dealing with social anxiety (& learning to love myself)

this is the first time I'm talking about this in depth with the camera on fully all goes well I have the power of Tata we can do this hello my friends it's Nina and today we're going to talk about social anxiety finally I am finally sitting down to just talk about this topic I think officially for the first time on my channel I've talked about social anxiety a couple times on my channel but I've never made a specific video about it I've mentioned it in a video where I was putting blush on for the first time and I made a video on how to be less shy which has a little bit to do with social anxiety but also doesn't because having social anxiety and being shy are similar but also different so today I'm going to be talking about this topic and how it has in a big part of my life I've literally wanted to film this for years now but I never really knew how to also don't mind my neighbors are out and about for some reason even though we should be social distancing right now my neighbors are just everywhere that's okay but I'm finally going to talk about me dealing with social anxiety I feel like most of you guys do know that I've dealt with social anxiety in the past I still kind of deal with it but it's definitely not as bad as it was in late elementary school middle school the beginning of high school I will mention that I'm not professionally diagnosed just because I've dealt with most of my social anxiety when I was younger when I didn't even know what social anxiety was I just thought I was extremely shy and just nervous and anxious all the time I thought it was a normal thing that I didn't really have to get help with I also became more aware of social anxiety when I was in it was like late high school early college that I really started to understand what it was and how I could actually deal with it in a healthy way but most of the social anxiety that I've dealt with was when I was much younger when I didn't even really understand what it was and so it was just a huge struggle but after learning about it and researching and finally figuring out what it was I did realize that I had almost all of these symptoms and signs of social anxieties I want to mention that if you do want to deal with your social anxiety the best way before my words or before any one who Evelyn's a professional about this is to seek an actual professional is to seek professional health I am in no means a professional on this topic I am just someone who's dealt with social anxiety for most of her life and has done my own research on it and learned how to deal with it on my own everyone is different everyone needs different things this is just my experience with social anxiety from one young adults to another I am NOT a psychologist or counselor or anything like that I am just someone who has dealt with it enough to want to be able to talk about it with other people who might be dealing with it I am just going to talk about it now and I honestly don't know where this is going to take me but anyway let's just get into it so first things first what is social anxiety it is basically like a social phobia a phobia of social situations of socializing of being in front of people sometimes it's about - the fear of presenting or performing basically you experience symptoms of fear and anxiety when you're in a social situation for me when I was in a social situation and my social anxiety was much worse my face would flash red my hands would shake I would suddenly start to kind of forget how to breathe I would run out of breath when I was speaking which would make my face more red which also made me more self-conscious and nervous because I was realizing my face was getting super red which made me feel embarassed and which made me feel scared and weak and I would start to get a little bit dizzy or forget my words stumble over my words sometimes choke on my words sometimes I would just stop speaking because I just can't speak anymore or I can't process my thoughts anymore so all of these things would start to happen as I was in a social situation and that would just hinder me from being a normal person it would make conversations very difficult and I would become very self-conscious embarrassed a lot of the times after a conversation when I would go home I'll just start crying another thing about social anxiety is that you tend to overthink how the conversation went or how the social situation was I would think about the same conversation for days even though it's obviously in a you know thing even though it's something that people don't really think about all the time people just have conversations and they just move on or someone with social anxiety you just it feels like the worst thing ever it is basically an irrational fear of social situations because your body kind of perceives the situation as something scary or dangerous just like how if you have an irrational fear of wasps or flying insects for example I'm talking about me if you have an irrational fear or something you start to get nervous around it's your body kind of just like tenses up or you feel like all the Bloods flowing out of your brain you start to get dizzy you start to shake I kinda for me I have an irrational fear of flying insects especially wasps because that's what really it triggered this fear I got stung by a wasp and it was the most terrifying painful thing ever I will literally leave a room or run away from my friends if I see one it's very bad but I'll have this fear and my friend will completely be okay around West and that's kind of how social anxiety is as well someone will have social anxiety but someone will carry on theory conversation just fine the thing is a person will often recognize that it's