Can I Always Be “Present?” – Thoughts About Being In the “NOW”

When I first read “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, my first thought was “How can I always be in the now, and still have things to work toward?”  It seems like goals are always in the future, so it would seem at first glance that Mr. Tolle would have us believe that we shouldn’t have goals. This thought scared me until I discovered that when I was in the present, I still had goals as much as I did when I wasn’t in the present.  When I am in the present, however, my perception of my goals is very different.

Explaining the difference in my perception of my goals in the present perspective versus the future perspective is very difficult. In a way, while in the present, I feel detached from my goals. It feels almost as if they might belong to someone else.  In this state, I no longer feel intense pressure to accomplish the end result of the goals, but feel the reason to accomplish the small piece that I am working on right now.  While I am in focused on the future, however, I feel the overwhelming pressure of the whole goal stacked up against the miniscule piece that I can accomplish right now. 

After realizing this I have come the conclusion that you can live your life in the “NOW” all of the time.   You can draw on your past and ideas for the future, but in the end both the past and future are just there to give you a plethora of possibilities that you can draw upon to live life now. 

Site Updates

Over the past few days, I have been working very hard on the site.  The site is now accessible via www.sociallydistressed.com.  In addition, I re-vamped the look of the site quite a bit, and will be making additional changes over the next few days.

I hope that everyone enjoys the content I have been providing, and I look forward to providing much more.  If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me at  andy at sociallydistressed.com.

Thank You for Visiting!

Service Disruptions

I would like to apologize for any difficulties anyone has accessing the site over the next 24 hours.  I had the bright idea of purchasing sociallydistressed.com, and made a few errors rushing to set it up.  With luck, everything will be solid by 5:00 tonight.

Once again I apologize for the inconvenience.

Andy

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.

NLP Resources

I have mentioned NLP in many of my articles, but I have been trying to avoid writing too much about it, because I do not feel I know enough to do the subject any justice. At the same time I have been itching to introduce everyone to this amazing field as it has been extremely helpful to me. This is why I have chosen to provide a list of resources to help with the matter. Below you will find a list of sites and books that deal with the subject, and do it much more justice than I could.

NLPMan.eu - This site contains many useful NLP techniques. The author has over 20 years experience and has been trained by some of the biggest names in the field. I have personally learned quite a few techniques here including how to cure a headache.

neuro-linguistic-pro-site.com - Yet another excellent reference, Neuro-linguistic-pro-site provides a wealth of information from the basics to more advanced topics.

http://www.intonlp.com/ - Here is one last resource that I felt worthy of being on this list. This site contains just about everything one needs to know including a very good article explaining anchoring.

Crazy Easy Confidence Builder!

Crazy Easy Confidence Builder!

Not suprisingly, here's another article that reccomends saying "Hi" to people. The author also suggests a few other tips to help you build you confidence. If you need help in this area, check it out!

Social Anxiety? Just Say No! | General Information | Dealing With Social Anxiety

Social Anxiety? Just Say No! General Information Dealing With Social Anxiety

This post offers a very simple, yet effective method of retraining negative thoughts. However, I felt the need to throw in my two cents, because I have a slightly different method that is very similar, yet has been much more effective for me. As humans we are very habitual, and often repeat the same patterns. The key to changing your thoughts more quickly is to break these patterns. So when you're consious of your negative thoughts, physically do something different than you'd normally do. Not only will this help you to change your normal patterns, but this will also break your negative train of though.

Give it a try.