Social Anxiety, Self Confidence, Knowledge and Depression - The Connections

Managing our social anxiety requires that we cope with a number of factors in addition to the anxiety itself. As the title suggests, the three factors that I will discuss are self-confidence, knowledge, and depression with hope of providing insight into how they relate to and effect your ability to control your social anxiety.

Many times people who experience social anxiety also experience depression. There are many factors that might cause or amplify depression, but it is important to understand how social anxiety and depression can affect each other. Social anxiety and depression are symbiotic in that social anxiety can feed of of depression while depression feeds off of social anxiety.  Depression will lower your confidence, make it more difficult to see your accomplishments, and make your shortcomings more pronounced to you. At that point, the negative feelings you have from your perceptions will lead to deeper depression. Unless it is interrupted, this cycle will continue perpetually.

Self-confidence has the exact opposite effect of depression. By building self-confidence you can overcome the vicious cycle of depression. The more confidence you have, the more confident you'll be in social situations. The more confident you are in social situations, the more you'll notice your accomplishments and the less effect your shortcomings will have on you. Your depression will weaken its grip, and you're social anxiety will dissipate. This is where knowledge comes in to play.

Think of a situation where you are confident.  Part of this confidence derives from the knowledge you have in dealing with the situation.  Often times, this knowledge is gained through years of learning.  We have a wide range of resources available to us to learn the skills and information we need to know.  There are good examples of social interaction all around us that we choose to learn from every day.  Not only can we learn from other people, but we can learn from characters from TV shows and movies just as well. Once you’ve built confidence through your knowledge, you’ll find it much easier to improve your confidence in other ways which will eventually lead to improvement in your social anxiety.

Now you know how self-confidence and Depression directly affect your anxiety.  Knowledge is one thing that you can gain outside of the situations that cause you anxiety that will increase your anxiety. If you learn to control your own thoughts and self-limiting beliefs at the same time as you are learning your social patterns, you’ll whip your depression into submission and notice your anxiety fading away in no time at all.