an irrational thing but that kind of just makes things feel worse because you start to beat yourself up for it you're like why can't I just hold a conversation regularly why can't I just get through this like a normal person you feel kind of weak and you feel like there's something wrong with you a lot of the times people avoid getting help because obviously you have to go to see someone about it and you're afraid to even get to that point which is why it's very difficult and why a lot of cases just go undiagnosed unseen because people kind of just continue to deal with it on their own because they're afraid to seek out help but that is sort of the gist of social anxiety and now I'm just going to talk about my personal experience with it some people don't think that I have social anxiety just because I'm on YouTube just because I seem to be good at public speaking or meeting people for the first time I personally don't understand that the reality is that I'm talking to a camera I'm not talking to an actual person I know that I'm talking to an audience that people are watching me but at the current moment I'm talking to my canon g7x camera and I'm not having a conversation with someone I'm not socializing I'm just merely speaking I'm speaking but I'm not socializing I'm not having a conversation with someone I'm not worrying about the person's facial expressions I'm not worrying about whether I'm being entertaining enough and I'm also not thinking about what my next response is going to be just because I'm talking on my own time when you're in a social situation you can start to panic about what you're going to say you also become very wary of the person's facial expressions which personally makes me nervous because if there's a change in tone or if there's a change in expression of the person that sorts to make me feel nervous especially if I start to think that the person's getting forward or the person is judging which is an irrational thing because maybe that's just holly lok maybe they're not trying to be scary well personally for me that's how I will perceive it which is not the greatest thing to do but someone who is socially anxious will be a little more sensitive to these things so that's kind of just like a big difference about me being able to talk to the camera versus me being able to talk to a real-life human being with feelings and emotions and unpredictable things one of the reasons why I actually even started a YouTube channel was because it was the place where I can be myself without judgments without holding back without being silenced or feeling like I can't speak for myself social anxiety eats up a lot of your life because you can't really be the person that you want to be you can't get your feelings across you can't get what you want to say across which kind of makes people think that you have nothing to say or that you can't stand up for yourself that you can't speak up for yourself people think that you don't have anything to say or that you're not interesting or that you don't have a lot to offer which is not true because everyone has something to offer everyone has something to speak about everyone has something that interests them or gets them excited but a lot of people just feel afraid to express those YouTube was basically my outlet it was this place where I could be free it was where I could just be myself and so that's why people tend to have this perception I am a super social person I actually don't know if people think that maybe you know I miss the amount of people actually think I'm very reserved I know that I do meetups where I meet you guys for the first time and communicate with a lot of people I do go to events where I meet people for the first time so I do understand why people may think that I'm maybe outgoing or maybe not shy around people but it took a lot of growth and a lot of change a lot of self revaluation things like that for me to finally get to where I am now where I'm able to communicate with people a lot easier so now I'm going to talk about how this all kind of started social anxiety doesn't just really come out of nowhere there are causes for social anxiety as much as there is with basically any fear there is always some kind of cause to it I think that's also one of the ways that I dealt with social anxiety is that I really had to kind of go backwards and understand where this all kind of came from like what made me so insecure and so afraid of a social situation every time I thought about making this video I would over share and I would talk way to and depth about certain moments in my life that triggered my social anxiety and gave me these traumas it would take me 30 to 40 minutes just to get through a few stories from my childhood and I would literally get nowhere and I still didn't get to the actual point of the video so I'm not going to go into depth about certain moments from my life just because I don't need to go into depth about those I don't need to remember certain people I don't need to bring up all these memories that I kind of wanted to put in the back of my brain in a box away from my other thoughts but basically when I thought about all those moments together I realized that those traumatic dark times the memories all had a similar theme of just mean people negative things said to me people who made me feel weak small unintelligent not worthy of being heard not worthy of having friends basically in my own past there were mean people who made me feel like I couldn't stand up for myself there people who said things in front of me knowing that I wouldn't be able to fight back knowing that I wouldn't be able to stand up for myself it makes you feel like people can just step all over you kind of kick you around there were just enough