Overwhelmed by small embarrassments

[AquaBear]

I would love some advice for how to become more resilient to embarrassment.

I have done a few things recently that have resulted in a paralysing level of embarrassment. For example, I recently accidentally unmuted myself in the middle of a 100+ people company meeting and moved some things around on my desk resulting in around 2 minutes of occasional rustling noises. The speaker was entirely audible the whole time, but I am sure my little square would have lit up green on the screen each time I rustled for everyone to see it was me. I have been totally mortified by this experience and as no one else in the meeting has mentioned it to me I have not had the opportunity to laugh it off. I find that is the only strategy I have to diffuse this feeling of just wanting to fall of the face of the earth and never see anyone again.

I understand my response is disproportionate, but can't seem to stop myself being so self-obsessed and overwhelmed with anxiety over these things. I have tried some strategies like thinking about how I would be thinking if this had been someone else (in the example above, presumably I would have been a bit annoyed at the noise for the few minutes and then forgotten it had happened almost immediately) but I can't get it out of my head that everyone around me is embarrassed for me and will always associate me with this incident.

My husband says it would help to not take myself so seriously, but I have been this way for 30+ years and struggle to know how to snap out of it. I would love to develop some more strategies to help me build resilience to deal with these events when they occur.

You need to remind yourself how you think and feel when other people do “embarrassing” things in front of you.

if you were walking through town and saw someone trip over you wouldn’t start laughing and think “how stupid are they?!” You would want to see if they’re ok and help them.

we are all human, we all make mistakes and so silly things. It happens and we don’t look at people differently when someone spills coffee down themselves in the office or if they say a word wrong.

Bless you OP. I am the same way. I offered to help a woman get her pram with a sleeping baby off the train three days ago, and she went out differently to what I was expecting and I didn't end up helping at all, and the pram bumped on landing and the baby woke up and I am still thinking about it.

I am not sure how much you can do- laugh it off with anyone, even your husband might help, some meditative deep breathing. I did a course on dealing with public speaking anxiety once and they recommended physically opening your body up, stretching and concentrated breathing helps quell some anxiety when it's there.

I am also very partial to a hot bubble bath when I am stressed :)

Thanks, I really appreciate that. I suppose I find it harder in a work environment where I feel I have let people down by being incompetent., but it would help me to remember that people probably are more compassionate than I assume them to be.

American author David Foster Wallace said;

“We would worry less about what others think of us if we realised how seldom they do.”

Our concerns about how good we are often come from how we imagine people might judge us for our efforts and actions. Social anxiety in particular is fuelled by the notion that others are looking at us and making negative judgements. Nonetheless, other people aren’t as interested in judging us as we imagine. Whilst we might think that when we walk into a room (real or virtual) all eyes are on us making silent criticisms, they probably aren’t. People are generally far too concerned with their own lives and hiding their insecurities to bother exposing ours.

Not one single person is thinking about that day

You are basically wasting your emotional energy

Thank you, that is kind. The example of your pram incident is very helpful, if I had been a bystander to that I would have forgotten it very soon after or if anything have just noticed that you had been kind.

I will try the deep breathing. My husband has watched the meeting recording and heard the rustling sounds and has told me it is not a big deal and I have tried to laugh it off with him as he thinks it is funny that I could have said or done something worse while unmuted. I am not sure how much this has helped me!

I think I need to acknowledge that I am the kind of person who is a bit ditsy and does things like this, and just develop the confidence to shrug it off and carry on. How I get to that point... I am not sure yet!

thank you. I might write this on a post it note and put it on my fridge :)

My boss fell asleep while on camera during an (admittedly boring) Teams call once.

I think @DaisyChain505 's advice to think about how you feel when others do similar sorts of 'embarrasing' things is really good. Does it make you think they are incompetent at work? I doubt it.

Agree with other posters advice. Your husband sounds like a lovely support to you btw.

I think CBT would help with this if you are able to access it.

Try and be scientific/objective about each incident - ask yourself or someone you trust- (these are my answers)-

how would you feel in a meeting if a colleague didn't mute and rustled a bit? ( Not bothered unless lots of noise)
How would it change your opinion of them? (Not at all, we've all done it)
How often does it happen in meetings? (7 times out of 10 in big meetings maybe)
Which of your colleagues have done the same ever? (Majority)

If someone is also a good colleague, effective, professional, nice to be around, no one notices the odd slip up.

It's completely unnecessary as what happened in the meeting was so inconsequential, but as you mentioned it being worse because no-one had said anything to you, could a strategy be to face up to the embarrassment asap to get that stage out of the way?

e.g. in your meeting scenario:

As soon as the meeting was over maybe either message the organiser/presenter to say that you realised you'd become unmuted during the meeting and you're sorry if it was distracting. They'll likely email back saying no problem and it might help you draw a line.

Or, as soon as the meeting was over, message a colleague to say that you realised that you were unmuted during the meeting and you're so embarrassed - was it really obvious? They'll likely message back saying they didn't even notice, or you can have a laugh about it, and again line hopefully drawn.

Ideally you can develop better resilience to allow you to talk yourself out of this tendency to ruminate over minor things, but until then it sounds like some outside support, straight afterwards might help you to avoid brooding about it.

