February 25, 2025 • 28 mins
Even though NK doesn’t live with the voice of constant criticism anymore, there’s still a lingering feeling that stands between her and her authentic self…or selves. In this episode she talks to social anxiety expert Dr. Aziz Gazipura about disrupting that pattern of social anxiety and learning to do something else.
Dr. Aziz Gazipura is the author of the books The Solution To Social Anxiety and Not Nice, and the founder of the Center For Social Confidence.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's kay. Basket Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional. So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading, and while
you're listening, take care. Okay. So there was this period
(00:21):
of time where I would tell people I was a
performance artist, and during that time I did do this
series of performances. One that involved dressing up is Beyonce,
and one that involved me as the host of a
messandrist game show, and one involved wearing a blond wig
and making white people laugh uncomfortably. At the time, there
(00:42):
was something inside me that needed to get out. That
something inside me felt hideous, grotesque. I was both ashamed
of what I'd been hiding and I needed it to
be witnessed. Writing about it wasn't enough anymore. I needed
an audience, one whose response I could see and feel. Honestly,
I think a lot of those performances were really bad,
(01:03):
and like, maybe one of them was good, but it
was exhilarating insisting that people watch and listen and stay
in the room. It was fun to make people laugh.
It was even fun making people uncomfortable, but it was
also horrible. I hated performing. I hated it every time
because afterwards, no matter what happened, whether I succeeded according
(01:24):
to my own standards or whether I failed, the same
story would take shape in my mind. The judgment and
criticism and disgust and vitriol that I was sure I
could sense, not just from the audience but everyone in
the world. These stories would just spin and spin and
spin in my brain, until eventually those stories were spinning
all the time, NonStop, and I just kind of lived
(01:48):
like that. And even when I got to a place
where I was able to see that the thoughts weren't true,
I still thought that having those thoughts was who I was.
I was convinced that I had anxiety disorder, and I
got really obsessed with getting a diagnosis, the validation that
the level of anxiety I was feeling was not normal,
that it wasn't some sign of my immaturity, but something
(02:10):
extraordinarily challenging. I told myself, this isn't something you're going
to go out of You should just accept it the
way people accept that they have a chronic illness or disability.
It's just what you're working with. It's something you have
to deal with, something you have to make accommodations for
and anticipate and plan for. And you might even have
to disclose it to other people sometimes, and I did.
(02:32):
I would tell people I have social anxiety, so certain
situations are challenging or uncomfortable for me, or my nervous
system can't handle coming to that event. Again, sorry, I
identified as someone who has social anxiety. But what if
social anxiety isn't something you have but something you do.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Another way to think of it is that social anxiety
is a pattern, and so you can be running a
pattern or you could not be running a pattern at
any given moment. But are there moments in your day
or life where you don't experience it?
Speaker 1 (03:07):
This is doctor Disease Gazapura, a social anxiety expert, the
author of the books The Solution to Social Anxiety and
Not Nice, and he's the founder of the Center for
Social Confidence. And he also hosts a podcast called Shrink
for the Shy Guy. And since well obviously I am
a shy guy, I started listening. And the more I
learned about what motivates doctor Disease to do the work
(03:30):
he does, I could see why his messaging resonates with
so many people. This is Basketcase. I'm NK and my
conversation with confidence coach for the shy guy doctor disease
is after the break, what person's gonna walk.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Me, What person's gonna want me, What person's gonna want me,
What person's gonna want what person's gonna walk, What person's
gonna walk, What person's gonna want me? When I have
to press it an anxiety.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
How do you prefer to be addressed in the conversation
doctor disease or disease is fine? This is a doctor disease.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I am an author and a teacher, and I help
people liberate themselves from the cages of social anxiety and
excessive niceness and people pleasing.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I have to say that I got this job hosting
basket Case because I made an audio piece called Divesting
from People Pleasing Me. That was a very intimate portrait,
not really of the divestment process, but more of me
awakening to the fact that was a huge issue in
my life.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Well, the reason I'm so passionate about helping people break
free from those cages is because I personally spent many
years over a decade with pretty severe social anxiety, to
where I wouldn't talk to people I didn't know, I
wouldn't make eye contact with people that much. I certainly
wouldn't speak up in a group or become the center
(05:12):
of attention or give an you sort of public talk
or presentation. I didn't date. I really just lived in
a cage of fear and a lot of self criticism
and self doubt, which is I think the core of
social anxiety is there's some part of us that feels
like it's not okay, not enough, and so we have
to keep hidden. And then as I eventually began to
(05:35):
challenge that and become more capable to connect with other people,
I realized that talking to people and maybe even dating
or connecting and having friends or a girlfriend is not
necessarily the freedom, because what I found is, well, I'm
just playing a role. I'm trying to be who I
think everybody wants me to be. So now I can
(05:55):
go talk to people, but I'm still playing a certain role,
and there's a lot of fear still about saying something
that someone might not like, or doing something that might
not be quote attractive or whatever it is. And so
then I realized, oh, there's another cage, and that's the
cage of people pleasing and of niceness. And so I
became really focused on breaking out of that and becoming
(06:18):
ultimately a lot more authentic and real and not needing
to prove and pretend and please. And the result of
that is just so much more freedom to be me,
which is part of the passion to share that with
people as well.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Aziz says that people have these threshold moments what some
might call rock bottom. He calls a doorway, a chance
to step away from the familiar into the unknown.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I did have a threshold moment, and I would describe
a threshold moment as a specific moment in time when
the pain of all the ways you've been living becomes
unavoidably overwhelmingly clear. That's the beginning of the threshold moment.
