Sometimes it’s harder to approach someone or initiate a conversation than it is to actually carry out the conversation once it has already started.

This kind of social anxiety is known as approach anxiety. It occurs whenever we want to meet someone new but are too worried or afraid to do it. Often it stems from our belief system:

• We think that we aren’t good enough or worthy of the person’s time.
• We think that we will do something stupid and embarrass ourselves.
• We think that we will be rejected as a person.
• We think about what other people will think.

These are some of the most common causes of approach anxiety, but there are probably others too. I believe that we can learn to better manage most anxieties by using a technique called reframing. Reframing (also known as “cognitive restructuring”) is a popular tool in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) where an individual investigates their belief system and replaces unhelpful beliefs with more life-enhancing beliefs.

Here are some reframes I have found helpful for managing approach anxiety:

Your presence is a gift.

As I mentioned before, one of the key causes of approach anxiety is that we feel like we aren’t worthy of someone’s attention. We may find ourselves thinking or saying things like:

• “Why should they want to talk to me?“
• “That person is way out of my league.”

We can begin to reframe these thought patterns by focusing more on how we add value to our relationships. Then we can begin thinking more productively:

“Of course someone should want to hang out with me – I’m smart, funny, and a loyal friend.”

The key is to identify your strengths and positive attributes, then recognize that you are a person that people should want to meet and get to know better.

Because if you don’t believe you are a person worth getting to know, it’s going to be tough for you to actively approach new people. But when you believe you are a person worth knowing, you’ll feel more free to initiate conversations. You believe that anytime you interact with someone you are offering value to them: your time, your attention, your energy, etc. So when a person rejects you, it’s their loss, not yours.

This kind of reframe can help eliminate a lot of the baggage when it comes to approaching new people. We often feel as though we have to “prove ourselves,” and when we get rejected it hurts because we feel like the person has denied us as a human being. But if we have self-esteem and we understand the value we offer to others, we realize that when a person “rejects us” they are the one’s missing out.

Any failure is a learning experience.

Let’s say we continuously try to meet new people and everyone one of them turns us down. Maybe we have an incredibly poor track record of job interviews or dates or public speeches, so we begin to believe that deep-down we aren’t fit for success in these areas of our life.

The truth is that no amount of failures can dictate how we succeed in the future. In fact, failure is often times an integral part of success. The best hitters in baseball bat only .300, that means they fail every 7 out of 10 times. Even as awesome baseball players and future hall-of-famers – they need to face failure everyday.

Failure is not something that we can completely eliminate from our lives because it is a part of our growth. When you begin to reframe your failures as learning experiences, you see them as a good sign – a sign that you are testing your boundaries and exploring new territory. I would be more concerned if I wasn’t failing, because that probably means that my growth is coming to a halt and I’m not pushing myself enough.

See the bigger picture.

Rejection can be a really painful thing, but often it is only temporary. Sure, in the moment that we embarrass ourselves, make a mistake, or say something stupid, we may feel like we are in the pits of hell – but as time passes these memories tend to have less power over us.

Imagine yourself 90 years old looking back on your little blunders while you were in high school or college. From this perspective, do you really think these memories will still resonate with you the same way they did back when they were actually happening? Probably not.

And if we can maintain this “big picture” perspective, we often learn how to put less emphasis on the little things. Because in the long-run, most of it is just little things. When you look at the bigger picture, do you really care that you got rejected at that job you wanted 40 years ago? Or that girl who slapped you at a bar during your first date? Or that embarrassing first attempt at sex? Or that time you farted during a business meeting?

Most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to really remember all the times you messed up and embarrassed yourself. Most of the time, there are just too many other things going on in the world for people to focus on all your past mistakes. If you could forget about these past mistakes as quick as your peers could, you’d be in a much better position to put your best foot forward.

So remember to look at the bigger picture of these little events, and often times you’ll find it a lot easier to move on. Usually, they aren’t as big of a deal as we tend to make them out to be.

Transform anxiety into motivation.

