How to Stop Feeling Self-Conscious: Escaping the Panopticon

In the late 1700s, a philosopher named Jeremy Bentham designed a prison. You can picture a ring of cells that are built around a central guard tower. The guard can see into every cell, but the prisoners can't see into the tower, so they never know if the guard is watching them or not. And if you might be watched at any moment, you start acting like you're being watched all the time. Bentham called his design the panopticon. I've been thinking about that image a lot recently, because I think that most of us have internalized that guard tower, that feeling of being constantly observed between flock cameras and LGTVs and recording devices in every pocket. There is plenty of real observation going on, but this episode is less focused on the general loss of privacy and more on the emotional and psychological consequences of that. The consequences that come when we start feeling like we are under constant surveillance, and particularly when we start policing our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior as if we were. This is being well, and I'm Forest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, you'll know that this format is a little bit different for us. I wanted to try something new, so it's just me today, and we will all see how this goes together. On this episode, I'm going to be talking about the internalized panopticon, where it comes from, what it costs us, and hopefully how we can escape it. So what are we talking about here today? We can illustrate this feeling as having three big pieces. First feeling distant from the actual lived experience of day-to-day reality. It's hard for you to get in the moment, because you feel kind of like you're observing yourself. You're really thinking about what that thing you say is going to sound like to other people. You feel almost at a short distance from your own body. I have these moments myself when I feel like I've had to zoom out, and I'm viewing myself as if from a kind of third person perspective, as I'm doing like totally normal things and going about my day. There's also a feeling of self-consciousness that can really accompany this. You're concerned about how you're being perceived, and you're afraid about how other people might evaluate your behavior. This can then turn into a kind of feeling of hyper-vigilance, or always on. It feels like this is running in the background, even when we're not interacting with other people. Even when we go home, even when we are around our friends, or we're around safe groups of other people, there's this feeling like we have to keep performing. So the point here is not that we are literally being watched, although there's plenty of that too, it's that everybody has become both the observer and the observed, and this has really been turbocharged by technology. This means that we are all providing a kind of regulatory function inside of the systems that we're a part of. We're watching other people, we feel like they're watching us, and we regulate our behavior because we experience that sense of observation. And the core character of all of this is that we feel like we must placate that watcher. So to do so, we have to regulate our behavior closely. And the best way to do that is by internalizing the beliefs and standards of that watcher. The only way to be sure that we can really stay safe is by thinking the same thoughts that those people who are observing us are thinking, or maybe judging our own behavior by the same standards that they are judging us. So let's think about this practically. If you're watching somebody else in some kind of a big social event, you probably don't have a real sense of who they are, or the stuff that happened before whatever you see them do, or even a lot of the time the stuff that happens after whatever you see them do. You just see them do something that seems inappropriate or seems like it doesn't make sense or seems a little too intense or whatever, right? You don't have context on who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. A joke that you tell in one group might not be as appropriate in a different group. When we have long-lasting friendships with other people, they develop a context on who we are and why we're doing what we're doing, but we've really lost that socially. We are no longer in small groups or relatively small groups of 20, 30, 40 people, these insular communities where we spend most of our lives. We're seeing people online without any context. We're seeing people out socially without any context and when you don't have context, you tend to be a little bit more critical. So we see other people being more critical and we go, "Oh, I need to hold myself to that extra critical standard of behavior." Some of this observation is real. People really are critically viewing us some of the time, but there's a lot of evidence that it's when it becomes self-monitoring that things get really problematic. There's research into something called meta-perception. This is how a person views other people's views of them. We are big social animals. It is really important for us to be able to tell or to think we have a sense for how other people appraise us, right? If you stayed in the group a couple thousand years ago, you had a good chance of surviving and maybe passing on some gene copies. If you didn't, if you were kicked out by other people because you were just too unpleasant to be around or they didn't like you or whatever, you probably died. That was kind of it. So it's very important for us to be able to evaluate our standing socially. And when people are asked to assess how they're viewed by others to give a kind of estimate of how people perceive them, they normally make these big sweeping generalizations. They think that people are just kind of a group, as opposed to thinking of the views of specific individuals. So they say things like people think I'm funny, people think I'm smart, people think I'm stupid, whatever it is for you. So