(07:03):
Because sometimes people see all the pain they're living in,
they just feel more discouraged and depressed. And then there
is an awareness of the future, some fantasy if it's
just going to get better or somehow the problem's going
to go away and everything's going to be fixed. We
have just this crushing, dawning awareness that that's not going
to change either. But actually those two awarenesses come together,
(07:29):
and what makes it a threshold moment is something awakens
inside that is, instead of being demolished by it's actually
an active defiance to that. And the best words I
have for that are enough of this. There's like a
charge inside and with that there's a power. And you
don't even know how to fix it or change it,
or what exactly you're going to do, or you don't
(07:49):
have a big plan. It's almost just like a wild
rebellion energy to life as you've known it. And usually
for people it comes on the cusp of ather pain.
And for me, it was another night where I'd finally
worked up the courage to ask a woman out and
she'd actually said yes. But what always seemed to happen
(08:10):
is after the first date cheat they wanted nothing to
do with me, and that was even more crushing to
my already pretty fragile self esteem. And so it was
that night, you know this, just had a conversation, a
follow up conversation with this woman and she clearly had
become disinterested, And so I trudged up the stairs to
my apartment. It was dark. I thought no one was.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
There inside his apartment, Azis was on autopilot. He did
his standard routine, cooked some pasta, started playing video games,
something he did for three or four hours a day.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
And then I heard this laughter coming from my roommate's room,
but it was him and his girlfriend and the levity
of it and the connection of it, and that was
the nail in the coffin, you know. It was this
sense of like, I'm never going to have the freedom
to be me and to connect. And then that's where
the past page and the future pain all converged. And
(09:03):
instead of a sobbing in my bed, it was just
this intense almost It's not anger, it's like a power,
but there is a defiance to it, and I claimed
like something more. But I didn't have this foundation of
building up your sense of self compassion and what I
call being on my own side, and so all I
(09:24):
had was raw frantic action and a desperate desire and
willingness to do it. But it was so scary, but
also pretty quickly I realized, hey, all the stories, the
predictions I had about how it was going to go
are not always true. But I'd say within a six
(09:45):
month period, I experienced some radical changes that I'd never
experienced in my life, like being able to walk up
to someone I didn't know and start a conversation, or
I mean, things that might be basic to other people,
but to me they're revolutionary and not to me.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, because I think sometimes I think people in my
life who maybe don't have struggle in this way maybe
dismiss it as just being like, oh, just shyness or
self consciousness or something, and it feels like much deeper
and much more challenging to me than that. What do
you think the stakes are of I guess having that
kind of breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Well, to someone who is not really in the cage,
it seems like a matter of preference. Shyness is kind
of a natural quality. We can all feel it. Sometimes
it can be paired with things like tending to be
a bit more reserved or quiet, more empathy, better listener,
hesitating before jumping in. Shyness is actually not inherently a
(10:44):
negative trait at all. The problem is over time we
can we hold back and then social anxiety can come
in there. And the difference between shyness and social anxiety
is social anxiety is the belief that my sharing who
I am, whatever's going to come out of me is
going to be rejected because it's bad or wrong, and
(11:06):
then the reservation is that is painful because we don't
really want to hold back. We're just holding back from fear.
When we're in that cage, the stakes are high. There's
really interesting research around one of the big qualities of
niceness and people pleasing is emotional suppression. And the people
(11:27):
that had the highest level of emotional suppression were four
times more likely to die from any cause over a
twelve year period. But the truth is, it is life
or death right now today, not in the future, but
it's life or death not to your physical body, but
to what you're here to do, to your soul's purpose,
to your joy, to the connection and intimacy that you
(11:50):
could have in life with not just a lover or something.
I mean the intimacy, like the deep connection with all
of life. That to me, that's why the stakes are
so high right now today.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Something I thought was really interesting that I heard you say,
I think I believe on your show about social anxiety
being something that you do as opposed to something that
you have, which is what I always say. Can you
give me some examples or a way as I might
be doing social anxiety.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I really do believe that from observation that social anxiety
is not something we have, it's something that we do
or practice. Another way to think of it is that
social anxiety is a pattern, and so you can be
running a pattern or you cannot be running a pattern
at any given moment. And the reason I highlight that
is I say someone's like, I have social anxiety. It's like, okay,
(12:44):
but are there moments in your day or life where
you don't experience it, where you feel that there's an
absence of that judgment, self criticism, hesitation, doubtful, self absorber, criticism.
That it's really the hallmark of social anxiety. And the
(13:04):
usually think, oh, yeah, you know, when I'm by myself,
or when I'm with my dog, or maybe when I'm
with a close friend that I don't feel it. Now
some people say yes, I feel it twenty four to seven.
It's like, well, then you're running the pattern twenty four seven.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
No, my dog is judging me.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah exactly. It's like, oh my goodness, you are what
a scary world. That's unfortunate, you know. And so then
we want to get really curious about when I'm doing it,
how am I doing it. So that's the question I'll
have clients ask themselves, is how am I creating it?
What is the pattern for social anxiety? What am I
focusing on? And we might think, oh, there's only one
(13:39):
way to focus, and it's on this. Actually, no, there's
a lot of ways to focus. And when I ask people,
the pattern is almost always when I'm experiencing social anxiety,
to focus is on myself.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
You might say, well, no, I'm looking at the other person. Yeah,
but you're kind of looking at yourself through the eyes
of the other person or the mind, the imagined mind
of the other person judging you, And so we might
have the perception of they're judging me, and usually there's
like a lot of specifics in there that are quickly
embedded in there, like they're judging me for what, for
(14:12):
the way I look for, the way I stand for
this or that, And when you study the pattern, you're like, hmm,
everywhere I go, my mind's telling me that people always
judge me for these same four things. Interesting, like if
that's why would everyone be noticing those same four things?
