This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace. I'm the author of this naked mind and today I have a

readers question that I'm going to answer and the question is, it's from Charlotte and she says,

I see lots of videos that you've done on social drinking, but not necessarily on social anxiety.

Let me know if I missed something. I'd find it really helpful if you could do a video on how to cope with

social anxiety without drinking. It's one of the main reasons I started drinking in the first place.

I found it at the edge off and I could relax in people's company and actually give eye contact and feel much more at ease.

I still suffer with acute social anxiety and don't reuse alcohol as a crutch for it anymore, but as it does take the edge off,

I'm finding it near impossible not to drink in social situations.

First of all, Charlotte, just kudos to you because social anxiety can be absolutely crippling.

There's all the sorts of research and studies that show that our fear of a social situation, our fear of humiliation,

our fear of embarrassment can be just like our fear of physical pain.

Sometimes it can be worse than our fear of physical pain, especially if something's happened to you in the past where you were humiliated or embarrassed or something quite negative happen in the social situation.

There's one thing that you should know up front and that is about avoidance of anything.

What happens when you basically avoid social anxiety and you can do this in a lot of ways.

You feel anxious about going out and you just decide not to do it.

Your anxiety goes up because you feel anxious about going out and you decide you're not going to go out and your anxiety immediately goes down.

What that does is it actually teaches your brain that avoiding it is the solution for the social anxiety.

The exact same thing happens with alcohol.

When you decide that you're going to go out and then you feel very anxious about it and you say,

oh, but I can have a drink.

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