This phenomenon makes you socially anxious. Read ahead to dig in deeper.

Whenever something embarrassing and awkward takes place , we tend to overthink about the situation and cling to it. We assume that people would be judging us on the basis of a single incident and we feel super uncomfortable. This entire process of replaying the incident in your head on loop and irrationally concluding that people must have witnessed this embarrassing moment of yours is called THE SPOTLIGHT EFFECT.

In actual, all of this is a total fallacy. Each of us considers oneself as the center of attention in our own lives. So, if we think that our embarrassing moment was noticed by others, then we are not truly right. It’s because others have lives of their own. They, like us, have a plethora of thoughts and overwhelmed feelings popping up in their respective minds. For instance, you accidentally stumble on a piece of rock while scrolling through social media. Now, this incident becomes your first world problem and you go red in the face and try to sneak out from the place of incident surreptitiously. You start beating yourself up for your clumsiness. You carry this cumbersome load on your shoulders. You start to become conscious as to how people would perceive this action of yours and this tickles you like forever. However, people, on the other hand, are in their own worlds: some of them are probably overthinking too and becoming angsty on their silly incidents while some of them are pondering about their problems and how to get rid of them.

How to overcome it?

• Firstly, stop beating yourself up for your not-so-proud incidents. After all, we all are humans. We all tend to make mistakes. So, what if you spilled coffee all over your t-shirt, what if you stuttered while delivering a speech, what if you run into someone who knows you but you don’t recognize them. It’s totally okay. It somehow indicates a similarity among all of us that we all are clumsy in one way or the other; no one is perfect. Let’s embrace our flaws and imperfections!
• Secondly, you would not know what is really going on in people’s minds for eternity. At the time of any particular incident, we get a zillion of unpleasant, critical thoughts out of which most of them are solely assumptions and absolutely not true. All of it is just in our heads. So, try to throw all of these self-underestimating thoughts off your brain. I know that it’s not a piece of cake. You will get used to it if you begin to practise this technique regularly. Catch yourself whenever you’re pondering about how people will judge you and try your best to drive away these thoughts. They aren’t healthy at all.
• Lastly, if you feel embarrassed, put yourself in the shoes of the people who may have been there at that instant. Think if you would notice some random stranger in a room of 50 people. Even if you do, by chance, would you begin to judge them just because they acted a little uncanny? Possibilities are that you won’t even notice and even if you would, you wouldn’t bother to give them attention. So, to cut to the chase, changing your point of view will make you realize that people don’t actually care much as they are too engrossed in their own little worlds and this would help you to cure yourself of this effect.

Hope you were able to get your head around this concept.

Kindly don’t mind the errors if any. Not an expert in English. Thanks for reading!😊