Or is it just me that's judging myself? And so
(14:32):
the greatest question we can ask ourselves, is just what
am I doing? How do I create the pattern of
social anxiety.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
After the break as these and I talk about what
I learned about being my authentic self, whatever that means
after playing a fictional version of myself at a murder
Mystery party dr B. When I moved to Mexico, I
(15:06):
feel like I don't even know if I really talked
about having social anxiety sopecifically before. I think I just
talked about having anxiety, although a lot of it was
social and triggered socially, And now it seems like it's
almost exclusively in a social context that it comes up,
which is why I've started referring to it that way.
Something about moving here, I think it heightened that experience
for me, and so I started taking notes about you know,
(15:26):
what were the signs that I was noticing, Like I
thought I saw an expression on someone's face that made
me think they were thinking X, Y and Z about me,
and that I couldn't stop think about it for three days,
like that's kind of what happens to me. But I
did recently think, you know, I've been here for a
year and I really have met a lot of people,
but I have only like one or two people I
have like I have deep connections with, and so I've
just been strategizing a lot about how I can meet
(15:49):
more people. And one I strategy came up with was
I said, I think I'm going to be what I
was calling this experimental self where I just sort of
play a role. I guess. I don't know if it's
like a version of myself that like I liked more,
or version of myself that I think other people will
like more. To be honest, I'm not sure which of
those feels true. But something that also came to the
(16:11):
forefront of my mind was that a couple maybe like
a month ago, I went to a friend of mine
had this murder mystery party, and afterwards he told me
he was like, Oh wow, you were such a hit
at the party, like everyone really liked you, like everyone
really wants to knowing he would be friends with you,
And I just didn't really know what to do with
that information. Just these two things will related because I
think at first I was like, oh cool, and then
the over time I was like, but that wasn't me,
Like I was, that wasn't me at all, But it
(16:33):
was the experimental persona I was thinking about doing like
was more or less that same character. And so I
guess if I have a question after telling you all that,
it's it's something about, like I guess, strategies, or it's
about storytelling's about telling yourselves different stories. It's about you
know what, maybe like what you think about performance, like
is that a useful way to think about making these
(16:55):
changes or does that seem like a trap?
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I think interesting thing here is who is myself and
who authentically am I today is different than a year
from now or five years from now, And so this
idea of oh I'm this way and I'm this and
I'm not that. But also I like to talk about
the human band of behavior and all the ways you
could show up and how narrow we make that band
(17:25):
to be what feels familiar. But underneath, maybe I want
to be able to be all of it. Sometimes I
want to be quiet, Sometimes I want to have a
deep conversation. Sometimes I just want to be silly or
playful or expressive, or make a joke or talk about
something that's frivolous. Maybe I want to do all of it.
And so to me, the ability to really access different
(17:50):
ways of being, different parts of you, different versions of you.
I love that language I use there, and it might
feel foreign at first, but so does play an instrument
when you've never played that instrument before. But there's there's
this sense of, well, maybe you need to try on
a new way of being and it's uncomfortable, and you're
(18:12):
using the discomfort as a sign that it's not me,
but really it's fear.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, So I'm hearing an endorsement of my trying out
my experimental selves. I'm a selves now plural to that,
But I think it's maybe with something about other people
witnessing me having different selves and thinking there's something wrong
about that. And I think I was hearing your answer
like there is nothing wrong about that, and it's kind
of someone else's problem if they are confused by it
(18:38):
or off put by meeving quiet one day, meving loud
and playful the next, which I think is kind of
my more natural way of being.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, And this goes to that fear of like what
they are going to think of me, And one of
the biggest freedoms with that is when we don't need
to protect against that person thinking something I mean, you're
fighting so many of attack if you have to guard
against every thought and every judgment that everyone might have,
and the simplest way is just to own it if
(19:07):
that's what feels true, So you know, imagining something like wow,
you're very different, and some owning inside of yourself like
oh yeah, I mean you've seen nothing yet I got
a thousand parts. And as soon as you own it, like,
what are they going to do? Like, yeah, that's there's
a lot of them. That's right. I told you there's
a thousand get ready. And I try to help my
(19:29):
kids with this. They're eight and ten and they're in
this stage where it's just beginning about you know what
everyone thinks, everyone as if everyone is a hive mind
that all thinks the same thing. But there's this real
beautiful aha moment people can have where you just see,
wait a minute, I just get to choose. There is
no referee or external authority that's evaluating people's worth based
(19:54):
upon their way of being and how they communicate and
how they share and who they are in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
That's just me.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
And soon as soon as I just claim it and
own it, then really all that fear and guarding melts.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Away, yeah yeah, and then seeing yeah, like kind of
recognizing your own inherent worthiness, which is like it's so,
you know, a practice unto itself. I think extending that
also to sort of see yourself as the same as
everyone around you. I think when you mentioned earlier seeing
people as like my enemy and seeing people as potential
threats all the time, that was something that I kind
(20:28):
of became aware of and had to name and let
go up. Maybe because I'm in a new social context,
there's some of that guard is up again where I'm
like thinking a lot about am I fitting into like
this culture, Am I doing Mexico correctly or whatever. In
the beginning of your last response, you were talking about
how we can't make a rule, like there's not like
something you should do every time, And I was laughing
because when I was talking about how the data that
I collect and all the notes that I take on
(20:49):
my journaling, a lot of it is like rules for socializing,
like rules for X, Y and Z, just to give
myself guardrails. I also wanted to ask you how control
plays into these things that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You know, it's funny, I was I was just teaching
an in person workshop last weekend, and I played a
song for everybody. The conductor the whole first two minutes
of the song is like in this kind of robotic
voice saying control, control, control, control. I mean, it's not
too far fetched that it's like there's a little we
called it the control bot inside that is literally in,
(21:22):
you know, initiating this control command every two seconds.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
It came up from this participant saying that these in
conversations or some part of it feels like, no matter
what it is, he's doing it wrong. And that can
come from specific rules that you're aware of. And it
is good to flush out the rules. I don't think
you become aware of every single one, but you become
aware of enough to say, oh my gosh, this is insane.
