#58: How to Stop Caring What People Think - Tips for Confidence & Anxiety Relief

How do I stop caring what others think? 

This is a question I get asked regularly. 

This last episode of Season 2 answers these questions and more! I share 10 practical tips for overcoming the fear of being judged by others. These strategies include understanding why we care so much, recognising the spotlight effect, stopping mind reading, and reframing rejection. I also discuss how to manage anxiety and live a more confident, fulfilling life. Watch to learn how to reclaim your self-belief and start prioritising your own happiness over the opinions of others.

Highlights include:
02:09 The Anxiety Cycle of People-Pleasing
08:04 Accepting Judgement and Identifying Important Opinions
09:23 Reframing Rejection and Future Self
12:16 Taking Action Despite Fear

You can also watch the episode on YouTube. 

Plus, stay tuned for some sneak peaks into what's to come in Season 3.

If overthinking and worry is draining you, start with my 30-minute mini course How to Stop Spiralling. It gives you the exact tools I teach clients to interrupt thought loops in real time.

 If you want something for the moments you’re already anxious or overwhelmed, the Spiral Rescue Kit has guided audios and a printable SOS plan you can use anywhere.

 → Get both HERE (get £5 off when you buy both or gift it to a friend!)

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The Hello Therapy podcast and the information provided by Dr Liz White (DClinPsy, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CSci, HCPC reg.), is solely intended for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute personalised advice. Please reach out to your GP or a mental health professional if you need support. 

Transcript

Introduction to Not Caring What Others Think

Speaker 1 0:09

Welcome to Hello Therapy, a podcast to help you take charge of your mental health through evidence-based psychological tips and tools straight from the therapy room so that you can live life better. I'm going to bet that most of you listening will have had a moment in your life where you felt someone was judging you or thinking something negative about you. Well, this week I'm using a couple of examples from my own life to demonstrate how to not care so much about what other people think. The episode today was, in fact, a YouTube video I published a couple of weeks ago the link is in the show notes if you want to watch, and also to let you know that this is the last episode of season two. We are in GCSE exam territory in my house, so I am going on a break over April and season three will begin on the 6th of May. I have so many amazing guests and episodes lined up which I'm really excited about, but we'll still be posting Hello Therapy related stuff over on Substack, so go and sign up there. It is free. Thank you so much for listening over the last season. Now let's dive into the episode.

The Anxiety Cycle of People-Pleasing

Understanding Our Social Evolution

Speaker 1 1:30

Have you ever stopped yourself doing something because you were afraid of what people might think. Maybe you didn't wear that outfit or post that video or speak up in a meeting, or maybe it's one step on from that and it actually causes you anxiety. Perhaps you lie awake at night replaying an awkward moment from two years ago, or perhaps your heart races and you feel anxious every time you have to send a text to a friend, all because you fear being perceived negatively by others. The good news is is that you can train yourself to care less about what other people think and feel more confident in yourself. So first let's set the scene and have a think about what happens when you let fear of judgment from other people rule your life. So, firstly, you tend to overthink everything, replaying conversations, decoding your text messages, second guessing yourself, doubting yourself, and this can gradually erode your confidence, your self-belief and your ability to trust yourself. You tend to miss out on opportunities because you let thoughts like what if I embarrass myself? Or what if they think badly of me? You let those thoughts get in the way and you end up kind of losing yourself, living for other people's approval instead of your own happiness. And the other thing that can happen is that you get caught in a vicious anxiety cycle. You worry about what other people think, so you change your behaviour to avoid judgment from others. This then reinforces the belief that you need other people's approval, but it also constricts your life. But then worry always comes back and the anxiety just grows more. So here are my top 10 tips to get you out of that vicious anxiety cycle and start caring less about what people think.