when researchers study this, what they find is that most people think others perceive them pretty much identically to how they perceive themselves. I think that the research on this, it was like a 0.86 correlation between self-view and perceived other view. And in psychology, that is an incredibly big number. That's like as close as you're going to get to a one-to-one relationship. So the call is coming from inside the house here. The anxiety that we experience about how other people perceive us is mostly anxiety that we have about how we perceive ourselves. And so what are some of the consequences of this? Really anxious rehearsal. You're anxiously rehearsing your sentences before you actually say them. Not starting something like not starting a hobby because you're afraid of what it will look like as you learn, right? We normally have to go through stupid to get to cool, to use a phrase that was offered to me by a dance instructor once. And that that phase of being in stupid, that phrase of conscious incompetence is very unpleasant to us. And so we just avoid it because we're afraid of how other people will appraise us or how we will praise ourselves. And then the third example of this that's very real for me is what I'll call third person in ourselves out of life. We are both living and creating for the purpose of observation because again, we are all both the observer and the observed. So you can see this in how people take videos that they know they will never watch. I was at a Florence in the machine concert recently. And there was a song where she asked everybody to put their phones away and to not videotape the song. And she had to like beg the audience four or five times before people actually put their phones away. And even then some people just would not put their phones away. Now maybe I'm just really out of touch and I'm like boomer mode here my my 38 soon to be 39 year old self. I don't think any of those people are really going back and watching through the whole Florence concert video that they took. I think they're mostly taking those clips because they want to share them online. People vacation plan now around which locations will have the best photos. People's food gets cold so they can get the perfect shot for IG. We are taking a little step back from the actual act of engaging in life because we want to participate in this big panopticon that we've all created together. Where we are all both being watched and watching others. So let's take a second here to talk a little bit about where this comes from. There's this phrase from Mark Leary's professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. The socio-media. Self esteem is a kind of fuel gauge that fills and empties based on our sense of how good a job we are doing at belonging. When we feel like we're good belonging, the gauge goes up, when we feel like we're bad belonging, the gauge goes down. This means that a good group member self-assesses and goes these parts of me over here are ones that increase my standing in the group and these parts of me over there are ones that don't increase my standing in the group. And you know to some extent this is true there are impulses that we really have to regulate in order to be a functional member of society and to belong in the groups that we're part of. But the standards here are typically way too stringent. They're typically much more critical or much more like carving off core aspects of who we are than they actually need to be in part to do that lack of context that I was talking about a second ago. Rick has a this phrase about shame. I think he got it from somebody else and if you're new here, Rick's my dad is a clinical psychologist. Shame is when something that should stay hidden gets exposed. So we want to keep the bad parts of who we are kind of concealed. These are the parts that we feel won't be accepted by other people. And we self abandon we leave those parts behind when we appraise safety as being more important than authenticity. This then relates to an idea called conditions of worth from Carl Rogers. Love came with requirements for people growing up. most kids experience this. Their parents praise some things and they don't praise other things. And we learn to watch ourselves through the eyes of whoever set those terms. And then we then kind of internalize those rules as we grow up. One way of thinking about personality and the big picture is that it's kind of a social performance. We reveal different parts of who we are to different groups of people. I act differently when I'm sitting here recording these episodes than when I'm with my friends. So when we feel constantly watched or constantly evaluated by other people, that means that we need to be constantly performing. But we don't really know who we're doing that performance for. Again, that context collapse that I was talking about. You're never really sure who the watcher is. So you need to hold yourself to the standards of whoever the most critical person might be. And we can think about developmentally where some of this comes from. Often these critical voices that we have inside of ourself that that watching third person voice, it often has a kind of character to it. That doesn't mean that you literally internalized the voice of your mom or your dad or some critical coach or teacher that you had growing up. It feels like sometimes when we talk about psychology, everything comes back to the relationship you had with your parents when you were four years old. I do not think that that's true. But sometimes that voice has a kind of character or at the very least we can start to figure out what were the lessons that we learned about the acceptable and less acceptable parts of ourselves. And where did those lessons come from? Then what happens is the watcher outlives the watchers. So what I mean is that our internalized watcher outlives the actual real watchers that initially gave us those beliefs. So we internalize this kind of invisible cage that's created by the