Social Anxiety, Awkward Moments, and Keeping It Cool

Episode Summary

In this episode of Taco Chats & Laugh Attacks, Alex and Danny dive into the world of social anxiety, overthinking, and those all-too-familiar awkward moments that make us cringe. They share personal stories, humorous takes on navigating social interactions, and practical strategies to keep cool under pressure. Whether it’s sitting too close on a love seat, second-guessing past conversations, or managing the internal chaos of overthinking, this episode is a relatable and engaging discussion on the quirks of social interaction. With a mix of laughter and insight, they explore how to cope with social anxiety and embrace our awkwardness rather than fear it.

Key Topics Covered

• Understanding Social Anxiety – What it is, why we experience it, and how it manifests in everyday life.
• The Art of Overthinking – Why our brains replay awkward moments and how to break free from the cycle.
• Keeping It Cool in Awkward Situations – Practical tips for navigating social interactions with confidence and humor.

Important Definitions & Concepts

• Social Anxiety: A feeling of intense nervousness or fear in social situations, often driven by worry about judgment or embarrassment.
• Overthinking: The tendency to analyze past or future social interactions excessively, often leading to stress or self-doubt.
• Giggling:  a light, repeated, and often uncontrollable laugh, usually in response to something amusing, nervousness, or embarrassment. It is typically higher-pitched and softer than a full laugh. 

Discussion & Reflection Questions For Educators

• How has social anxiety impacted your interactions, and what strategies have helped you navigate it?
• What is one awkward moment you’ve overthought for years, and how would you handle it differently today?

If you have questions for Alex or Danny, you can send questions to tacochatsandlaughattacks@gmail.com

