Overcoming Social Anxiety/Love and Appreciate Yourself - Journal of Jay

[Ryan]

Jay, awesome to see you're making progress. The overcome anxiety sub also allowed me to feel more at ease around others, actually, I hardly cared what people thought of me so I was more tempted to speak my mind and disregard any of my flaws (especially the shakes from my nicotine withdrawals), it was like I was drunk. It's so great to have that freedom and I hope to develop it more over the next few weeks so I don't have to fear a damn thing. Really makes you wonder why the hell you lived your life so afraid... It's non-sense.

[Jay]

@suzylyne

Yeah, picking only 3 subs can be quite hard. I really think that Shannon should consider offering less choice on his webshop What I’ve noticed so far with OSA is that in comparison with other subs it works quite subtle. You have this underlying sense that you have all the freedom in the world, but you only have to take as much as you need to get the job done. It comes more down gradually; it’s more relaxed, more down to earth I think then for example ASC (which is more like a no holds barred adrenaline rush compared to this). You interact only when you think it’s necessary, and have more opportunity to (rationally) think and prepare than to callously blurt out **** (emotional thinking). You’re also able to see more openings to interact with people, and the world seems more warm and welcoming (I keep picturing it orange now for some reason when in thought…).

When in public places I’m a lot less self-conscious (which is really like a breath of fresh air) but the push behind it to really take action and interact still lingers on a bit, I still hesitate a bit too much. I do notice that the threshold is getting smaller, but it’s going to take at least another month for that to fully dissipate I think. I still get anxious from time to time (my mind racing and my heart beating like mad) but the initial fear and negative self-talk aren’t a leading thread in it anymore. I can overlook my thoughts more now instead of them taking over.

Still when I hear someone says something “insulting” to another I still think it’s somehow directed towards me, I try to rationalize it but that emotional trigger is still there, the same goes for when people start laughing. I hope that within time I’ll have a stronger boundary for that or that I simply have the ability to ignore it. Depression and social anxiety makes you selfish I guess

If you’re going to use OSA again, just try to be patient. It definitely works, but you have to give it time. Also building up a lot of unbridled self-confidence in the meantime will only amaze yourself of what capabilities you have, and give you a sense that anything you want to do is simply within reach. Also your social anxiety will get a nudge into the backseat

@Ryan

That’s great man, I’m sorry to see that you had to drop Alpha Male, but it will give you time to get your **** together until you can get your **** together with AM It also helps to keep your goals as minimal as possible, and you can spend a lot more time and energy getting these few things right, instead of making a lot of half-arsed attempts. Just take it slow and focus on getting rid of (getting knowledge on how to deal with) your fears/anxieties and stop smoking. And don’t try to fix and help other people in the meantime, just focus solely on yourself. Be selfish. Do it just for yourself. And don’t beat yourself up when things don’t run as well as you intended it to be, it doesn’t have to be perfect or to get it right the first time. Just pick up the pieces and keep going at it. It will get easier with time (this especially goes for quitting smoking).

The first four days are the “worst” (i.e. the most withdrawal pangs per day) when you quit smoking, just take it day by day. After three weeks your body will be 99% free of nicotine, and the only withdrawal pangs you’ll encounter will be mental. Also every association you ever made (every event, place etc.) with smoking will remind you of smoking, when that happens just know that a withdrawal pang only lasts 30 seconds to 3 minutes. Anything longer is simply your own doing Drinking water also helps to fight the withdrawal pangs and speeds up the process on getting the chemicals quicker out of your body and it doesn’t count as an substitute to smoking itself.

I think your outlook on stopping smoking will become more uplifting after you read Allen Carr's - Easy Way To Stop Smoking. It’s only 144 pages long, and you can get the ebook/pdf of it pretty easily. I really recommend reading it since it works quite therapeutically, also it clearly communicates that stopping smoking is easy, which helps a lot. It didn’t seem like such a struggle anymore after that.

The following page gives a good outlining on what actual symptoms there are, instead of fabricating more in your own head. Was very helpful at that time. http://whyquit.com/whyquit/a_symptoms.html

I also know what you mean by that slight drunk sensation, only had that twice so far but it’s more like a short temporary protective bubble/shell I think, nothing really gets through when you’re like that. Everything that is being said to you is all neutral, not good or bad. I thought it was pretty weird when that happened, you also seem to lose control but you don’t care about it

Just like the "pleasures/loss" of smoking, fear is nothing but an illusion you've talked/thought yourself into. It's all in your head.

Also where the hell did your thread go? Can’t access it anymore, also Majordomus’s thread has been to reduced to vapor…

[Ryan]

The threads were removed because they violated the rules. It's been a hard ride, I usually wake up extremely depressed and go to sleep extremely happy, it's so strange. I'm noticing each day I wake up less and less depressed but it's still difficult at times. Yesterday, I also experienced vertigo which really makes it worse. Cigarettes are horrible

[suzylyne]

hey ryan keep pushing on thru, we wont settle for less...