As the Pressfield quote suggests, anxiety and fear never truly go away. Even professional performers admit that they experience a little anxiety every time before they step on a stage or into a field. I believe the same is true whenever we meet someone new. There is always a bit of social anxiety because we never quite know what a person is going to be like or how they may react to us.

I recently saw an interview with comedian Robin Williams about how he gets incredibly silent and lethargic before he gets on stage. That’s his body’s way of managing the fears that come with every performance he does. Professionals don’t ever get rid of their fear, they just find ways of managing it better than most people.

There is a rule in the pick-up community called the 3 second rule. The idea behind this rule is that the very moment we start experiencing anxiety, that is a sign to approach now or never. So instead of viewing anxiety as an inhibitor or a reason not to approach, they view it as THE reason to approach. By doing this we learn how to view anxiety as motivation.

There was actually a study done by a Harvard scientist that seems to support this kind of reframing of anxiety. Students who were told that “nervousness was a good thing” ended up performing better on an academic exam rather than students who weren’t told this. This suggests that by viewing our anxiety as a positive motivator we may actually be able to turn it into one.

I think this is true because both anxiety and motivation (or thrill-seeking) are very biochemically similar – both are based on the stress hormone cortisol. Take for example, the thrill-seeking found when we ride a rollercoaster, watch a scary movie, engage in a challenge, or celebrate the holidays. These kinds of “positive stressors” have been coined eustress, and endocrinologists like Hans Seyle believe that these are healthy stress responses that aid our excitement and life satisfaction.

So can social anxiety and approach anxiety become a kind of eustress? I believe they can. I believe that when we see these stressors as a sign of motivation or thrill-seeking we are more likely to channel that energy into something more enjoyable and productive. So even though the response of approach anxiety is the same from a biochemical standpoint, I think that how we interpret these feelings of anxiety is ultimately what will affect our behavior and well-being.

In the end, individuals who interpret these anxieties as motivation to approach a new person will be far more likely to act on these thoughts and feelings than those who interpret these anxieties as a sign of fear or inhibition. Remember, anxiety won’t ever go away completely, so it is up to us to manage it in a way that benefits us more effectively.

Managing approach anxiety.

I think if you integrate one or more of these reframes you will definitely see a noticeable change in how you manage approach anxiety. A lot of anxiety is all in our heads, and when we learn how to think more effectively we can often times overcome a lot of unnecessary inhibitions.

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• The seemingly harmless action your parents or relatives did that reinforced your anxiety at a young age.
• How to use the secrets of psychological conditioning to manage your anxiety.
• How the “Power Of Expectations” keeps you shy or socially anxious.
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• An ancient Buddhist technique for becoming absolutely calm and in control.
• Why shy people are afraid to wear cool or stylish clothes.
• And much more…

Find out more about The Shyness and Social Anxiety System.

The experimenters had participants watch a video presentation of a small girl visiting her grandparents. While the girl and her grandfather were trying to build a bird house, the girl accidentally caught her hand in a saw. To increase the effect of the story, the participants were shown a picture of the girl’s hand after the incident. Objective measures of cortisol in participants’ saliva (before and after viewing the video) indicated that participants had a strong reaction to the presentation.

Three days later, the participants were brought back. One group took a placebo, while two other groups took different doses of a drug that cuts back cortisol from being released into the bloodstream. The researchers discovered that those who took the cortisol-diminishing drug were less able to recall details of the memory involving the small girl. Meanwhile, those who had average cortisol levels were more likely to remember the memory, especially the more gruesome details.

Lead researcher Marie-France Marin theorizes that this study depicts how cortisol affects the recollection of memories. Marin believes that cortisol-diminishing drugs may be beneficial in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), by minimizing the intensity of memories that triggered the condition.

Further implications suggest that our ability to relax (sometimes called “rest and digest,” the opposite of “fight or flight”) is important in our capacity to move on from emotional events and continue our lives “as normal.” In contrast, a stressful life can add to our emotional distress and increase our tendency to recall negative events in our lives. Perhaps the more stressed out we are, the more we tend to reflect on these negative ruminations. This can become a vicious cycle.

