The Danger of Misplaced Attention: When Their Attention Becomes Your Self-Worth

Why do we crave attention or validation from certain people — especially the ones who seem to dismiss us?

This week on The Weekly Recharge, I’m unpacking my own unexpected need for someone’s approval and what it taught me about self-worth, people-pleasing, rejection, and the nervous system.

We’ll look at how learning to associate attention with love can leave you overthinking interactions, analyzing someone’s every move, and trying to earn their validation — and why the answer might not be getting more of their attention, but taking yours back.

A real-life conversation about seeking validation, nervous system regulation, burnout, self-worth, and breaking old patterns that quietly shape how we see ourselves.

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Transcript

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So I went away on a business trip this weekend, and something weird was bothering me. There was this one person whose attention I just kept wanting, which, if you know me, is actually pretty unusual. I am generally not someone who really gives a shit whether the person everyone idolizes knows who I am. I don't particularly care about getting close to the important person in the room. But this was different. This person was the host of the event, and throughout the weekend I kept feeling dismissed by him. Not necessarily blatantly, just enough. An interaction here, an answer there, moments where I'd walk away thinking, what the fuck just happened? And apparently I wasn't imagining it. Because someone else had actually come up to me after one interaction and said something along the lines of, I'm sorry for eavesdropping, but I feel like that wasn't the answer you deserved. That seemed very dismissive. Which was strangely validating because at least I knew I wasn't making the whole thing up in my head. But that still didn't explain why I cared so much, because here's what kept bothering me. Someone being dismissive towards me isn't particularly interesting. What was interesting was why I kept putting my attention on it. Why was I noticing where he was? Why was I noticing how he interacted with other people? Why did I care whether he acknowledged me? And why was I giving this person so much fucking real estate in my brain? If you're new here, this is the weekly recharge, where every week I take something that actually happened in my life, look at what it brought up in my nervous system, how I worked through it, and what you might be able to take from it too. Because nervous system regulation is great in theory, but I think it's a hell of a lot more useful when we can talk about what this shit actually looks like in real life. So subscribe if you want to keep doing life and figuring this shit out together. Anyway, back to the person that's living rent-free in my brain. So then I heard this. And suddenly it clicked. So the person that said that went on to correlate that attention equals caring. So if you resonated with that sentence, if you leave something under the light too long, it burns. More than likely, you grew up believing that attention was one of the ways you learned to show people that you cared. So if someone close to me needed something, I would notice. If someone was upset, I should notice. If someone was in distress, I should help them calm down. If someone needed me and my attention wasn't on them, somewhere along the way that became you don't care enough. So I learned to associate attention with love and care. So if I care about you, I pay attention to you. Which sounds harmless enough until you flip it around, because then, if you care about me, you'll pay attention to me. But when I first internalized this, I actually struggled with that idea because my immediate reaction was, well, I'm not an attention whore. I'm not trying to be the loudest person in the room. I don't need everyone looking at me. I don't usually care about being acknowledged by the person everyone thinks is important. But that's not the kind of attention that I'm talking about in this moment. There's a difference between wanting to be the center of attention and experiencing attention as a form of care. Attention can be quiet. It's someone listening when you're talking instead of waiting for their turn or continuing to look at their phone. It's remembering something that you told them. It's noticing when your energy changes. It's actually engaging with what you said instead of brushing past it. You can show someone that you deeply care through your attention without making them or yourself the loudest person in the room. And there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting that reciprocated. But if somewhere along the way you learned that attention means love, someone's attention isn't just attention anymore. It's evidence. Evidence that they care. Evidence that you're important, evidence that you matter. And their lack of attention can start feeling like evidence too. And then the starvation starts. So what happens when you're giving your attention and they're not giving theirs? It can start to feel weirdly humiliating. Almost like you're standing there saying, Hey, I'm showing that you matter to me. Could you possibly show me that I matter to you? And when they don't, you don't just feel ignored, you feel rejected. But taking your attention away from