Have you ever found yourself overstimulated, surrounded by others, and noticing every glance across the room? Have you feared the slightest change in someone’s tone of voice, shift in their expression, or anything that would appear judgmental? Have you ever felt anxious because you’re thinking about what others are thinking about you? This behavior is known as mind reading, and it is a common symptom of social anxiety. It can be a destructive habit that can negatively impact your health as well as your relationships.
Mind reading is a cognitive process meant to protect, but relies on assumptions, personal bias, and imagined scenarios rather than the truth. It stems from and amplifies insecurity, low self-esteem, and painful experiences. If left unchecked, mind reading can easily lead to cycles of social distress, avoidance, and eventual isolation. In this article, we will explore what mind reading is, how it got there, how it impacts you, and five steps necessary to stay inside your own head and reclaim control over your thoughts.
What is Mind Reading?
Mind reading is a thought process where you start to put your words in someone else’s head. This is a faulty process of thinking, as it often does not have evidence to support those thoughts. In the context of social anxiety, this means believing others are judging you harshly. This judgment is assumed to be something negative about you, something you fear that others will see. Mind reading forces you to focus on every interpreted action, word, or facial expression of others. Meanwhile, your attention to your life, feelings, and enjoyment begin to fade into the background.
Attention is key in mind reading. Your attention shifts to every indicator for any negative meaning for every person you interact with. You become hypervigilant for any evidence of rejection, and in response have a strong desire for validation. The extensive attention required for mind reading is called monitoring and it is draining. Mind reading takes more than it gives, and it’s a slippery slope into further feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.
Why Do It?
Mind reading is a defense mechanism meant to protect yourself from rejection. With social anxiety, it is meant to protect you from the negative evaluation of others. It is anxiety, as it prepares you to survive a threat, and it is social, as other people pose that threat. However, people are not always directly sharing their thoughts, so much of it is left to interpretation. For example, imagine a conversation where someone makes a vague comment. Like a terrifying mad lib, you fill in the blanks with negative judgment. This starts the next step, which is avoiding those conversations to dodge rejection and embarrassment. The purpose of mind reading is to identify threats and avoid them. However, social mad libs can only be filled out with the words that you know. These words are biased, and you aren’t just born with them, they’re learned.
It’s typical, even advantageous, to practice social awareness. However, social awareness is monitoring and perception in small, sustainable, and accurate doses. Mind reading comes from events that take a sustainable 2/10 social awareness and increase it to a 9/10 social anxiety. Past experiences of extreme or unearned critique, harassment, or judgment can create social anxiety. Bullying and abusive relationships are often a source of mind reading, as it spurs the brain to react. Mind reading is adaptive, and while life goes on, the behavior persists. While your brain tries to prepare you for negative outcomes in social settings, it locks you into a constant fear. Mind reading shackles you to defending yourself from terrifying scenarios that may never happen.
The Consequences of Mind Reading
Mind reading is not just exhausting, it can become self-destructive. Social events, once opportunities for connection and pleasure, become dangerous. They are minefields where you are constantly one step away from catastrophe. You start to lose enjoyment and begin to focus on surviving the situation. Socially anxious habits drain your energy as you monitor everything about everyone around you. Rather than a nice outing, you are trapped in a cycle of increasing anxiety and increasing monitoring.
Mind reading not only takes the joy from social outings, but also spins a cycle of isolation and disconnection. Social anxiety can prove to be too much, and the mental strain of social interactions become too overwhelming. You might start avoiding certain scenarios such as meeting new people or eating with friends. The more you avoid others, the more you isolate yourself.
Mind reading only perpetuates this experience, where you become anxious that others will see you feeling anxious. This increases your anxiety, which makes you more noticeably anxious, which further drives anxiety. It is a defeating cycle that often only ends in enduring social situations with great distress, or avoiding them altogether. Your isolation is perceived as protecting you from the negative judgment of others. Because you might think to yourself “who would want to be around someone who is always anxious?” So instead of letting it get to that point, you decide to not risk it at all. You would rather not show up than to be rejected. As a result, you find yourself stepping down into the hole you didn’t want others to push you into.
Even if you choose to endure social settings, mind reading can potentially warp your relationships. It causes frequent misinterpretation of other’s intentions or behaviors. Your insecurities can be projected as other people’s thoughts, leading to unnecessary tension and conflict. As a result, you can damage relationships by reacting to what you think people mean rather than what they actually say. Mind reading can ignore the free will of others, their values, thoughts, and motives beyond your own insecurities. To truly protect yourself, and your relationships, you must stay within your own head.
