Social anxiety ruins millions of people’s lives annually; it steals joy, happiness, and life and leads to major depression and then medication, which only chemically alters your brain synapses to ignore the real problem: your thoughts. Young and older people suffer from this debilitating thinking problem.

You are probably familiar with that tinge of unease that shoots down your spine whenever you’re in new environments. Maybe your heartbeat quickens when you take to the stage and present to an audience. Well, public speaking and meeting strangers may not be a walk in the park, but it doesn’t inhibit well-adjusted people. Why?

I personally suffered from social anxiety most of my life, and it constantly caused me to seek ways to avoid social events, career changes, people, and opportunities that could have changed my life for the better for almost 30 years!

At one point in my career and life, it was so bad, I would sweat profusely at social gatherings and faint from panic. It was horrible, and I got so good at finding ways to avoid change and people that I finally realized had I used those same creative energies to embrace opportunity, change, and making new friends, my life would have been 100 times better!

What the hell was going on? Was it my diet causing this social anxiety and fear?

All I had to do was think about anxiety when around people and it would start creeping on slowly but ever so strongly, escalating with sweat and light-headedness...and the sweat would start forming on my forehead, and wherever I was, it was quite obvious something was very wrong with me from an outside observer. It was embarrassing and debilitating.

It was crazy, and it had to stop; I had to end this anxiety immediately.

And I did, but it was hard at first because I refused medication or mind-altering chemicals like antidepressants. Why? Because I saw how friends of mine used them to mask their true cause of anxiety and depression, and when they tried getting off them, there were major side effects.

Just to give you an idea about how many people suffer from anxiety (which leads to depression), just look at the stats for how many Americans are prescribed antidepressants annually.

What I came to discover on my own is that social anxiety is a thinking problem; if you can change how you look at events and think about them, you can eliminate social anxiety. It all starts with not caring, accepting who you are right now, and walking dead-center into your fears and anxiety. As soon as you embrace and walk into your fear and anxiety, especially in a social gathering, it vanishes because it is just an illusion created by your thoughts.

Let's start that journey now.