of these moments in my childhood where complete strangers would say things to me or make me feel bad and sometimes even people in my own personal life would make me feel like I didn't belong or that I wasn't being heard and that all just affected the way that looks like what's getting so weak those moments all just kind of piled on top of each other and really made me start to believe that I wasn't worthy of being heard that I wasn't a strong person well it's so hard to talk about back then people would just pick on my insecurities which obviously it just doesn't make a person feel good and it made me start to believe that I was just my insecurities and that it was just this or that that I couldn't stand up for myself that I couldn't make friends it really just takes a toll on how you think about yourself and you feel like you can't grow out of it you feel like you can't change it was very constricting because you felt like that was all they could be growing up before I went to school before I was five I was a very happy loud child I think I had my brother who was a year younger and we played all the time we were very loud and I was a happy child I was not insecure in any way because I was three L's for I didn't think about insecurities at the time I was pretty loud and chaotic as any child could be and that's how I realized that it was me becoming a part of society where things started to go kind of downhill and all these insecurities would pop up and I became more afraid of the world around me and myself but because I experienced these negative things whenever I was socializing with people whenever I met people for the first time and because I experienced these negative things with both complete strangers and also people in my life it really affected my trust in people whether it was a strange whether it was an actual friend I had a pretty hard time making friends because I felt like I didn't belong anywhere that kind of affected the way I would make friendships with people as I grew up it was harder for me to open up to people and let people in or try to make new friends because I felt like they would go away or that it just wouldn't go well more and more just social situations became exhausting to me I just didn't want to participate in them anymore there were lots of circumstances in elementary school and middle school that made me have to constantly find friends and all that because I just didn't know where I belonged and it just became exhausting to a point where by the time middle school finished I was just spending time in the library by myself at lunch I would just go to a library and just read because I was just so exhausted from trying to find a place to belong I even remember a lot of the books that I read because I spent more and more time just there by myself because I just didn't want to try anymore by the time it was my middle school graduation I was just so exhausted that I went to my graduation I said hi to a few new friends that I made but at the end of the graduation I was just so tired as soon as the graduation ended I went outside I didn't take pictures with anyone and I just went home I felt like I would never be able to be confident in myself because I only ever really heard hurtful things it was just hard for me to kind of manifest positive things about myself it felt like there were just walls everywhere that you were just like facing a wall you're just surrounded by walls you felt like you couldn't really get over these walls that were kind of preventing you from living your fullest life or reaching your fullest potential and so that's why I'm glad middle school kind of ended I think a very important thing is that you don't surround yourself with people who don't uplift you surround yourself with people who make you feel good who make you feel seen why am i crying this entire video oh my god surround yourself with people who make you feel like a good human being try to avoid or cut out people who make you feel like you can just be stepped on you deserve much more than to remain in places that keep you from growing you are not the negative things that people say about you you are so much more than that and that took me a very long time to realize me dealing with social anxiety and me being able to let more people into my life and let myself open up to others it really took a lot of self growth and self-love there is this thing called cognitive behavioral therapy which is a practice where you try to change the way that you think where you try to adjust the negative ways that you think and try to put in more positivity which requires a whole lot of patience and it requires a whole lot of strength to do especially if all you've ever heard were all these negative things that it's just hard to manifest positive things out of nowhere basically it's like how do I suddenly tell myself I'm a good person how do I suddenly tell myself I'm someone who can be confident when all I've ever heard were negative things so that's why I definitely advise that if you can try to seek a professional to help you get through this because I don't know what I can tell you that can make you change the way that you think about yourself but definitely a thing that really helped me overcome my social anxiety and really trust people again and be able to open up to others was to change the way that I thought about myself because for a very long time I thought that no one was listening to me I thought that people just didn't want to listen and that is not true there's always someone who wants to listen I for example and always willing to listen to someone there are people like me and that was a very hard thing for me to believe when I was younger as well I kind of just needed someone like my 22 year old