Are you really that important?

1

Two days ago, I had dinner with a classmate I hadn’t seen for a long time. During the chat, she mentioned an embarrassing incident in college, and then said in passing, you must remember it. She said that once in an English class, she was suddenly called up by the teacher to answer a question. She was so nervous that her brain was short-circuited and she could not answer anything. Later, the teacher asked her to sit down in disgust. She also heard the class The boos from classmates. This incident has been lingering in her mind. Sometimes, I would have nightmares, in which I would be laughed at because I couldn't answer a question.

After hearing this, I was very surprised. First, she thought I must remember it, but I had no impression at all. Listening to her eloquent description of those details and using her own life to realize it over a long period of time, I was convinced that this incident really happened. Secondly, even if this incident really happened, it has been seven or eight years, and she still remembers it in her heart. She is still haunted by the negative emotions of that incident. It is really scary to think about it.

In fact, are you really that important? Are so many people paying attention to you? Is it necessary to always worry about the bad impression your past self has left on others?

2

There is a term in psychology called the spotlight effect, which is a manifestation of people overestimating the attention of others around them to their appearance and behavior. The focus effect means that humans tend to see ourselves as the center of everything and intuitively overestimate the amount of attention others pay to us.

This phenomenon of excessive attention to one's external performance also extends to our internal emotional world. We usually easily detect our own emotions such as tension, anxiety, anger, lies, etc., and We mistakenly believe that others will immediately notice our emotions. That is, at this moment, we will feel that we are in a "transparent" state and all our emotions are clear to the outside. This phenomenon is called the illusion of transparency. transparency).

The illusion of transparency can aggravate people’s nervousness when socializing and engaging in public activities. For example: once an applicant becomes nervous during an interview, he will easily enter a vicious cycle. He feels that the interviewer will easily see it. In order to prevent the interviewer from discovering his nervousness, he will try his best to hide it, but in his heart The more he tells himself not to be nervous, the more nervous he becomes.

It was precisely because of the simultaneous effects of these two effects that a small incident many years ago caused such great psychological pressure on my classmate. The moment she was called up by the teacher, she became nervous, because the existence of the illusion of transparency aggravated her nervous state, and eventually her mind went blank and the question was not answered. Then her focus effect kicked in and she felt like everyone was watching her joke and she was making a fool of herself. This mental imagination was repeated in her mind again and again, and she even speculated about the teacher's dislike and the ridicule of her classmates. She used these conjectures to put a heavy shackles on her life, and her life was... It's really sad that it's like this.

In fact, you are not as important as you think. You think that people all over the world are waiting to see your fooling around, but in fact they are paying attention to themselves, just like you are paying attention to yourself all the time. , This is human nature, therefore, the only person who pays most attention to you in this world is yourself.

What makes you unable to let go is never the event itself, but your own assumptions about the event. After knowing the effects of the first two kinds of psychology, you can put aside all your speculations and doubts, live the way you like according to your own temperament, and ignore the eyes of others. Because you are your own master, and only you are your own audience.