Introducing Emotional Duality - Overcome Social Anxiety

This episode introduces the idea of "emotional duality", which was an essential step towards my recovery from the default discomfort of anxiety, and gave me the freedom to be myself without the guarded feelings I always carried around. If you have anxiety, this is a game changer.. and one that doesn't get much coverage. 

If we want to teach our subconscious that our environment is safe and there is no need to feel on edge all the time, we need to change the way we connect with the world. First we need to become aware of our safety behaviours, because these are stopping us from interacting with life. Safety behaviours come in all sorts of guises, but common are: immersing yourself in your phone to remove yourself from the discomfort your experience, avoiding eye contact with humans at all costs, or making excuses as to why you can't go out. 

After relinquishing our safety behaviours, we can step into a mindful state and surrender to feelings of vulnerability. Staying with discomfort and awkwardness instead of avoiding them will allow us to relearn what it is to live without the guarded barrier of anxiety. Exposing and openly immersing ourselves to our current experience while holding them alongside feelings of safety and security will allow us to reconsolidate the emotional labels we assign to memories and stimuli. This is what freedom feels like. This is what living feels like. This is what it feels like to be yourself again. By repeating this process, we can re-educate our threat circuitry into the realisation that ambiguity does not require a threat response. 

If we like we can take it one step further. We can make a concerted effort to "take in the good". We can not only teach ourselves that our environment is safe, we can teach ourselves that it is joyful, beautiful and worth exploring.