Social Anxiety disorder (SAD) affects roughly 12% of us at least at some point during our life. Our next speaker, Philippe Goldin, is studying the effects of Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) aka meditation on social anxiety.

“The idea is that if a person has the psychological flexibility to shift freely from one mode of thinking to another mode, then that is a sign of health,” said Goldin. “It’s when we get stuck in certain thinking patterns that our beliefs become maladaptive.”

Specifically, the MBSR proved effective silencing the inner critic…you know the one that judges your every action. (Mine is saying I’m a terrible writer right now). They measured this by gauging reaction to negative self-beliefs while inside a fMRI machine. I should know, I took part in this study!

Simply put, meditation proved very effective over a 2 month period. The lay conclusion…slowing down, taking the time to practice mindfulness over a period had a significant impact on internal views. There was an uptick in the use of positive descriptive words such as “admired” and “loved”.

Not surprising, but it does serve as a good reminder that we all need to slow down a bit and maintain a healthy practice to combat the inevitable bout of social anxiety.

More Info:
Stanford Press Release
Philippe’s Paper on Social Anxiety
Philippe’s Paper on Emotional Reactivity