[Shannon]

Cigarettes are terrible indeed. That's why I spent so long building and refining the stop smoking sub - I built it for my mother. She was the most resistant person I ever met, and I knew she would only give me one go round with the sub. She had already tried live hypnosis with two different hypnotists, as well as multiple hypnosis tapes, subliminals, herbs, supplements, gums, patches, cold turkey, water, apples, you name it. 50 years she smoked, and I watched her - the strongest personality I ever met, able to do anything she wanted through sheer brute force - unable to quit time after time.

That got me doing research. Here's some of what I learned.

Different personalities seem to correspond to specific physiologies. Some people can quit easily, and some people have an extremely hard time. It depends on your personality/physiology combination; but all people can quit, if it is handled correctly, and they can quit without going haywire and they can quit without starting up again. It genuinely can be done.

Smoking/nicotine is a complex addiction, and people keep coming back to it for many reasons after trying to quit. The whole lot of them needs to be dealt with to give you the maximum chance of quitting successfully.

When I say quitting successfully, I don't mean what one of my friends said the other day. She said something about how she had quit successfully several times before. What? How can you quit several times and have been successful at quitting? Quitting means you stop, and sopping means you don't have to quit again! She had talked herself into the "It's okay for me to smoke, because I can quit whenever I want." faulty logic. Meanwhile, she's puffing away more and more every day, and talking about losing weight by transferring her uncontrolled hedonism from food to cigarettes... that doesn't sound like success to me.

That's another thing I learned: if you don't really want to quit, it's not going to happen. That's why the stop smoking sub is designed to bring all of you into alignment with the desire to stop. Once you have that alignment at all levels, it's pretty easy.

The first version of the stop smoking sub, I didn't offer it to my mother, but I sold it. Very little feedback, but one man told me he had failed to quit, and I interviewed him in-depth about why, and why he had been unable to quit in the past. Then I took that and built version 2. When someone failed to quit with version 2, I did the same thing and built version 3. Version 3 was refined enough that I offered it to mom, and after having it playing in her bedroom for 8 weeks with no effort made on her part at all, she just woke up one morning and didn't feel like smoking anymore.

The only time she smoked after that was when even morphine was not enough to kill her pain a couple days before she died. She tried smoking out of desperation, and didn't even smoke a third of the cigarette. Needless to say, she had well and truly become a non-smoker.

Becoming a non-smoker is actually much easier than we think. We get in our own way a lot of times about quitting. For instance, one of the reasons a lot of smokers start up again is that they are resisting being told what to do. They grow to resent that from non-smokers, and then they begin associating that with people who don't smoke, and resenting non-smokers. Not just because they feel like non-smokers are telling them what to do, but because they feel as if non-smokers think they are better because they don't smoke. And, because they grow to resent the non-smoker, and because we naturally resist what we resent or scorn, they subconsciously become self-programmed to resist not smoking! How's that for a snow job! (That's another thing the stop smoking sub deals with - disconnecting and releasing resentment towards non-smokers, and becoming comfortable with self-identifying as being a non-smoker.)

Physical habit? That's not hard to break either. The physical habit is quite a bit less trouble than the nicotine addiction. But even the nicotine addiction can be turned off at the source.

What I learned is that the kernel of the problem with smoking is nicotine, but that the secondary problems more than outweigh this kernel of challenge when it comes to quitting. Self delusion, self sabotage, not being in synch (part wants to quit, part does not), hedonism, laziness, fear of anxiety (!), fear of weight gain, fear of irritability, fear of failure yet again, resisting being told what to do, resisting people who seem to think themselves better than you, etc. etc. are all things the smoker does to themself, consciously or not. If those things were all gone, nicotine - as addictive as it can be for some people - would be much, much easier to walk away from. That's what the stop smoking sub does. It strips away all that self induced BS and then tries to disconnect the addiction itself, directly at the source. Every angle I could find is covered.

There are three keys to success in all things:

1. Believing that it is possible to succeed.
   
2. You must choose to do whatever it is you wish to have success with.
   
3. You must act on your choice, with persistence and determination.
   

These three things are the first steps to any success, and they are where most people fall flat on their face. With these three things, thy are already most of the way there.

However you choose to quit, you have earned my respect for doing so. Do your homework, and work whatever method you choose to the end goal you want to achieve. here are so many ways to quit smoking because it's not just possible, its a lot easier than people realize once you strip away the BS!

And... a real man is slave to no-one. Especially not a cigarette. To your success!

