Have you ever had a man ask you, why do you care so much what so-and-so thinks?

And it seemed impossible to even answer it, really, because how could you not care what other people think about you?

Well, the surprising truth is that while part of caring what other people think of you is baked into humans as a species,

another big part of it is actually created by our gender-based socialization.

So when a man in your life seems confused about why you care so much what other people think of you,

it's not because he's just naturally more confident or secure. It's because he's been socialized to be

that way, whereas your brain has been trained to fixate on other people's opinions. In this week's

episode, we're going to learn why you care so much about what everyone else thinks of you,

and why bringing more awareness to that is the first crucial step to being able to change

being so fixated on it. So let's get into it. Welcome to unfuck your brain. I'm your host, Cara Lowentile, master-certified coach, and founder

of the School of New Feminist Thought. I'm here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your

confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you're truly excited to live. Let's go.

All right, my friends, we're going to be going to be why we care so much about what other people think of us. So let's start with

some evolutionary biology because there is some baseline human species carrying what other people

think for most of us. Not all of us, to be sure, can vary for a lot of

reasons, even among people socializes women, depending on things like family history, childhood

experiences, even your neurotype can impact how much you think about other people's opinions of you.

But in general, as a species, humans are predisposed to care what other people think of us,

because we evolved in small tribes of hunter-gatherers where your community was essential to your survival.

So your status within that tribe was a big deal, and the regard in which your fellow tribesfolk held you mattered to your physical survival.

And we know that the brain gets really wired into anything that is relevant to its survival or that it even perceives as

relevant, even if it's not. So you can imagine in terms of evolutionary pressure that people who

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