Are other people REALLY looking at you?

First time I've come across this thread, and recently the same process was happening to me. I used to look at EVERYONE, and in constant anxiety that they was looking at me, judging, talking.
When looking at it in certain situations, like a crowded area at work, what i noticed was that no one was looking at me at all regardless of how i felt my appearance looked... They where all caught up in their own affairs and centered on themselves it seemed.
Evidence has come over the years, going from having long hair for a male, to short and nobody even batting an eye lid. Getting a lip ring, and not even my closest friends at the time noticed any change. (Also reflects that at time's i wanted people to notice things about me.)
Having this left my life quite alot, finding less importance of how i appear to others, this has also left me not judging or finding others appearance important to me either. So it is a big weight off my back by simply not caring as much,

Laura said:
Maybe if you stopped caring and worrying about it, you would stop giving off the energy that attracts it?
Click to expand...

This rings true, in the past if i am caring - people are attracted to this and notice. But im sure this was for me, if i cared - i believed people to be 'looking'. A created paranoia from being paranoid!
 
I think good exercise to break this sense of being observed is to spend a few minutes a day for relax in order to close eyes and recall social situation in the imagination and get out of one's body and enter, in turn, into the others bodies and try to say what you think about this guy (about myself) looking through the eyes of another person. Then thinking "what people think about me" ceases to be overwhelming.
 
for me too, this is the first time I came across this thread, and honestly I used to care too much of what others think about me, I stopped caring and continued with my life.
Now something has changed, there are a couple of people at work, that they have focused on the good things I do, and they keep turning this as a bad thing, they are always mocking me, and telling me that I'm wasting my time and money buying books and doing my keto diet.
Some times these things get me, that I feel that maybe it is wrong, but then I come to the revitalization that they maybe jealous of not been able to do something for themselves and want everybody to be as miserable as they are. :cool2:
 
Laura said:
One thing I've noticed about human beings - including myself at times - is that everyone is really worried about how they appear to others. They worry that every little mistake they made is like a HUGE thing, that people notice it, talk about it behind their backs, make fun of them, whatever. It's like an obsession.
Click to expand...


I would say that there are some people who pay attention to how others look like or behave and maybe even talk behind their back or laugh at them.

They usually feel bored or just can’t find nothing interesting about themselves, have low self-esteem and lots of complexes so concentrate on others either to try to notice their own shortcomings in others (projection) or just to get better for a while badmouthing others because they feel jealous of assets they lack themselves. I would call them soap operas funs.

Even if you happen to meet someone like this the best thing is just to acknowledge that it’s not you who has a problem, but they. They are full of things to digest and solve and as a result are in fact often pretty weak and insecure.

Fortunately, most people even if they notice something imperfect or weird about others they forget it quickly and redirect their attention again to themselves.
 
Xico said:
for me too, this is the first time I came across this thread, and honestly I used to care too much of what others think about me, I stopped caring and continued with my life.
Now something has changed, there are a couple of people at work, that they have focused on the good things I do, and they keep turning this as a bad thing, they are always mocking me, and telling me that I'm wasting my time and money buying books and doing my keto diet.
Some times these things get me, that I feel that maybe it is wrong, but then I come to the revitalization that they maybe jealous of not been able to do something for themselves and want everybody to be as miserable as they are. :cool2:
Click to expand...

Oh i get this often in work aswell. What i get from my teeny tiny petty tyrant is that they arnt really 'jealous' per-say, just that it contradicts what they themself do. Because we act differently, thry get the impression what they are doing is incorrect... So they counter this by projecting and saying what WE are doing is wrong.
But i agree, they want others to conform to what they are doing, which from what ive seen is being rather miserable indeed ;)
 
Thanks to all who contributed in this thread, most of my life I have been a person who always feel that others are constantly watching me, sometimes it becomes an obsession, in my case it is a kind of insecurity, lack esteem, something like a delirium of persecution, the strange thing is that most of the time do not even turn around to see, or pass completely unnoticed, like your many are immersed in their own insecurities, it's kinda funny now that I'm writing this, it's amazing what I've been discovering in my machine, and what is missing .... :scared:
 
Nous avons déjeuner en famille pour mon anniversaire dernièrement et j'ai lancé la discussion sur les livres de Laura : l'Onde, Ces mondes qui nous gouvernent, Le 11 septembre etc...
J'ai été agréablement surprise de constater que Matrix et quelques autres films et titres de livres aient été cités concernant les lézards et leur nourriture, "nous" dans leur poulailler...
Les avis n'étaient pas négatifs mais curieux de constater ces coïncidences... La graine est plantée...

We have family lunch for my birthday recently and I launched the discussion on the books of Laura: The Wave, September 11, etc ...
I was pleasantly surprised that Matrix and some other movies and titles of books have been cited for lizards and their food, 'we' in their henhouse ...
Reviews were not negative but curious to note these coincidences ... The seed is planted ...
 
PERLOU, did you mean to post this in another thread? It is quite off-topic for the discussion taking place here. Also, we strongly advice you to be extremely careful who you discuss these things with. You are lucky they didn't react badly.
 
Huxley said:
First time I've come across this thread, and recently the same process was happening to me. I used to look at EVERYONE, and in constant anxiety that they was looking at me, judging, talking.
When looking at it in certain situations, like a crowded area at work, what i noticed was that no one was looking at me at all regardless of how i felt my appearance looked... They where all caught up in their own affairs and centered on themselves it seemed.
Evidence has come over the years, going from having long hair for a male, to short and nobody even batting an eye lid. Getting a lip ring, and not even my closest friends at the time noticed any change. (Also reflects that at time's i wanted people to notice things about me.)
Having this left my life quite alot, finding less importance of how i appear to others, this has also left me not judging or finding others appearance important to me either. So it is a big weight off my back by simply not caring as much,

Laura said:
Maybe if you stopped caring and worrying about it, you would stop giving off the energy that attracts it?
Click to expand...