[suzylyne]

and thanks for the update jay sounds good, an when it feels really good its a bonus

[Jay]

Smoking/nicotine is a complex addiction, and people keep coming back to it for many reasons after trying to quit. The whole lot of them needs to be dealt with to give you the maximum chance of quitting successfully.

That was my quitting method, after I finished Allan Carr’s little book I knew it was easy to quit. It actually managed to temporarily shift my perspective from a smoker to a non-smoker. And since I thought it was that easy to quit smoking so I started to smoke again thinking I could quit anytime I wanted, too bad that the book didn’t had the same effect after a second read, and this to my utter annoyance. I re-read, and re-read it, then re-read it some more. Read the advanced version of his book (about 500 pages long), and the dvd just to get the message across, to get it to click again. It didn’t work. Every time after I read it I could keep myself away from cigarettes for a week, sometimes two. There was always some stupid reason to start again. There was this one particular sentence in the book that stuck, but I didn’t fully grasp it. But I knew it was important for me to get it.

”The only reason you smoke is to relieve the withdrawal symptoms that the previous cigarette caused”

And I based my personal stop smoking framework/theory around that, and figured out for myself how I could build up on enough solid positive personal reasons for me to stop smoking, and I got more and more insights from my quitting experiences to enforce it. Along with researching it daily. Eventually I had no reasons to start smoking again, I rationalized it. It took me about 6 months to get it right. The last silly reason I had for starting to smoke again was to punish myself for handling a social situation like a dork. In two days that was a year ago Now onto getting rid of the dorkiness!

On a side note; It’s actually quite nice to see that three point summary of how to succeed at things. I never had it put it into perspective, but I can confirm that’s a truism.

[Ryan]

Shannon, yes I have felt ALL of these things while quitting smoking and it is terrible, I must say. Do you think I should try that subliminal? Or do you think it will make situations worse? I know a lot of those beliefs really hold me back...

[Shannon]

Shannon, yes I have felt ALL of these things while quitting smoking and it is terrible, I must say. Do you think I should try that subliminal? Or do you think it will make situations worse? I know a lot of those beliefs really hold me back...

I think that you must make your own decisions. But my advice is to follow my directions first. I suggest that for the time being, you stop using ALL subliminals, ALL hypnosis programs, ALL affirmations... and then get into therapy with a qualified professional. That clears the plate to both figure out what the problem is, and deal with it minus any distractions.

Get right with the anxiety. Then you can deal with smoking. If you want to use my smoking program, that's fine. There are many ways to achieve that goal. But the way to success isn't just those three steps: there's a couple more steps that are very important.

4. Make a plan for long term, medium term, and short term goals. Break up your goals into small steps which can be readily accomplished.
5. Focus on achieving each step in succession, and nothing else. Accomplish each step, fully, and then move on to the next.

Jumping from thing to thing is going to get you nowhere. Failure is the path of least persistence. One thing at a time. Create your plan, break it up into small steps that are readily accomplishable, and then accomplish each one in order, and fully. It might not be as much fun, but it's what works.

[Shannon]

I'm sorry, Jay, I just realized we have been hijacking your journal. Back to Jay's Journal now. Apologies again.

[Jay]

No worries Shannon, I'll just have to hijack your thread somewhere in the future

I just wanted to share shortly that I made the switch to Alpha Male (solo). I've dropped Overcome Social Anxiety, Love and Appreciate Yourself and even Stop and Reverse Hair Loss three days ago.

Since my main goal was to prevent becoming depressed again (while thinking AM worked as a catalyst), I've done some tests the last couple of days but even with a couple of incentives I'm noticing that it's hard for me to come depressed. I'm glad that the previous programs allowed a stable environment for me to "recuperate" and prepare myself, so I can fully reap the benefits of AM without being immobilized. Perhaps I will later on post a summary of the effects I noticed with OSA, SRHL and Lay.

The only thing I wanted to keep going was the hair sub, but after carefully considering it I had to let it go, I don't want anything interfering with this, and make use of AM as good as possible. I will start using it again after I'm finished using AM or whenever, or purchase the 6 month version when it's out.

I can only say that I've missed feeling this powerful and direct. I just feel great, and am grateful for a lot of things, directed on taking action (with less boundaries to do them), and have a lot less things to worry about. What can I say, it feels kind of familiar

The Insomnia Aid has also been a great help on giving me more control over my sleeping behaviour (which controls my mood), but will continue my progress of that in Jackie's Journal.