self telling my twelve-year-old self that I am heard at some point after middle school I just wanted to change in my life I didn't want to be the same defenseless Nina that I used to be I don't know how I came to that epiphany but something in me just wanted that change I think I was also just friends that I made as I got older I started to be surrounded by people who actually uplifted me and made me feel like I was important I found friends who genuinely uplifted me and made me the person that I am today which I'm so thankful for and I'm looking at a Polaroid of that right now I have a Polaroid of some friends and I'm just very thankful for them I was definitely very lucky to find people who made me feel good I started to finally have these positive things in my head I started to finally believe that I was a good friend to someone that people laughed at my stories that people just saw me because as I said when I was younger I didn't feel that way in high school I also just did more things that helped me look at myself more I wrote in a diary a lot when I was younger in high school now you guys know that I bullet journaling stuff but that's mostly about tasks and all that but when I was in high school I actually wrote my feelings a lot and so I was able to kind of look at my feelings and analyze them that really helped a lot because I felt like I had an outlet because sometimes I felt like I couldn't share my feelings with someone especially because not everyone is able to find a closed set of friends that they can confide in luckily I was able to find that and I'm very fortunate for that my friends and I would just have sleepovers and we would talk to like three I'm talking about everything but otherwise I would also write my feelings a lot in my journal as well a place where I could organize my feelings and see my problems and see things that made me feel insecure dealing with social anxiety it wasn't me learning to be more social it wasn't me trying to figure out how can I carry on a conversation more things like that those obviously kind of helped but it was much more about learning to trust people again and learning to trust in myself as well it was about me literally learning to love and accept myself and not see myself as a bad person I had to change the battery but a huge part of dealing with my social anxiety was that I had to learn that the negative things that people said about me did not define me and it did not make me a bad person I used to think that because I was called quiet or boring or awkward that that made me an undesirable person that people won't like me because of that and that made me feel very insecure and very stuck and helpless because I was like how the heck do I change that how can I suddenly become more how can I be suddenly more fun how can I suddenly start to entertain people and that was not the problem no matter who you are you will be boring to someone you'll be annoying to someone you'll be so talkative to someone blah blah blah that's not the problem the problem was that I had to tell myself that that's okay now that's not something that should consume my life the problem shouldn't have ever been me it should have been the people who weren't trying to make me feel bad by poking at these insecurities trying to make me feel bad like less of a person I had to tell myself that it's not the end of the world if someone thinks this or that you're not here for someone else you're not here for someone else's entertainment I don't have to meet someone's expectations and I don't have to pressure myself to meet those expectations obviously you can want to be a more social person you can want to be a more exciting person you can obviously want that but you shouldn't beat yourself up for it because that will stress you out and that will make you feel like you're not doing enough or that you need to change and that's not going to make you happy with the person that you are is to be very hard of myself because I always wanted to change I always wanted to be more I never just accepted myself I just wanted desperately to change and that wasn't a very healthy way to think either it's okay to want growth and it's okay to want to change but it's not really okay to beat yourself up in the process and to not enjoy or love the person that you are it's pretty tiring and exhausting and not very healthy to always strive to be someone that you aren't it's kind of just sometimes easier to try to be easier on the person that you are right now because that's who you are right now and if you're constantly trying to look at the future or trying to wish that you were something else what happens to the person that you are right now that person just kind of feels left behind and you're never with yourself you're just kind of frustrated at the person you are and you're always wishing for something else and that's not a very healthy mindset I didn't become more social I kind of learned ways to be happier about myself to be a better friend to myself which in turn made me a more social and confident person because I had more positivity in here that I was able to put out to others and so I was able to see the positivity and other people as well and put that into myself and because I had more positivity and self-love in here that was able to make me less afraid of others and finally participate more in conversations and situations with me people because I didn't see people as scary things I started to see them as just normal human beings but in high school that was kind of the gist of it as well I just became slowly a little bit more confident myself as the years went by because I was finally with a group of people who made me feel good about myself it was healthy I was still shy around people but it was