The Social Habit That's Making You Less Likable
your anxiety might be causing you to signal “it’s all about me”
A few years ago, I was still pretty new to my city and working hard to make new friends. I took what felt like a big social risk: I asked someone I knew from volunteer meetings if she wanted to hang out one-on-one.
I really liked her. She was insightful, funny, and generous in meetings. We both usually remembered the snacks (Oreos, obviously), laughed at the same things, and even agreed about the direction our volunteer work should go in. Extremely promising friendship material!
And then the predictable adult-friendship thing happened: our schedules were impossible.
We finally picked a date months away. Then we had to reschedule it. Eventually, we landed on something neither of us had done before but both seemed excited about: an evening at a trampoline park.
This hang took so long to set up, and I had a lot riding on it and was pretty anxious. I felt excited, but when the day came I found myself really thinking about socks I picked out. Were the shorts right? What about shoes? What will I talk about? Was I going to make things weird?
The trampoline park itself didn’t exactly help.
We spent a surprising amount of time waiting in lines, including a very long one for some kind of Jedi-style battle involving giant foam boppers. There were kids everywhere, ranging from elementary-school age to teenagers, so a decent percentage of my attention was also devoted to making sure I didn’t accidentally cannonball onto an eight-year-old.
I found myself commenting on everything I was doing, often in self-deprecating ways. I apologized a lot for whatever inconveniences I imagined my acquaintance was experiencing. I was saying things like, “I’m so sorry we’re in line, again!” and, “Oh man, I was so totally awkward when we were doing the rock wall/trampoline combo.”
We never hung out one on one again. Eventually, the project we worked on ended, and the silence always felt pronounced.
For a long time, I thought about that hangout as evidence that I had somehow failed at being fun enough or normal enough or good-at-trampoline-parks enough.
Now I think something slightly different was going on.
I was so preoccupied with how I was coming across that I barely had any attention left for her.
I didn’t ask about her experience or interests. I didn’t learn whether she secretly spent her childhood dreaming of competitive trampoline acrobatics. I didn’t even find out whether any of the things I was apologizing for were bothering her.
I was unintentionally signaling, “this is all about me right now.” And that was making me less likable.
My anxiety had turned my attention inward.
And when that happens, we can accidentally send a strange social signal: I am thinking a LOT about me right now.
Which is unfortunate, because anxiety is often doing the exact opposite internally. We’re worried about the other person. We want them to have a good time. We care enormously about whether they like us.
But from the outside, all that concern can sometimes look like self-absorption.
The spotlight effect
Look, we are each the center of our own worlds. Small faux pas, habits, or quirks can feel like neon bedecked billboards along the night time highway in Nebraska. Literally last week, I started to panic and over-apologize while putting on my shoes before going to the bike shop with my roommate.
My heart was pounding, my mind racing, fumbling over my shoe laces.
He, of course, hadn’t even noticed a time lag and we had a chuckle about it.
Psychologists have a name for part of this: the spotlight effect. Basically, it’s our tendency to overestimate how much other people are noticing what we do. In a particularly goofy example, a 2000 study had subjects put on a Barry Manilow tshirt - a pretty embarrassing shirt for a college student to wear in 2000 - before entering a room and predict who would notice. The results were clear: the “average estimate [of how many people would notice] made by the targets was exactly twice as high” as how many people noticed the shirt in reality.
Which I find enormously comforting.
Other people are usually busy experiencing their own day. They’re thinking about what they just said, whether they left their laundry in the washer, why their knee suddenly hurts, whether they should text that person back, and possibly what you think of them.
Meanwhile, you may be conducting a full internal investigation into the way you said “thank you” to the bartender.
Anxiety can gradually eat up your curiosity
This is the part I wish I had understood at the trampoline park.
When you’re using most of your attention to monitor yourself, you have less available for the actual person you’re with.
You may notice yourself doing things like replaying your last sentence while they’re already answering it. Or checking their face for signs that they’re bored. Or mentally grading your own story while you’re still telling it.
Sometimes it comes out as apologizing for perfectly ordinary things.
“Sorry, I’m rambling.”
“Sorry this place is crowded.”
“Sorry I’m terrible at picking restaurants.”
“Sorry I just told you a 90-second story about my landlord’s recycling habits.”
You might even start trying to anticipate every possible inconvenience before the other person has had a chance to experience one.
The problem is that all this self-monitoring pulls you away from the thing that actually helps people feel connected: paying attention to each other.
Curiosity gives you somewhere else to put that attention.
Maybe your friend suddenly lights up when they mention a ceramics class. Follow that.
Maybe your date is staring at the most upsetting painting you have ever seen hanging over the bar. Ask what they think of it.
Maybe you’re both watching a pigeon attempt something physically impossible with a bagel.
“Look at this weird bird” is honestly a perfectly good bid for connection.
The goal isn’t to relentlessly interview your prospective friend. It’s more like letting yourself participate in the experience that is already happening as opposed to hovering above it, evaluating your performance.
you can practice noticing where your attention goes
Counteract the spotlight effect by leaning into curiosity about your companion’s experience. One thing that has helped me is paying attention, outside the interaction itself, to the situations where I become especially self-conscious.
I sometimes have trouble accurately reading what I’m putting out socially, and anxiety makes that harder. So rather than relying entirely on my anxious brain’s recap afterward, I can get a little more concrete.
You could jot down things like:
what was happening
what you were worried the other person thought
what you actually did or said
whether you had any evidence for the thing you were afraid of
Maybe you notice that you apologize constantly when someone is waiting for you.
Or that dates make you start explaining every silence.
Or that when you’re meeting new people, you’re so busy planning the next thing to say that you sometimes miss what they just told you.
Once you can see the pattern, you have a little more choice about what to do with it.
when you notice yourself spiraling, come back to the other person
During the interaction, I find it more useful to redirect my attention than to yell internally at myself to STOP BEING ANXIOUS, which has personally never produced the desired effect.
You can come back to something concrete.
What is the person actually saying?
What changed in their expression when they mentioned their sister?
What’s happening around you?
What does the coffee taste like?
Why is there one dining chair in this café that inexplicably looks like it belongs in a medieval castle?
You can also ask a question that comes naturally from what’s happening:
“What’s been taking up most of your brain this week?”
“How did you get into that?”
“Okay, wait, you seemed VERY excited when you mentioned this. Tell me more.”
Or you can simply say something about the shared experience.
“This playlist is absolutely unhinged.”
“I think we have chosen the slowest possible line.”
“Come look at this dog.”
That shift can be surprisingly helpful because it moves you back into the interaction instead of watching yourself have the interaction.
And yes, sometimes you will still say something awkward. You may choose a bad trampoline park. You may wear socks that, in retrospect, were not your strongest socks.
The other person is probably not cataloguing those details with anything close to the intensity you are.
They’re much more likely to remember how it felt to spend time with you.
I wish I had spent less of that evening trying to make sure my new friend was having the Correct Good Time and more of it actually getting to know what her good time looked like.
I might still have been anxious. I probably would have still worried about cannonballing onto a child.
But I would have been there with her a little more.