This has happened to me too. I'm not sure it was part of my anxiety but rather it was from low self confidence. I felt so bad about myself and thought everyone else felt the same way about me. I projected my own feelings about myself on everyone around me. Through lots of therapy and even more hard work I was able to turn my thinking around and have more self confidence. My attitude now is, if you don't find me intersting then you can find other friends. I have a great circle of friends now. We have lots in common and get along great.

So, it may be a combination of your self talk and the anxiety. They do seem to feed off one another - at least for me they do.

Take care

I completely understand where you are coming from and Lucky definitely hit the nail on the head as well. The social anxiety could be a little bit of just the anxiety but also the low self esteem. When I feeling good about myself self esteem wise I tend to feel less social anxiety but when I feel bad about myself I always feel more anxiety about new people. Although there are days where I feel just fine as far as self esteem goes but still have the social anxiety so it just all depends on the person.

Just remember that everyone has a little bit of self esteem issues here and there and everyone is somewhat nervous of meeting new people but if the new people are meant to be part of your life, it will happen. You don't need to force friendships and not everyone in life needs to like you.

Keep your head up and stay strong :)

I always had some esteem issues even while I was young but they improved quite a bit until I developed social anxiety in college. Since then, even when my esteem is good I will start getting anxious and concerned about my social relationships when a new person is added into the mix. Questioning everything regardless of how long I have known my friends. There is definitely esteem issues in there, but it seems it's the social anxiety that really sets things off.

Plus it will/does keep me from sleeping, put me into a panic and all I can do is think. Exhausting and so hard just to get get past one day.

Oh yes I know about thinking all night long. It's terrible. A few things helped me to 'shut my mind off' at night:

*Meditation - this took practice but all meditation is, is the ability to let thoughts go.

*I started writing down what was on my mind - then I could let it go. I wrote out lists and even stories of what I was thinking about

The hardest one for me to break, and it's not broken yet, is how I mull over what I could have said in a situation. I play it over and over in my mind...Ugh... When I figure out how to shut this thinking off I will jump for joy.

I can completely understand what you are going through with social anxiety. When I am in a big group setting with new people I do not feel interesting and I have this huge fear of saying something wrong so I barely talk. Afterwards I try to be positive about the experience because I think about how I put myself out there in an uncomfortable social setting when I could have avoided it and stayed home, but then all these negative thoughts cloud my head like I'm not good enough and things like that. It's still important to combat those negative thoughts with positive ones because I am sure that you are an interesting person and obviously you do have a group of friends which means you can make more friends!

It's tough because I am shy initially with people I don't know and I'm not from my area but moved here for work. I work in a group home with about 8 people so there isn't a lot of chances for interaction with others really and I am not a bar or club hopper.