Talking from my own, maybe this is down to having the need to be accepted, needing everyone else’s approval, needing to be liked, to people please. And by thinking that these instances, where you believe that you came off looking//sounding bad or terrible, it’s precisely in these moments that you are feeling that you are being judged, and therefore disliked. Generally speaking though, there is not one single human being, on this earth, that is liked by everyone. We all make mistakes, we all trip, we all do stupid things. Yes, some people will judge, but then we all do it, to a lesser or greater degree to other people, consciously or subconsciously. There will always be people who won’t like you. But so what - for sure there are people that you haven’t liked, for whatever reason. But all these things do not matter in your life. There are lots of people who do like you, who do adore you, including your husband. And that is what matters. Our lives are fleeting, you can’t waste so much of your precious energy and time worrying what other people think of you.

Definitely putting this one on my fridge! thank you :) this is great advice. I would benefit a lot from absorbing the idea that other people aren't that interested in what I am doing and the only person who really cares is me. Everyone feels like the centre of the universe from their perspective I guess.

The problem with anxiety is that we start to make ourselves the centre of everything as if a spotlight is on us. I dont mean that in a selfish/unkind way, I just mean that we think everyone is looking at us, everyone is wondering about us, everyone is judging us etc.

OP- frankly, you arent that powerful.

You dont have the power to affect everyone to the extent that your actions are going to be remembered for all eternity and dwelt upon by others constantly throughout the day. Noone cares that you rustled a bit. At worst they would find it a minor annoyance but they arent going to be thinking about it all day, they arent going to go home and wonder about you because you simply arent that important to them. They dont care about you.

I dont say that to be unkind, I say it to bring you relief to recognise that you arent the centre of everyone's thoughts. Why would you be? YOU are thinking it because to you, you are the focus of everything and are looking at your actions through a microscope and analysing them. Noone else is. There is liberation to be found here.

To prove this to you- think about any random work colleague. Now, recall in microscopic detail every single thing they did yesterday- exactly how they made their coffee, how many times they went to the loo, everything they talked about the entire day. Exactly how many hours did you spend thinking about their routine daily actions, what they did, and what it means about that person- how much time did you actually spend wondering about this person and judging them for it? I dont mean thinking about what they think of you, I mean you thinking about what you thought of THEM? Did you then go home and think about them even more? I bet you did not.

Thoughts arent facts. Your brain is thinking these thoughts because you have created neural networks around them and its habitual. Just because you think something does not mean it's true, valid or even real. Next time you get these thoughts dont forbid them nor agree with them. Notice them passing through your mind as if you are observing them with curiosity. Feel neutral about them and let them pass like clouds across the sky. To detach even further you can think "oh aqua bear is thinking about X", "aqua bear has just had a thought about Y"- by observing them in the third person you can detach from them and take the emotional charge out of the thoughts and you dont take them on as true.

Another helpful tip is to devote 15 mins at a daily specific time to worry about what people think of you. The rule is, you cannot do it during the day- you dont need to because you will devote 15 mins at 6pm every evening to thoroughly worry about it so you've got it covered. When it gets to 6pm each day, go for it. Worry yourself into an absolute frenzy- let yourself go absolutely wild wondering about all the horrible judgments people will be making about you but then at 6.15pm you must stop. I guarantee that when it comes to 6pm you'll get bored and you wont even be able to sustain it for more than 5 mins.

Literally no one cares about your rustling.

Perhaps have a think about why the opinion of others is so important to you and why you crave reassurances. That sounds a bit blunt, but I think this need to be reassured probably comes from childhood.

Thanks yes I am wondering about CBT. My husband tries to get me to do a "what's the worst outcome" thought process, but the worst outcome for me has often already happened in the incident itself. I suppose it is different to the kind of "what if" anxiety. I think these kind of questions are more helpful to get me to put the event into perspective. Thank you.

It's definitely a thing. I think it's called intrusive thoughts.

I remember saying to some friends: "You know when you're in the queue at the post office and you suddenly remember that cringy thing you did when you were 13 and your sharp intake of breath makes everyone turn and look at you?" Three of them looked at me as if I was crazy and one said: "welcome to my life."

Have you heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria? What you are saying reminds me of that .

It can also apply to any form of embarrassment or criticism, rather than rejection.

I totally hear you and loads of people feel like this. I HAVE to do as others have said which is to try to believe others don't care about my actions half as much as I think (worry) they do

Thank you. I do think this approach helps and I should have done one of these options to try to diffuse some of my spiralling before I really got stuck into it. Like you say "drawing a line" is something I massively struggle to do alone.

thank you, this is so kind and so helpful. I've re-read this at least three times already 💙

I did a CBT visualization exercise that really helped me with this (I think it depends on personal perception/ways of processing as to how successful it is.)

The exercise was about visualizing a news reporter saying the anxiety inducing thing - then seeing the report on a small tv, in a room, in a house, in a street. It sort of put the 'thing' in a box and the context made it smaller and smaller and less significant.

You'd be better finding an actual CBT coach or at least online tutorial to make something similar work.

Thank you this is so helpful and so practical. Thank you for taking the time to write this out for me. I am going to try the detached thought process approach. Thank you for sharing this. I have tried something similar once before in a guided meditation where I was encouraged to observe my thoughts as they came to me and set them aside deliberately. I do think this could be achievable for me.

I found a book called Pure O by Chad Lejeune very helpful for these kind of intrusive thoughts, which are a form of OCD (the O being the obsessive element, which is why you can't move on from it.) Someone recommended it on MN and I still dip back into it when a situation triggers spiralling thoughts again.