less bad I just I was just a little stronger in my hearts then I was in middle school that I didn't take such things so seriously once I got older I was on YouTube and I had to build a harder shell because the Internet moving on to college I went to Community College and that was basically the first time I would be away from my old friends this was just a whole nother stuff for me basically I explained all that in so many videos in the past so hopefully you guys understand my college life but I went to Community College and there I took a public speaking class I wanted professional kind of help with dealing with being in front of people and just learning properly how to communicate with others and publicly speak basically so that's another question that I get is how am i a good public speaker I don't think I'm the best but I think I'm much better than I used to be about maintaining eye contact with people and using my hands and just speaking better in front of a camera or in front of people but that is because I took a public speaking class and that helps so much it literally taught me ways and techniques to speak and breathe breathing was such an important thing that I learned because a lot of time with my social anxiety I choked on my words and I choked on my breath I'm like because I would forget how to breathe I wasn't able to speak properly I wasn't able to take the deep breaths for me to say my things that I want to say I would run out of breath very fast my face would get red I would get dizzy because not enough oxygen was going up there but so just taking deeper breaths helped me put more words across because I was able to say more without choking there were just a lot of things in my public speaking class that I learned that I couldn't really have learned on my own it was kind of just nice to be taught these things by someone else and also the people who are joining a public speaking class they are most likely there either because it was a requirement or because they actually signed up because they want to be a better public speaker ultimately people are all there just to get their own class and improve or learn something I personally was able to kind of trust these people a little bit I was able to see them as just classmates who want to get through this class and learn something that kind of helped a lot but I really did have to tell myself Nina it's okay I had to do speeches weekly in front of 30 to 40 people and it was scary at first but because we learned all these things it just made me a better public speaker but most of my college life is just a whole another thing that I've talked about in past videos like I really just had to tell myself that there's not much to worry about people aren't out to get you anymore people hopefully aren't that mean anymore and if people are still mean then that's their own problem they have things in their life that is making them want to project all this anger out onto other people but moving on to transferring I feel like being at a giant public university like UC Berkeley was definitely kind of challenging because I really had to learn to be okay with both being by myself much more and communicating with so much new people all the time Kumi college was much more small but once I went to UC Berkeley it was I feel like just more exhausting because I don't know how colleges are now even though I've been out of college for a year but when I was in college I don't think it was very accommodating towards people who are socially anxious I remember I had some classes where participation was required and it was part of your grade and made me literally very anxious there were just some times when you didn't want to talk college you might feel left behind a lot of the time because they just expect you to get along with others and they don't really expect anything else they just want you to participate with others and make all these connections and bonds and all that and work with other people and usually you're going to work with strangers a lot of the time so I really kind of just had to grow and learn very fast sometimes it was just a lot of pressure and my signs and symptoms of social anxiety would appear again there was this one time I was in a discussion section for a class so a discussion was just a small class it was like 20 students and we would talk about what happened in the bigger lecture which would be hundreds of people there was this one time I was in a discussion section and we sat in a circle all the time so we were constantly facing each other very nerve-wracking but that was basically the best way to get everyone to participate unfortunately so we always sat in a circle and we would just have discussions and there was this one time I really did have something that I wanted to say and obviously I had to participate because it was party grade so when I wanted to speak I was just like shaking am i see anticipating when the person would stop talking and I would go next it was very scary I was like a countdown like a silent countdown and then eventually you would need to talk I found myself wanting to participate because obviously sometimes you just have something you want to say I was speaking but then I suddenly felt my face go red just because everyone was looking at me because you're in a circle everyone was focused on me my face was starting to feel hot and my voice was kind of shaking but I was just trying to get my thoughts across I was also forgetting how to breathe until speaking wasn't very easy to the point where I can still remember this story I said what I wanted to say but when I finished talking my hands were shaking they were shaking so much I had to hide my hands under my desk and I was like what to subject because as I got older