Looking into The Issue of Shyness: Studying Its Causes and Effects

Shyness is a commonly used but often misunderstood term. What is the definition of shyness? Shyness is a feeling of apprehension, awkwardness or discomfort in social life situations or personal situations that will keep us from pursuing and achieving our goals in life. Based on the American Psychological report, the number of individual reporting of shyness issue had been increasing gradually every year. Shy individuals are usually introverts and normally young kids, aged between 5 years old to 12 years old. Shyness can be a chronic issue on someone’s daily routine as it will results in many negative consequences. The extent which shyness can create many problems on an individual varies widely. These are a few of common negative effects of shyness on someone’s life, which is making friends, job opportunities and health problems.

A shy individual may have disability to make new friends in their social life as they have low self-esteem. An individual with low self-esteem will have a powerful impact on their own behavior, they are fearful of exploring their own real life. A shy individual will keep themselves distance from strangers, colleagues, classmates and even their relatives, therefore this will result the individuals facing impacts on their social life in a way that they are not able to make new companions. Besides that, they will also have to face the lack of courage to speak. As an example, the individual will fear to start a conversation with someone else even is to greet them. One may wonder how will one ever make friends if he or she never talks to anyone at all? Therefore, shyness will lead to an individual to find difficulty in finding new friends. Also, a shy individual can’t express their true feelings and thoughts in their social life. Hence, this phenomenon will affect the individuals to have difficulty to blend in the society. This will cause the individual to feel emotionally left out due to the lack of company surrounding them. They will also be unable to share their daily problems or troubles with anyone else. In addition to that, a shy individual will find difficulty asserting themselves in school or their workplace. This will lead them to be unable to communicate with their colleagues or schoolmates and they will have hard times when they are required to go to school or work.

On the other hand, the shy individuals will face concern while being employed and also when they are applying for a job. The individuals will have to face with verbal skills issues due to fear and lack of courage among themselves. As an example, the individuals will face trouble expressing in words during their presentation in work to their fellow colleagues and even worse, their employer due to fear factor. This lack of confidence will lead them to be unable to convey their thoughts and ideas to their employer. Meanwhile, they will also find themselves lack of self-confidence to speak out during job interviews and it may result them to get rejected from the following companies. This will lead them to be depressed and they will felt useless and helpless in life, shyness really does have huge costs to individuals after all. Furthermore, the shy individuals will have difficulty interacting and cooperating well with groups of people in work. Therefore, this will cause them to have low work quality in their workplace. They are usually afraid of working on new tasks given during work and they will try to avoid new endeavors because they are fear of making mistakes or failures. This will make them less daring to try out new ideas and take more risks that may prove to be beneficial for the company they work for or the business that they run. The shy individuals will also worry about judgments from their colleagues and employer.

In fact, the shy individuals will also have to face fairly serious health issues in their lifestyle. People who are shy are much more vulnerable to develop other types of psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety. They will manifest depression because they will need to face stressful anti-social life. This issue is very chronic as many suicidal cases and harming one’s self had happened nowadays due to depression issues. The individuals will thought that the deep despair and hopelessness that goes along with depression can make suicide feel like the only way to escape the pain from them. Additionally, individuals who are shy will also encounter concentration problems; they will find out that they have issues on focusing, making decision and remembering things. A shy individual will also have anxiety issue because they find it tough to step out from their comfort zone. As a matter of fact, they will lose the interest on doing the daily routines like, working, studying, eating, reading, playing and many more. They will also face sleeping problems like waking in the early hours and also oversleeping. Moreover, there might be a possibility that shy individuals may suffer from a social phobia. They will get very anxious when they are with people because they are afraid of criticism and judgmental from the people. Also, they are afraid that they may do something embarrassing in front of them.

To sum up, there are many impacts of shyness on someone’s life. The level of shyness which will create problems on someone’s life varies widely, from social awkwardness to even worse, social phobia. The negative effects of shyness on someone’s life can be effectively overcome and reduced by many types of treatments. An individual with shyness symptom can overcome their shyness by looking for a right, skillful counselor to talk to. They will feel more comfortable and they will soon or later get out from their comfort zone after having a heart to heart talk with the counselor. Shyness really does affect the self-esteem of an individual. Lastly and most importantly, shyness is a very common symptom which it is a painful state that can be treated and overcome eventually.