Overcoming street anxiety: Helpful tips

Street anxiety is a fairly broad term, but the street generally begins at your front door so it is a fear that can keep you in your home. Therefore, overcoming street anxiety can be important to living a normal and enjoyable life. In this blog, I will elaborate on the fear and give you tips on what you can already do yourself to overcome this fear and what treatments are available to overcome street fear.

What is street anxiety?

Fear of the street is also known as agoraphobia. This is a type of anxiety where you feel it simply isn’t safe outside your home. You may be afraid of all sorts of things on the street—from car accidents to violent robberies. It’s safe inside your home, but outside your home—on the street—it’s unsafe, and that’s when you may suffer from street anxiety.

As a result, you may experience panic attacks outdoors due to the potentially scary things that could happen to you there.

Researchers are still debating whether it is a panic disorder, or whether agoraphobia deserves its own classification[1].

If you suffer from agoraphobia, you avoid going out in public to escape the anxiety[2]. But this means you miss out on enjoyable activities such as shopping and vacations.

In the beginning of this anxiety, you may suffer a lot of panic attacks while in a public place. This is why you may develop the habit of not going out at all then.

You may also suffer from more common anxiety symptoms while on the streets, such as dizziness, trembling and sweating. This can look like a panic attack, but is not quite it. With a panic attack, for example, you often think you're going to die. As long as that is not yet the case, you just have super much anxiety, which, by the way, is not fun to feel either.

Another way people deal with street anxiety is to always have someone with them when they go out. So then you always need someone when you go to the store.

If nothing else, of course you can go to the store, but do so while feeling incredibly stressed. Then you go through street anxiety, so to speak.

You can feel incredibly depressed and anxious if you suffer from street anxiety.

Women suffer from street anxiety more often than men. Most people who suffer from street anxiety develop it before the age of ³⁵.

Social anxiety is often something that can develop alongside other issues, such as substance abuse, other phobias, somatic symptoms, and depression.

In addition, you may be more likely to develop street anxiety if someone in your family, such as a parent, also suffers from it.

If as a daughter you had very protective authoritarian parents who gave very little warmth, the chances of developing street anxiety are also higher.

The death of a parent at a young age also increases the risk of agoraphobia.

It is important to do something about street anxiety, because this fear is one of the most tenacious fears that can help people. You walk around with it for as long as 10 years, and the chances of the fear going away on its own are slim.

Street anxiety is often treated with cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants.

Tips for overcoming street anxiety

But if you, like many others, prefer not to rely on pills, you may want to learn a few other techniques first to better deal with this anxiety.

Placebo

Research shows that a placebo pill, if you think you're getting antidepressants, for example, but you don't, also works very effectively to go out and do your thing with much less anxiety.

There are studies that indicate a placebo pill can work even if you know you have a placebo. This is something you can discuss with your doctor to then get a placebo[3].

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a way to stay in the here and now with your thoughts. After all, anxiety is usually a thought about the future. A thought of what might happen in half a minute or so.

Practicing to stay in the now with your attention can help you be more relaxed on the streets.

Research shows that people who practice mindfulness by applying mindfulness meditation daily, for example, suffer less from their anxiety[4].

Acceptance

Chances are you think your street fear is just silly, but yes it does bother you. So in addition to the fear, you may also suffer from your own judgments about it which may only make the fear worse.

A study of the results of compassion and acceptance therapy for people with street anxiety found that it helped greatly in reducing anxiety compared with people on the waiting list who had not yet had this therapy[5].

Indicating to yourself that it is ok to feel anxiety can already make you feel less excited when you walk out the door.

Acceptance alone can do a lot for you.

Confront the Street

If you have practiced mindfulness and acceptance a bit, it can be helpful to confront the street again. This is also ultimately an important step in many therapies of anxiety, to confront the fear.

Still find it exciting? Then perhaps you can share your location with a friend and say you're going out for a while. Then you still have the feeling that someone is watching or at least can see when your cell phone stops moving outside your house and can then call the emergency services in case something did happen.

In a study in which people with street anxiety had to treat themselves by going out into the streets, it was found that after six months, this had reduced anxiety considerably[6].

Treatments for street anxiety

In general, agoraphobia is treated with medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps you become aware of and change your thoughts.

The cool thing is that you can get cognitive behavioral training combined with hypnosis. And even hypnotherapy itself can be used to overcome street anxiety[7]. In a study on the effectiveness of hypnotherapy to overcome street anxiety, hypnosis was used with a treatment protocol and people had to get a session every week for 10 weeks following this protocol. Because in science, everyone has to get exactly the same suggestions. In this way, fears were already reduced by at least 50%.

If you then consider that at the HIN we encourage people to offer individual treatment tailored to each client, you can imagine that the effectiveness becomes even greater than working only with general suggestions that should work for everyone.

In doing so, the practice also shows that hypnotherapy often helps people in as little as 3 sessions.

Finding the cause of anxiety

Street anxiety can therefore develop early in your adult life. The risk factors are that you are a woman and were raised strict, protected but cold. So it could be that you experienced something in your childhood that suddenly in your adult life, when you have to go out on your own for the first time, you suffer from street anxiety.

With hypnotherapy, you can use regression. Regression takes you back to the very first moment when you felt it was better to go out with other people—and certainly not alone—rather than walking down the street by yourself.

Generally, this is an event from your childhood, because that is the time in your life when you determine how life works and how you can do best then.

Since you don't usually review these kinds of "rules," now is a good time to do so with your adult knowledge. The hypnotherapist will help you with this. For example, who can help you empathize with people who were there at the time to see why they did as they did.

Or you can have a mindful conversation with your younger self about street safety and that it's all ok now.

These types of techniques can do something very quickly to release the belief that it's best not to go out on the streets alone.

Then you can fill that void with new helping beliefs. For example, by repeating hypnotic suggestions, such as:

"I am calm."

"People are mostly concerned with themselves," says Dr. K. K., "but they're also concerned with themselves.

"I can go anywhere."

"I am an extra in the lives of others."

"Others are extras in my life."

These are just examples. Depending on your street fears, you may receive other suggestions to overcome them.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how it works? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

Or sign up for one of our courses to help yourself and others. The course is taught online, so you can take it safely from the comfort of your own home 😉.

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