How to break free

Being anxious is fear.

Fear to failure. Fear to being judged. Fear to learning how weak you are.

The mental prisons we put ourselves into causes us to miss good opportunities. And every time we reflect we could've done better is painful.

I used to be shy.

I was the type that would avoid people and pretend to use my phone so I don't have to greet anyone. I was that lonely kid who always stayed in the corner.

I let anxiety win. I let it consume my mind. I let it take away good relationships because I was afraid of judgement.

I want you to do better. In this letter we'll talk about why shyness happens and how to get over social anxiety.

How shyness steals away your life

Being socially anxious results to shyness. And shyness results to social anxiety. It's a loop that finds the beginning by starting at the end (a mind f*ck honestly).

When you are shy and socially anxious, you become negative.

You repel people because you're unable to connect spiritually and people can sense that.

But why is shyness so bad?

• You lose good opportunities

• Puts you in illusionary mental prisons.

• Makes you hate yourself for missing opportunities.

All my life every time I didn't act because I felt shy always resulted to regret.

Deep down I knew I could've done better but instead I let emotions take control. Making me miss a lot of good things about life.

I used to be a people pleaser. I was afraid of judgement. I didn't realize I was anxious.

I criticized myself strongly for making small mistakes. I let my rampant thoughts take control inside my mind. Seeing the situation worse as it should've been.

Shyness takes away your life.

You end up valuing other people's opinion more than yours.

You think people think about you all the time,

You let anxiety win when you could've win.

We were taught to value other people's opinion more than ours. We listen to criticisms more.

We discard good feedback because it feels strange and unfamiliar.

I know —because I've been through the same. I rarely get good feedback and every time it happens it feels so strange and unusual.

And that's exactly how being shy steals your life away.

Your reality becomes distorted. You think more negatively and it mirrors in your actions and words.

You end up saying things you didn't mean. You end up acting cringe without meaning to.

This happens from a series of influence, past experience and beliefs about yourself. It's not a disease you have no control over. This can be overcome and fixed.

But first let's understand why shyness happens in the first place.

Why shyness happens

Social anxiety is a real problem.

That's where depression starts. Where people start to isolate themselves mentally then degrade physically over time.

If you want to understand why you always freeze and can't seem to speak up when you need to —let's go deep in this letter.

1. Painful Past Experiences: Scars from the past

• Bullying

• Accidents

• Heart breaking breakup

• Betrayals

• etc.

People live with traumas. Some know and most are unaware.

There are a lot of types of trauma. PTSD is the worse of them all but not all trauma results to PTSD.

I'm no pyschologist but I understand what it's like to have trauma. I understand what it's like to live a painful life.

Your experiences from the past controls your actions in the future. While you may object and think this is not true. Just look at your past.

Maybe people rejected your idea in public that caused you to never speak up again.

Maybe a friend that you trusted the most was actually a snake talking behind your back.

Maybe when you felt so confident in your progress people criticized you and told you it's shit.

Your mind might have forgotten already but your body remembers the experience clearly. It relives the moment by doing unconscious movements and behaviors.

So before you hate yourself why you tend to overreact and do impulsive actions, try to think about it deeply first.

That way you'll understand why it happens in the first place.

2. Social Anxiety: The Naked Observer

Social anxiety is fear being judged, watched and criticized by other people.

It's when you get sweaty walking across a crowd, or having an intense battle inside your mind when you're about to present a report.

Even if you know them or not your mind gets overwhelmed by the thought of them judging your actions.

The thought of being judged of other people becomes scary. It distills your mind full of fear and thinks of everything that can go wrong.

Which is mostly BS.

Your mind likes to create illusions and create problems when there's none.

When your body and mind refuses to relax your primal instincts tell your body to be ready for fight or flight mode.

Fear is different to social anxiety. It is only tied to social situations mostly feeling it unbearable and hard to overcome when around other people.

The problem with is when people leave you alone and your social anxiety doesn't get worked up —you feel regretful and sad because your inner self wanted to socialize but you didn't.

So what happens? A loop starts.

I don't talk to people → I feel bad → Because I feel bad I want to be alone → Ends up alone and not having any chances talking to people → Turns to self-hatred → Repeat.

Then there's fear.

3. Fear: The Wall

Fear is different to social anxiety.