Transcript

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So that last one, you said something and then I started talking, it would go and say, "Oh, they're both talking on that microphone," and would just try to boost me to match your level. I think we were sitting too close. Maybe we shouldn't sit on a love seat together. I enjoyed it. It was nice. It was like another hairy leg touching you. Welcome to Taco Chats and Laugh Attacks. Today, Alex and Danny dive into social anxiety, overthinking awkward moments, and keeping it cool. Let's get into it. Yeah, when you sent it to me, I was listening to it. I kept thinking, "Hey, I don't know if Alex sent me the right file," because this was real unusual for him to send me something that would be sort of that oddly mixed. And then I thought, "Wow, this is really interesting," to the point where I was like, "I think I emailed you and I said, 'I love it,' and the sound sounds a little weird, but I'm okay with it," which was honest. I was being serious. And so, it didn't cross my mind that I needed to be critical of the audio in that way. It's like that, "I completely trust what you're saying," or what you're doing. It sounded good to me in the editor, and then I went and exported it and didn't even check the audio before I sent it to you. You hadn't heard it like I did. I think we were sitting too close. Maybe we shouldn't sit on a love seat together. I enjoyed it. It was nice. Yeah. It wasn't like another hairy leg touching you. Reason number one why we don't have video of us. You want to not have an audience? Well, I thought it was great. It's funny because I think that's one of the things that you and I have talked about where when you do something, you really like it. There's a real confidence level to that liking it to the extent where if somebody has a criticism about it, you don't care because it's at that level that you wanted it to be. I did notice I said, "Right," a lot also in that one. When I was listening back to it, I thought, "I need to get a t-shirt for you that says,'Right,' so I can remind or a hat or something." I'm going to make a little sign for here. I cut some of them out. One day I'll make a montage of an hour of "Right." I was listening to that and I thought, "This is really it." I had forgotten that we did it without headphones. The reason was primarily because you don't like the sound of your voice and it's distracting. I think that's one of the things that fascinates me so much about behavioral health and how our environment can impact us with our levels of anxiety, depression, self-criticism, all that stuff that small accommodations for those issues can make a huge difference in the success of what somebody is able to do. It's like accommodations with kids that have dyslexia or kids that have in and in school and that we have these accommodations in place because if you remove some of these barriers, then you get to see the real productivity, creativity, and success of somebody. Not because there's something wrong with them, because our system doesn't accommodate that teaching style. I was thinking about it in terms of that there's something about your voice that you don't like that is at a level where it makes it hard for you to engage in a conversation. I don't like it. That's kind of why I work behind the camera. I don't want to be on. That's what I wanted to ask you about. Because everything's got to be a research project for me, I went and did a little research on it. It's a phenomenon and it is called voice confrontation. It's kind of interesting because there's two sides to it. One is the reason why we hear our voice different from when it's recorded is because when we're speaking it's reverberating through our brains, through our bones, through our tissues and all that kind of stuff. It's deeper. It's more, I don't know what the term is, compressed. Yeah. Is that right? Is it like a compression? It's compression and it's also like you've got a 5.1 surround sound system with the subwoofer turned up a little louder than the other voices that you hear. Right. That's a good way of explaining that. But the whole idea of voice confrontation is the phenomenon of why we don't like the sound of our own recorded voice. I did some reading about it and it was pretty interesting. There's all these different things to it. There's this one process where you could be in a room full of people and if somebody says your name, it'll perk up. Or let's say you're in a place where it's really loud or busy or whatever and say somebody pulls up a video and you hear your voice on the video, you'd perk up immediately. And that has to do with voice prioritization that we're so in tune with that, that that's what keeps us sort of our head on the swivel. But the voice confrontation is self-criticism. And it's this thought that I don't like my voice, therefore people don't like me in a way. That's like the nickel tour of that. But it's interesting because there's this study I read where they did recordings of people and then had them do some other kind of assessments like what's their level of anxiety, what's their level of fear, what's some other things. And they were all people that spoke multiple languages. And the thing that was kind of, I think what was most striking to me was that the people that had higher levels of social anxiety disorder were more critical of their voice than anything else. And, you know, yeah, and you see some of these kind of research articles like this and you're like, duh, that's common sense, right? But what's really kind of funny about that is, and I think it was sort of it dawned on me in looking at that and thinking about how you are with your creativity, and the fact that you're always behind the camera. When you said that, I was like, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. You know, I hate to say, but I think you have social anxiety disorder, Alex. I do. I do. I don't know if this is confronting it or not, but I try to go to as many networking events I can as I can to like within the filmmaking community. I'll not go at the last minute just because I'm just not feeling it. I'm not feeling good about it. I'm not feeling like anyone wants to hear me. I don't know if that has any relation. But yeah, I definitely don't like being on camera. I don't like being on audio, but I feel like I do a lot of it to confront