them doesn't necessarily feel like a neutral decision either, because if your brain learned attention equals love, then removing your attention couldn't subconsciously feel like I don't love you anymore. Or I'm being mean, or I'm abandoning you. So now you're trapped. You don't want to keep chasing their attention, but taking yours away feels wrong too. And that's where I think this almost manic starvation can start. You start trying to earn something that was never really supposed to be earned in the first place, their interest, their approval, their acknowledgement, their love. And the more starved that you feel for it, the less you start acting like yourself. Because now you're monitoring everything. Because you're not just studying them. You're grading yourself. Enter all my overthinkers and ruminators. Y'all can definitely relate. What did they mean by that? Why did they answer me like that? They were a warmer person to that person. Did I say something wrong? Do they not like me? Should I have approached it differently? Why didn't they acknowledge me? And then suddenly you're studying every facial expression, interaction, tone, change, mannerism. But here's what really fucked me up this weekend. When their attention finally is on you, you then assume they're looking at you the same way you've been looking at yourself. Grading, assessing, evaluating, deciding how worthy you are of their attention. Except, they're probably not doing any of that. You are. You've been standing under your own microscope the entire time. I'm honestly, I'm talking to myself in this. And now you're assuming, I'm assuming everyone else is holding that same magnifying glass. No wonder why it feels so fucking exhausting. And this is where their lack of attention stops becoming information about them and starts becoming evidence about you. Instead of thinking, huh, this person isn't giving me the kind of attention or care that I give them. We start thinking, what do I need to do differently to make them want to? And that's an entirely different game. So you have to take the light off them. But I'll tell you, my first instinct when I started to understand all of this in the short period of this weekend was almost to turn the spotlight onto this person, to really look at them and to dismantle them, take them off whatever pedestal I had unknowingly put them on. Notice their dismissiveness, notice the behavior, trust the instincts I had about them in the first place. And I do think there's something important there. Sometimes we spend so much time wondering why someone isn't responding to us differently that we forget to ask a much simpler question. Do I even like the way this person treats me? But I don't think the answer is to spend more time analyzing them. Because then I'm just giving them my attention, just doing it differently. Maybe the answer is much simpler. I noticed how you treated me, I trust what I noticed, I don't need to keep investigating it. Because someone's inability or unwillingness to give me their attention doesn't require me to work harder for it. And it certainly doesn't require me to burn myself trying to earn it. I can just take the light off them. And when I do, something else becomes visible. The people who are actually paying attention to me. The person that noticed I had been dismissed without me even saying anything. The people checking in. The people listening to me and giving me their time. The people loving me in ways that I wasn't even noticing because I was staring so fucking hard at the one person who wasn't. Maybe that's the real danger of leaving something under the light for too long. It's not only that you burn the thing that you're staring at, you leave everything else in the dark. So this week's practice is to ask yourself, where is your light going? Notice where your light or your attention is shining. Who are you studying? Whose response are you waiting for? Whose approval are you trying to earn? And when someone's attention isn't there, are you allowing that to be information about the relationship or are you turning it into a verdict about yourself? Because you don't have to convince yourself that they secretly care. You don't have to prove that they're an asshole either. You can just trust what you've experienced, take your attention back, and see what is sitting in the light with you the entire time. And if you missed last week's episode on the Hustle Rebels, I brought back a newsletter that I never actually recorded and made it to the air. Somehow it turned into one of those conversations that people still reference months later. It starts with a ridiculous debate about showering on shift and not washing your legs, but it quickly spirals into a much bigger conversation in question. How much of your life is actually built on rules that you never chose? I was traveling when this was actually released and in the middle of questioning a lot of my own proven strategies and playbooks, and realizing that I was still following someone else's blueprint amongst it. So if you're in the middle of questioning, why am I doing this shit, this episode will probably hit. And if you're new here or feeling nostalgic, you can uh check out some previous newsletters by following the link below. Until next time, be careful what you keep under the light. Your attention is valuable. Spend it where it's actually deserved. And I'll see you guys next week.