• Fear of failure

• Fear of making mistakes

• Fear of being disliked

• Fear of never being good enough.

Unlike social anxiety that happens only in social settings, fear lives in your mind 24/7.

It slowly f*cks up your thinking by imagining the worst case scenarios.

Slowly but surely fears become worse over time.

It happens and usually people become aggressive and angry.

They cannot handle the fear for they lack an outlet such as a positive coping mechanisms that should allow them to channel those energy to productive and meaningful means.

It’s like when a kid gets a big pile of blocks but doesn’t know how to build anything with them. They get frustrated and scared because they don’t know what to do, so they just kick the blocks everywhere and get mad. If they had a simple plan or a fun game to follow, they could use those blocks to make something cool instead of losing their temper. When people don’t have a good way to deal with fear, they get angry because they’re stuck with all that energy and no idea how to use it.

The underlying problem here is anger results to shyness.

While contradictory if you have unmanaged emotions you'll experience fear from withdrawal and conflict.

Because emotions are interlinked. They are connected.

Sadness can turn into anger. Shyness can turn into anger. Or Anger can turn into shyness. And sadness can turn into shyness through self-isolation.

4. Thin skinned: Lacking courage

You have no courage to fail.

You haven’t experienced soul crushing failures.

You are sensitive to people's opinions even if that person isn't credible.

Life will happen and will be merciless. It doesn't care about your feelings and will f*ck you up the least you expect it.

The real reason you are shy is because you haven't experienced enough pain and problems in your life that pushed you to come out of your shell.

Involuntary suffering is where people change and realize if they don't act right now something bad will happen now or in the future which makes them do actions they don't normally do causing them to break out of their shell.

And after realizing that they too can do it, the action they did gets engraved in their consciousness (memory) resulting to a higher baseline of self-esteem.

Life is a prankster. Just when you thought you couldn't you did and just when you thought you could you couldn't.

Your mind loves to deceive you all the time.

Now that you know the issues about shyness let's talk about how to overcome it.

Becoming Multi-dimensional. How to break out of your shell:

Shyness is arrogance in disguise. Telling yourself you deserve more without without proving anything to yourself.

Becoming disconnected from your inner self results to frustration and anxiety. Being not who you wanted to be will kill you faster than you think.

If you want to reclaim who you are meant to be read the following.

Phase 1: Understanding Negativity Bias.

Humanity survived catastrophic events multiple times. We are hard wired to avoid risk and danger.

It's in your brain to look for what is dangerous and avoid it at all costs.

You have fight or flight mode for a reason.

It's a defensive mechanism put inside you to make sure you stay alive.

The problem is we are in the modern age. Most problems dated thousand of years ago is gone.

Instead of being truthful to ourselves —our mind lies to whatever we are experiencing is considered to be a life and death situation.

For example:

• Being scolded by your parents

• Breaking a precious item

• Not being able to answer the teachers question and looking dumb in front of everyone

• Hitting someone instinctively out of impulse

• Fear arising when you hear someone raise their voice.

Even though there is no violence involved your mind will have internal conflicts.

Without proper training your mind will be clouded with negativity. It will only think in negative terms and think of the positive perspective as unrealistic.

That's why it's so crucial to practice mindfulness. So you can differentiate thought from feelings.

Because emotions does not give the perspective of truth but in terms of whatever feelings that person is having inside (A subjective perspective).

The same relates to shyness. When you mess up your mind will think about the negative consequences intensely. It will discard positive resolutions as ineffective.

So you need to be aware. Mindful what's on the other side of the coin.

Phase 2: Confronting delusions

Let go of control. Stop trying to be perfect.

The reason you're not confident is because you care too much. You let fears in your mind stop you.

A lot of people think they're born shy. They convince themselves that their personality is being shy.

F*ck being shy.

It doesn't serve you in any way. It steals your life away and makes you hate the world.

No matter what —never accept shyness as part of your personality. Introversion is not the same as being shy.

Introverts like to be alone voluntarily due to their high capacity of understanding abstract knowledge. Shy people involuntarily become alone because they fear judgement.

The delusions and fear you have in your mind only have power because you've never confronted them.

They intimidate and scare but once you confront they go away.

The paradox of fear is simple. The more we avoid, the more intimidating it becomes. The more we confront the weaker it's influence becomes.

