In order to learn how to manage stress or get rid of anxiety and feel more confident and self assured, it's helpful to know what causes these emotional states.
You know how people will say, often disparagingly, "It's all in your head!" Well, that's true, but it does not diminish the experience of social anxiety or shyness, or make it any easier to deal with. Quite the contrary.
Everything is all in your head. Every experience you have is interpreted by your brain. For example, two people stand before a group to deliver a speech. One feels fear and anxiety, the other exhilaration and confidence. Why? They are interpreting the situation differently. That's all. How a given experience is interpreted has to do with how you've trained your brain to interpret similar experiences.
Training your brain is usually done unconsciously, without thought or design. It just happens. A stress management program, or one that helps you learn to overcome anxiety or eliminate phobias and become more confident and self assured is simply applying methods to retrain your brain. It's been conditioned to respond to certain situations in undesirable ways and now you want to retrain your brain to respond in better ways.
How does this brain training happen? Every experience you have either creates or reinforces a neural pathway. Babies are born with a hundred billion neurons. Trillions of connections are created in the first decade of life, forming an immensely complex network. That elaborate network is you. It's your personality and behavior and emotional makeup. It's your experience of life. It's what you are. It determines how you feel about and respond to situations.
A person who suffers from anxiety or feels a lack of self confidence has simply formed and reinforced certain neural pathways, and every time a person responds to a situation with anxiety or a low level of confidence, they reinforce those pathways. So the task of a person who wants to get rid of anxiety and become more self confident is to stop reinforcing those negative pathways, and create and reinforce better, more positive neural pathways. This is precisely the process that happens when a person uses systematic desensitization therapy to overcome, for instance, a fear of flying or a phobia of spiders.
There are, in fact, many powerful strategies for dealing with anxiety and building self esteem. This site is here to help you learn these strategies and create a dynamic, confident, and joyful experience of life.