(21:49):
Then you can see you can follow the trail to see, Okay,
this is about me trying to protect myself and feel safe.
And if I follow all the rules and I just
have enough control, then I'm going to feel safe. And
I have to control what do I have to control? Well,
I have to control myself and everything that, how I
(22:10):
show up, how I express why, So I can control
other people and I'm going to control their perception of me.
I'm going to control their emotions so that they feel
positively towards me and not negatively. I'm going to control
what they say. And yet we're perpetually trying to live
out this script as if it's going to work, and
it's a malfunction. The control bot is misfiring. It doesn't work.
(22:33):
And the key here is to get that. It's all
about trying to get a sense of safety. The problem
is when we strive for what I call insane safety.
And insane safety is no one ever thinks anything negatively
about me, or I don't feel safe, no one ever
judges me, or I don't feel safe. Or another form
of insane safety is I want to know that I'm
going to experience no pain ever in the future ever again. Okay,
(22:57):
well you can want that. No organism gets the guarantee
that there'll be no pain or discomfort in the future.
In fact, it's the opposite. You're guaranteed that you will
have some pain in the future. So we want to
relinquish that demand. And so the way that we do
that to turn towards to life, to open to life
and say bring it on. And that means also bring
(23:18):
on the pain. Now it's not just a pain fest.
We can also have some really beautiful moments. But we
want to build our capacity to say, yeah, discomfort's going
to happen, and I want to build my capacity, my resilience,
my strength to be able to be with it and
run and really stay with with compassion with ourselves. And
(23:39):
that's becoming a lost art in this world where there's
just so many tempting ways to try to turn off
the pain.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I think what you're saying makes total sense. Well, I
think this goes back to like there isn't a rule.
There isn't like a one size fits all solution, but
there's certainly like a need for a balance between allowing
the discomfort to occur versus like ruminating and I'm I
am a ruminator. I'm just thinking out loud. I'm realizing, Okay,
Like the rumination actually is also a story, So it's like,
(24:11):
when I'm ruminating, I'm allowing a story to like take
over versus I guess I could sort of see my
discomfort as just being like what you're describing, a byproduct
of moving towards a more liberatedself that I want to inhabit,
or a more liberated life that I want to lead,
and just seeing it is like, here's a necessary step
to that process that might help me to not go
(24:34):
down to the path of rumination, but just more of
like the what you're describing, like building up that resilience.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yes, I would say that rumination is actually the resistance
to being with our own experience. So there's a feeling
or set of feelings that we don't want to be with,
and so we try to go into our head to
resolve the feelings without feeling them. Yeah, and there is
(25:00):
something to like resurrender and stay, you know, drop beneath
the mind right into the center of the discomfort in
our body and be willing to be with it and
drop all resistance to it. And then there's there's a
pathway there. And then the discharging it through the spinning mind,
(25:21):
which takes forever and never works, is shifts and we
can actually just really allow the feeling to move through
us and come to peace just by being with it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And do you think of these things in the realm
of mental illness?
Speaker 2 (25:33):
There are times where having a diagnosis can be helpful
and there are times where it can be limiting. Sometimes
people having oh, there's a name for what I have.
Oh oh, there's treatments and there's solutions for this. Oh great,
Like that's where a diagnosis can be extremely liberating. Now,
that's one of the potential cons is people think of diagnoses,
maybe even unconsciously, as some sort of permanent or character quality.
(25:56):
That's where I highlight to people like, look, everyone experiences
social anxiety. If you've been running that pattern a lot,
then sure you'd meet criteria for social anxiety disorder. That
doesn't mean that that's who you are and what you
have to stay as. And I've worked with people who've
run that pattern for thirty years and then they don't anymore. Now,
it doesn't mean they never experienced social anxiety, but what
(26:17):
it means is it's no longer so frequent and so
intense that that's who they are and what their life is.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Okay. So the gag is that when I told myself
to just accept that having social anxiety is who I am,
When I told myself to accept it and accommodate it
and stop apologizing for it. After I told myself all
of that, that critical voice suddenly got very quiet. The
voice didn't go away entirely, but the times between hearing
that voice, living with that voice, and not living with
(26:52):
it became farther and farther apart, And in the in
between times, I began to understand that there was some
other part of me that did exist outside of the
pattern of social anxiety, some part of me who just
wasn't fixated on my own discomfort or on how other
people perceive me, A part of me that was just
(27:13):
tired of giving a shit. And I started to think
that if I could feel that all the time, why
would I ever want to feel anything else? And thanks
to this conversation with doctor Ziz, I'm letting go of
the need to control how other people see me, Every me,
Every version of Me. Basket Case is a production of
(27:44):
molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts. The series is hosted, produced,
and sound designed by me NK Nicole Kelly. I co
created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green, who's also
our executive producer. Production assistants by Siona Petros and Ammani Leonard.
