Blushing has a purpose in communication, but excessive blushing can be a problem. Medical causes should be ruled out before addressing the physical reaction, fear, and embarrassment. Cognitive behavioral therapy and hypnosis are treatment options, while surgery is only for severe cases.
If you’re interested in learning how to stop blushing, it might be helpful to remember that blushing has an important purpose in some circumstances. When we blush, we make others aware of our feelings so they can adjust their behavior appropriately. Blushing helps communicate emotions that we may be too afraid to express verbally. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Man is the only animal that blushes or needs to.”
If you want to stop blushing, the first step is to make sure your condition has no verifiable medical cause. Flushing is often confused with flushing caused by side effects of prescription drugs, rosacea, menopause, or other ailments. Discussing your symptoms with your doctor can help you determine if there’s a physical reason for your blushing.
However, the difficulty in finding a way to stop blushing lies in the fact that there are three separate problems to deal with: the physical reaction to blushing, fear of situations that cause blushing, and embarrassment felt about other people’s reactions to the blushing. your blush. In essence, blushing is a vicious circle. Embarrassment and anxiety make you blush, but embarrassment and anxiety make you blush more. To stop blushing, you need to break this pattern.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you stop blushing by teaching you to adjust your expectations of social norms. According to researchers, people who blush excessively have unrealistic expectations of how they should behave in social situations. They fear that even a small mistake will be laughed at by others, so they become unnecessarily anxious and start blushing. In comparison, infants and toddlers who have yet to develop these feelings about social interactions don’t blush at all.
Hypnosis is another popular treatment option to stop blushing, although it may not work in every case. Essentially, the goal of hypnotherapy is to help you reprogram your unconscious mind to stop blushing. A good hypnotherapist can also help you learn to feel more confident, thereby reducing the embarrassment and anxiety that contribute to chronic blushing.
While you may have heard that surgery can help stop blushing, it should be noted that this is only a viable treatment option in severe cases. Endoscopic transthoracic sympathectomy, the surgical procedure used to stop blushing, requires portions of the sympathetic nerve trunk to be clamped, removed, severed, or burned. Side effects can include difficulty regulating heart rate and body temperature, as well as excessive sweating. For this reason, surgery is typically used only in patients experiencing idiopathic craniofacial erythema, blushing with little or no provocation that is unresponsive to all other treatment options.
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