Social Anxiety Disorder : How To Beat It

My Experience With SAD

This chapter will be about my past experiences with social anxiety. I want to share this with you so you know you are not alone, and that many, many people around the globe go through this. Hopefully this can be relatable to most of you and hopefully you can get something from this.

Here are all of the symptoms I have personally experienced:

-Being overly self conscious when walking by people ~ I would constantly worry about the way I looked to people, and try to appear as normal as possible. I would be extremely tense passing by anyone and this would cause me immense stress, especially at school.
-Feeling extremely anxious when making eye contact ~ this was probably one of the hardest things for me, making eye contact with people I didn't really know was always a challenge. Id never be able to look someone straight in the eyes comfortably for a long time, I'd always have to look away because I was always afraid of appearing weird to them or whatever. Also, since I was always overly concerned about the way people perceived me while talking to them, it'd me hard for me to actually pay attention to what they were telling me, so a lot of times I found myself misinformed.
-Not being able to do the simplest things like go to the grocery store or the movies ~ going to any place where I knew I had to interact with people I didn't know was always pretty hard for me. Going to these places I would always try and appear normal, but on the inside I was completely terrified. I couldn't even talk to the store clerk without feeling high stress and anxiety.
-Stuttering/fast speech
-Tenseness in face
-Not wanting to speak up in class ~ whenever I wanted to ask my teacher a question or if I wanted to participate in a class discussion, I was never able to get myself to because of fear of judgement from the teacher and my classmates. I was always scared that I would stumble on my words or that my voice would come out funny and that they would all judge me for it. Because of this a lot of my questions were unanswered and my participation grades weren't the best.
-Being a "people pleaser" ~ this might not be a direct symptom of this disorder, but I feel like it has a lot of relation to it. Because I was always so concerned about other people and their opinions, I would always make sure that I didn't offend anyone in any way, and was pretty much a kiss up. Unfortunately I have been taken advantage of because of this because I was always "too nice".
-Not being able to express self and true emotions ~ Whenever I talked with people, I was never able to express my true self. I was always scared of being judged and tried to act a certain way that I thought the other person wanted.
-ALWAYS worried about not having anything to talk about and constantly trying to come up with conversation topics

These are all of the symptoms I can think of as of now. If I can think of any more I will definitely add them on. These things were a huge problem for me at one point, but I was able to get over them for the most part, and so can you.