How do I stop caring what other people think? (How to Stop Letting Every Criticism Stick)
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 201
"How do I stop caring what people think?" Is the sneaky little title of this podcast. But I kind of lured you in with a false pretext. You don't. The goal of not caring about what anyone thinks is a trap. It's something that's hardwired into us. We're meant to care about what other people think. We're social beasts.
Being cared about by our community and by the people around us is literally a survival mechanism that has worked for us for most of human history. Our aim is not indifference, it's actually discernment.
The problem isn't that you care what other people think, it's often that we've given a whole load of different voices equal weights in our brain.
Maybe you've got some difficult aunt who always comments on your body whenever you go around for lunch, or maybe you're not always sure about the tone of one of your closest friends when they text you. Or maybe your boss always emails in quite an abrupt tone, but then they're really friendly face-to-face, and you're not quite sure how to read that.
Your brain puts all of these things together and gives them equal weight, even when you think that they don't.
You might think that you hold a lot more weight on what your friend thinks of you, but when your aunt says that thing about the size of your thighs once more, or tells you that you've just put on a little bit of weight, or maybe now is about time that you should start using night cream, we absorb these things and take them on even when morally or ethically we don't want to hold them on the same level.
We know that they shouldn't, and then we start berating ourselves for the fact that we are holding this kind of criticism as a value judgment of ourselves because it doesn't align with who we want to be and how we want to be treating another person.
And so what we're actually doing is adding into that criticism by criticising ourselves.
Most of what we worry about other people thinking about us, actually they don't. Most people are focusing on themselves.
The spotlight effect is real. Our brain casts us as the main character. We always think that we are the star of our own show, but most people are the star of their own shows, because everyone's living in their own heads and viewing outwards.
And even when people do offer you criticism, whether it is unsolicited or unwelcome, or whether it is feedback that you have asked for, our brain can still process anything that might take us slightly closer to what it reads or perceives as rejection as something that's dangerous.
So of course it's gonna set off a whole load of things that makes your body want to protect yourself.
But the reality is the opinion that is doing the most damage is rarely coming from outside. If someone said something to you that you didn't believe, it wouldn't hold any weight at all.
The things that really bruise us and the things that we hang onto are things that we worry about for ourselves.
We've got this internalised Photoshopped composition that is made up of every single criticism that we've ever heard about ourselves, or every way that we've heard that someone like us may be rejected.
And that composite critic lives rent-free in our heads. And it calls itself your own judgment. When actually it's just a whole load of layers of things that have been piled on us as long as we've been able to process that information.
Rather than asking what they'll think of me, Or if I did something wrong, or was that warranted? Next time you get some kind of unsolicited advice, ask yourself, " Am I afraid of what I'm making it mean about myself if they disapprove of me?"
Because if you're worried about what they think, you can't control that You have complete control over what you make it mean about you. Just takes some practice.
So rather than aiming to try and stop caring what other people think, I invite you to just slightly redirect that question and think, " How can I care more about what I think, and how can I make that care a lot more kind?"
Nice little short succinct one for you this week. I hope it's useful, and I'll speak to you next week.
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