In reality, only 25% of the people in the room were able to identify the Barry Manilow shirt. The students wearing the shirt estimated that about 50% of the room noticed. The researchers asked the students wearing the embarrassing t-shirt to estimate how many people in the room noticed what they were wearing. In this study, “the researchers brought in groups of students to complete an unrelated task in the same room, and randomly assigned one of the students to put on an embarrassing t-shirt (if you must know, it was a t-shirt of Barry Manilow, which the researchers had previously established was highly embarrassing for this college population)” ( Mendoza-Denton, 2012). In case you don’t believe me, Tom Gilovich and colleagues published a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000. If most people don’t notice or don’t care, then that knowledge should help us combat social anxiety and be more comfortable being ourselves. Most people do not care about how you look or what you’re doing. ![]() This causes a lot of social anxiety for people, and I want to help try to dilute some of that. There is something in psychology known as the “spotlight effect.” This is the phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one’s appearance or behavior. Guess what? I can guarantee that you greatly overestimated how many people noticed or cared (and I can back it up with psychological studies). As you walk past several people, you can feel everyone looking at you, noticing your messy hair that you couldn’t fix this morning. You’re walking down the hallway, and you know that your hair looks bad. Live a life that makes sense to you and does not disrupt anyone else’s life.Įxpectations often kill whatever there is to grow – so keep a check on how realistic your expectations are.Let me pitch you a scenario that probably sounds familiar. Understand that your understanding of things will be different than others – and there’s no right or wrong in most cases. Understand that perspectives are all relative, they are all subjective to change and they are never linear. Stand by your “right”, without correcting everyone else’s “wrongs”. That’s where an open mind comes into play.ĭo things, without expecting validation from others. But if you always choose to give the society and its acceptance or validation more weightage than your own wants and likes?- you’re living in a hamster cage. Your body will give you signals, your mind will tell you what it wants to do, your interests will always resurface and present themselves to you in multiple ways. That’s the hamster cage I am talking about here. Except for this fact, there’s another fact that we seldom remember – most of us are living our lives just to be socially acceptable. In all honesty, there’s almost nothing that you can do that will make the society happy. There always is a judgment passed around them being arrogant. There’s always an unsaid judgment about people who mind their own businesses and are keeping their profile to themselves – in whatever they do. The definitions of the right ways have always changed though, they have never been the same. There’s always a looming pressure to get married in the right “age” to the right “partner” and in the right “way”. There’s pressure to find a job that aligns with “perfect job” definition for the vast majority of the society. There’s always an undue pressure to do things – and to do things in the right way. All because we were scared of what people would say. ![]() But in all honesty, whenever our hearts have wanted to do something that is not “trendy”, we have always stopped ourselves from doing so. ![]() There’s always a rat race about things – getting a job, getting into Ivy League, getting married, having kids, having a pet, having a boastful relationship, being outrageously successful at work – everything is a race that comes at the cost of your mental peace. And we know nothing of this is beautiful. We know how we conceal our flaws, the darkness within us and the insecurities we have picked up during our course of life – and show it as “beautiful scars” to the world. In all honesty, if you were an alien and you were to open any of these platforms you will probably think how happy every one is and how beautiful everyone’s lives are.īut we, humans, know that’s not true. Each of these platforms host a plethora of stories, memories, moments and knowledge about another plethora of things.
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