Updated March 13, 2014.
The thought of public speaking may trigger your jittery nerves and cause your anxiety level to soar. Fear not. If you’re interested in overcoming social anxiety, Researchers at Stanford University have advice for you: Meditate.
Psychology researcher, Philippe Goldin led a study on participants with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). He wanted to see if Mindfulness Meditation could help them in overcoming social anxiety. The Stanford Report tells us that after two months of training, the participants were less anxious. Results were published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy.
Meditation Helps in Overcoming Social Anxiety
From Stanford University:
Before and after meditating, participants went into an MRI scanner that observed their brain activity. They were told to decide if various positive and negative adjectives presented on a screen appropriately described them.
After meditation, participants were more likely to pick positive words like “admired” and “loved” and less likely to choose negative adjectives like “coward” and “afraid.” Mindfulness meditation helped reduce people’s habit of grasping at negative attributes, Goldin said. “Often, people who have either depression or anxiety have a poor or negative self-view,” he said.
The meditation also appeared to calm the brain circuitry associated with self-describing adjectives such as “weak” and “insecure” or “strong” and “able.” The finding suggests that mindfulness meditation might make it easier for people to shift between ways of viewing themselves, Goldin said.
The mindfulness meditation also caused an increase in brain activity in areas that involve visual attention. People with social anxiety often try to avoid things by diverting their gaze from people and things that might be threatening. But this increase in visual attention “means that instead of running away they were staying with the stimulus.”
Social anxiety affects up to 12 out of every 100 Americans and can lead to other psychological problems later in life. A support group for those with SAD, Social Phobics Anonymous, also recommends meditation as a means to reducing or overcoming social anxiety symptoms. They say that by using meditation to focus on the present, one is unable to worry about the past or future and the anxiety that creates.
What do you think about the potential of meditation in overcoming social anxiety?
