If you haven't heard about this ?latest and greatest? social anxiety cureyet, let me regurgitate the news in brief. It all started whenscientists from Zurich University found that people who inhaled thehormone called oxytocin continued to trust strangers even after theywere cheated on. That discovery, they say, could lead to future treatments for social phobia. It didn't take long for a long-sales-letter type websites to appear selling the new wonder drug:
oxytocin.
It has been called ?the love hormone?, ?the cuddle chemical?, "the mind reading hormone" and ?the trust drug?.
And for a reason.
It?sthe chemical that makes you feel what you're feeling during an orgasm.It is also produced during labor and it's responsible for the uniqueand unbreakable mother-child bond. When your brain is releasingoxytocin, you feel loved, relaxed and more open to trust ? not onlyfriends and lovers, but also strangers.
The Zurich University?sstudy has found that oxytocin has a very specific effect in socialsituations: it seems to diminish fears. Lead researcher Dr ThomasBaumgartner thinks that a lack of oxytocin is at least one of the causes for the fear experienced by social phobics.
Brainscans show that oxytocin can lower activity in the amygdala - a regionof brain that is responsible for feelings of fear and apprehension ?and which is overactive in social phobics. So, yes ?it's true: a sniff of oxytocin could improve readiness to engage insocial interactions for people who suffer from social anxiety disorderby simply making them less fearful.
Then again, there are other things you can sniff to increase your confidence in social situations? Lots and lots of people who don't have social phobia consume alcohol for the same reason.
Theproblem is, such substances are indiscriminate in their effects:uncritical trust can be just as damaging as irrational avoidance.
