The Spotlight Effect — How Social Anxiety Makes You Egotistic
No, you are not the center of the world. Not everyone is staring at you.
Imagine this: You are walking through your university hallway, and your hairstyle is not at its best. It’s messy and badly done because you slept through your alarm and woke up late for class. You did what you could do in two minutes, and now you regret coming to the university looking like the Bobby Deol of the ‘90s.
You walk into your classroom 10 minutes late, praying you could somehow become invisible until you reach your seat at the far corner.
As you enter, you notice your peers glance at you. Someone on the back bench is snickering. That beautiful girl you crush on is saying something under her breath to the other girl sitting next to her, and they both stifle a chuckle. It seems everyone has noticed the social gaffe you made.
For you, there is no escaping the embarrassment. The next hour stretches to eternity — you struggle to breathe, let alone lift your face and talk to someone. You are sweating profusely and cursing yourself for staying up late the previous night. You are certain there is no recovery from this faux pas. You are officially a joke, and this social gaffe will haunt you for the rest of your life.
It’s an extremely relatable scenario, and chances are, you’ve been through something like this a couple of times.
What is the Spotlight Effect?
Most of us have had embarrassing moments since we were kids. We’ve asked stupid questions and done stupid things, only realizing our mistakes much later. Afterwards, we can’t forget it. The image of our fourteen-year-old self going arse over tit on a flat ground still flashes in our mind.
But researchers have found that we are terrible at assessing how noticeable our social gaffes are to others. This phenomenon has a befitting name — the Spotlight Effect, the tendency to overestimate how much others notice about us. In other words, we think there is always a spotlight on us in social gatherings, highlighting all our mistakes and insecurities, for the world to see.
The Spotlight Effect stems from social anxiety and being overly self-conscious, the former being a major contributor.
Here are a few scenarios:
- You are afraid of dressing up nicely because you think it would make you stand out
- You can’t participate in your class, because you’re afraid your peers and the teacher would judge you
- When in an uncomfortable situation, you instinctively reach for your phone or start fidgeting
- You wear headphones in public because that way nobody would talk to you
- You are afraid of taking up space and being loud, so you shrink up in silence
- Giving a presentation causes the feeling of butterflies in your stomach
- Eye contact makes you uncomfortable
- You often overcompensate because you are afraid others would notice your anxiety
- You bury your face in your phone whenever you are passing by a group of strangers
- You struggle to make your point, even when you know you are right
- You can’t call someone out for being rude or violating your boundaries
If you’ve been in one or two of these situations — and in all likeliness, you have — then you suffer from social anxiety, a type of anxiety disorder that causes fear in social settings. People with social anxiety — sometimes known as social phobia — have trouble talking to strangers, meeting new people, attending social gatherings, and making new friends. They feel anxious about other people judging or scrutinizing them.
It is not a world-ending realization. Everyone you know probably suffers from social anxiety. Just relax.
No, not everyone is staring at you
Seeking social validation and acceptance is hardwired into our psyche, which is why it’s not hard to understand how the spotlight effect shows up in our lives.
First, we humans have an egocentric bias in how we assess our actions, behaviours, and appearances to others. To us, we’re the centre of the world, which fuels our egos and deludes us into exaggerating our importance. We are used to seeing things from our perspective, which makes us unable to put ourselves in the shoes of another person and understand their point of view. The gaffe you think would cause lifelong embarrassment for you might only be an innocent mistake to someone else. To most others, what we do is a non-event, because guess what, everyone is in their own spotlights.
Second, there is what psychologists call the illusion of transparency, our tendency of overestimating the degree to which our mental state is known by others. In other words, we mistakenly assume that much of our concern leaks out and is available for all to see. We think others can sense how we feel; we imagine that our anxiety and embarrassment are noticeable, which only makes us more anxious and embarrassed.
