How To Break Your Anti-Socialism

In 2000, psychologist Thomas Gilovich, then at Cornell University, devised the following procedure: He called together groups of students and randomly chose one member of each group to receive a message from Gilovich telling her to show up at a specified time to a specified room (all of which she conveyed back to the rest of the subjects in the group). Importantly, all the seats in the room were arranged so that everyone would be facing the door.

He would then take those individuals, delay them for a moment, and have them put on a T-shirt with a well-known celebrity on it — maybe Martin Luther King or Bob Marley. He would then say: ‘Go to this room over there; you know you’re late. Also, you know that all the other students right now will have just glanced at the door as you’re walking in, and they will all know who came into the room late.’ That was supposed to be our trigger for the embarrassment. We knew we were the only ones late and we knew they all noticed because why else would they all look at the door?

Following up on the embarrassment experiment, researchers asked these cringeworthy folks how many of the students do you think remembered the events clearly? On average, those singled out thought that 50 per cent of all the other students would be able to commemorate the event and the shirt that they wore, because, well, they flubbed it, and they were sure they had left an impression on a large portion of the room.

However, what the investigators instead learned was that only 10 percent of the subjects in that classroom could recall the event and the T-shirt — five times fewer than what those of our embarrassed ‘helpers’ thought. What the experiment uncovered is what’s called the spotlight effect — we humans tend to overestimate how much others care about the negative and positive things we do. We think we’re under a spotlight, that everyone is looking at us and judging us when the vast majority simply don’t.

And this is something you have to really internalize if you’re socially anxious: you feel like you’re spending half your time trying to inhibit behavior because you think other people are watching you and making judgments about you, and also because you don’t want to have people dislike you. And yes, there is a subset of other human beings who do actually care greatly about what you’re doing and who you are, but the vast majority of people not only don’t care, but most of them desperately don’t care.

This is a hard thing to hear, but, believe me, it’s true — humans are incredibly self-centered creatures. For the most part, other people aren’t even aware of you, let alone actively judging your outfit/nose-picking/stumbling over your words. The moment you sincerely, completely, internalize that belief — really buy into the spotlight effect — the more your social anxiety will diminish. Of course, this is much easier said than done. How exactly do we train ourselves to genuinely, genuinely believe in the spotlight effect?

Okay, so here’s the two-step process I developed that has helped me drill this principle into my brain. Step 1: You have to start developing an awareness of how you think. The vast majority of us are just unaware of the fact that we’re having tens of thousands of thoughts every single day; that’s why you need to try and build a habit of mindfulness, so that you start becoming aware of it. (That’s why I recommend meditation; trying to clear your head, trying to focus on one thing like your breathing. It helps you build habits of mindfulness, so that you become 10 times more aware of when you’re thinking, and you’ll also start to notice that the vast majority of your own thoughts are going to be about you — past events, future concerns, worrying about what other people are thinking of you. All of those kinds of things. You’ll notice that less than 1 percent of the things you think about on your own are about other people or anyone you interact with that day at all.

Step 2: Once you’ve started seeing your own thinking as something separate, you can then do another thought exercise, one of which I call the swapping shoes exercise. You’ll do this by going to a public place and choosing a random fellow human. After noticing that you are now thinking about this person, you then try as hard as you can to imagine what it is like in his head. You take his place, you sit in his chair, if you can so that you can pretend to have his thoughts. What is going on with him? What problems is he facing at the present moment? If you were in his shoes, what are you going to be worrying about or stressing out about? What insecure thoughts are circulating in his head? What other things are you going to be thinking about? Then, try as hard as you can to imagine what it’s like to take his place, and in addition, pretend: that he is you, and try to imagine what this is like.

You’re doing your exercise. You’re practicing and practicing. Once you practice the spotlight effect, you will start to believe that others spend much of their time thinking about their own problems and themselves; and that’s largely the truth. As you practice, you’ll internalize the spotlight effect, and eventually, you’ll start to feel less and less social anxiety because you know that you’re simply in others’ peripheral vision. Maybe it sounds a little depressing to find out that others aren’t really paying that much attention to you. But, trust me, what you’ll feel when you don’t have that spotlight on you is amazing. You’ll feel free.

This episode is brought to you by Blinkist. I get a lot of questions from you guys, ‘Man, where do you get all these ideas from?’ A lot of them come from books, but the problem is sometimes it can take a while to read something, and I don’t have that much time. So, Blinkist is something I like. Do you guys know what Blinkist is? It sums up the core insights of thousands of nonfiction books into little, 15-minute reads, or little 30-minute audio listens, so you don’t have to spend all day reading a book in order to extract the lessons.

Here’s a quick example: I use Blinkist whenever a random topic of interest comes my way and I want to get quickly up to speed on that topic by learning more about whatever is trending. (You may remember that early last year there was a lot of buzz about the subject of psychology and its benefits). So just three days ago, I decided I needed to do some research about the subject of psychology — I was looking for new angles, ideas, concepts, etc. But in order to do that, it meant: go read 200 pages. Look around — there are probably 20 or 30 books a year published on the subject of psychology. How would I remotely have time to go find all of those physical books and start flipping through them for 10 minutes at a time? But because of Blinkist, I could pull up a piece of content: learn 20 minutes worth of content about roughly 40 great psychology concepts from books like Truth by Hector McDonald, Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon by Rahul Jandial, and Childhood Disrupted by Donna Nakazawa. All of those books are a must-read, by the way.