Adrian Lillly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue
and orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created
(28:06):
by Sinnay Rolson. Fact checking by Serena Solin. Legal services
provided by Rowan, Maren and File. Our executive producer from
iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman.
Hey, it's kay. Basket Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional. So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading, and while
you're listening, take care. Okay. So there was this period
(00:21):
of time where I would tell people I was a
performance artist, and during that time I did do this
series of performances. One that involved dressing up is Beyonce,
and one that involved me as the host of a
messandrist game show, and one involved wearing a blond wig
and making white people laugh uncomfortably. At the time, there
(00:42):
was something inside me that needed to get out. That
something inside me felt hideous, grotesque. I was both ashamed
of what I'd been hiding and I needed it to
be witnessed. Writing about it wasn't enough anymore. I needed
an audience, one whose response I could see and feel. Honestly,
I think a lot of those performances were really bad,
(01:03):
and like, maybe one of them was good, but it
was exhilarating insisting that people watch and listen and stay
in the room. It was fun to make people laugh.
It was even fun making people uncomfortable, but it was
also horrible. I hated performing. I hated it every time
because afterwards, no matter what happened, whether I succeeded according
(01:24):
to my own standards or whether I failed, the same
story would take shape in my mind. The judgment and
criticism and disgust and vitriol that I was sure I
could sense, not just from the audience but everyone in
the world. These stories would just spin and spin and
spin in my brain, until eventually those stories were spinning
all the time, NonStop, and I just kind of lived
(01:48):
like that. And even when I got to a place
where I was able to see that the thoughts weren't true,
I still thought that having those thoughts was who I was.
I was convinced that I had anxiety disorder, and I
got really obsessed with getting a diagnosis, the validation that
the level of anxiety I was feeling was not normal,
that it wasn't some sign of my immaturity, but something
(02:10):
extraordinarily challenging. I told myself, this isn't something you're going
to go out of You should just accept it the
way people accept that they have a chronic illness or disability.
It's just what you're working with. It's something you have
to deal with, something you have to make accommodations for
and anticipate and plan for. And you might even have
to disclose it to other people sometimes, and I did.
(02:32):
I would tell people I have social anxiety, so certain
situations are challenging or uncomfortable for me, or my nervous
system can't handle coming to that event. Again, sorry, I
identified as someone who has social anxiety. But what if
social anxiety isn't something you have but something you do.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Another way to think of it is that social anxiety
is a pattern, and so you can be running a
pattern or you could not be running a pattern at
any given moment. But are there moments in your day
or life where you don't experience it?
Speaker 1 (03:07):
This is doctor Disease Gazapura, a social anxiety expert, the
author of the books The Solution to Social Anxiety and
Not Nice, and he's the founder of the Center for
Social Confidence. And he also hosts a podcast called Shrink
for the Shy Guy. And since well obviously I am
a shy guy, I started listening. And the more I
learned about what motivates doctor Disease to do the work
(03:30):
he does, I could see why his messaging resonates with
so many people. This is Basketcase. I'm NK and my
conversation with confidence coach for the shy guy doctor disease
is after the break, what person's gonna walk.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Me, What person's gonna want me, What person's gonna want me,
What person's gonna want what person's gonna walk, What person's
gonna walk, What person's gonna want me? When I have
to press it an anxiety.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
How do you prefer to be addressed in the conversation
doctor disease or disease is fine? This is a doctor disease.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I am an author and a teacher, and I help
people liberate themselves from the cages of social anxiety and
excessive niceness and people pleasing.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I have to say that I got this job hosting
basket Case because I made an audio piece called Divesting
from People Pleasing Me. That was a very intimate portrait,
not really of the divestment process, but more of me
awakening to the fact that was a huge issue in
my life.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Well, the reason I'm so passionate about helping people break
free from those cages is because I personally spent many
years over a decade with pretty severe social anxiety, to
where I wouldn't talk to people I didn't know, I
wouldn't make eye contact with people that much. I certainly
wouldn't speak up in a group or become the center
(05:12):
of attention or give an you sort of public talk
or presentation. I didn't date. I really just lived in
a cage of fear and a lot of self criticism
and self doubt, which is I think the core of
social anxiety is there's some part of us that feels
like it's not okay, not enough, and so we have
to keep hidden. And then as I eventually began to
(05:35):
challenge that and become more capable to connect with other people,
I realized that talking to people and maybe even dating
or connecting and having friends or a girlfriend is not
necessarily the freedom, because what I found is, well, I'm
just playing a role. I'm trying to be who I
think everybody wants me to be. So now I can
(05:55):
go talk to people, but I'm still playing a certain role,
and there's a lot of fear still about saying something
that someone might not like, or doing something that might
not be quote attractive or whatever it is. And so
then I realized, oh, there's another cage, and that's the
cage of people pleasing and of niceness. And so I
became really focused on breaking out of that and becoming
(06:18):
ultimately a lot more authentic and real and not needing
to prove and pretend and please. And the result of
that is just so much more freedom to be me,
which is part of the passion to share that with
people as well.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Aziz says that people have these threshold moments what some
might call rock bottom. He calls a doorway, a chance
to step away from the familiar into the unknown.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I did have a threshold moment, and I would describe
a threshold moment as a specific moment in time when
the pain of all the ways you've been living becomes
unavoidably overwhelmingly clear. That's the beginning of the threshold moment.