it. I do like hate to keep going back to it, but my doc, like I was like the biggest like force for me to actually be interviewed or be up on stage to talk about this project and do all these things. And I mean, it's kind of helped me with being able to be on a client call and actually have my camera on and all those things. But yeah, it's always a battle. It's been a battle and it still is. What's sort of neat about what you said was that it's less about having to fix it or change it as much as it is the awareness of it. And we talked about last time that sort of the insight, knowing how something's happening for us, that that's 95% of the power that we have behind that sort of self discovery. So I started looking at how do you, how would you treat this? Right? What is the modality you would use to sort of help somebody through that? And you're doing it, you're putting yourself is so by putting yourself in those situations, it's kind of confronting that fear. When you think about that sort of experience for you, and when you, I guess came to the realization that you know, to get over this, I need to start doing this more. I'm actually coming to it now because you bringing it up. It's just it's all connecting. It makes sense like what you're saying. So it's not like I'm walking around and I know I have this disorder. And I'm not saying that, you know what I mean? I'm not saying you have the disorder, but you know what I mean? Like not not having the disorder, but like that social anxiety thing, like connecting it all. It's like, Oh yeah, it does. It does make sense that you know, I don't like being on camera and I don't like being out in a group and then having a giant group listen to me. Yeah. It's, it's intimidating. And I think what's kind of fascinating about that is that you can go two routes with that. You can look at, okay, here's this, here's this difficulty I have with speaking in public or just hearing my voice or whatever it might be. And this is where I am today. And where I am today has a lot to do with having to deal with that. And then you, that's one way of looking at it. Because, you know, by going through and challenging that in yourself, you are very successful what you do today. And that, that is, that is part of your like survival instinct. You have a passion and that passion takes precedence over those fears. And so by having that passion at the degree where you're going to challenge it, you muscled through it. So that's a very healthy way to look at it. The unhealthy way to look at it is, okay, here I am today. What is it? What would my life be different? How would my life be different if I didn't have that? And I think that is one of the cornerstones to that, you know, self assessment, self-esteem, all those pieces to it. And especially when we start getting to our age, we get into this, this developmental stage where we're kind of looking at our life and figuring out, okay, what did I leave behind? What's my legacy? Right? Where am I today? How can I share what my experience is so that it carries on, right? That's giving value to what you know, and all those things. And there's, and that's sort of a real significant piece of development that happens to where it's, it's called integrity versus inferiority is the stage that we talk about. And it's this point where we kind of think back, how did that work out for me? How does regret play into that? I think that's the part where you look back at what could have you done, what you could have done different and recognizing that, you know, you might've had control over those things, but the reality is you don't have, you don't really always have the control you think you do after the fact, like the Monday morning quarterback. Yeah. The regret I think is the part where we are having difficulty accepting that we didn't have that choice that we wish we had today. Yeah. Makes sense. It all comes down to, I think, acceptance to it and knowing that, you know, you can't control the past, you can't control the future. And if there's something about what you did in the past that you would want to do different, you can start doing it differently today. Might not be the same thing, but you can look at the overarching theme and say, okay, well, here's a fear. I want to move forward. I want to move forward confronting my fears because I did a damn good job doing it over the last, you know, 30 years. So truck on, keep on, and then find another fear that might be that way rather than focusing on, oh, here's what I should have done. But the fear is still there. It's still just as relevant as it was when I was younger. It is. And I said it in the last episode that, you know, and I think I've said it a few times before is that we categorize emotions as good and bad. And the reality is there is no good or bad emotion. They're just emotions. They exist. And they're information. It's sort of like when you're on your computer and you're, let's say you're editing something and you start getting some kind of error and we rather than, and this is what I do, I'll get an error and I'll just say, okay, keep going. I won't even read it because I'm like, oh, this is, you know, how dare you getting my way of telling me what I'm doing wrong. Computer's still running. Stupid. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. But they keep happening, keep happening until you notice, oh, maybe I need to pause and read this message of what it is because it's gotten to be so annoying. And then you make a decision. Okay. I need to go. I need to stop what I'm doing and go figure out what's going on. Or I don't know what's going on. I need to go get on Google and search up this error. And I think that that's how emotions are. They're just a message saying something's different here and you got a choice. You can either fix it or it might be something that says, oh, here's a way to improve it. You know, and it's all those pieces that fall in line where, you know, that fear continues. The fear is a good thing. The fear is a place I look at as this is an indication of something I need to lean into and I should probably address it. Because addressing it is that that fear is a self-criticism that doesn't want you to be hurt. And that's old stuff. It's like almost like it's like a it's like an internal parent. This is I don't want you to have because I'm afraid this is going to happen. And