But short of our faces flushing red or our voices choking, no one can tell that we want to hide in a hole after a social gaffe. No one out there is a telepath who would read your thoughts and know how much you want to die of embarrassment at that moment. Very few people can accurately interpret body language signs, and these are not walking around judging every person they meet. To everyone else around you, you are a closed book, that is, unless, you consciously decide to open yourself up to them.
As dickens beautifully put it in A Tale of Two Cities:
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
Where does it come from?
Like many other psychological phenomena, the spotlight effect is the result of outdated biological wiring.
Back when societies were not a thing and civilizations did not exist even in the wildest stretches of the imagination, our human ancestors used to live in tribes. This lifestyle required the tribesmen to ensure that they had others’ approval. And because they used to hunt, scavenge and gather fruits and nuts together in bands, to commit a faux pas/mistake would have resulted in banishment from the tribe. A solitary lifestyle did not suit that era, and being exiled meant certain death. So thinking that everyone around them was watching them kept our human ancestors more self-conscious in their behaviour. It gained social validation and kept them alive.
Today, we don’t live in tribes, hunt animals, or gather fruits. We may have escaped the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors, but we still carry with us the vestiges of their psyche. We still seek validation and acceptance from the people around us. We have evolved to associate rejection with death. It gives rise to social anxiety which, in turn, causes the spotlight effect.
Trust me, no one gives a fuck
The thing about social anxiety is that it makes us egotistic. It makes us heavily focused on ourselves and our importance in other people’s lives. We think we are the centre of everyone’s attention — everyone notices how we dress, speak, walk, or style our hair. We imagine that people would remember our failures as well as our achievements. But in reality, no one gives a fuck. Everyone has better things to worry about — themselves. Everybody feels they are under the spotlight.
Think about it for a second: how often do you remember that time your classmate gave a bad presentation? How about when your friend misgendered your professor? Did you notice the guy who wears the same T-shirt several days in a row? Can you recall what shoes your teacher wore last week? Do you remember when your friend tripped on the escalator and fell flat on her face? Have you noticed that two guys in the class you thought were BFFs don’t talk to each other anymore?
Chances are, you don’t remember any of it. And even if you do, it’s only when you really think about it, or someone reminds you that this thing happened. And if you don’t notice or remember the details of someone else’s life, what makes you think they would care what you do in your life? What makes you think they would notice and remember your mistakes and failures?
(Still not convinced? Let me help you out. Ask a friend if they remember when you accidentally spilled your drink on your trousers in a restaurant, or any other embarrassing incident you can’t recall without wanting to kill yourself. That should give you some clarity.)
I’m going to be brutally honest with you — the vast majority of people don’t give a fuck about what you say or do the vast majority of the time. I’m not saying this in a bad way — I’m sure you have your fair share of admirers. I’m saying this in a practical way. If most people don’t notice or care about most of the things you do, then you can do whatever you want. You can fail, make mistakes, be silly and loud, make jokes, dress however you like, style your hair the way you always wanted to, sit and walk however you feel comfortable with, openly share your thoughts, and just be yourself.
Realizing that most people don’t care what you say or do is liberating. You can also implement this in the most important areas of your life, like applying for a team, telling someone how you feel about them, quitting that shitty job you’ve been holding on to, starting a new business, and calling out that asshole who is always mean and disrespectful to you. We assume that the world will laugh at us if we fail, but the truth is, the world is too busy to be noticing.
Summary:
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. You deserve all the good things in life. Here’s what I want you to take away from this article:
- The Spotlight Effect is the psychological phenomenon where we think everyone will notice and remember our mistakes and failures. It stems from social anxiety.
- Social anxiety makes us egotistic — it makes us believe that we are the centre of everyone’s attention and that people would remember our achievements and failures.
- Seeking acceptance and social validation is hardwired in our psyche; we cannot escape it.
- In reality, most people don’t care about the things we do and say, just like we don’t care about the things they do and say. Everyone feels like they are under the spotlight.
- Realizing that nobody cares is liberating — you can do all the things you want to do and just be yourself without the fear of judgement looming over your head.
