ANXIETY!!!!!
Everybody gets anxious, it's a natural reaction to stressful situations. However, what causes a stress response in one person, may not affect the other person, and visa versa.
The anxiety is sometimes caused by us linking a situation to a bad feeling or mood. We do this because at some stage in our lives we experienced the feeling and situation both at the same time; sometimes the situation caused the bad feeling (operant conditioning) and sometimes the feeling and situation were unrelated but our mind connects the two by association (classical conditioning).
An example of classical conditioning could be:
You were at school in an English lesson and told you had to prepare and give a presentation in front of your whole class by yourself. This didn't bother you, apart from the extra work when you got home that evening.
You return to school the next day prepared for your presentation and confident about the work you have done. It comes to your turn to speak and you give what you think, is a clear, informative presentation, (even making a few successful jokes). But, mid-speech, you hear sniggering at the back of the class room, and this spreads quickly in proximity and decibels. Soon the whole class is roaring with laughter. You become disheartened by the time they calm down and find your self whispering the rest of your presentation, forgetting the point of what you are saying.
You receive your grade and don't do badly, but are convinced you did an awful job and embarassed youself, after all, the whole class were laughing at you...... weren't they?
Well, the truth is, they weren't laughing at you at all, they were passing a joke around about the teacher. But you associate the laughing majority, with you, the presentation giving minority, and assume they must be laughing at you.
This scenario shows that by classical conditioning we can create a fear, an association, that could potentially haunt us and cause anxiety for a long time, causing us to avoid certain situations.
We are ALL self conscious, which is why a lot of us usually perceive any kind of negative energy around us, as directed at us, and of course we think it is deserved.
There may be many reasons why we develop fears, but in any situation like the example above, there is mainly one root cause...
Low self esteem.
