How To Stop Caring About What Others Think
Being curious about the part of you that seeks approval can set you free.
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I know many Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) who are so tired of worrying about what other people think of them, and wish they could learn not to care so much about others’ opinions.
Learning to worry less about how I come across to other people has been a big challenge in my own life — and one that’s still very much a work in progress. So this week I wanted to take a deeper look into the roots of this common pattern for HSPs, and offer some suggestions for letting your worries go.
Let’s start by asking whether any of these common patterns sound familiar.
Perhaps you:
Worry that you said the wrong thing and offended a friend who hasn’t texted in a while.
Seek constant reassurance in your relationship to feel okay.
Find it difficult to stop thinking of your mother-in-law’s judgmental comments on your parenting. You start doubting yourself and think: “Maybe she’s right.”
Ruminate over your parent’s disapproval of your decision to leave your stable job to go self-employed.
Feel embarrassed when a colleague disagrees with you.
Feel anxious that your friendship group is growing distant because you have turned down the last two invites to meet up with them for coffee.
Long for your boss to show you some appreciation, so you burn yourself out working round the clock.
For many of us, it’s not just the ruminating over what other people might think about us that can be so draining. We compound our suffering by judging ourselves for experiencing this form of worry in the first place, asking ourselves questions like:
Why do I care so much about their opinion of me?
Why am I so bothered about what they think?
Why do I need so much reassurance and validation from other people?
Why can’t I just be confident and comfortable in my own skin?
The question we might choose to ask instead is: How can I work towards letting go of caring so much about what other people might think? And how can I strengthen my sense of self-worth?