You will need this post-stroke since you will lose most of your friends. Your doctor, psychologist and psychiatrist should have multiple protocols to boost your social self esteem. Or they could take the correct way out of this and get you 100% recovered in the first month so you will immediately go back to your previous life. I bet they do neither and you will have to figure this out on your own. Or they tell you to join a stroke support group which is their way of saying they are incompetent in getting you recovered.
A Simple Way To Boost Social Confidence
An easy self-affirmation exercise helps reduce social insecurities for at least two months.
Sometimes in life we get exactly what we expect.
Nowhere is this more true than in social relations.
When we meet someone new, if we expect to like them—for whatever reason—then they tend to like us.
If we experience apprehension or nascent dislike then things can quickly go wrong.
Psychologists have called it the ‘acceptance prophecy’ and there’s more about it in this previous article:
The Acceptance Prophecy: How You Control Who Likes You.
The problem is that for insecure or socially nervous individuals it becomes the rejection prophecy.
A feeling of apprehension about meeting new people is outwardly expressed as nervous behaviour and this leads to rejection.
But a new paper published in
Psychological Science provides a
simple exercise that helps boost relational security and should help
turn the rejection prophecy back into the acceptance prophecy.
Self-affirmation
Stinson et al. (2011)
measured the relational security of 117 participants by asking them how
much they agreed with statements like: “My friends regard me as very
important in their lives” and “My partner loves and accepts me
unconditionally”.
Half of them were then asked to do a very simple self-affirmation task.
Participants looked down a list of 11 values including things like
spontaneity, creativity, friends and family, personal attractiveness and
so on.
They put them in order of importance and wrote a couple of paragraphs saying why their top-ranked item was so important.
The results showed that this simple task boosted the relational
security of insecure individuals in comparison with a control group.
Afterwards their behaviour was seen as less nervous and they reported feeling more secure.
And when they were followed up at four and eight weeks later, the benefits were still apparent.
It appears that even a task as simple as this is enough to boost the social confidence of people who feel insecure.