you're fully mature self is like, I'm going to be okay. But for whatever reason, we really listen to that critic, that critic, then think about where we are going forward. I tell this a lot of times to the interns that ever I work with, if they're starting in their in their clinical practice, or they're in they're starting their clinical internships, things like that is that if there's ever anything or a client characteristic or something that you are reluctant to work with, you need to go work with that. Because you can't determine what that is, whether you can or can't work with that, until you've actually done it. Because the perceptions that you're coming up with are all fear based. They're all they're all made up. They're all in your head. It's it's not you don't have the experience to back up that you're right or wrong about that. Now, if you have experience, you know, let's say you're a clinician in training. And, you know, you had, I don't know, some significant death in your life when you were younger. And you know that I can't work with kids that deal with that. Because it's too triggering. That's completely unreasonable. That's that's part of what we do, we have to know what our limits are. If your reluctance is fear based, because of perceptions or because of what you've read or because of what think stigma and all those kind of things, you need to this is what you need to go do. And it's two sides that one is you're confronting that fear. And you're showing yourself you have more power than that inner critic, which you always do. The other side of it is that you're able to see that you can go through it and learn something about yourself. But then there's also the patient that that's getting this benefit of, hey, this person has gone through the same thing. Can be doesn't have to be the same thing, though. I mean, I guess I don't know how personal, how personal you get where you can say, hey, oh, I understand what you mean. This happened to me. Do you do that kind of? No, not typically. Sometimes it might come up. You know, it might be something with, you know, I have a parent who's struggling with something and I might express that. I understand, you know, when my kids were going through that, it was really a struggle. And but I don't go into like what my history might be. That's a that's sort of an ethical boundary. We don't want to really go into or not sort of it is an ethical boundary. And so when people ask me specifically, like, well, did you ever have anybody die when you were a kid? I did. And so let's talk about why it's important for you to know that I had. Right. And that comes from a place of I want to make sure the focus on you, not on me. But it's also people will judge and. I have to stay as neutral as I can in those situations that you could sit there across from me and tell me about these terrible things you do. And I may be completely against everything you're saying and doing. But my goal isn't to judge what it is you're doing. My goal is to help you determine how you can make yourself better the way that you want to make yourself better. I could sit with people all day long and identify all these different things that are going on with them. But if that's not what they came to see me for, I won't necessarily bring that up unless they either specifically ask about that. Or there's something that they're doing that in my questioning, they'll recognize it in themselves. I would never sit across from somebody like I did with you and say, hey, I think you have social anxiety disorder. Unless you were coming to me because you had anxiety and all that stuff. And I would I probably wouldn't even tell you a diagnosis. I don't really particularly like diagnosis work. It's all it's all insurance based. You have to have a poker face to not like show any kind of judgment or. There are times when expression in what the person is saying is, is appropriate and necessary. Because you want to make sure that you're engaging with them so that they know that you're listening to them. And active listening all day long is exhausting. You know, and but that's, that's my job. That's what I do. And so when somebody is going through something really difficult, or they're sharing something that's super intense, you want to match the emotion. And that's a lot of it where we contribute the that connection that we have, we connect with our emotions to it. How am I feeling right now in the room listening to this person tell me the story? And if it feels painful, I'm probably going to be showing a painful face in some way, but not like this is disgusting. I can't believe you're telling me this kind of painful thing. More like I'm, you know, I'm not gonna sit there and smile at you and completely flat, right? You got to have some level to it. But, and I've had therapists that fall out. And I'm telling them, you know, something that I experienced or something that I'm thinking about, and they get like this like shocked look. And I'll call them out on it. It is hard to be a therapist for a therapist. And we do supervision because you're trained for it that way. But you don't want to react to something somebody saying to where it causes them to rethink that you're judging them. That's the hard part. How do you stop your mind from wandering? It's hard. Yeah. Like, how do you not think Oh, did I leave the stove on? There's two parts to it. If the person in front of you is talking and they're talking about how like they have terrible relationships and they're my friends don't want to go hang out with me and they're going through all their stuff and you're you start to notice you're wandering. That's probably why their friends aren't calling them too. And so you bring yourself back in that when we're sitting with a client. I'm spending as much time checking in with myself as I am listening to the client. Because I have to know that that's part of what's happening to them in their world. You know, even like if I'm working with a kid, if I have a child and he's like, pushing my buttons, I have to stop and think. I'm wondering if this is what their parents are dealing with. And that's where we then use that as a therapeutic moment. Okay. And we we reflected back if it's something that you know, somebody is telling me something and they're sort of doing it with like a smile or whatever and it's terrible. I might say, you know, and