Anxiety Outweighed by Desire
There’s a particular clinical insight I wanna try to explore here. I feel like if someone is suffering from social anxiety, you have to first ask yourself, “Do they have the desire to engage in social interaction in the first place?” Because it’s one thing to have a fear of social interaction, and it’s another thing to actually want it. If your car has broken down and is not moving forward, you can try to fix the problem and make sure it runs again—but what if it doesn’t even have a acceleration pedal in the first place?
Get Zeta’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In other words, what if the primary way we overcome things like social anxiety is via making sure that our social anxiety is outweighed by our social desire? A toddler might be too nervous to begin talking to a stranger, but they are also entranced and exploding with curiosity and excitement to do so. The excitement is what pushes the toddler to actually engage in social interaction, to the point where they overcome their initial anxiety in the first place.
Now compare this to introverts, many of whom have less motivation to engage in social interaction in the first place. This means that it takes a lot more effort to overcome their social anxiety, since one of the methods you use to overcome it is to actually desire social interaction more than you are scared of it. Their problem isn’t just that they have social anxiety; an additional problem is that they’re just not excited enough to engage in social interaction in the first place. This makes the problem less of an anxiety disorder, and more of a… well, personality one.
None of which should discourage the treatment of social anxiety. But I’m just trying to explore an interesting idea, which is that approach motivation is often what combats avoidance motivation, and this is usually what spurs forward motivation in our daily behavior. You can try to reduce avoidance motivation all you want—and it could work, often to a very large extent—but if you don’t have sufficient approach motivation in the first place, no amount of avoidance reduction is gonna make you move at all.