So how do we confront it?

Phase 3: Breaking the Cycle

You need self-belief.

You need to believe in yourself that you can actually become confident.

If you don't —you'll stay the same. Your actions doesn't have to be grand or life changing.

You can start small and fix your situation bit by bit. Like Lego bricks stacking into each other.

Here's a simple framework to start breaking out of your shell:

Talk to everyone

People aren't aliens. They're humans and you can talk to them.

At first this will feel incredibly scary but you must understand that overcoming shyness starts from building social confidence.

This will teach you a lot on how to deal with people. The best people I've talked to were elderly people.

They were open and compassionate (of course not everyone in the planet is but you get the point).

As a young man talking to people young and old will give you a lot of wisdom. You'll learn people are people.

Imperfect and full of insecurities just like you.

Cold approaching girls as a young man is the cheat code to confidence (most men's social anxiety only comes from not having learned how to talk to the opposite sex).

So being open to rejection will help you build mental toughness.

It will be incredibly painful at first when someone avoids or ignores you but the more you do it — the less it hurts (I've been there).

I rarely tackle this kind of subject because I want deep thinkers in this blog who can do in-depth discussions and create meaningful conversations.

But none the less a man needs to be able to communicate both to his peers and women. Success in life comes from building good social skills.

You can start by talking to elderly people.

They are always the most open. Even in YouTube you can see people approach elderly people all the time (Of course be respectful and have integrity, you never know what can happen).

By then you can then proceed to start talking to your peers.

Brick by brick you'll build that social skills you always wanted. Practice doesn't make perfect but it makes you better.

Dress Nicely

It fathoms me to see people rarely dress well but they have mountains of good clothes in their closet.

Afraid of looking good

Afraid of judgement and opinions.

You don't need to look like a royalty prince or princess. You just have to look appropriate.

T-shirt matching your size, pants not oversize or overly skinny and your style going along with your body shape.

Fashion is a deep topic and I know no extensive knowledge of it. But I do know working out makes your physique look better (broad shoulders, sharp traps and V-taper body etc.,).

If you don't work out I highly recommend you start as soon as you can. You don't need to know everything about body building and diet.

A simple 5 minute cardio exercise is a good start. I started with 3 warm up exercises 3X a week.

Being fat I couldn't push nor strain myself too hard. But 2 years later with consistency I've lost nearly 15-20kg (If you're interested about going in-depth on how to start and build discipline working out let me know by hitting reply).

Implant positive beliefs about yourself.

If you have thoughts like

• "I'm not good enough"

• "I'll never be better"

• "I'm a failure"

Delete that sh*it immediately.

That will never serve you as a person. You'll only hold yourself back and cause future damage.

The more you repeat it in your mind the more your body will respond.

I've been using strong language in this article because I know what it's like to be mentally prisoned by social anxiety and shyness.

It took me over 6 years of trial and error to get over break it.

Half a decade wasted because I feared judgement from people who never knew I existed nor cared who I was as a person.

You have to take back control of your life.

You can't let shyness or social anxiety put you in mental illusions.

You need belief.

Change your internal dialogue (self-talk) to:

• "That's too hard" → "If I learn how to do it right I'll get it right"

• "I'm a failure" → "I have to learn from my mistakes because that's how you improve"

• "That'll take too long" → "Time will pass anyway why not make progress instead of wasting time?"

You have to force positive thoughts to your mind. Building a mind that aligns with your mission and goals.

That way when you're mind fears judgement you combat it with positive self-beliefs.

Just when the fear is about to strike, you strike back doubling the damage.

Living freely is not being free from doubts. It's about dealing with them when the time comes.

Confident people are people too. They experience doubt, fears and anxiety.

The difference is confident people push on and continue despite their mind having contradicting thoughts.

You do the same. Even if the odds were stacked against you must continue and believe you can do it.

That's the only way to get it done.

I'll stop here as it's almost 3000 words now (to avoid overwhelm).

What I want you to do is:

• Open your mind to the good life

• Internalize the process I've talked above.

• Do what you need to do but don't like doing.

• Reflect on how you can use the information I've given

And start breaking out from your shell realizing you are meant for more.

I hope this letter was helpful. See you next week.

-Noat (Author of Improvement Letters)

PS: What’s your biggest problem in life right now?