The Fear Of Being Perceived: Why Your Brain Treats A Glance Like A Threat

all of us to some degree want to be seen, appreciated, loved, and validated.

it’s a primal part of our nature.

when we work on something, in the back of our mind there's always this thought of someone noticing this work, admiring it, loving it.

you want your ideas to matter to people.

you want to walk into a room and feel like people actually register that you exist and that you're someone who's important and needed.

but you want to know something fascinating.

as primal as this urge is, we as humans tend to be scared to fulfill it.

it really is so crazy when you see how many times this plays out.

human beings spend almost their whole life wanting recognition, but they also at the same time hide from it.

part of it comes from a level of self-awareness. the second you actually have to put yourself forward to get all of those things i said above, attention, love, admiration, something in you flinches.

because when you start to do that you come to the realization that people now watch you try.

and trying something publicly is terrifying.

it's terrifying in a way that trying something privately never is.

when you do something in public you risk the fear of being perceived.

you risk the fear of people seeing you fail.

i think the thing most people don’t realize is that they’re not scared of failing in itself but they‘re scared of being exposed when they fail.

other people seeing them fail is what makes them fear failure.

most people think that when they put out something into the world, the world will reject it.

we do everything we can to avoid that and to avoid the feeling of what that rejection represents for us.

but something interesting about all of this is what we fear is often what we already believe to be true on some subconscious level.

when someone rejects something about you or what you put out it doesn‘t create the wound, it only confirms it.

it just gives evidence to something that we already think to be true and we already feel to some degree.

it was just waiting for a signal or validation.

and 9/10 times that ‘thing’ isn’t actually objectively true.

all the stories that we tell ourselves in our heads about why we can't do things, or why we're not enough, or why we're inadequate, or why nobody will love us.

they're not true.

to your subjective experience they might be true but as an objective reality, they're not. they’re variables not constants.

and people need to understand that some part of the world will always reject you no matter what you do. which is why you need to be unapologetically authentic.

you need to step into this world as if you own it. you need to step into this world as your truest self and who you are in your core.

to be authentic is to be rejected by somebody

you will never be able to live the life you want if you let the fear of being perceived sit in the driver's seat and drive you to your destination.

because the fear of being perceived will take a right turn and take you to mars.

it won't take you to where your end goal is.

so let’s explore why the fear even occurs in the first place and most importantly what you can do about it.

beautiful morning to write today. feeling tired and wired at the same time.

this post is in honor of everybody that feels like sometimes the world has every eye on them.

like the world judges their every move and action.

this fear is what’s causing people to be paralyzed from taking action. it can prevent you from doing the stuff you want to do.

it can range from social anxiety to the fear of being physically seen by people walking by. to just the fear of putting yourself out there in a meaningful way.

the range is massive. so let's get into it.

"The fear of being judged is often worse than the judgment itself."

social connection is a biological necessity for humans and it’s not something that you can opt out of.

you literally need to be able to form functioning bonds and relationships with the people around you for the sheer survival of your own existence.

you need to be able to effectively communicate with others.

if you weren't able to fit in or be a part of a group or tribe, you would literally die.

good luck surviving on your own and trying to kill a bear for some food.

in our modern context, being unable to form bonds and communicate with people doesn’t put you in literal immediate danger but your brain still thinks it does.

which is why when you put yourself out there for people to observe you, your brain views this as a social evaluation and it wants to optimize your behavior for fitting in because your brain thinks that it’s survival depends on it.

this observation from others can be incredibly limiting to us because in the back of your head your subconsciously questioning if the social evaluation could be negative.

the threat response in your brain is primed to deal with that.

your amygdala processes the judgment of others much the same way it would process a tiger walking towards you.

those two things aren’t so different from each other in the grand scheme of the brain, they just have different circuits dedicated to them.

obviously, your amygdala isn‘t going to have the exact same response to seeing a tiger as it would to seeing someone judging you.

you’d probably have an stronger physical reaction like an adrenaline surge and a racing heart.

