Some assorted tricks I’ve found to tackle social anxiety
Slow your tick rate
By and far the most consistently effective tip has been to “slow my tick rate.” This is kind of tricky to explain but like as a socially anxious person you do this thing where your leg bounces 10000 times a second, and you respond to everything really fast with automatic presaved responses, people-pleasing etc. You say automatic yeses without even registering what was asked, thinking you’ll figure it out later. You move too fast, you say things and immediately hide. Your dance moves are frantic to the point of scaring people. You can solve all of this, basically by “slowing down,” except that advice always infuriated me because it was unactionable. I have no device by which to “slow myself down.” However, what does work is adjusting my tick rate so that I only action on 4th beats. Basically, instead of going tick, action, tick, action, tick, action, internally I use the same clock but only action on fourth ticks. Tick, tick, tick, action. This seems much more palatable by normies and improves results significantly.
Bring it down your spine
I’ll have to find the original source material for this, but someone taught me this trick. When you are anxious, when you’re in your head, when your sphere of influence is inside of your skin, you’re living inside of your brain. Your consciousness and energy is pooled there. Imagine bringing it down the base of the head and into the center of your body instead. Let it fill all the way to your fingers and live in your body. Become your body. Own your body.
Box breathing
Practiced this on a JetBlue flight when I tried a random Open meditation and it was actually excellent. Box breathing is great.