The Voices in Your Head Aren’t Yours

Are you the type of person who walks around constantly preoccupied with what people think of you?

Here is what usually happens in your brain: you imagine someone is looking at you. Then you immediately decide you know exactly what they are thinking. And it is never positive. Your mind turns into a judgmental version of them, running commentary about your hair, your choices, your laugh, or the fact you didn’t comb your hair today because you were late for work and now everyone is apparently judging you.

Then, because it seems you like to suffer, you take this mean little version of them (that you invented, by the way) and use it to beat yourself up. Crazy, right?

It is ridiculous when you spell it out. They probably were not thinking those things at all. They might have been wondering if they locked their car or whether they should try almond milk next time. But in your head you decided they were mean, and then you turned on yourself with the voice of Mean Them. Which really means it was you all along. You were the judgmental one. You turned them mean to fuel your own insecurities, to give your inner critic a script.

I always think of Charles Cooley’s quote: I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

That line explains so much.

·       We give more weight to other people’s opinions than our own, but those opinions are not even real. They are our own perception of what others might be thinking.

·       Then, because we act as though those perceptions are true, others start responding to us accordingly. The whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

·       The most important part is this: we can actually change how people see us by changing how we think they see us. If you start believing others see you positively and project yourself that way, they usually follow along. And remember, no one has that much time to obsess about you anyway. You are the main character of your own movie, and they are the main character of theirs. On their screen, you are a background character at best. And on yours, they are too.

So instead of torturing yourself with imaginary critics, flip it. Assume people are nice. Assume they are probably thinking decent, maybe even kind things about you. In your own videogame, they are NPCs helping you get to the next level, not bosses plotting to take you down. And when someone does eventually prove you wrong and acts mean for no reason, when there really is an opponent trying to destroy you, remind yourself of this: the version of you they are being mean to is not really you at all. It is some distorted version of you that exists only in their head. Which means their meanness is a mirror of themselves, not a reflection of you.

And when you try to people please, who are you really pleasing? You are pleasing the version of them you created in your head, along with the expectations that version has of you. Again, it is you making things up. Maybe it is time to start creating a different story.

You are not a mind reader. Even when the ego tries to convince you that you are, you will never fully know what someone else thinks. Even when they tell you, they might be thinking something entirely different. As much as we try to believe we know what goes on inside someone else’s mind, guess what? We don’t.

This is not even a new idea. The Buddhists had it nailed centuries ago. There is a story where the Buddha is teaching in front of a huge crowd. A man shows up and starts yelling at him, throwing insults, trying everything he can to rattle him. But the Buddha just keeps teaching, calm as ever. The man gets more and more frustrated, shouting louder and meaner, until finally he explodes: “Don’t you hear me? Don’t you care? I am insulting you!”

And the Buddha, serene as always, replies: “If someone gives you a gift and you refuse to accept it, who does the gift belong to?”

The heckler says, “Well… it still belongs to me.”

“Exactly,” says the Buddha. “The same is true of your anger and insults. If I refuse to accept them, they remain with you, not me.”

Mic drop.

It is the same with other people’s opinions, imagined or real. If you do not pick them up, they are not yours to carry. Most of the time, people are not even thinking about you. And if they are, they are only projecting the noisy movie playing in their own heads.

So maybe the trick is not to stop caring what people think. Maybe it is to stop caring what the fake versions of people you created in your own mind think. And to stop accepting “gifts” that were never yours in the first place.