expectations and beliefs and standards of the people that were around. There are some examples of this that come from looking at chimpanzees and zoos. So there was this group of chimps at a zoo who was living in a very small enclosure. Then that enclosure was naturalized and expanded, which is great for the chimps. And they had all of a sudden all of this extra space to live in. It was 25 times bigger than the previous enclosure. But five years later researchers looked at this and they found that most of the chimps stayed inside the footprint of the old cage. So even though their circumstances had radically changed, they had habituated to life being a certain kind of way. And I think that we really do this when we internalize those external others, those watchers that we have, particularly early on in life. Now I do want to say at some point here that some watchers probably good actually. We live in a society. Plenty of people are not the best and I don't want everybody to feel like perfectly liberated in their behavior. Even the most pathological libertarian out there wants there to be some rules that govern other people, right? They just mostly don't want people telling them what to do. Also, nobody has a kind of pure self without any sense of the internalized other. If somebody had that, they're probably either enlightened or kind of associate path. So the important questions for us here are how much internalized audience are we carrying around, then which audience who are these people and have we chosen their values? And are we kind of at choice about how much we pay attention to that internalized watcher and how much we don't? That last one is huge because we could follow the same general rule like be considerate for very different reasons, right? I have to or I'm a bad person is one reason to be considerate to other people. Another is I want to because I care about them and that is something more that comes from a sense of values that tends to feel a lot better for people. So we internalize vigilance originally because it's useful and sometimes necessary. We really do have to regulate our behavior or have some thoughtfulness about how we're perceived by other people. But I'm inclined to argue that for most people most of the time they've over internalized, which has a ton of negative consequences. Self-consciousness and society stress the total loss of backstage recharge time because we feel like we're always on losing our own values to the values of other people becoming a little bit less authentic over time. You know you could keep on going here. The watcher just isn't in the tower as much as we think it is. But for some groups of people their chronic vigilance is more likely to be fairly accurate or they might have experiences that really understandably lead them to the stronger internalization of the panopticon. I'm thinking about people who come from really insular tight-knit communities, particularly ones that have a lot of rules that govern behavior. I'm thinking here fairly conservative religious environments as an example. My fiance Elizabeth is somebody who came from one of those environments and she was constantly told to be quieter, run less, take up less space, you know, turn it down you're too much. It's very easy for that to turn into a kind of persistent self-monitoring. You know we really internalize that hyper-critical external observer. Then also cultures in general can vary in how panoptic they are. Some cultures tend to be more loose or open or not observing and then some cultures tend to be more tight and tend to have like stronger social norms around behavior. Then just in general some people are watched more than others. All of this is much more complicated for neurodivergent people, minorities, anybody who feels like they don't fit into the majority of culture. Autistic people regularly describe masking. They talk about it as being very tiring and they're trying to modify their behavior to essentially appear less autistic inside of groups. This is a kind of very strong internalized panopticon. WEB Dubois talked about this in the Souls of Black Folk back in 1900. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. My guy was essentially describing the internalized panopticon over 100 years ago. So this is not a purely modern phenomenon. People have been observing each other in groups for as long as humans have been in groups. But I do think that it's gotten worse over time. And one of the philosophers who really writes and talks about this is the South Korean philosopher Biong Chul Han. And he talks about how the function of the original panopticon was to isolate and silence people. But the modern one runs on people putting themselves on display by choice. And the fuel is wanting recognition from others. This isn't just smartphones and technology. Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1949. David Riesman wrote a book called The Lonely Crowd in 1950. And in it he talked about the movement through these three main cultural types, tradition directed first, then inner directed, and now other directed. So Americans were shifting from staring by a kind of internal compass to staring by social radar constantly scanning for cues about how to be. This was back in 1950. Now imagine the turbocharging of modern society and modern technology. We are constantly living in reference to other people, putting all of our experience, the whole movie up against their highlights that they are posting on social media or going out of their way to tell other people about or just frankly cultural mythos, the idea that you're supposed to have checked certain boxes by the time that you're 20 or 40 or a 60 or whatever it is. And the cost of this are pretty considerable. Anxiety, stress, inauthenticity, all the stuff that I was talking about earlier. And there's this review that was done of 208 lab stress studies. This was done in 2004. The biggest stress hormone response came from tasks where other people can judge you and you can't really succeed no matter what you do right. So you're being watched by other people and you feel like you can't win. That's what generates the most stress for us. Critically, in those studies, the audience that was watching doesn't have to be in the room. They noted that shame can be set off by a disapproving imagined other. