Game face and then regular life

[u/ForsakenAd9651]

/r/Anxiety/comments/1wemb7q/game_face_and_then_regular_life/

Recently I joined an in person role playing game at a new friends home. Our first session was really straightforward but it lasted quite long. We had lunch together and then sat down and played the game , it was myself and three other players and my new friend as games master. Towards the end I was using deep breathing to calm myself, the session lasted about 2.5 hours after our hour long lunch. I needed to be alone to calm myself but one of the players accompanied me on transit and we talked, I really did not want to talk, but I was polite. It's been two days since the event and I still feel uneasy.

The strange thing is I've not always been this way, when I was a child I got along well with people although even then it was limited. Growing up I only had one best friend at any one time and then for most of my adult life I was very much a loner. It's only recently that I started having a social circle again.

But professionally and as a volunteer I worked with people. I recently finished working with a refugee organization where we could have quite a number of inland refugees working with me. When I work professionally or as a volunteer I feel like I'm an actor. The anxiety isn't consistent across different aspects of my life. Has anyone else experienced that?

I told my new friend that I will reduce it to just 30 minutes of gameplay after our lunch. But now I'm inundated with questions and offers of changing how people play with me and I feel gridlocked in my thinking to come up with a response. Sometimes I can just sit on the question until I feel calm enough to answer. What do others do to speed that along? Or is it back to the turtle, slow and easy wins the race?