If you’re too nervous to ask out a girl you like, then you may fantasize about going out with her in your head. You may begin to use your thoughts to live a life that your shyness or social anxiety holds you back from. If you are shy, if you don’t have a lot of friends, if you don’t really like yourself, then you may try to escape from that reality. Escaping a Painful RealityĪnother possible reason why people with shyness or social anxiety daydream a lot is to escape their current situation. It’s a way of lessening the unpleasant feeling of anxiety. In the case of social anxiety, that probably means being around people.īasically, if you feel anxious just being around people, then your mind may start to daydream and get lost in thought so you don’t have to “face” the situation fully. Partial avoidance is usually mental avoidance of the thing you fear. You are distancing yourself from the anxiety-provoking situation you are in through using distractions, daydreaming, and so on. Instead of avoiding the situation by not going into it physically, you avoid it with your mind. Partial avoidance means that you avoid situations mentally instead of physically. So now what does partial avoidance mean? Partial avoidance is a little more subtle than regular avoidance.
You avoid the people, places, and situations that make you feel anxious. They may even get to the point of staying inside their house all day. They may see someone they know walking towards them down the street and quickly try to find ways to avoid them. To understand what partial avoidance is, you first have to know what avoidance is.Īvoidance is when someone who has social anxiety avoids the situations that make them feel anxious. My guess is that it’s a form of partial avoidance. Why is it that people with shyness and social anxiety daydream so much? Why is it such a common problem for them compared to “regular” people? Why Are You Constantly Thinking and Daydreaming? If this describes you, then this article is going to change the way you live. Constantly caught up in their thoughts, daydreaming, being absent mentally from the people around them and the outer world. It would be many years after this realization that I would learn that many people with shyness and social anxiety suffer from the same dilemma. It was very difficult to socialize with other people because I was never “there.” It almost felt like I was cut off from the world, just looking into it but not interacting with it. I was always absent from the real world because I was thinking to myself constantly. And I didn’t even realize how often I was doing it until one day, in high school, someone mentioned that I was a daydreamer.Īt that point I started to become aware of how often I was caught up in my own thoughts, getting lost in my own inner world.
I was always lost inside my own thoughts and payed little attention to the outside world. Whether I was by myself or with other people. I would always be thinking about things and fantasizing about things happening. Do you often wander off into your own thoughts?ĭo you daydream and “zone out” many times a day?ĭo you always talk to yourself in your head almost to the point that you are living inside your head instead of out in the real world?