but your alarm system doesn’t need to differentiate between the two.

all it needs to do is make sure you’re sufficiently aware of the potential threat and it can do that by surging you with neurotransmitters that make you more aware of your surroundings.

this is why people who have a fear of being judged or rejected can become easily startled when someone looks at them with a judging expression.

all it takes is a little side eye or furrowed brow to trigger a full body response.

it’s also been shown that the parts of your brain associated with processing physical pain are the same ones that are engaged when you experience social rejection.

this is why you feel so physically bad when someone ignores you.

it’s why the last unread message you sent feels like a burning fire in your chest.

when your amygdala detects social rejection and danger, it tells your hpa axis to start pumping your body with cortisol and adrenaline which leads to the increased heart rate, sweaty palms, and muscle tension that characterize a fear response.

basically the explanation behind social anxiety in a nutshell.

on top of all that people with a fear of being judged or rejected often have an abnormally strong connection between their default mode network (the part of the brain associated with self referential thought) and their amygdala.

so they’re constantly feeding themself scenarios about how they’re being judged, without conscious control.

and this is a big part of what fuels the spotlight effect.

the spotlight effect is when you believe that other people are paying more attention to you than they actually are.

and there’s research on that too.

which takes me into the next section.

researchers ran a study asking one simple question.

it was centered around the spotlight effect and also tied to agoraphobia.

agoraphobia is the fear of being in public spaces where you might be embarrassed or helpless.

it's basically the feeling that drives social anxiety and it gets magnified in public spaces.

the research wanted to show if we overestimate how much people notice the ups and downs in how we look and perform in day-to-day life.

for example, if you’re having a bad hair day, do other people notice?

they had participants in a class seminar evaluate everyone, including themselves, for whether they were having a “good day“ or a “bad day“ based on their appearance.

across several sessions scattered through a semester, people also predicted how they thought their classmates would rate them.

across the board, people expected the bad days to register with others far more than they actually did.

the gap between what people expected and what actually happened was consistent and real.

then they tested it with something more objective.

a college volleyball team rated each other on how well they played during a series of scrimmages, and then they compared their predictions to reality.

people thought their teammates would judge them more harshly than they actually did, and they overestimated the variation between their own performance compared to their teammates’ by about 28%.

in a third variation of the experiment groups of people played a video game and then rated how they thought their performance was based on how they thought a teammate and a neutral observer would judge them.

people way overestimated how much their teammate noticed their ups and downs.

but they didn't overestimate how much a neutral, uninvolved observer noticed.

because the observer who had nothing else to focus on, actually was paying close attention.

the teammates weren't failing to care. they were just busy managing their own performance.

busy being the main character of their own experience, the same way you are of yours.

that's the whole mechanism in one line.

when you yourself are observing yourself and watching yourself do these actions, it's like you're watching yourself in 4k high definition and you're observing every single pixel on the screen.

whereas when people are watching you, they're watching in 180p and 30 frames per second, catching a single pixel at the top of the screen at best.

because in between watching you they're managing their own hair, how they're sitting, how they're looking, their own mistakes, their own internal monologue.

i can prove it to you right now with one simple thought experiment.

think about the last time a stranger did something embarrassing in front of you.

can you even remember it right now? (unless it was really recently, like yesterday, it’ll probably take you a while to think of an example)

in that moment you were thinking about yourself.

that’s the whole point.

people are consumed with themselves as much as you are with yourself.

in fact, we all think about ourselves more than anything else in our lives.

we hyper analyze everything we do and we obsess over it for much longer than we should.

we’re all the main characters of our own lives. our lives are movies and we’re the stars.

to you, everybody else is a supporting role.

to everybody else, you’re a supporting role.

