Before 2025 had even begun, I’d already decided that I was going to be entering my IDGAF era. I’ve always been quite a self-conscious person—or, if not self-conscious, then concerned with what others think—and have often thought about how this facet of my personality has probably held me back. I can be quiet in large groups, for example, and sometimes refrain from sharing my opinion. I worry that I’ve annoyed people when I prioritize myself, and have been described as a “people pleaser” on more than one occasion. I don’t like these traits—they’re not useful or enjoyable—and I’d like to finally kill them off.
But “caring less about what others think” isn’t as simple as just waking up one day and deciding to do so. I’ve tried that already, and failed. (The other day I canceled plans because I was tired and then just sat there feeling guilty about it for ages.) And I also don’t intend on suddenly becoming callous or sociopathic. It’s more that I would like to figure out a way in which I can cut out the noise that isn’t serving me. We’re all hurtling towards death, every second of the day, and I’m not going to be on my death bed thinking about my Instagram aesthetic, or remembering how cringe it was when I tried to launch a zine in 2018 and gave up halfway through.
I decided to give Daniel Glaser a ring. He’s a renowned neuroscientist, and has written extensively about how neurobiology in particular relates to human behavior. He tells me that I’ve been coming at all of this wrong. It’s not that I care about what other people think, because I don’t know what they think. Instead, I’ve been telling myself stories about what they think, and those stories have been negative. “I have this person in my head called the ‘critic’ or the ‘editor,’ and at my worst, I’m incredibly good at conjuring up the person who would be most critical of my performance,” he says, adding, “As a species, we’ve evolved to tell stories about ourselves, to create narratives. We make things real, and then those things change how we act.”
So, how do we get rid of that inner critic? Well, according to Glaser, human brains are hugely suggestible. They don’t take much convincing (which is why you tend to feel happier if you physically smile). So you basically have to replace the critical voices with positive ones. “The trick isn’t to not care what others think, but to care about the right people,” he says, pointing out how if we try not to think about an elephant, we’ll only think about an elephant. Instead, we need to swap out the elephant for something else. “If you’re trying to plan projects, imagine a specific person saying a really cool thing…so the trick isn’t to stop yourself thinking of other people, but to vividly conjure up someone who’s delighted with what you’ve done.”
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