How to Stay Inside Your Own Head
“You’re in your own head” is often meant as a way of saying that you are anxious. However, mind reading goes beyond your head and into the brains of others. Either it be projecting your thoughts onto others or their thoughts being assimilated into your reality, there is enmeshment. This means that these two worlds are not supposed to be determined by the other. You are supposed to be in your head, and they are supposed to be in theirs. Everyone is the only author of their unique thoughts and emotions. If you assume others opinions, without proof, it creates a habit of distorted thinking and maladaptive behavior. To not get lost in the imagined thoughts of everyone else, you need to restrain your focus to just yourself.
Mind reading is a destructive cycle, but it can be remedied by prioritizing yourself. Practice diverting your attention away from other’s thoughts, emotions, and needs and focusing back on your own. It may feel selfish, that is because it is focused on yourself, but that is not wrong. It may feel dangerous, because you are lowering your defenses against potential rejection. That is okay, because refocusing on yourself is a risk to what you previously believed to be a threat. The solution to mind reading is being self-focused on all aspects of only your existence. There are five steps to reclaim your mental space, and the first is to recognize when you are mind reading.
Step 1: Recognize the Signs
The first step to stopping mind reading is recognizing when you’re doing it. It’s easy to get caught in an anxious thought pattern without recognizing the shift. As a response, you would benefit from paying attention to signs of mind reading. It could be certain thoughts or insecurities in specific social settings or even in response to certain statements. Whatever it may be, listen for it and make a list. Document these signs to catch yourself in the act and start addressing it.
Step 2: Stop and Address It Head On
Once you recognize that you’re mind reading, take a moment to stop whatever you’re doing. Pausing, even if for just a moment, can help you focus on your mental health. Instead of letting your anxiety buzz and linger in the background, you can start to ask yourself some questions. Questions like “What I am scared of?” or “What am I feeling?” This is key in distinguishing how you feel from what others are saying. For example, if you perceive someone as judging you, simply acknowledge it as an assumption. Take a moment, and redirect your focus back on yourself and how you feel. Now that you’ve recognized your signs of mind reading, and paused to recognize your feelings, it is time to start taking care of yourself.
Step 3: Self Soothe
Once you’ve acknowledged your assumptions, it’s time to calm yourself down from what those assumptions would have meant. Anxiety can heighten physical and mental distress, which contributes to the socially anxious cycle. To address this experience, there are multiple methods of relaxation including:
- Deep breathing exercise (5 seconds inhale, 8 seconds exhale)
- Progressive relaxation (tensing and relaxing each muscle group)
- Grounding technique (Use each sense to identify different things in your environment)
With these relaxation exercises, you can start to calm yourself and bring your attention back to physical reality. If you can calm the body, it can help you address some of the deeper roots of your worries.
Step 4: Challenge Your Assumptions
Now that you are calmer, it’s time to challenge the thoughts you assume are on other people’s minds. Be specific with your thoughts, and ask yourself “is there any evidence for this?” or “what would I say to a friend who thought this?” If there is no evidence, and you have good rationale to disprove those critical thoughts, then it’s time to shut it down. These assumptions often have little basis in reality. They depend on the interpretation of vague cues that reflect your own insecurities more than anyone else’s opinion.
Step 5: Risk Rejection, Find Connection
The hardest part of stopping mind reading is trusting that you won’t be rejected. When you’ve had a wall up for a long time, it’s hard to trust that taking it down won’t end in catastrophe. Address your fears, stay within your own head, and allow others the freedom of their choices. If someone rejects you, it’s likely that it’s not due to just you or your actions. If you mind read, you’re likely convinced that it actually protects you. If you believe watching for rejection keeps you from being rejected, that is unfortunately untrue. Yes, you can do things to hurt others and create disconnection. However, that is different from being judged and rejected for just being yourself.
Put on horse blinders, focus on yourself and your tasks for the day. Not only will it increase mindfulness of your actions, but it will relieve the stress of monitoring and mind reading. If these steps don’t help, it’s probably a good time to start searching for a therapist. Clinicians who specialize in social anxiety, like myself, can give you the tools necessary to unpack deeply rooted fears and negative core beliefs. Either it be with friends, family, or a mental health professional, it’s time to connect.
Conclusion
Mind reading is both a symptom and a catalyst for social anxiety. It spins endlessly, leaving you drained and disconnected. Mind reading doesn’t come from nowhere, and it’s worth investigating what caused it. Until you find that answer, recognize the active signs of your own mind reading experience. Take a moment to address the issue, self-soothe, and challenge the thoughts at hand. Finally, risk rejection to find connection. Lower the walls of skepticism and allow yourself to take a risk of vulnerability. With practice, these steps can help you stay grounded in your own head, reclaiming your confidence. Just by doing so, you are proving to yourself that you are worthy of connection and a happy life.
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Camden specializes in social anxiety, trauma, and depression. He uses modern evidence-based treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) & Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT).
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