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. I'm excited to let you know that the Turning Points Navigating Mental Health podcast is back with a new season. On being well, we've spent a lot of time talking about how affected we are by our environment and particularly by the information that we take in. So one episode this season really caught my eye. In it, host Francis Lease, a clinical therapist, talks with Lisa Thalhamer, a journalist who burned out covering negative news every day and who now studies what constant news exposure does to the people who are reporting it. Lisa also speaks with Sherry Terkel, Founding Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and they look at the psychological costs of an always on media world. 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That's livemomentus.com promo code being well for up to 35% off livemomentus.com promo code being well. Now back to the show. The idea that we are disappointing some imagined other is kind of a great summary of a lot of modern life for a lot of people. The leading clinical model of social anxiety, this come from Clark and Wells, says the problem is looking at yourself from the outside, right? That feeling of being a few feet back from your body, kind of third person observing yourself as you're doing normal tasks. And being watched makes us monitor skills that we otherwise would just do very effectively normally. So if you wonder why that the guy at the free throw line misses free throws when he's had 200 of them in a row in practice, well, that's why he's monitoring behavior that he would do naturally otherwise. And I think that a lot of the consequences for people get back to this idea of context collapse that I was talking about earlier. And this is the flattening of multiple audiences into one. So again, identity is this kind of continuous performance, right? We tailor our behavior based on context. I act differently right now than I do with a friend group. This is normal and natural. There's nothing wrong with this. But there's this idea of an imagined audience. I got this from Marwick and Boyd. Whenever we speak right or post something online, we picture the person who's receiving it. The problem is that we can't really do that online because anybody could be consuming it. Separate contexts exist for really good reasons. Something could be totally appropriate with your friends and totally inappropriate. I work. So if we don't know the context that we're in, we have to set the strictest possible standards for our behavior. This is the lowest common denominator idea. Post only what would be acceptable to everybody who could conceivably be watching. And we see how this leads to a lot of curation of people's online identity. But I also think that we again internalize this and curate our own kind of internal identity that way. We certainly set standards for our behavior and action that way. The reality is that most of the people who view us, whether it's online or out in the real world, are doing it pretty indifferently. They don't actually care that much about what we're up to. Some people are friendly. Some small percentage of people are actually pretty critical or hostile. But the hostile ones are the ones who are setting the rules of engagement. You're on commenting on the thing that you posted for your friends, your coworker who now knows your politics and boy, they aren't happy about it. All of that, right? These people are most of the time relatively unemployment in the overall scope of your life. How long are you really spending around that person? But man can they make things complicated for you. Situations where we know who's watching us and we can kind of control that observation are ones where we can try on different versions of who we are. And this is particularly important for younger people, right? They get to kind of experiment in the creation of themselves. But context collapse really takes these kinds of, for lack of better phrase, safer spaces away from people. As an aside, this is also kind of why both AI music and network TV shows are generally not like the highest rated things by critics. They tend to be bland and boring and a bit uninteresting. When you just take all of the tropes and you average them out and the show is written for everybody without any kind of context. There's no focused person in mind that you're creating this thing for. It tends to become safe and bland and frankly kind of boring. So this then takes us to what should we do about all of this? How can we relax the sense of self observation and calm down that kind of internalized observer? There's some things that we can do actually out in the world to be in environments where we feel less observed in critical ways. But again, what I'm really focusing on here is this internalization of observation. Most of the problem for most people is you watching you. This normally means applying standards that we picked up from other people or the kind of crowd that's society at large. We think other people really care. But the reality is that most people just don't care that much most of the time. And this should be liberating for people, right? You actually are allowed to do the things that you want to do. You are allowed to be the ways that you want to be. This kind of constant critical self observation is probably not as necessary as we think it is. And this gets back to again, that self observation met a perception thing that I was talking about earlier. Most people's view of themselves is what they think other people think of them. And a little earlier, I was talking about how people also think that they tend to give everybody the same impression. And this gets to the second big