Have you ever had that experience where you are really stressed out about what someone else thinks about you?

Maybe it's your boss.

You're really worried about whether they think that you are ready for a promotion.

Maybe it's someone you're dating who's being kind of weird and inconsistent.

Maybe you're feeling left out among some friends or you're feeling judged by colleagues or you feel like your parents don't

approve of your life choices and it's hard for you to stop worrying about it. And someone says to you,

just don't worry about what other people think. Just let it go. How helpful is that on a scale of

one to fucking not at all? Not at all. It's not helpful because your brain evolved and

was socialized to really care about what other people think. So it's normal and natural for your

brain to fixate on it. That being said, it's not necessary. You don't actually have to live your

whole life, constantly

monitoring and being hypervigilant about what other people think about you. Because while a little

bit of this is evolutionary and probably a good idea, keeps all of us being more or less

sociable and civilized to each other, at least some of us. A lot of the fixation on what other

people think about you is actually created by socialization. It's something that society

specifically teaches women and people socializes women to worry about way more than people

who are male or socializes male. And that means that that part of it can be undone. And it is really

worth doing that work because when we are really fixated on other people's opinions of us,

the more we worry about that, the less grounded we feel. The less we actually know ourselves,

know what we want, know what we care about, the less we can make decisions well

because we don't even know what basis to make the decision on because we're not connected

to what we truly value, what we really care about, what we think is best, what outcomes we really

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