"We are so afraid of being wrong that we won't admit we are afraid."
— Charles Bukowski

most of the things that hold us back in life are caused from this same fear of judgment.

nobody is actually stopping you from going after what you want.

it’s all in your head

when you decide not to wear that shirt because people will think you look stupid in it, that’s before anyone has told you that you look stupid in it.

so you’re already predicting the future based on your own self judgment.

every time you don’t post, or do a thing, or say the thing, or approach that person, or quit that job that was emotionally draining.

you did it to yourself. you preemptively judged yourself on your own behalf

you have this imaginary audience in your head that has a face and a body, and you think about how they see everything that you see.

if you’re predicting humiliation, you think about the exact details of that humiliation, and what the worst case scenario is where everybody’s pointing their fingers at you and laughing.

so you change your behavior to avoid that event that hasn’t even happened yet.

so you end up become invisible to everyone.

because that’s the only way not to be perceived by this imaginary audience that you’ve created in your head because you’re afraid of being rejected or judged by people.

you need to realize that if nobody can reject you, nobody can choose you either.

nobody will be able to love the work you‘ve shown them. nobody will be able to hire that version of you that they‘ve never met. nobody will be able to connect to the person you hide behind the curtain because you’re too scared of being rejected, perceived, embarrassed, or judged.

i’m not going to sugar coat this because it’s not something that can be sugar coated.

it’s the reality of things.

it's easy for me to tell you, "you're gonna step out and everybody will love you once you put your work out there," but that's not the truth.

even if it were all love, you'd see through it anyway.

some people just won’t like you in this life.

they’ll hate you for no reason. they’ll hate your guts. they won’t like your personality. they’ll think everything you do is stupid, your work. they will actively root against you, and they hope that you fail.

some people will reject you for reasons unrelated to you at all.

and that’s the cost you have to pay for visibility

but i think it’s a price worth paying ten times over.

when you realize your own authenticity then other people’s opinions don’t matter to you at all

think about the alternative.

the alternative is you build a persona that is optimized not to reject you, which makes you impossible to know because everything has been edited out of it.

everything has been curated for other people but you’ve changed yourself fundamentally in the process of doing that so you’re much harder to relate to.

technically to your brain you win because you do everything to avoid that rejection.

but we all know you don’t really win because you never actually were rejected.

nobody ever got to know the real you

that’s the tragedy of this paradox we’ve created that is so incredibly damaging.

you crave to be seen but you spend your life making sure that nobody can see you.

here’s the practical part. it’s why you’re here.

so here’s what you can do about it

regardless of what you do some of them will like it, some of them won’t, and most of them will barely think about it at all.

so operate as if no opinions matter. because at the end of the day they really don’t matter.

pay attention to conversations and activities as you observe other people instead of focusing on how you think they see you.

someone observing you isn’t the same thing as someone judging you, and someone judging you isn’t the same thing as someone condemning you.

it’s easy to sit in your head and over-analyze a glance from somebody like you‘re in a courtroom and you have to defend yourself but you need to create distance and space between the observation of you and an action.

slow yourself down in that process so that you’re not just reacting in the moment.

again, as i‘ve said before, people are just going to reject you, and their opinions on you are inherently subjective.

the number one way that humans cope with internal insecurities is by projecting them onto other people when they see it in them so other people’s opinions on you are largely going to be a reflection of themselves and what they see in you.

what do you think. just because other people’s opinions are a reflection of themselves, does that mean they hold a sort of objective truth about you?

of course not.

it‘s a matter of what you think. this is your life. your reality.

they can only see a fraction of you, you’ve seen everything, and you know yourself best out of anybody.

embarrassment is not easy to deal with, it’s something that people fear more than most other social emotions.

but people can get desensitized to it just like they can get desensitized to pain.

the more you expose yourself to it the less it affects you and your nervous system will stop responding to it in the same way.

the best way to do this is to simply start putting yourself out there.

post on social media often. post things that are only 60% ready. wear clothes that you think other people are going to judge you for. speak up in meetings that you otherwise wouldn’t, raise your hand in class and ask the silly question.

basically, train your brain to start getting used to the idea that you’re being seen.

because every time you put yourself out there and survive it, your next time will be a little bit easier.

your prediction of disaster will update itself a little bit.

and your nervous system will stop treating it like a tiger walking towards you.

that’s the game.