finding, which is that the people rating us, the people assessing our behavior, often show little agreement with each other. The ratings from other people were essentially weekly correlated with each other. This means that there is not one view of you that's out there. There is no single unified what people think about forest or what people think about Sarah or what people think about whatever your name is, right? What people think of me is something that we mostly build ourselves. I think this finding that other people are not unified in how they view us and how the views that we think other people have about us are mostly our own views about ourselves is incredibly hopeful because we have a lot more control over how we view ourselves that we have over how other people view us, right? And so we can essentially turn both of those levers at the same time just by changing our own self view. I think the way out of this whole thing, the internalized panopticon, the constant sense of observation by others, is mostly about determining what we value. What do we really care about? Which audiences do we want to care about and listen to? Who standards are we applying? What's the stuff that really matters to us? So the big picture question that we're asking is who gets to say about what we do, including how we think and feel. And this model that I'm about to share my four rings model is very much back of a napkin that so take it with a grain of salt. We can organize the observers of our behavior and the impact of those observers on our related thoughts and feelings into four rings. First, you watching you, that closest circle, right? Just you with yourself. Second, you're chosen people. This is a small, hopefully kind of selective group of family, friends, mentors, all of that good stuff. People whose takes you care about. Third, there's the rooms that you move through. Work, school, extended family, people you share a hobby with. You're going to be in real environments with these people. You can see them in real life. They can see you in real life. And as a note, rooms are not always kind. High school is a room and high school, I think mostly sucks for most people. What saves a room is that it is bounded. It only exists in one finite space. It's readable. You can see what other people are doing in it. And it's possible to leave. These are people you share a context with. Then the fourth ring is the crowd. That's everyone else. That is the faceless masses. It is context less. It is most of what exists online. It's tempting to view that first ring as the safest ring and the furthest out ring, the crowd is the most dangerous. But that's not really how it works most of the time. That first ring has the harshest critic that most people will ever meet. But I do want you to pay attention to a couple characteristics of these different rings. First, am I dealing with real reactions from real people? Or am I just guessing? Second, does the room that I'm in, whether it's with myself or a friend or a group of people that I'm moving through, have a kind of edge to it? There's a time that I can clock out and drop the mask, drop the performance a little bit. Then third is visibility mutual. Can I watch the people who are watching me? And then fourth, what are the rules of the game? And are these rules that you have actually chosen to play by? A good room passes at least the first three. Chosen people pass all four. And the crowd actually passes none of those rules. And this is why the crowd is a panopticon. Anthem's design was that you're visible, you can't really see who's watching you. And you didn't opt into their rules. And also, it only runs one way. The guard is observing you. You're not observing the guard. As we move outward through those circles, two things should happen at the same time. The first is that your reach grows. You can access larger numbers of people. If you are a creative person who is producing something that other people consume, you need to kind of care about what the crowd thinks of your work, at least a little bit. But something else should happen at the same time. Authority should shrink. You should care less about the views of those people as you move out through the circles. I don't think that actually happens for most people. I think that we have internalized this observer so strongly that we care about this kind of imagined other almost as much as we care about the real people in our lives. So who gets to say, who gets to say on us, on who we are, and how we act? Well, your people, that second circle, are your people because you care about their judgment of your character, at least to some extent. It's relevant, they understand you and your context, and it's important. You care about what they think or say or feel about you. Then as you go to the third layer, those rooms you're a part of, those rooms get to say in how you play your role. Was your presentation good? Are you a good teammate? All of that kind of stuff. Then the crowd, well, take it with a grain of salt. There might be a kind of general metric out there of broad acceptance, like how many books you sell, how many times your podcast gets downloaded, whether or not that tweet was a real hit, you know, whatever it is. But I would kind of hold it there and not be focused on it pretty much outside of that. The crowd does not get to say on your worth. The crowd does not get to say on who you are. And the penopticon kind of inverts this. We hand our sense of worth to the ring that knows us the least, has the least context and requires the most act. So we're being judged on the least authentic version of who we are. I think that hyper vigilance is when the further out circles, the rooms we move through and the crowd broadly, the third and fourth circle, start to infiltrate the ones closer in. Back to the show after a quick break. On days when I'm recording the podcast, it's really easy to feel pressed for time and lunch can be one of the first things to go. I look up, it's three o'clock. I haven't eaten since breakfast and it's not exactly surprising that I don't feel great. That's why Elizabeth and I keep our sponsor Hule that's spelled H-U-E-L in the kitchen. Their black edition powder is a complete meal you have instead of food, not a shake on top of food with 27 essential vitamins and minerals and no artificial sweeteners, colors or flavors. 