The answer seems to be pretty simple: engaging in activities that promote relaxation can be a helpful aid in overcoming memories of negative events in our lives. Exercise and meditation are two of the best known methods to help minimize stress and cortisol in the long-term. I imagine also engaging in more leisure activities, and perhaps looking at our lives from a less “busy” and more “playful” mindset, can also make drastic changes in helping us live more relaxed lives.

This isn’t to say that all stress is bad. Stress can obviously serve a useful function in motivating us to change behavior when we need to. But I also find that a lot of today’s stresses are unnecessary and unhealthy, and therefore worth eliminating. As most of us know, society is more busy-minded than ever before. There are so many distractions we experience on a daily basis, and many fairly insignificant things to worry about. In my honest opinion, most people are way more stressed out then they need to be (and often times this increases the emotional baggage they carry with them). Having a clear idea on what brings us relaxation is key to a healthy mind.

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One great example of neuroplasticity is sensory substitution. For instance, if a person is born blind, often the visual parts of the brain will be taken over by another sense, such as hearing or touch. This is the brain’s way of re-allocating unused processing power only to what we are actually experiencing. It would be wasteful to leave potential neural networks dormant simply because we aren’t getting any input from that sense. Thus, brains have evolved over time to become more adaptive to these changes in our biology.

Neuroplasticity occurs inside us everyday as we encounter new experiences. Below you’ll see several photographs of neural circuity in the brain. From the left the pictures show us the neural circuity of a newborn, then a 3 month old, 15 month old, and 2 year old. As the child ages, their brain’s wiring becomes increasingly more complex and interconnected. Neuroplasticity is what allows us to take our experiences, then learn from them and form new memories. Huge changes are occurring in the brain during these early stages of cognitive development, but the truth is that our neural networks continue to build on each other until the day we die.

The more often neural pathways fire, the stronger the connections will become. This is called long-term potentiation, and it is the basis of all learning and memory formation. This idea is best encapsulated in Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s famous quote, “neurons that fire together wire together.”

The big implication here is that if our brain changes itself based on our experiences, then by changing our experiences we can actively reshape our brains. One way to consciously change our experience is to learn how to apply mindfulness, the ability to be intentionally aware of our experience as it is unfolding. And by being more aware of our present experience as it is happening, we begin to form a secondary ability that UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls “response flexibility” – the capacity to pause before we act. He describes it as follows:

“It creates a spaciousness of the mind to notice that an impulse has arisen and to disconnect from the automatic behavior that usually follows when someone is an impulsive person. So mindfulness creates a space between impulse and action that allows us to be more flexible in our responses.”

For more of Siegel’s thoughts on mindfulness and neuroplasticity you can check out the video below (or for even more information check out his book Mindsight):

Because mindfulness allows us this flexibility in our decision-making, it also gives us more flexibility in how we choose our experiences, and a more plastic brain. Earlier this year a study was published that showed just 8 weeks of mindfulness training can create significant changes in regions of the brain associated with attention, memory, stress, and empathy. Two of these regions include the pre-frontal cortex, which allows us control and shift our attention, and the insula, which makes us more self-aware and empathic.

Being mindful is the exact opposite of our “fight, flight, or freeze” part of the brain, the part of our brain that is activated when we feel threatened or in danger. This state of mind isn’t necessarily bad, but unfortunately, due to our busy and very fast-paced world, we have been conditioned to activate “fight, flight, or freeze” as a reaction to novel stimuli that don’t actually pose a threat or danger. However, when we are able to remain mindful, calm, non-impulsive, and feeling safe, we can free up our mental resources and use them more effectively for things like learning and problem-solving.

The takeaway here is that by practicing daily mindfulness we can take advantage of the neuroplasticity of our brains and ultimately improve our lives. For some beginner practices in mindfulness you may want to try:

• 100 Breaths Meditation
• Mindfulness of Sound
• Objectless Meditation (a little more “advanced” but I believe this actually describes the essence of a universal mindfulness practice)

I will certainly be sharing more mindfulness exercises in the future. If you are more interested in the neuroscience behind mindfulness check out this Google lecture on the cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness meditation.