How to Overcome Shyness

Many years ago I was so shy I couldn’t enter a restaurant, let alone speak to a pretty girl.

My stomach chu
ed, my face became hot, my hands damp, my voice squeaky. Similar symptoms to decades later when I worked as a community organizer and had to face the media.

I wish I could tell you that hypnosis (more accurately, hypnotherapy) cured my shyness back then but unfortunately it was decades before I learned about hypnosis and its value in helping to conquer shyness.

Symptoms of Shyness

A shy person’s symptoms may range from being unable to speak to an attractive member of the opposite gender to a full-blown phobia that completely isolates the sufferer psychologically or even physically (as in the case of an agoraphobic).

Everyday shyness contains three, intertwining elements:

• physiological signs such as blushing
• negative thoughts such as “everyone is looking at me” - bad feelings such as shame, anxiety and loneliness.

These interwoven elements often result in avoidance behaviour (such as my keeping out of restaurants or not speaking to attractive girls).

This behaviour frequently causes non-shy people to label the shy person as “stuck up” or “aloof” thus completing the self-defeating circle and reinforcing the shyness.

Causes of Shyness

A person may be shy because of traumatic experiences, family background, culture, even genetics. Extreme shyness may be diagnosed as “avoidant personality disorder” which often has no obvious origin.

Lack of experience in social situations, isolation as a child in a home or community can contribute to shyness. Low self-esteem arising from the poor parenting skills of your care-givers can leave you vulnerable to shyness as an adult.

As can over-involvement with inanimate objects such as television and computers and video games.

If you have little occasion to acquire social skills no wonder you’re frightened by the possibility of interacting with humans.

Coping with Shyness

Unfortunately, the most common way of coping is avoidance. Avoidance of places and people who arouse the anxiety within a person that causes them to feel shy.

Anxiety of a shy person is most evident when he or she is asked to speak in public.

Coping with that (very common) form of shyness requires changing your thoughts and to let go of the terrifying fear of rejection.

Shyness Treatments; Hypnotic Cures

Behavioural treatments for shyness involve exposure to the fear-inducing person or place. Thus I eventually became immune to shyness on entering a restaurant by making myself go into them.

Drugs are prescribed for some forms of shyness, especially those which include high levels of anxiety. However, reducing the anxiety with chemicals is only a stop-gap. While it is great to reduce the anxiety the so-called side effects may be worse than the apparent cure.

On the other hand, if taking prescribed drugs temporarily enables you to engage in psychotherapy, then that could be highly beneficial.

The safest route to cure shyness is the hypnotic route.

How To Stop Shyness with Hypnosis

There are two main ways hypnosis is used to overcome shyness: suggestive and analytical.

Positive Suggestion Hypnosis to Conquer Shyness

As the title sounds, this involves you, while in hypnosis, imagining yourself calm, confident and at ease in situations that previously had you feeling shy.

Coupled with powerful post-hypnotic suggestions this approach can result in a swift disappearance of the discomfort of shyness.

Positive Suggestion Hypnosis often incorporates techniques from behavioural psychology.

Hypnoanalysis to Get to the Root(s) of Shyness

The second way of using hypnosis is to get to the root cause(s) of your shyness. And then, of course, dealing with them. While the fact of you having no siblings, or coming from another culture or being ignored as a child for instance, cannot be changed, your perceptions and therefore your thoughts, behaviour and feelings can.

Hypnoanalysis requires a trained professional to guide you.

But you can use hypnosis on your own to tackle shyness. Here are two hypnotic ways you can help yourself conquer shyness in the privacy of your own home:

Overcoming Shyness http://www.hypnosisdownloads.com/downloads/self_improvement/overcoming_shyness.html#226rnSubliminal Hypnosis to Build Self-Confidence http://www.hypnosisdepot.com/DVD.htm