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So we can go back to meta perception here. If the tower is mostly staffed by our own self view, then there are two levers. The first is trying to change that self view, looking at what we've internalized, whose standards those were, how do we actually want to think about ourselves, all of that good stuff. The second lever is how we think about and look at other people. And I think this one's really interesting. So I want you to start by thinking about how you relate to other people. How long do you think about the person, the actual human? Who is behind that silly social media post that you read? Or who looked dumb on tech talk? Or who you saw moving through the Starbucks being a little obnoxious to other people? I hope the answer is not much time. And if you think about it, it passes pretty quickly. The big panopticon these days for people is social media. How do you engage with social media? How could your relationship with it change to make you feel a little bit better about everything that I've been talking about today? The actual research on quitting social media is pretty modest. The biggest experiment on this paid 35,000 people to deactivate Facebook or Instagram for the six weeks prior to the 2020 election. And on average, their mood improved a little bit. Something like a fifth of what a typical therapy or mindfulness program does. This benefit was concentrated into particular groups of people, older users on Facebook and women 18 to 24 on Instagram where the effect was nearly three times the average. So a modest effect is still something. And if you're a part of a vulnerable demographic, the improvement could be even bigger than you think. It is really easy for us to turn online life into just life. And it is so not just life. Then the second thing to really focus on is what I was saying a second ago about how our own role as guard reinforces our feeling of being watched ourselves. The magic of the modern panopticon is that we are both guard and prisoner. We are both observed and observer. This is just more of a hunch. But I think that as we lessen our role as guard, we also relax a role as prisoner. This is somewhat validated by research. There's a general finding that how positively you see other people is a relatively stable trait. And it's also positively correlated with our own well-being. So there are some people out there who just tend to appraise people a little bit more positively. And there are some people out there who just tend to appraise other people a little bit more critically. People who saw others more positively reported higher life satisfaction, lower depression, and a stronger sense of fitting in with their peers. They were also rated as more likeable by the same people they were rating. Seeing other people negatively tracked with several personality disorder measures, including avoidant personality, which is more or less the people who are really afraid of the judgements of others. So this means that the harsh guard and the anxious prisoner tend to show up in the same person. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that relaxing the guard role will inherently lead to less anxiety. But man, I think it's pretty interesting. And certainly in my own life, when I feel like I'm really watching others, again for me, the common situation for this is dancing where literally you are asking to be observed by other people. And when you are observing people in that more harsh and critical way, it's really easy to turn that lens on yourself and go, "Oh, am I living up to those standards that I'm saying that I have for other people?" And so I think that this is just a pretty common experience that people have. As we become more critical, we start criticizing ourselves more. This takes us to a really interesting question, which is where does that criticism come from? Where does that critical lens start to show up for people? And this is a place where you can start seeing if you can name the faces and the voices that are in the crowd. Part of the power of the panopticon is that the crowd, that broad internalization of other people could be anyone. Highly judgmental people could be powerful people, sensitive people, you don't know. If most of our beliefs about how other people view us are driven by how we view ourselves, as I've said, over and over, then the beliefs about ourselves that we've internalized are a really crucial part of the whole thing. Where do those beliefs come from? Where does the belief that I need to be critical come from? Where does the belief that I'm actually not good at feeling the blank come from? Well, it's our experiences, of course. Particularly with the powerful people we've had in our lives, parents, bosses, friends who have a lot of pull, all of that. When you hear an internalized belief pop up inside of you. When you have a moment where you're thinking about doing the thing and you go, "I'm not going to do that." Oh, that's not for me. I'm going to swear away from that one. Ask, can you put a face to that? Where does that belief come from? What was the experience that you had that led to you thinking or feeling that way? And it might be a very real experience, but we can start to look at it a little bit. We can start to go, "Huh, am I more capable than I was back then? Am I around kinder people than I was back then? Do I know more about myself than I did back then?" Are other people really watching me? Are other people really assessing me that critically? Maybe they are. I'm not saying 100% that they're not. Maybe they are. But most of the research suggests that for most people, most people most of the