You Don’t Need Alcohol To Ease Social Anxiety, You Need A Tame Mind

Your body decays without exercise; what of the mind?

We drink alcohol to forget ourselves.

No offense to alcoholics. I’m not one to moralize at others for their choice of poison, so long as they’re not hurting others in their intoxication. Indeed, I enjoy a good drink myself.

But none of that takes away from the character of alcohol — like running, playing music, and child-rearing — as a self-escaping or self-transcending agent.

Aldous Huxley, in the latter half of The Doors of Perception, speaks to this evident fact. We humans, or should I say egos, are almost always trying to escape ourselves. We drink, we get high, we train til’ we break, all to quieten that inner voice dripping with self-concern and self-judgment.

But this isn’t optimal. I for one want to enjoy that beer with friends, rather than use it as a crutch of self-escapement. When I train, I want to run toward goals, not away from ego. So is there a better way?

Taming Your Mind is the Way

A substantial part of that chattering mind, that confined self, that inescapable sense of self-concern which we drink to forget, arises because our minds are wild.

Before the 20th century, there was little societal value placed on training your body. We just didn’t know the incredible health benefits that followed. But thanks to a lifestyle and workout revolution that’s since occurred, almost everybody at least knows the benefits of regular exercise and healthy eating. So, we’ve tamed our bodies such that, more than in the past, they work for and not against us.

Despite this mass realization that the body could be tamed, trained, and optimized, until recent years there was no similar reasoning when it came to the mind. Perhaps because we identify with the mind (while feeling we have our body), the notion of molding it around “our” desires was a contradiction in terms. If we’re our minds, who’s there to train it?

This has changed, partly due to the mindfulness renaissance currently underway. Now, it’s obvious to us that the mind is just like the body. Left without training, it falls into a chaotic state. Most minds go without such training, so remain in chaos. As Sam Harris says, “our minds are completely out of control”.

I’ve been taming my mind with meditation for nearly a year now. And, this past weekend, I experienced a profound example of the benefits of that training regime. Here, I found that mind-taming dealt with social anxiety far more effectively than alcohol.

I sat amongst close friends as we watched F1. And for some reason, I felt uneasy and nervous (not due to Verstappen’s 51G crash just witnessed). I was restless in my chair. My solar plexus felt strained. And, as I began to notice, my mind was aflame with rapid-fire thought. I couldn't simply relax into the occasion and enjoy the moment with my friends, as I really wanted to do.

I had a glass of wine with me. And to appease my unease, I drank it quickly. But its intoxicating effects did little to help my anxiety. I still felt off-kilter.

An element of the anxiety was all that mental chatter. With meditative mind-training, it had become second nature to respond to that with awareness. So, as the occasion unfolded, I became aware of my chatter. I didn’t fight. I concentrated on simply noticing. As my mind would wander, I’d gently bring it back to being aware. I expanded that awareness to take in the room, and the sounds heard within it.

Interestingly, this didn’t affect my ability to respond when people talked to me. I could focus on being aware, while my body and mind reacted automatically to the social field around me (but that’s what they’re always doing, isn’t it? The sense that the voice in your head responds is just an illusion).

And, within a matter of minutes, I literally watched as my mind calmed. The thoughts that flitted like hummingbirds began to float like bees. High-frequency stress gave way to low-frequency chill. My body relaxed, and the sense of “I” surfaced and expanded. I no longer felt myself to be the voice in my head. Rather, I was the room seen around me, the sounds heard, and my friends within it.

I felt at ease and comfortable in my own skin: a marked contrast to how I’d felt just minutes before, where I’d rather have been left alone. Now, I sunk into the occasion and enjoyed being with my friends. I talked and listened, laughed and smiled, with little in the way of inner self-referencing to get in the way. It was a great time.

The basis of this good time was my decision to calm my mind by “stepping back into awareness” — a mental technique you practice when meditating. It’s not mystical, or complicated. It’s like learning a tennis swing. You practice and practice until it starts to feel natural. Then it’s a part of your tennis toolkit.

In the same way, the techniques learned on the mindful path become part of your toolkit for life. They’re designed around making the fact of being in this world a better experience. And they’re founded in taming our wild minds, just as physical health is founded in training our bodies.