(If someone could change the thread name into "Alpha Male - Journal of Jay", or just "Journal of Jay" would be great. )

Dates

15 October 2010 - 2 May 2011

[Jay]

I’m on day 11 for Alpha Male – Stage 1, in the first few days I’ve noticed a spike of confidence which caused me to be more assertive, asking more questions in social situations when normally I would shut up. And I would speak up more. This was certainly the case when some guy at a store cut in front of me, I strongly noticed this sudden anger towards him and asked him directly what he was doing, and I told him to get back of the line. It was funny to see him perform like his nose bled, but at least he did what I told him to. This spike has dropped in the meantime. I can notice a decline in the effects by the OSA sub, but still I had to use that for at least another month for that to properly sink in, I guess. In some cases I feel normal or even better, in other cases I think I come across as a social retard not able to respond properly to certain social signals and say the stupidest **** to people, especially to women. I have noticed that I worry less about it afterwards, it's still strong as ever, but instead of days, it's hours. I also took a break from school, to get myself sorted out properly, in the meantime I can expose myself up to Stage 4 before I return there.

Since I’ve started AM again I’m noticing headaches that I had when I was a child, it’s on the right side of my head. Pretty acute, but it clears up pretty quickly. Yesterday evening, when I was lying in bed I was thinking strongly of moving to another place, and felt a real strong feeling of anguish and a lump in my throat. I don’t know if it was caused by that particular thought, or that my subconscious had a mental breakthrough...

The insomnia aid helps me be more clearheaded, but I have noticed on four sequential nights that I woke up around 3-4ish in the morning. I’m able to sleep for a few hours after I’m but have been feeling pretty tired the last few days. Even though I feel a lot better by suppressing REM sleep; The problems that cause me to worry still exist. Still have to work on that, but I'm writing them down as I become aware of them, and put them on my to do list so it's harder me to put it off. I've also adjusted my sleep routine to wake up at 5 am since yesterday, experimenting with alertness, being more pro active etc.

[Jay]

Day 16 on Stage 1 - I’m noticing to be more socially interacting instead of just reacting. I’m more inquisitive, especially when dealing with strangers and the lot. Keeping less distance, and almost seeing them as acquaintances. Normally I would just see which way the wind blows, and unless it was really, really safe I would simply keep to myself in such circumstances. Since experimenting with affirmations I have been opening up a bit more, but that was nothing compared to this.

On the other hand I’ve become less reactive to my sister, even though I normally I could get along fine with her. I’m still not sure but I’m starting to become annoyed with her behaviour, and the more I see of her, the more I'm seeing her as this egotistical energy sucking vampire that doesn’t stop for nothing to make herself look good. Her motives for even coming here are becoming annoyingly transparent as well. As long as there is something to get or take, she’s here. When I'm with her on the phone everything is pretty much good though.

Perhaps I was expecting her to be more supportive of my decisions (taking a break from school, using subs, reading up on alternative books, conducting small social experiments, getting myself sorted out in my own way) but for the most part she has only been giving me criticism, and she acts like I’m some idiot throwing my life away.

I know this period is especially well for me and if I don’t focus on myself and solve this now it will only continue on harming/constraining me in the future. On the other hand I’m glad that she does it because it only affirms that I really want to do this, but I wouldn’t have acted that way if she would undergo all this.

On day 13 I had another sudden overwhelming feeling of sadness with a corresponding lump in my throat, this time I didn’t had any corresponding thoughts to go along with it. Behind the scenes break through I guess. Had another smaller version of it on day 14.

I’m noticing that the Insomnia Aid isn’t a guarantee for me to be able to sleep, had a few nights now where it took me almost 3-4 hours to fall asleep. Lot of thoughts coming up. I stopped waking up 3-4 am and notice that I'm more clear headed through the day though. But easily tired. Also purchased the Meditation Set, but haven’t done much with it since I’m still having the belief that it could mess up my sleeping routine. But as soon as I start using it, will report on it.

I’ve also implemented a new daily routine, which incorporates a few simple steps like doing a couple of mirror affirmations, taking vitamins daily, generating gratitude (jotting down things where I’m truly grateful for) and making myself more presentable daily (even if I’m not planning on going somewhere). The former version I had was a bit too much, so I scraped it down to the bare minimum to get it going. I can always add more lately. What I’ve also added to the list is doing ‘Morning pages’, this is simply jotting down your thoughts after you wake up. The whole purpose behind it is expressing your thoughts no matter the amount of criticism, along with jotting down the criticism so you can look more objectively at it. And I can surely say that I’m a complete arsehole to myself in a lot of cases. I am noticing however that my personal criticism is becoming less and less, so this or the subliminal is working. And since I always had the belief that glasses made me less attractive, I’ve refrained from using them and only use contacts now. Still having issues with waking up at 5 am.

On a side note, my mother complained of having back pains for a few weeks and it wasn’t clearing up so I set up a speakerset I still had lying around and put on Love and Appreciate Yourself along with Chronic and Useless Pain Relief I have to say that it did the trick.

[Ryan]

I haven't used this but perhaps a good insomnia hypnosis tape will work before bed? I've read a lot of good reviews about Paul McKenna's tape.