time. A lot of most in there. So there are still a lot of people who are heavily observed, who are heavily criticized, all of that. Most of the time, we just think that we're being observed much more than we actually are. We have more capabilities than we realize, and trying the thing will probably be okay. We can also start to build a backstage for ourselves. I think that one of the big feelings here that really pains people is this feeling of never being able to drop the mask. This feeling of truly constant observation. I talk with Elizabeth about this a lot. What is really nice about that second circle, close friends, and the third circle, the rooms we move through is that you get to go home. You get to go home, you get to go to your room, you get to close the door, and you get to just chill. But when we have internalized that observer, when we are in that habit of constantly watching ourselves, there is no backstage. You can't get a break from self observation. It's not possible. And we need time when we're free of observation, and under no pressure to observe ourselves in order to truly relax and recharge. Always on, hypervigilance is a life with no backstage. You can't recover from playing a role that you never step out of. Backstage is where the people who've already seen behind the mask are hanging out with you. Right? For most of human history, we were rarely alone. We were constantly surrounded by other people in small groups. The problem isn't being around people. It's the feeling of constant evaluation by strangers with no context. And again, our internalization of the sense that those strangers are there. Full solitude can absolutely help too. There's research that suggests that just sitting alone for 15 minutes with no phone, the no phone is very important. Lowered high arousal feelings for people. These were both anxious feelings and excited feelings because anxiety and excitement are kind of cousins to each other. And when we're participating with a phone, which is literally a panoptic device, right? It's a video recorder and an audio recorder, and we're participating with social media on it. We are watching others. We are being watched by them. It's a panoptic as it gets. The phone constantly reinforces the sense of both watching and being watched. Scrolling through it, having these distant relationships with other people that we see online is absolutely not being alone. This can get really complicated for people who have what is sometimes called relaxation-induced anxiety. Some people get more anxious when they try to relax. Because they have the feeling that whenever they relax, well, that's when the bad thing happens to them. They have to hold onto their anxiety. They have to hold onto that hypervigilance in order to keep themselves safe. And this ties really closely to some of the predictive processing stuff that we've been talking about a lot over the last six months. What are the predictions that you have about having to stay on guard? What's the actual prediction that we're testing? When I relax in my room, bad thing happens. When I'm a little bit more myself in front of other people, bad thing happens. What's the bad thing? What is it really? How bad is it? How well can you cope with it? All of that stuff that we talked about on the episodes, about avoidance and moving from insight into action. People are often very resistant to the idea that their predictions aren't totally accurate in part because when they are accurate, the consequences can be pretty dire for people. The toughest category for us to evaluate just as humans is both very unlikely and very dangerous. What are the things that aren't very likely to happen? But if they do, they are very high consequence for you. And I think this takes us all the way back to the first question that I asked. Who gets to say about what we think, feel, and do? Part of the function of the panopticon is to get you to care about the things that the crowd cares about. Likes, views, all of these social media metrics, all of that. These are all metrics of how much the crowd validates what you put out there. If you don't know what you care about, the crowd will choose it for you. So figuring out what you're going to care about, whose opinion is really going to listen to is a huge part of the whole project here. What is your personal scorecard for your work, your values, all of that good stuff? Am I trying hard? Am I showing up? Am I learning from my mistakes? Am I willing to be a little different tomorrow than I was yesterday? What would you actually do if nobody else were watching? How would you actually behave? What would you really care about? One of my personal takeaways from doing the work that went into this episode is that I'm going to start focusing on regularly doing more things, particularly more creative things that I just don't share with anyone. I'm just doing them for me. If you are a person where success is registered as relief, instead of really feeling it as a win, then that means that the audience is keeping its power, right? You are more relieved that you aren't being criticized than you're actually happy and excited about what it is that you've done. You're focusing on the evaluation of the audience as opposed to actually internalizing that you met your own standards. Success is supposed to feel good. I think the episodes that we recently recorded on self-acceptance have a lot of overlap with what I'm talking about here today. Can we start dropping our act around chosen people? What happens when we do? What do we predict will happen if we drop that act? What actually happens when we drop that act? How accurate was our prediction really? Maybe it was very accurate, but sometimes it's not, and we have something that we can learn from. Letting the mask slip and particularly internalizing when it goes well is what lets us become a little bit more authentic over time. If it doesn't go well, or maybe there's a communication issue, maybe it was like a little too much mask drop, or maybe