How Meditating for 1,500 Days Rewired My Social Anxiety & Shyness

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Before 2016 I had never thought of meditating. I didn’t know much about it and sort of guessed it was for hippies or some ultra-religious tradition for monks, and not for a normal guy like me.

It wasn’t until I experienced a dark period in 2015 with my mental health that forced me to deal with this and find new tools for my problems. Alongside reading books, eating healthy, and sleeping well, I was led to meditation.

I discovered people like Oprah, Lebron James, Ray Dalio who were all very successful all spoke very highly of the power behind meditation. I figured I would give it a shot. 

While my coffee was brewing I would sit at my kitchen table while everyone else was asleep and meditate. At first with the Headspace app, and then eventually taking different courses, programs, and learning from meditation teachers. 

Luckily, I researched and found many different people’s perspectives on what meditation does for them. One thing that stood out was this is... 

Meditation isn’t actually about calming yourself down. From an outsider’s perspective meditation seems like a peaceful practice where you float up in the clouds and melt all your stress. While there may be meditations that teach this, it’s important to not build the expectation of having this experience every time. Meditation is actually about rewiring your brain, emotional connections, and free up space in your mind to effectively live in the present moment.

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Meditation isn’t easy.

“I tried to meditate and couldn’t do it for more than 2 minutes because I kept messing up and thinking again and again and not staying focused.” 

Yea, that’s the point. 

Meditating isn’t about staying calm and not thinking.

Meditating is realizing you’re overthinking and building the muscle that realizes you are overthinking, which gives you conscious control of the present moment. 

Meditation is non-negotiable for me. Meditation is as essential as eating a healthy diet. Especially in an overly-cerebral world of digital distractions every single second from the moment we wake up. Meditation is the island of peace in the form of a 10-minute wash for your brain amidst the sea of stress, chronic anxiety, endless thoughts, techno-takeover, and more. 

Now, meditation isn’t a drug. It’s not something you can do and instantly feel a certain kind of way. Approach meditation the same way you approach physical exercise. 

You don’t walk into a gym on the first day and expect 6-pack abs the next. If you want a 6-pack mind it’s going to take the same consistency of meditating for months and years. 

It’s fine to start meditating on your own. Either with a youtube video or meditation app. However, I highly recommend getting trained either through a program or meditation instructor or even through a meditation self-tracking tool called Muse.

Meditation is essential for social anxiety.

A study from 2017 found that mindfulness meditation is equally efficacious in treating social anxiety disorder as CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy). Researchers at Stanford found that it's not just about relaxing. Meditation helps people with social anxiety and their public image via a study done in 2009, head researcher Philippe Goldin states:

“The idea is that if a person has the psychological flexibility to shift freely from one mode of thinking to another mode, then that is a sign of health. It's when we get stuck in certain thinking patterns that our beliefs become maladaptive. Often people will subsequently show up in their 20s or 30s with depression or substance abuse and then if you dig below that you find that what preceded all of that was internal anxiety about performing in social situations.”

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Overall, here are 5 main reasons why I meditate daily even though my mind tries to convince me not to...

1. Rewires Mind’s Connections (Internal <> External)

Throughout our life as kids, we try to make sense of the world by creating connections between our internal world, how we feel and think, vs the external world of how things seem to be objective. When you grow up, these can cause long-term problems.

Example: 

• Eating sugary junk food that feels good equals happiness & love. Why? Because from a young age when many people weren’t emotionally reliable. They found a consistent source of good feelings from eating food. Play this out and this leads to obesity, chronic health problems both physically and mentally. 

Meditation is the biggest tool you can use to rewrite these connections at a conscious and subconscious level. 

2. Shows You First Hand You Have Voices In Your Head

I’m not talking about literally hearing a shout in your head. I do not have schizophrenia or hear audible voices but this is a common thing many meditators speak about regularly.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit of meditation is beginning to realize that I had a series of voices and dialogues going on inside my brain at all times. I never realized that and in fact, a friend of mine Jeff Warren states: Meditation makes you realize that we all have a voice in our head that's actually running the show. 

But even more profound is I became aware that some of the strands and highways of thought weren't even mine. My brain had picked them up, unknowingly as key pieces of information for my survival. Which linked back to the days in school when I endured bullying and racism.

It's almost as if I was an onion, with layers on layers but deep down I was a squishy bulb that didn't represent those other layers I had worn on like a coat. As I began to meditate, eat healthy, exercise, which then enables you to start sleeping well for 6 to 8 hours a day....these layers began to shed and fall off, cognitively & psychologically speaking. 

This leads to my next point...

3. Highlighter Effect 

At first, this was terrifying. I felt like I had to hide from everybody in my life as I was going through this extremely spiritual quasi experience. It was especially frightening because I had grown relatively comfortable and accepted these layers as my own. 

Change is difficult, even when it's a great evolution that's happening in the process. When you meditate properly. Your brain begins to highlight elements of your life for deletion. The human mind is so powerful it can normalize anything. Even if it is extremely destructive, toxic, and hurts us daily. 

I remember this specific moment where I was trying to start my journey but had troubles. I would go and party in College and drink alcohol to remove my shyness. I remember when I went to this party and I had been meditating for 2 weeks. I walked in and my mind had a completely different perspective. The way I visualized my experience of the party, the people, the behaviors were strange. I immediately ran out of the party and realized I shouldn’t be doing this because it’s not a behavior that’s authentic to me or aligned with my goals. 

4. Improves Your Perception of Time

It might be hard to understand as maybe someone who’s never experienced the profound benefits of meditation before. But, mindfulness meditation enables you to live life in the present moment, which enables you to make decisions in slow motion while life is still happening for everyone else at a normal pace.

Let me explain, the human brain is governed by a series of beliefs and emotions which can trigger thoughts to emerge. We observe the thought, and with our consciousness may be seduced to believe it, create an emotional reaction like getting angry or afraid, and then act out certain behavior stored in our memory either from a past experience or someone we observed in the past in the external world.

If you meditate, you’re able to see thought from a neutral perspective and at times dismiss the emotional reaction away and experience it from a purely present standpoint. Enabling you to make a decision not based on a split-second reaction or fear but from your true self of who you choose to be as a human being.

Social anxiety makes your thoughts fast. Meditation slows things down, calms down, which you can use to maneuver, wiggle around, and when it comes to conversations, this is key, especially with social anxiety. 

A saying from Navy Seals: “Moving slowly is moving smooth and moving smoothly is moving fast.” 

5. Teaches You Anxiety is a Radio Channel You Can Tune In or Out

By far, the biggest benefit of meditation is that it teaches you thoughts, stresses, anxieties are 24/7. Imagine your brain giving you anxiety as often as waves crash on an ocean floor.

One after another, and then another, and another, etc. 

It doesn’t end. So, what’s the solution? 

By realizing your mind is creating a simulation based on your subconscious fears, memories, past experiences, survival, and isn’t your authentic self.

By realizing the waves in the ocean will always crash one after another you can tap into a different channel. A channel that only exists in your mind and must be worked on like a muscle. 

The reality is, there’s nothing in this article that can give you the effect of what I am talking about...

Other than closing this article and meditating and sticking it out as a consistent habit for at least 2-4 weeks before you see any change.

You don’t have to do anything.

But, if you are looking for a meta-habit that will give you time back, improve your mind, social anxiety, sleep, and just moment to moment happiness of life...

Meditation is where I would walk you towards :) 

I understand you may have questions. So, I will try my best to respond to every email I receive that entails a question about meditation.

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