(07:03):
Because sometimes people see all the pain they're living in,
they just feel more discouraged and depressed. And then there
is an awareness of the future, some fantasy if it's
just going to get better or somehow the problem's going
to go away and everything's going to be fixed. We
have just this crushing, dawning awareness that that's not going
to change either. But actually those two awarenesses come together,
(07:29):
and what makes it a threshold moment is something awakens
inside that is, instead of being demolished by it's actually
an active defiance to that. And the best words I
have for that are enough of this. There's like a
charge inside and with that there's a power. And you
don't even know how to fix it or change it,
or what exactly you're going to do, or you don't
(07:49):
have a big plan. It's almost just like a wild
rebellion energy to life as you've known it. And usually
for people it comes on the cusp of ather pain.
And for me, it was another night where I'd finally
worked up the courage to ask a woman out and
she'd actually said yes. But what always seemed to happen
(08:10):
is after the first date cheat they wanted nothing to
do with me, and that was even more crushing to
my already pretty fragile self esteem. And so it was
that night, you know this, just had a conversation, a
follow up conversation with this woman and she clearly had
become disinterested, And so I trudged up the stairs to
my apartment. It was dark. I thought no one was.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
There inside his apartment, Azis was on autopilot. He did
his standard routine, cooked some pasta, started playing video games,
something he did for three or four hours a day.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
And then I heard this laughter coming from my roommate's room,
but it was him and his girlfriend and the levity
of it and the connection of it, and that was
the nail in the coffin, you know. It was this
sense of like, I'm never going to have the freedom
to be me and to connect. And then that's where
the past page and the future pain all converged. And
(09:03):
instead of a sobbing in my bed, it was just
this intense almost It's not anger, it's like a power,
but there is a defiance to it, and I claimed
like something more. But I didn't have this foundation of
building up your sense of self compassion and what I
call being on my own side, and so all I
(09:24):
had was raw frantic action and a desperate desire and
willingness to do it. But it was so scary, but
also pretty quickly I realized, hey, all the stories, the
predictions I had about how it was going to go
are not always true. But I'd say within a six
(09:45):
month period, I experienced some radical changes that I'd never
experienced in my life, like being able to walk up
to someone I didn't know and start a conversation, or
I mean, things that might be basic to other people,
but to me they're revolutionary and not to me.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, because I think sometimes I think people in my
life who maybe don't have struggle in this way maybe
dismiss it as just being like, oh, just shyness or
self consciousness or something, and it feels like much deeper
and much more challenging to me than that. What do
you think the stakes are of I guess having that
kind of breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Well, to someone who is not really in the cage,
it seems like a matter of preference. Shyness is kind
of a natural quality. We can all feel it. Sometimes
it can be paired with things like tending to be
a bit more reserved or quiet, more empathy, better listener,
hesitating before jumping in. Shyness is actually not inherently a
(10:44):
negative trait at all. The problem is over time we
can we hold back and then social anxiety can come
in there. And the difference between shyness and social anxiety
is social anxiety is the belief that my sharing who
I am, whatever's going to come out of me is
going to be rejected because it's bad or wrong, and
(11:06):
then the reservation is that is painful because we don't
really want to hold back. We're just holding back from fear.
When we're in that cage, the stakes are high. There's
really interesting research around one of the big qualities of
niceness and people pleasing is emotional suppression. And the people
(11:27):
that had the highest level of emotional suppression were four
times more likely to die from any cause over a
twelve year period. But the truth is, it is life
or death right now today, not in the future, but
it's life or death not to your physical body, but
to what you're here to do, to your soul's purpose,
to your joy, to the connection and intimacy that you
(11:50):
could have in life with not just a lover or something.
I mean the intimacy, like the deep connection with all
of life. That to me, that's why the stakes are
so high right now today.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Something I thought was really interesting that I heard you say,
I think I believe on your show about social anxiety
being something that you do as opposed to something that
you have, which is what I always say. Can you
give me some examples or a way as I might
be doing social anxiety.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I really do believe that from observation that social anxiety
is not something we have, it's something that we do
or practice. Another way to think of it is that
social anxiety is a pattern, and so you can be
running a pattern or you cannot be running a pattern
at any given moment. And the reason I highlight that
is I say someone's like, I have social anxiety. It's like, okay,
(12:44):
but are there moments in your day or life where
you don't experience it, where you feel that there's an
absence of that judgment, self criticism, hesitation, doubtful, self absorber, criticism.
That it's really the hallmark of social anxiety. And the
(13:04):
usually think, oh, yeah, you know, when I'm by myself,
or when I'm with my dog, or maybe when I'm
with a close friend that I don't feel it. Now
some people say yes, I feel it twenty four to seven.
It's like, well, then you're running the pattern twenty four seven.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
No, my dog is judging me.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah exactly. It's like, oh my goodness, you are what
a scary world. That's unfortunate, you know. And so then
we want to get really curious about when I'm doing it,
how am I doing it. So that's the question I'll
have clients ask themselves, is how am I creating it?
What is the pattern for social anxiety? What am I
focusing on? And we might think, oh, there's only one
(13:39):
way to focus, and it's on this. Actually, no, there's
a lot of ways to focus. And when I ask people,
the pattern is almost always when I'm experiencing social anxiety,
to focus is on myself.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
You might say, well, no, I'm looking at the other person. Yeah,
but you're kind of looking at yourself through the eyes
of the other person or the mind, the imagined mind
of the other person judging you, And so we might
have the perception of they're judging me, and usually there's
like a lot of specifics in there that are quickly
embedded in there, like they're judging me for what, for
(14:12):
the way I look for, the way I stand for
this or that, And when you study the pattern, you're like, hmm,
everywhere I go, my mind's telling me that people always
judge me for these same four things. Interesting, like if
that's why would everyone be noticing those same four things?
