Help with social anxiety?

[Nick]

I'm going through social anxiety (as well as depression), and I don't have the money to see a therapist, nor do my parents. I'm a junior in highschool. My biggest fear is public speaking and it's a big contributor to my bad thoughts, like it helps make me think about not wanting to live anymore. As well as the fact I'm nervous around people and hesitant to speak up. I'm not suicidal but it feels as though I'm taking the steps mentally to get to that point. Is there something I can do? I don't have many friend to vent to but I have a secret tumblr and twitter, tumblr for journaling and twitter for like the smaller stuff. I used to have a therapist and was prescribed to medicine but I don't think it really helped. What can I do?

[araktsu]

http://livinglovesystem.info/Living_Love...e_Page.php

There are seven billion persons. If you knew how human beings have been behaving, you would not be so worried about whether or not you fit in. To be blunt, just be happy that you live in a time and place where none of them have yet eaten you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM

There are far too many examples to list here, even from the last 100 years.

* Where we live:
Christopherson, Robert. “Geosystems: An Introduction to Physical Geography”
(Prentice Hall, several editions available)
* Where we came from:
Jurmain, Kilgore, Trevathan, Ciochon. “Introduction to Physical Anthropology”
(Cengage Learning, several editions available)
* What we have been doing:
Roberts, J.M.; Westad, O.A. “History of the World”
(Oxford University Press: 2013)


MINDFULNESS MEDITATION

Your perceptions and desires are products of conditioning and other sentient experience you have acquired up to this point in life. You can change the contents of your mind, and you can shape your mind to be pro-social, rational, and smarter, too.

That task is part of what is called mental development and, in my opinion, requires a long-term commitment to high quality education about the real world including the evolution of our species and how the human mind has evolved along with evolution of our brain.

Some kinds of suffering are self-imposed although we do not always recognize this to be the case. Instead we are on a sort of automatic behavior method of coping with reality. We can change our sentient experience however by a sort of deconstruction into component parts; from that point it is ultimately a matter of adopting new, rational, wholesome paradigms.

Unless you have brain damage, as in dementia, you will never lose certain mental schemas and memories. Your inner life is largely based on those schemas. The perceptions and sentient experience you have can be moderated and shaped purposefully as long as you are still functioning. Such an approach requires vigilance and practice. It can be enhanced with greater knowledge of the real world and acquisition of critical thinking skills.

Consciousness is a function of a cognitive neural network processing both sensory data and memory. Sentient experience can be subjectively deconstructed into four foundations of mindfulness:

1. Mindfulness of body.
2. Mindfulness of sensation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (physical sensation).
3. Mindfulness of state of mind (attitude, emotion).
4. Mindfulness of content of mind (ideas, learned skills, memory, mental images, beliefs).

As you consider this paradigm there will be the usual background of a continuous stream of thoughts, random or specific ideas, and images, feelings that come and go. Any of these can distract you, but you can just ignore them, too. The brain will do this sort of thing as long as you live. There is no need to suppress any of it; your brain normally processes information via random association or cognitive models you have acquired either on purpose or by random experience. These are the things that usually drive your perceptions and behavior, even your dreams.

See comments by Denim at the below:
http://debateunlimited.com/Debate/viewto...43f935e52f