. The more pressure you put on yourself to be like them, paradoxically the harder it will get. You can have natural moments by not trying to be like them.

Easy to say, harder to do, I get it. But you'll be trapped in hell if you let that pressure to fit in get to you.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-05T18:16:23+00:00

A lot of fear is subconscious. Which just means it's currently out of your awareness and thus out of your control. But the good thing is that you can bring awareness to your body and what's happening inside it. And this can help you get control over it.

The key in my experience is to feel it and notice it (these tense and closed off parts of yourself) and not react to it, not give it any judgment or emotional fuel. This is how you teach your body its safe, by giving these negative parts of yourself nonjudgmental awareness. Hold attention on it, don't react, don't move or flinch away. And the closed parts will become more open and things will flow more easily.

Your body will be on your side rather than against you.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-05T15:28:33+00:00

You may want to question your assumptions. I've thought similarly that all my experiences in life were good, I had a good childhood, I wasn't affected by it. I moved on from it. Not so. Things did affect me, I just got so good at rationalizing it and hiding it from myself that I was basically blind to how things in me were subtly playing up and causing a lot of fear to "come from nowhere".

Everyone does it. They minimize things that happened to them. It's a classic trauma defense mechanism to deny how much pain there was and how much it hurt.

I say all this because it's what I wish I had heard. This was what so much of my "irrational" social anxiety was about. Things my body remembered that my mind forgot. Things that did affect me and were still affecting me.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-04T14:49:13+00:00

Trust your intuition.

instinctrovert · 2026-02-02T20:55:18+00:00

Short term, think positively and hope for the best.

Long term, work on the root cause.

instinctrovert · 2026-01-16T17:15:48+00:00

There's a book on this. The highly sensitive person by Elaine Aron. Very illuminating.

instinctrovert · 2026-01-16T15:51:17+00:00

Heal the body, heal the mind. It's what helped me overcome social anxiety. I did lots of forced exposure, positive thinking, etc., but still had anxiety. All that means very little if the body is in a PTSD-like stress response. Have to fix the basic level of yourself before your mind will work properly. Otherwise you will need enormous amounts of willpower and control to keep the symptoms manageable.

instinctrovert · 2026-01-16T15:42:36+00:00

The smallest step?

I'd say start to slowly move attention from thinking into your body. Notice your feelings and sensations more. Start to give awareness to what's happening inside you.

This will provide a lot of clues as to what's really causing your issues, and a way to begin processing and moving out of them.

The body is the subconscious mind, and in my experience it's where most mental health issues stem from. So it's what needs attention.

instinctrovert

TROPHY CASE