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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
This is not a trick for making the feeling vanish. The feeling usually hangs about for a while. It is more that when you walk in and the whole room seems tilted towards you, you have one plain sentence to set beside it: they are busy. Say it, then carry on with what you came to do.
do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs (Quran 49:12). The scrutiny you brace for is something believers are told not to do, not the ordinary state of a room.
الحجرات
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱجۡتَنِبُواْ كَثِيرࣰ ا مِّنَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعۡضَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِثۡمࣱۖ وَلَا تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلَا يَغۡتَب بَّعۡضُكُم بَعۡضًاۚ أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمۡ أَن يَأۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ أَخِيهِ مَيۡتࣰ ا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوهُۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ تَوَّابࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
Believers, avoid making too many assumptions- some assumptions are sinful- and do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs: would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? No, you would hate it. So be mindful of God: God is ever relenting, most merciful
Qur’an 49:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The clearest evidence comes from work on fear of blushing, where what keeps the fear alive is not how red a person actually goes but how visible and how damning they believe the blush to be. The gap between what shows and what is felt is the thing being corrected. That literature is about blushing in particular, so read it as a good illustration rather than a measurement of every social situation.
Drummond PD, Shapiro GB, Nikolić M, Bögels SM. (2020). Treatment Options for Fear of Blushing.. Current psychiatry reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The sense of being watched runs far ahead of how much anyone is actually watching.
Build the ladder from what you do now, not from what you think you should be managing. If phone calls are currently impossible, the first rung sits somewhere below a phone call.
Social fear usually has a first address. School corridors, a year when appearance decided everything, a group that made a project of you. Knowing where it began does not undo it, but it stops it feeling like a fact about your character.
Sometimes the help you need is not insight. It is someone sitting with you while you sort out what actually happened this week and which bit of it mattered.