Speaker 1 3:27

So, firstly, you need to understand that our ancestors, so millions of years ago, when we were early humans, we existed in groups and we relied heavily on social approval. Rejection from the group would mean death. We could not survive on our own, so we evolved to be really aware of our standing in our group and we developed the ability to compare ourselves to others. Nowadays, instead of survival, we fear embarrassment, criticism, rejection and being excluded. So understand this. You did not design your brain this way. It is how we have evolved, and understanding this can help us open the door to a little bit of self-compassion. It's natural that I care about what other people think of me, but I don't need to let that dictate what I do and the decisions that I make in my life, and that is the key.

The Spotlight Effect Explained

Speaker 1 4:31

My second tip is that people think more about themselves than you. I remember once I was walking along the road and suddenly a bird pooed on my shoulder. Now, I didn't have any tissues you know you never do, do you? When these things happen and I frantically looked in my bag, found like an old receipt was trying to wipe it off my shoulder. But the whole rest of the day I was convinced that everyone was looking at me and noticing this stain. Have you ever had something like that happen to you? Let me know in the comments. Now, this is what social psychologists call the spotlight effect, and this is essentially a cognitive bias where we overestimate how much another person is noticing us or noticing what we do. Now, studies show that people with social anxiety tend to have higher levels of the spotlight effect than people who don't have social anxiety. So my tip here is this you may feel like everyone around you is noticing things about you the bright pink top that you're wearing or the bird poo stain on your shoulder but really they're just too busy worrying about themselves Because, guess what, they are also experiencing the spotlight effect.

Mind Reading and Time Perspective

Speaker 1 5:49

My third tip is to stop mind reading. So one of the most common unhelpful thinking styles that we do is something called mind reading, which is when you act as if you know what someone else is thinking. So let's say you're on a train and you look up and somebody is looking at you. Your brain goes they're looking at me funny, they must not like me. But you can't actually know what someone is thinking. You can't read someone's mind. You assume that someone is thinking negatively about you, but you have no proof. Instead, try and recognise when you are mind reading and name it as that, so you may say something like this to yourself ah, there's my brain again thinking that it can read minds.

Speaker 1 6:39

My fourth tip is this will it matter in a year? Imagine you have a time machine and you can move forward in time to this time next year. Think about it. Most things that we stress about right now we're not even going to remember in six months, one month, a year's time. So the next time you notice the anxiety around being perceived in a negative way or people judging, you ask yourself this is future me going to care in one year's time? The answer is most likely going to be no. So then ask yourself well, why am I wasting my time worrying about it now? My next tip is to accept that judgment is unavoidable. So let's get real for a minute.

Accepting Judgment and Identifying Important Opinions

Speaker 1 7:31

At the beginning of this video, I told you that our brains have evolved to allow us to compare ourselves to others and to ensure our survival by being part of a group, to be accepted by others, generally speaking. But this also means that we naturally judge other people too, and this can be positive or negative. And judging someone means that we're forming an opinion or an evaluation of someone based on certain things like characteristics they have, what they're wearing, what they look like, their actions, their words, etc. So I think accepting that as human beings, we naturally judge others is a really key point, and it can be helpful to say to yourself not everyone in this world is going to like me or like what I do, and that's okay. I'm not on this planet to live a life someone else wants me to live. So think about it this way Other people's judgments and opinions are like bad Wi-Fi signals they come and they go, but you don't have to waste your energy trying to connect to the Wi-Fi. You can just step back and use your phone data, ie do your own thing.

Speaker 1 8:50

My next point is identify whose opinions really matter. So, following on from my last point. Not everyone's opinion of you deserves space in your mind and it's really important to focus on the people that do support you in your life. Everyone else strangers in the street or people that you don't know that well you don't have to care about what they think. So focus on those people whose opinions actually matter to you.

Reframing Rejection and Future Self

Speaker 1 9:20

Tip number seven is reframe rejection. So there was one time when I was walking in London and I walked up onto the pavement and tripped and I fell over. I really hurt myself, I really scraped my knees. It was in the middle of summer and someone actually, because I fell down so hard, someone actually had to help me up and I noticed that as I was getting up, there was a couple of people walking past and they were smiling and basically laughing at me and I did get a bit caught up in that embarrassment feeling. It lasted a while.