This rings true, in the past if i am caring - people are attracted to this and notice. But im sure this was for me, if i cared - i believed people to be 'looking'. A created paranoia from being paranoid!

I believe this was true for me also. I have been thinking about this lately, so it is odd that it came up. Can a person be Narccisistic if they are hiding this fact from others? Like constantly paranoid about my appearance seems narccisistic, but i would be embarrassed to let anyone know that. Like i think i may have been more vain in my thoughts than i would have liked to have thought, but i tried to portray the opposite to those around me. I wanted to be seen as humble, yet i was always hoping to look good to others.
Click to expand...

EDIT: For Perlou, Here is a defiition of external considering you may be interested in:

http://thecasswiki.net/index.php?title=External_vs._internal_considering
 
Chu said:
Also, we strongly advice you to be extremely careful who you discuss these things with. You are lucky they didn't react badly.
Click to expand...

It is very understandable Perlou to be eager to share your knowledge about Laura and her amazing books once discovered, but it is very important to be external considered what you share with other people and as Chu wrote you were lucky that they didn't react badly. Especially in the context what happened in the past to Laura and the Chateau crew one needs to be very careful what to say to people and what not, especially when they never heard of Laura.

You can read for example the following topic and session to get a better understanding:

Important Warning for Readers in France
Session 6 December 2014
 
Chu, désolée si ce post ne concerne pas cette page, n'hésitez pas à l'enlever s'il pose problème...
Je vais le mettre chez Perlou dans ma page d'accueil... Merci pour votre lien que je vais aller lire...

Davey72 et Gawan, merci pour vos liens que je vais aller lire également...



Chu, sorry if this post is not about this page, please remove it if a problem ...
I'll put in my Perlou homepage ... Thank you for your link I'll go read ...

Davey72 and Gawan, thank you for your links I'll go read also ...
 
I've been thinking of this thread in connection with this one.

For people who suffer from feeling like other people are REALLY looking at them, they can try some experiments with just observing people in a wide variety of situations. I've collected a lot of observations of people over the years and here's a couple:

A person may appear to be casting sideway glances at you with their head tilted down slightly and you might feel they are having covert or ill-intentioned thoughts about you. The actual probabilities, though, are that they are simply afraid to make direct eye contact or to hold that contact for long. This comes from their past or whatever.

People will also look at you as a mere reflex action on many occasions. You walk into their line of sight and the impulse seems to be to 'take note.' That doesn't necessarily mean that they even 'see' you and even if they do make conscious note of your presence, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are thinking anything at all about you. People have a lot of a priori knowledge of others anyway, it seems and it would likely take something very very different to make any lasting impression if they don't already know you or have some personal connection to how you present yourself.

When you make an entrance into someone's presence, they may look, but so what? They already know you're going to fit a human profile. You have a body, skin, head, face. There are going to be differences between how you look and other people and they already know that. You're going to be wearing clothes and so on and so forth. But most people will actually notice very little. Ask them what they recall from about 5 minutes ago and you might have to do some serious prompting to get them to remember anything in particular. :)
 
This thread is quite revelatory. There are all sorts of ideas floating around my preconscious, and if I get worried about them (though such worries are quite transient) people can pick up on it now and then. It has given me a different idea of people who consider themselves psychic - we all are to one extent or another. It probably has most to do with "mirror neurons" and such.

I can think of a simple example. On the bus there are days where I'll just look out the window and think about anything, not too concerned with people around me. On a few days I might the thought floating around - "hopefully people don't think I am looking at them." (I can sometimes get preoccupied with what people might think I think about them, if that makes sense.) So on those days, wouldn't you know it, someone will be glancing my direction now and again, for reasons of their own - it could potentially have nothing to do with me. But a few of them will look to their friend and say something to the order of "this guy is looking at us." Even then, it points to what a common perception it is among people - everyone has some of the same slightly paranoid thoughts.

Of course, on most days when I am looking out the window, they could do the same thing to the same extent and I just don't notice it. It could be an interesting thing to try and measure statistically.

An interesting example that I hope I can relate here satisfactorily, concerns my judgments of people. Not that judgments are bad per se, especially brief ones, but some of them come like a cloud over my head with a negative 'tinge' to it. I will judge a person, say at work, and not necessarily mean it. As always I try to speak courteously and I always do realize that they, likely enough and as far as I should be concerned, have their own rich lives (I believe sonder is the word). But nonetheless they will pick up on my feeling, and look at me as if they are offended.

All I can do then is make the best of it, not overreact in any way. This is not a great problem - it is brief and five minutes later we would be normal acquaintances once more. I can see, however, that sometimes people let it get to them physiologically, and then a domino effect could commence from there.
 
Sometimes I wish people really would look at me instead of ignoring me or doing the equivalent of trying to back away. :P I suppose it has a lot to do with people not wishing to see what they don't want to see (and for my proclivity to present unwelcome information - such as reality, directly to them).

Recently, I found out that even if a person can think in terms of 'the big picture', like I tend to do, their peripheral vision can incredibly poor. This was pointed out to me by my alternative therapist. Some of this has to do with concentration required for my job. I have so much information presented to me in such a short period of time, that I will not recall the name, or even what the person who presented it to me, even looked like! That sort of blinkered vision spills over into my private life. Kind of like that which is necessary for extreme concentration. Mind you, if the situation was a lot less stressful, I would be aware of more things, including people. But, if I'm going to notice them it helps if they are interesting, or have something interesting to say. ;) I think people are more relaxed around others who are comfortable with themselves too and not overly 'stressed' about what other people think of them...
 
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