Or is it just me that's judging myself? And so
(14:32):
the greatest question we can ask ourselves, is just what
am I doing? How do I create the pattern of
social anxiety.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
After the break as these and I talk about what
I learned about being my authentic self, whatever that means
after playing a fictional version of myself at a murder
Mystery party dr B. When I moved to Mexico, I
(15:06):
feel like I don't even know if I really talked
about having social anxiety sopecifically before. I think I just
talked about having anxiety, although a lot of it was
social and triggered socially, And now it seems like it's
almost exclusively in a social context that it comes up,
which is why I've started referring to it that way.
Something about moving here, I think it heightened that experience
for me, and so I started taking notes about you know,
(15:26):
what were the signs that I was noticing, Like I
thought I saw an expression on someone's face that made
me think they were thinking X, Y and Z about me,
and that I couldn't stop think about it for three days,
like that's kind of what happens to me. But I
did recently think, you know, I've been here for a
year and I really have met a lot of people,
but I have only like one or two people I
have like I have deep connections with, and so I've
just been strategizing a lot about how I can meet
(15:49):
more people. And one I strategy came up with was
I said, I think I'm going to be what I
was calling this experimental self where I just sort of
play a role. I guess. I don't know if it's
like a version of myself that like I liked more,
or version of myself that I think other people will
like more. To be honest, I'm not sure which of
those feels true. But something that also came to the
(16:11):
forefront of my mind was that a couple maybe like
a month ago, I went to a friend of mine
had this murder mystery party, and afterwards he told me
he was like, Oh wow, you were such a hit
at the party, like everyone really liked you, like everyone
really wants to knowing he would be friends with you,
And I just didn't really know what to do with
that information. Just these two things will related because I
think at first I was like, oh cool, and then
the over time I was like, but that wasn't me,
Like I was, that wasn't me at all, But it
(16:33):
was the experimental persona I was thinking about doing like
was more or less that same character. And so I
guess if I have a question after telling you all that,
it's it's something about, like I guess, strategies, or it's
about storytelling's about telling yourselves different stories. It's about you
know what, maybe like what you think about performance, like
is that a useful way to think about making these
(16:55):
changes or does that seem like a trap?
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I think interesting thing here is who is myself and
who authentically am I today is different than a year
from now or five years from now, And so this
idea of oh I'm this way and I'm this and
I'm not that. But also I like to talk about
the human band of behavior and all the ways you
could show up and how narrow we make that band
(17:25):
to be what feels familiar. But underneath, maybe I want
to be able to be all of it. Sometimes I
want to be quiet, Sometimes I want to have a
deep conversation. Sometimes I just want to be silly or
playful or expressive, or make a joke or talk about
something that's frivolous. Maybe I want to do all of it.
And so to me, the ability to really access different
(17:50):
ways of being, different parts of you, different versions of you.
I love that language I use there, and it might
feel foreign at first, but so does play an instrument
when you've never played that instrument before. But there's there's
this sense of, well, maybe you need to try on
a new way of being and it's uncomfortable, and you're
(18:12):
using the discomfort as a sign that it's not me,
but really it's fear.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, So I'm hearing an endorsement of my trying out
my experimental selves. I'm a selves now plural to that,
But I think it's maybe with something about other people
witnessing me having different selves and thinking there's something wrong
about that. And I think I was hearing your answer
like there is nothing wrong about that, and it's kind
of someone else's problem if they are confused by it
(18:38):
or off put by meeving quiet one day, meving loud
and playful the next, which I think is kind of
my more natural way of being.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, And this goes to that fear of like what
they are going to think of me, And one of
the biggest freedoms with that is when we don't need
to protect against that person thinking something I mean, you're
fighting so many of attack if you have to guard
against every thought and every judgment that everyone might have,
and the simplest way is just to own it if
(19:07):
that's what feels true, So you know, imagining something like wow,
you're very different, and some owning inside of yourself like
oh yeah, I mean you've seen nothing yet I got
a thousand parts. And as soon as you own it, like,
what are they going to do? Like, yeah, that's there's
a lot of them. That's right. I told you there's
a thousand get ready. And I try to help my
(19:29):
kids with this. They're eight and ten and they're in
this stage where it's just beginning about you know what
everyone thinks, everyone as if everyone is a hive mind
that all thinks the same thing. But there's this real
beautiful aha moment people can have where you just see,
wait a minute, I just get to choose. There is
no referee or external authority that's evaluating people's worth based
(19:54):
upon their way of being and how they communicate and
how they share and who they are in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
That's just me.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
And soon as soon as I just claim it and
own it, then really all that fear and guarding melts.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Away, yeah yeah, and then seeing yeah, like kind of
recognizing your own inherent worthiness, which is like it's so,
you know, a practice unto itself. I think extending that
also to sort of see yourself as the same as
everyone around you. I think when you mentioned earlier seeing
people as like my enemy and seeing people as potential
threats all the time, that was something that I kind
(20:28):
of became aware of and had to name and let
go up. Maybe because I'm in a new social context,
there's some of that guard is up again where I'm
like thinking a lot about am I fitting into like
this culture, Am I doing Mexico correctly or whatever. In
the beginning of your last response, you were talking about
how we can't make a rule, like there's not like
something you should do every time, And I was laughing
because when I was talking about how the data that
I collect and all the notes that I take on
(20:49):
my journaling, a lot of it is like rules for socializing,
like rules for X, Y and Z, just to give
myself guardrails. I also wanted to ask you how control
plays into these things that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You know, it's funny, I was I was just teaching
an in person workshop last weekend, and I played a
song for everybody. The conductor the whole first two minutes
of the song is like in this kind of robotic
voice saying control, control, control, control. I mean, it's not
too far fetched that it's like there's a little we
called it the control bot inside that is literally in,
(21:22):
you know, initiating this control command every two seconds.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
It came up from this participant saying that these in
conversations or some part of it feels like, no matter
what it is, he's doing it wrong. And that can
come from specific rules that you're aware of. And it
is good to flush out the rules. I don't think
you become aware of every single one, but you become
aware of enough to say, oh my gosh, this is insane.