that person should not be on yours, it's safe to drop the mask list. Maybe that was actually a really important moment with them because you learned something. You learned that they cannot be trusted in that way. As we move through the third circle, those are the rooms that we're a part of. We can let them judge the role. We can let them judge our performance of that role, but that's all that they're judging. When a room judges you, it is judging how well you played your part that day. That's it. It's not judging who you actually are as a person. Then the joy of the room clock out. Rooms are only rooms if they have walls. If you are bringing work home with you all the time, that's going to end up being a little too much performance. What I love about this is that we can start to build a more complex identity house. When we have more rooms that we're moving through, we have more things to fall back on. We are not just a this or a that. We're also all of these other things as well. We start seeing that this big generalization that we had about how the crowd views us is actually not there at all. Actually, the crowd is made up of all of these individuals. Most of the individuals that we actually care about are the ones that we see day in and day out. They are not those random people on social media who are liking or not liking or commenting or not commenting or whatever. They are the actual real humans that you engage with and those real humans are all themselves unique and they all themselves have their own unique context. So maybe we should lighten up a little bit about how we're judging them or how we're evaluating their behavior. Maybe there's a reason that they did whatever they did that day that was slightly obnoxious or slightly silly or slightly awkward. And maybe we can even go, Hey, when I observe other people really closely in this way, I tend to observe myself more harshly. And I don't want to do that anymore. So even if it is just out of a sense of pure unfiltered self-interest here, it probably makes sense to be a little bit less judgmental of other people. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you liked this format, please let me know. And also, if this format was not your preference, please let me know as well. The show will still, of course, mostly be conversations with people. But every once in a while, I find a topic that I get really interested in. I talked this one over with Rick. And he basically said, Hey, I think this is really cool, but I'm not sure if I have a lot to add here. So I think that you should just give it a shot at doing it yourself. See how that feels and see if people like it. If you've made it this far and you somehow haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, we would love it. If you took a moment to subscribe, you can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast. And I'm also writing more on Substack these days. So quick recap of what I talked about today. I talked about the internalized panopticon. That's the sense that we are constantly being observed by other people. And it's also how we participate in that kind of co-observation. We are both the watched and the watcher. And over time, we internalize that sense of the observer. We internalize the views and thoughts and feelings that we think that other people are having about us. But here's the trick to the whole thing. Most of those views are essentially projection. We think other people view us more or less the way that we view ourselves. So a big thing to work on is self-evaluation. What are the views you have about yourself? Where do those views come from? Who gave you that idea that you couldn't really do that thing or that you had to be a certain kind of way? And are those circumstances still relevant for you these days? Do you know more about yourself? Are you more capable? Is this a different environment with kinder and more thoughtful people? Do you really have to regulate your behavior as closely as you once did? Then we can start to pay attention and see, huh, are people really watching us? As much as we think they are. There are definitely some groups of people where they really are heavily observed and heavily monitored. I don't want to dismiss that at all. But even for those people, there are settings that are safer. There are environments where they can relax a little bit more. So if you're somebody who's highly observed by others, if anything, it's even more important to find the environments, to find the moments where you can drop the act, relax and become a little bit more authentic. We talked about the four rings. There's you watching you, you're chosen people, the rooms you move through, and then the crowd, everybody else. And we talked about lightning up as we move out through those rings about the evaluations of other people. It makes sense for you to really care about how you evaluate you. It also makes sense for you to care a good amount about how you're chosen people evaluate you. It makes sense for you to care about how the rooms you move through evaluate your performance in that room. And it maybe makes a little bit of sense some of the time to care about what the crowd thinks about you. But as we go out through those circles, it makes sense to lighten up a little bit as we go. And as part of that process, we need to figure out what we care about. Because if we don't figure out our own values, well, other people will select them for us. Really interested in reading people's comments about this episode. You can also reach out to us at [email protected]. I had a lot of fun recording this one. And I hope you had fun listening to it and until next time, thanks again for listening. Abercrombie is and always has been the destination for holiday dressing. Make soft sweaters for those cozy nights in and classic matching sets for unforgettable nights out with friends. Complete the look with our wool blend A&F carry trench and you're all set. Have a very Abercrombie holiday, shop in the app, online, and in stores.