Social Anxiety and Alcoholism

Do you suffer from social anxiety?
Do you use alcohol to make social events manageable?
Has your alcohol consumption increased because of social anxiety?
Are you an alcoholic or are you socially anxious?

I suffered with severe social anxiety for many years, from my late teens until fairly recently. I thought that social anxiety was something that I was going to suffer with for the rest of my life; I believed it was a part of me, possibly genetic, and something that I would have to get used to forever.

For years I used alcohol to self medicate, I knew that alcohol would take the edge off the anxiety, alcohol allowed me to function on many different levels. Without alcohol, I was unable to do the most basic of things, such as look someone in the eye.

Today, I am a different person than I was 18 months ago. The social anxiety that ruled my life is practically non-existent. I can walk into a room with two people or a room with a thousand people, not only can I cope with it, I enjoy it, too.

I have done many things that have contributed to my success in overcoming social anxiety, I have spent a huge amount of time working on increasing my self esteem and confidence, I have also spent time with a therapist and resolved many issues that were a problem for me, I have read tons of books and learnt about addiction and the many problems it causes, and I have learnt how to cultivate enthusiasm and inspiration for life.

Here are some resources that have helped me;

The Social Anxiety Institute (SAI) has been in my sights for a long time, I absorbed everything on the website including watching the videos. You can also see the videos on YouTube if you search for them. I really wanted to go to one of the programs for treatment but it didn’t happen. The website is informative and helpful if you suffer from social anxiety.

Johnathan Berent has a website and a book specifically about social anxiety. I benefitted greatly from the series of podcasts that he has on ITunes, I would recommend you look them up and listen to them. It helped me enormously to hear about other people suffering from the exact same problem as me. The more I learned about social anxiety, the less I feared it, that is the simplest way I can describe how I have been able to overcome it as much as I have. Being educated about social anxiety has taken the fear away.

Ultimately, the one action I took that had the greatest impact on eliminating social anxiety, was giving up drinking alcohol. As scary as that sounds it is true. The further in to my sobriety I get, the less social anxiety I suffer.

Don’t give up trying to get sober!

Tags: Addiction, eliminating social anxiety, giving up drinking alcohol, Johnathan Berent, Social anxiety and alcoholism, suffer from social anxiety, The social anxiety institute

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Get Sober. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.