Speaker 1 9:58

My here is is that there are times in your life where you do experience rejection or being excluded, or being criticized or being laughed at in my case, and it hurts. It's not very nice, is it? But try to see that as an indication of well, maybe they're just not my people. They're not the sort of people that I want in my life. Now, my example was complete strangers, so I could just you know sort of dismiss that in my mind. Well, they're just people that I don't know and I don't need to talk to them or see them ever again. But it is a lot harder if it's people closer to you that you feel are criticizing or judging you, and in that case it might be an idea to communicate actually that hurt me when you said that or that wasn't appropriate, that you said that to me or that you treated me that way, and to see how they respond. And then you can use that information to decide for yourself how you want that person in your life, if at all. Decide for yourself how you want that person in your life, if at all.

Speaker 1 11:01

So number eight is imagine yourself as an 80 year old. So I want you to fast forward for a minute, so get back in that time machine and fast forward to when you are going to be 80. And I want you to very quickly imagine that it is your 80th birthday party. All of your friends and your family and the people that you worked with, they're all gathered in a room and they're there to celebrate you and one of the guests gets up and does a speech about you, and I want you to think about what this person might be saying about you, about your life, about how you've influenced them and about the difference that you've made to the people in your life. Now come back to the here and now, and I want you to really think about what that person would have said about you if you had lived a life where what other people think of you had held you back where it had stopped you really living a full life that you wanted, doing things that you truly wanted to do.

Taking Action Despite Fear

Speaker 1 12:07

And I use that exercise quite a lot in my sessions with clients because it's a really helpful way of thinking about this idea of values, thinking about what's actually important to me. What kind of life do I want to live? And here is my tip. So, whenever you are making a decision about something what to wear, what job to go for, whether to speak up in a meeting ask yourself what would my 80 year old self want me to do right now? How can I live boldly in this moment, aligned with what's truly important to me?

Speaker 1 12:47

Number nine is do it anyway. So you may be thinking well, that all sounds great, but actually, when I try and do things that I want to do, I feel really anxious. I get really worried about what people might think. Well, here's my tip Do it anyway. You can do the things that you want to do and feel anxious and fear judgment. Those things can coexist at the same time. It's not easy, but it can be done, and what I would recommend here is that if you are someone who does stop themselves from doing things because you fear judgment from others, then start really small. Try doing one thing today that makes you feel a little bit nervous, where you feel it might invite that negative judgment, like posting that video, for example, or wearing that bright green outfit that you love. See what happens when you do those things, treat it like an experiment and, most importantly, congratulate yourself for doing it.

Wrap-Up and Season Break Announcement

Speaker 1 13:53

Now my last tip is about managing anxiety. If you do experience anxiety symptoms when you are doing things that go outside your comfort zone, then I've got a couple of videos that will help with this. So one of them takes you through a really simple five senses exercise. So it just helps you refocus on your five senses rather than the physical symptoms that you're experiencing, and the other one talks about self-compassion and how to use self-compassion to reduce anxiety. But you can do all the sort of basic stuff for anxiety management, so slowing your breathing down, using your five senses and generally giving yourself encouragement.

Speaker 1 14:37

So some good things to say to yourself when you're doing some things that feel a bit scary is I am good as I am. Others opinions don't define me. I am living according to how I want to live. This is how I train my brain to care less about what other people think. So you're giving yourself just some gentle reminders of why you're doing that thing. So that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope that's given you some ideas on how you can start not caring so much about what other people think. I hope you all have a great April and I'll see you on the other side on the 6th of May.

Speaker 1 15:15

Thank you for listening to this episode of Hello Therapy. If you found it helpful, don't forget to subscribe, follow and review. You can get more wellbeing and mental health tips by joining our email list and visiting the resources section of our website at harleyclinicalcouk. The Hello Therapy podcast and the information provided by me, dr Liz White, is solely intended for information and educational purposes and does not constitute personalized advice. Please do reach out to your GP or a mental health professional if you need support. Until next time, take care of yourself.