what is shyness

[sushi]

i have experienced shyness since i was young

the first time unable to talk to a girl i like at high school

but now i reflect on it, shyness is like a invisible mental wall you must climb and overcome to interact with other people

it is also an avoidance issue related to anxiety.

i think the only way to overcome it is exposure, and acknowledge that you fundamentally have this weakness.

 

[Black Rose]

it is an emotional process of being unconfident.

to become confident we must feel like we can succeed.

so we must feel safe to fail.

we do not feel safe to be vulnerable around others.

we could have been rejected too much as children.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Could it be that we know interactions are like an act or performance and something inside thinks it’s wrong and hesitates. It feels fake to perform socially.

Holy basil extract, ashwaganda, magnesium might help.
ive always even as an infant been shy around people and crowds. I’m the only one in family like that.

 

[dr froyd]

i dont think one should immediately assume it's some sort of disease

ill give you a boring and theoretical answer but one i think takes you closer to reality:

shyness and outgoingness are behavioral strategies meant to achieve some optimum given a certain social environment.

for example if you live in a small tribe of 50 people and you are surrounded by people who want to take the strategy of outgoingness and leadership, your optimal strategy might be to be shy and avoid direct competition with these people. Instead you might want to take a longer-term strategy where you outlive and outsmart these people and get all the coconuts and pussy in the end.

being afraid of girls follows a similar logic; when the availability of mating partners is limited, pursuing a girl poses a risk because if you get rejected this might permanently damage your chances of reproduction. Your brain mostly operates on the assumption that you still live in a prehistoric 50-person tribe, so it might see such risk as quite significant.

that's the gist of the origins of the behavioral adaption itself, how to circumvent it is a bigger topic

 

[ZenRaiden]

I think shy means in relation to people.
Humans are unpredictable and also dangerous, but also things matter.
I think shyness is not longterm strategy.
Its a tactic, of short lived meaning.
Essentially mating can get competitive as usual competitive means also aggressive and violence.
Shyness protects you jumping into that dynamic head first.

 

[scorpiomover]

i have experienced shyness since i was young

the first time unable to talk to a girl i like at high school

but now i reflect on it, shyness is like a invisible mental wall you must climb and overcome to interact with other people

it is also an avoidance issue related to anxiety.

i think the only way to overcome it is exposure, and acknowledge that you fundamentally have this weakness.

Black Rose has hit it on the nail.

it is an emotional process of being unconfident.

to become confident we must feel like we can succeed.

so we must feel safe to fail.

Exposure won't work, if you don't know how to deal with the situation. Even if you know what to do, if you don't feel like you'd succeed, you won't do it.

So shy people need to be taught how to socialise, how to behave in different social situations. Like Black Rose pointed out, then need to practise these skills in safe environments where they won't have to worry about being humiliated, until they are skilled and experienced enough that they can be confident in their abilities, and then can perform them confidently in real life.

we do not feel safe to be vulnerable around others.

we could have been rejected too much as children.

True. Most children have to be told not to talk to strangers, because talking to people they don't know is natural to most kids, as usually it's a lack of fear that makes children open to talking to other people.

So in most cases, shy children were bullied or criticised a lot as children, and learned that talking to people was liable to lead to more suffering, and so avoid most social interactions.

So the main difficulty with shyness, is not actually that they need to learn how to be social, but rather, they need to un-learn what they were taught, i.e. that being sociable is harmful to them. It's much harder to un-learn something, to remove something from your memory and your brain, than to learn something.

 

[sushi]

anxiety is mostly subconscious, learn to listen to it.