Social anxiety

Social anxiety is reflection of your self esteem, or how you see yourself.
Your self esteem is built from two components, your own actions and actions of others towards you.
When people are not sure if they are "worth anything" they can not rely on what they feel about themselves, because they are not sure.
So they lean heavily on opinions of others as a way to measure their self worth. Being aware of the fact that people outside can be cruel and do not care much about them - anxiety and follows. They try to please everyone.

 

In my case, I often have anxiety that I might have hurt somebody's feelings due to my social ineptitude.

 

Anxiety is often understood as something that is "negative." Yeah, we don't like feeling it, but everything we "feel" we feel for a reason. Don't know if you have thought of it in those terms. Anxiety, though we wish we did not feel it, is a successful survival trait. Successful species feel anxiety, or, at least most do. Plankton is the least anxious species in the world, they feel nothing. They can afford to feel nothing because they reproduce in the billions, and don't have to care whether they are prey. They are born to be eaten, so, looking forward to be eaten with absolutely no anxiety may be their natural state. Humans, we evolved in an environment where we could be eaten, or killed, or attacked, mostly by other humans. Well, the killed and attacked part, mostly. We feel anxiety because, in the environment we evolved, being anxious, not just about other humans, but our environment, made us more aware of those things, and less vulnerable to them. I know, anxiety sucks, but take time to understand its evolutionary roots and role. Take time to understand the evolved purpose of anxiety. It does not make it easier, but, at least when you feel it you can know it is an evolutionary throw back that had a purpose. Like your appendix. For a lot of people, today, that purpose still exists. There are still a significant percentage of the population for whom anxiety still serves a valuable role. You are a member of the alpha predator species on the planet, and you spend your days walking among and interacting with alpha predators. Yeah, fuck, I am fucking anxious!

Take time to study your brain. It will help.

W.

 

Anxiety is a feedback mechanism, that must properly integrate in to emotional systems of the individual. It literally gives you feedback.
For someone needing to cross a busy road:
Person with no anxiety will be killed by a truck because he is not anxious about it coming towards him.
Person with abnormally strong anxiety repose, will become obsessive about the danger of being hit by a car and never cross the road.
Person with normal anxiety response is able to use anxiety as a tool to decide when to cross the road safely. No cars, no anxiety - lets go.

Feedback mechanisms presents signals of different intensity to show gradation of some specific characteristic, like danger.
Healthy and emotionally stable individual has anxiety gradient that appropriately represents reality.
Emotionally unstable people, develop problems with grading danger of events, this feedback mechanism no longer represents reality and they experience unreasonable level of anxiety, which negatively impacts their behavior.
In essence excessive anxiety prevents you from seeing the world for what it is, things appear more dangerous than they really are and you avoid them. There is nothing good about abnormal anxiety.

Result of poor self esteem, trying to please everyone.

 

I'm not getting this analogy unfortunately. Surely most adults cross a road with virtually no anxiety. They will presumably understand the ramifications of not checking both ways, but this is usually done without anxiety.

 

People that have absolutely no anxiety when crossing the road - get killed. Think of children that run out to the street to get a ball.
You have some degree of anxiety, because you look both ways to "manage it". You cross in a safe place to avoid it.