I'm listening, you tell me this stuff. It's I mean, I can feel it, I can feel the heaviness to it, the pain to it. But it doesn't match up with the sort of the smiling that's going on. What's wrong with you? What does that mean? Is that is there? Is there anything behind that? Because I mean, like, I'll know, I know that when I'm when I'm confronted with something that I should be angry about, or I should be there's there's an expectation of what should be there. And I don't know if it's it's in my brain, but I basically like go opposite. I'm just like, Well, no, I'm not going to react the way you want me to react or what was expected. Like if somebody is getting angry, you tend to change your sort of demeanor or is it? Let's just say I make something up a drop a camera, the lens breaks, everything just breaks and everybody's like, Oh my god, you know, and I'm just, you know, my instant reaction is be like, it's fine. It's okay. I got it. It's cool. Oh, don't worry. I got another one, you know. I'm not going to turn in like, why did I do that? Or how did that happen? But I won't react that way in front of them. Only because I don't know if it's an instinct or I just don't want to react the way they want me to or what what they expect of me. Well, I think in those situations, it's that you're taking care of if it's if it's business related, you're taking care of the relationship that you're cool and under control. And that if you were to like totally lose your shit, because you drop the camera, your client might be like, I don't know what's his problem. Dropping cameras, he's flipping out, he's calling himself names. And so that's a scenario where it's you know, that's it's survival. Yeah. Because all these things are coming into play where it's like, and you've probably seen it, you've probably seen where a professional or somebody does something and they screw up and then they start hammering on themselves about it. And everybody else feels like they got to take care of them. So it's okay, don't worry about it. Let's just you know, somebody else jumps in there in that role. And really what you're what you're doing is you're jumping in that role for yourself, you're taking care of yourself, so that you know, okay, I'm going to compartmentalize this and I'm going to I'm going to, I'm going to beat myself up in the car. Yeah, yeah. I think we've all been there. Yeah. The way we respond to critical situations is a lot of times our own like self preservation and not wanting further criticism. You dropping a lens is a is a highlight of your unprofessionalism. I don't want people to think I'm not professional. So I'm going to show them how professional I am by not giving a shit. Yeah. Yeah. So back to social anxiety disorder, where does that come from? Is that upbringing or it can be it's it goes back to that whole that perception that you're not measuring up to something. And that it's varied across everybody's sort of experience. Sometimes these kind of things can come up because it's, you know, of a really unhealthy household growing up. It can come up for people that have a completely healthy household coming up. You could have you have a parent that is really focused on their health and their their how you look. And it's at such a level where a child sees that as that's what I have to be, I have to do and it has to do with what other people perceive you as. So as they grow up, when they start going into environments, all they can think about is am I measuring up the way I was supposed to for my parent? It can get more intense if it's not addressed, specifically addressed for ourselves. Like you've taken care of it. It's still there, but it's not to a point where you're, you know, I can only edit, nobody can be around me. I don't even want to go to meetings. I don't want to be online, you know, all that kind of stuff. You've muscled through it. All that stuff has to do with anxiety, whether it's social anxiety disorder, whether it's obsessive compulsive disorder. So it's either way, a lot of those characteristics of our behavior are best met with challenging it. I've seen in front of the camera and I get asked all the time like, Hey, you're an actor. Oh, never. My business partner, Tom, like he will not do public speaking, but he'll go and actually record his voice and do voiceover and his voice is on stuff all the time. And he'll, he'll act, he'll, he'll do all kinds of stuff that I would never, that I would like, I'm just terrified of those things. But it's funny how like he's got, I just dropped. That is so unprofessional, Alex. Yeah, no, it's cool though. It's all good. I mean, what are those headphones around you? Oh, don't worry. I got a bunch of them. Dropped a coffee over here. Talking about social anxiety. I'll be right back. I'm going to go to my car. Oh my God. Definitely not a first. I guess what I'm just saying is that we both have, we both have, we both have a lot of challenges. We both have our challenges and we both face them differently, but not all of them. Like we just kind of pick and choose. My thought and what you're saying is that, and this might even be the case is that by doing a voiceover, by recording, by acting, those things can be deleted and I can control when I like what I produced opposed to if I'm standing in front of a group of people and I'm giving a presentation and I screw something up, namely like dropping coffee all over your equipment. So it's all good. You've got, you don't have faith in yourself with how you would deal with it. I think that's the difference for you. Even like with what you just did, it's not a matter of that we make mistakes. It's how do you recover or how do you deal with the mistake when it happens? If we go into something knowing that I'm going to screw this up and I don't know if everyone was like, you know, what mistake am I making today? We go into that, then we're prepared for something to happen that we're going to recover. We have more, we have more faith in our ability to recover from a situation so that we move forward with that opposed to I don't trust that I could recover from it. So in that way I have to control everything up until it's actually completed. And if I don't have any way of controlling it, I ain't doing it. If this episode made you overthink your overthinking, welcome to the club. Thanks for listening to Taco Chats and Laugh Attacks.