(21:49):
Then you can see you can follow the trail to see, Okay,
this is about me trying to protect myself and feel safe.
And if I follow all the rules and I just
have enough control, then I'm going to feel safe. And
I have to control what do I have to control? Well,
I have to control myself and everything that, how I
(22:10):
show up, how I express why, So I can control
other people and I'm going to control their perception of me.
I'm going to control their emotions so that they feel
positively towards me and not negatively. I'm going to control
what they say. And yet we're perpetually trying to live
out this script as if it's going to work, and
it's a malfunction. The control bot is misfiring. It doesn't work.
(22:33):
And the key here is to get that. It's all
about trying to get a sense of safety. The problem
is when we strive for what I call insane safety.
And insane safety is no one ever thinks anything negatively
about me, or I don't feel safe, no one ever
judges me, or I don't feel safe. Or another form
of insane safety is I want to know that I'm
going to experience no pain ever in the future ever again. Okay,
(22:57):
well you can want that. No organism gets the guarantee
that there'll be no pain or discomfort in the future.
In fact, it's the opposite. You're guaranteed that you will
have some pain in the future. So we want to
relinquish that demand. And so the way that we do
that to turn towards to life, to open to life
and say bring it on. And that means also bring
(23:18):
on the pain. Now it's not just a pain fest.
We can also have some really beautiful moments. But we
want to build our capacity to say, yeah, discomfort's going
to happen, and I want to build my capacity, my resilience,
my strength to be able to be with it and
run and really stay with with compassion with ourselves. And
(23:39):
that's becoming a lost art in this world where there's
just so many tempting ways to try to turn off
the pain.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I think what you're saying makes total sense. Well, I
think this goes back to like there isn't a rule.
There isn't like a one size fits all solution, but
there's certainly like a need for a balance between allowing
the discomfort to occur versus like ruminating and I'm I
am a ruminator. I'm just thinking out loud. I'm realizing, Okay,
Like the rumination actually is also a story, So it's like,
(24:11):
when I'm ruminating, I'm allowing a story to like take
over versus I guess I could sort of see my
discomfort as just being like what you're describing, a byproduct
of moving towards a more liberatedself that I want to inhabit,
or a more liberated life that I want to lead,
and just seeing it is like, here's a necessary step
to that process that might help me to not go
(24:34):
down to the path of rumination, but just more of
like the what you're describing, like building up that resilience.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yes, I would say that rumination is actually the resistance
to being with our own experience. So there's a feeling
or set of feelings that we don't want to be with,
and so we try to go into our head to
resolve the feelings without feeling them. Yeah, and there is
(25:00):
something to like resurrender and stay, you know, drop beneath
the mind right into the center of the discomfort in
our body and be willing to be with it and
drop all resistance to it. And then there's there's a
pathway there. And then the discharging it through the spinning mind,
(25:21):
which takes forever and never works, is shifts and we
can actually just really allow the feeling to move through
us and come to peace just by being with it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And do you think of these things in the realm
of mental illness?
Speaker 2 (25:33):
There are times where having a diagnosis can be helpful
and there are times where it can be limiting. Sometimes
people having oh, there's a name for what I have.
Oh oh, there's treatments and there's solutions for this. Oh great,
Like that's where a diagnosis can be extremely liberating. Now,
that's one of the potential cons is people think of diagnoses,
maybe even unconsciously, as some sort of permanent or character quality.
(25:56):
That's where I highlight to people like, look, everyone experiences
social anxiety. If you've been running that pattern a lot,
then sure you'd meet criteria for social anxiety disorder. That
doesn't mean that that's who you are and what you
have to stay as. And I've worked with people who've
run that pattern for thirty years and then they don't anymore. Now,
it doesn't mean they never experienced social anxiety, but what
(26:17):
it means is it's no longer so frequent and so
intense that that's who they are and what their life is.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Okay. So the gag is that when I told myself
to just accept that having social anxiety is who I am,
When I told myself to accept it and accommodate it
and stop apologizing for it. After I told myself all
of that, that critical voice suddenly got very quiet. The
voice didn't go away entirely, but the times between hearing
that voice, living with that voice, and not living with
(26:52):
it became farther and farther apart, And in the in
between times, I began to understand that there was some
other part of me that did exist outside of the
pattern of social anxiety, some part of me who just
wasn't fixated on my own discomfort or on how other
people perceive me, A part of me that was just
(27:13):
tired of giving a shit. And I started to think
that if I could feel that all the time, why
would I ever want to feel anything else? And thanks
to this conversation with doctor Ziz, I'm letting go of
the need to control how other people see me, Every me,
Every version of Me. Basket Case is a production of
(27:44):
molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts. The series is hosted, produced,
and sound designed by me NK Nicole Kelly. I co
created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green, who's also
our executive producer. Production assistants by Siona Petros and Ammani Leonard.
Adrian Lillly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue
and orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created
(28:06):
by Sinnay Rolson. Fact checking by Serena Solin. Legal services
provided by Rowan, Maren and File. Our executive producer from
iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman.
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