you know I became more comfortable working in groups and obviously I went through lots of changes as I grew up but my social anxiety was still there but even though that happened I just remembered to not be hard myself to not feel embarrassed and to just remember that that happened but that's okay that's not something to be ashamed of I think it's still something that's going to be there for me but it's definitely something that you can manage and I think a very important thing is that you just learn to be aware of when your social anxiety is coming it's really about reassuring that you're going to be okay because anxiety can eat up everything and it can again make you feel like you're just surrounded by walls that you can't move you can't go anywhere the only was social anxiety I have to be aware of it and recognize it and not be afraid of it in middle school I was afraid of it I didn't know how to deal with it properly I would succumb to my emotions it just made me feel weak and took a huge toll on my self-esteem I felt like I failed myself and that I just lost control of myself but hopefully you can tell yourself that social anxiety doesn't make you weak it's just how your body kind of naturally reacts to a situation that you don't like everyone has an irrational fear everyone has something that they're afraid of that other people might not be afraid of and social anxiety is one of those fears I had to grow a lot I had to get myself out of negative situations and take out toxic people and thoughts from my life for me to be able to finally take in good things that's the thing that I forgot to mention is that I also had some help with my self-love I listened to music that made me feel uplifted and it literally was just another perspective that one was able to love themselves and love themselves simply for being themselves they didn't have to be a certain someone they just deserved to love themselves because they existed and because they're just a decent human being this may be a little bit cheesy but it's when I was transitioning from my life at commute to a public university like UC Berkeley I discovered BTS and their lyrics really just helped a lot it really just put self-love into my brain and made me feel that I can just love myself for being a human being I didn't have to have a reason I just could and I hope more people can realize that for themselves too you don't have to be anyone for anyone you can just exist and be yourself and love yourself for that I was able to listen to these songs that made me feel positive and I feel like everyone has an artist that or some kind of thing that they love that makes themselves feel like that and I hope that people can just be happy with themselves too they don't have to have a reason to they can just feel good about themselves not be afraid of themselves not be afraid of the world not feel like they have no one listening to them or that they don't have anything or anyone on their side there's always someone on your side and if they're physically isn't one just know that I am that person for you that I genuinely just want people to live their life to the fullest I just wish it wasn't so hard for us to be able to love ourselves it took me more than a decade to finally accept who I was and to finally trust myself and be confident in myself that I could let people back into my life that I could put myself out there to other people as well don't reject yourself or hate yourself because others did what people have said about you is now who you are only you know who you are you've lived with yourself the longest and you're going to live with yourself the longest as well if you're just a decent human being not hurting yourself not ruining others then you deserve to grow you'd serve to just live your life sometimes I look back at my past self and I just get frustrated and for myself that I let so many things hurt me for a very long time I hope that you guys can deal with this properly as soon as possible and know that change is possible I look back and I'm honestly thankful that so much has changed even today I meet you guys and some of you may be dealing with social anxiety as well I feel like I'm also making this video to remind you guys that I also deal with it as well and I just want to be a safe space for you guys I genuinely just want the best for you and hope that you can take the steps that you can to grow and overcome your social anxiety and other anxieties as well if you're ready and in the mind States definitely seek professional help if you can to deal with the things that you're going through because someone is always willing to listen it's also okay if you're not ready to get professional help but just know that there are ways to slowly get over this and slowly overcome it I'm still dealing with it but I'm not as hard on myself as they used to be and it's just a learning process but it's definitely very possible to overcome it a little I think that it's going to be it for this video I don't really remember what I talked about but I hope that this was just kind of eye-opening or that there was something good that came out of this I may talk more about this in the future just because I am curious to hear what you guys have to say thank you guys so much for watching and for hearing me out and for hopefully making it to the end of this video I love you guys very much and I will see you in my next video bring it in and goodbye my friends

Channel: oh no nina

Views: 197,450

Rating: 4.9895763 out of 5

Keywords: social anxiety, advice, love myself, how to love yourself, dealing with social anxiety, anxiety, how to, introvert, vlog, mental health, self care, oh no nina, nina yu

Id: 0eD1q64XcWI

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020