Getting Out Of Your Own Head

In June 1967, Barbra Streisand gave a free concert in New York's Central Park. She was 25, already one of the most famous singers in the world, and the crowd that came to hear her is usually counted at well over 100,000 people. Somewhere in that concert, she forgot the words to some of her songs.

Years later, she described what it felt like to Newsweek: "I forgot the words in front of 125,000 people, and I wasn't cute about it or anything. I was shocked; I was terrified."

In a 2015 interview, she explained what it did to her: "That frightened me so much that, except for at fundraisers, I didn't perform in public for 27 years."

Think about that. One of the most famous singers in the world spent almost three decades avoiding the concert stage because of one night. What kept her away was the fear of it happening again in front of an audience. She didn't announce her return to live concerts until 1993, and she finally went back on New Year's Eve of that year in Las Vegas, followed by a tour in 1994.

Most of us will never sing in front of 125,000 people. But many of us know a smaller version of what she felt. You walk into a room full of people and suddenly you're watching yourself from the outside. Your hands feel strange. You're not sure what to do with your face.

You think of something to say and decide it's not good enough, and by the time you decide it is, the conversation has moved on. In a meeting, you have an idea and spend so long rehearsing how to say it that you never say it. Afterward, you lie in bed replaying the one awkward thing you said, over and over.

Some people find the only time they feel free in front of others is after a couple of drinks. They say it's because they finally get out of their heads. And underneath all of it, many people carry a deeper belief: that the room, the opportunity, the conversation, the world, somehow belongs more to other people than to them. That they need permission to take up space.

This article looks at what's actually happening when you're "in your head," why it happens, what it costs you, why a drink seems to fix it for a while, and the deeper assumption underneath it.

Then it lays out, step by step, how to get out of your head and live like the world is as much yours as anyone's. We'll follow one person, Kai, a 26-year-old who's good at his job and funny with his closest friends, but who goes quiet in meetings and at parties unless he's had a few drinks.

Psychologists have a name for it: self-focused attention. Normally, when you talk to someone, most of your attention goes outward, to what they're saying, their face, the room, the task. When you're self-focused, a big share of your attention turns inward, onto yourself: how you look, how you sound, whether you're being judged, what your body is doing.

In 1995, the psychologists David Clark and Adrian Wells described how this works in people with social anxiety, and their model has shaped how social anxiety is treated ever since.

In their account, when a socially anxious person walks into a situation they find threatening, their attention shifts inward. They start monitoring themselves in detail, and they use what they feel inside, like a racing heart or a warm face, to build a picture of how they must look to others. That picture is usually much worse than what other people actually see.

Clark and Wells also described two things people do that keep the problem going. The first is what they called safety behaviors: small things people do to protect themselves, like avoiding eye contact, rehearsing sentences in their head before saying them, gripping a drink so their hands don't shake, staying at the edge of the group, or keeping answers short so nobody can judge them.

Today, the most common safety behavior may be one Clark and Wells never wrote about in 1995: pulling out your phone. Between conversations, in a waiting room, or at the edge of a party, a phone gives you something to look at so you don't have to be looked at, and a reason not to start a conversation. That's a reasoned point built on their idea rather than a finding from a specific study, but most people will recognize it in themselves.

The second is what came to be called post-event processing: going over the conversation again afterward, focusing on everything that might have gone wrong.

You don't need to have social anxiety disorder for this to describe you. Many people do some of this, some of the time, especially around new people or people they want to impress.

Kai does all of it. At a work happy hour, he stands near the wall with a drink in his hand, thinks through every sentence before he says it, and leaves early. On the drive home, he replays a joke that didn't land.

Being self-focused would be less of a problem if it gave you accurate information, but it doesn't. Research has found two mistakes many people make about how others see them, and both point the same way: toward thinking you're doing worse than you are.

In 1998, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Medvec published a series of studies on what they called the illusion of transparency: the belief that your inner feelings are more visible to others than they really are.

In one study, people told lies to a group and then guessed how many people in the group had caught them. Half of the liars thought they'd been caught. In reality, only about a quarter were.

Other studies in the series found the same pattern with feelings like disgust and alarm. People felt their emotions were written on their faces when, to others, they mostly weren't.

In 2003, Savitsky and Gilovich applied this to public speaking. People who gave short speeches thought they looked far more nervous than the audience said they did. That nervousness you're sure everyone can see is barely visible at all.

The second mistake is about what happens after a conversation. In 2018, the researchers Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom, and Margaret Clark ran five studies in which people, most of them strangers, talked to each other and then rated how much they liked the other person and how much they thought the other person liked them.

Over and over, people underestimated how much their partner liked them and enjoyed talking with them. The researchers called it the liking gap. The gap showed up in conversations of different lengths and among first-year college students living together, where it lasted for months as they got to know each other.

It was bigger in shyer people. And the more negative thoughts people had about how the conversation went, the bigger the gap. Meanwhile, outside observers watching recordings of the same conversations could see the signs that the two people liked each other.

Margaret Clark put it this way: the people in the conversations seemed too wrapped up in their own worries about what they should say or had said to notice the signals that observers saw right away.

Put those two findings together and you can see the trap. When you're in your head, you think everyone can see how nervous you are, and you think they like you less than they actually do. Both beliefs are usually wrong, and both make you pull further inward.

If you've ever wondered why a friend can walk into a party with no trouble while you can't, part of the answer may start in infancy. Starting in the late 1970s, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan studied how babies react to new things, like a voice they hadn't heard before or a mobile moving above them.

He found that about 20 percent of four-month-old babies reacted strongly, crying and thrashing their arms and legs. He called them high reactive. Following these children for years, he found they were more likely than others to become cautious toddlers and shy teenagers.

But temperament didn't decide everything. Kagan also found that only a minority of the high-reactive babies grew up to be extremely shy, and most never developed social anxiety.

Experiences shape it too, like a teacher who mocked you in front of the class, a family that made you feel you should be seen and not heard, or one bad night in front of a crowd, the way it went for Streisand.

This matters for two reasons. First, if you're more in your head than the people around you, it isn't a character flaw. You may have started out wired to notice more. Second, the people who start out this way have the most to gain from the rest of this article. Remember that the liking gap was biggest in shy people. They're the ones most likely to think they're coming across worse than they are.

Being in your head also changes how you come across to other people, usually for the worse. The safety behaviors people use to protect themselves are a good example. They're meant to keep you from looking awkward.

But in a 2008 study, Freda McManus, Ana Sacadura, and David Clark found that when socially anxious people used safety behaviors in a conversation, their conversation partners saw the conversation as less enjoyable and saw them as less likeable.

When they dropped the safety behaviors, the people they talked to rated them better. Keeping your answers short, avoiding eye contact, and holding back can come across as being cold or uninterested, which is the opposite of what you want.

Self-focus also takes attention away from the conversation itself. If part of your mind is busy watching yourself, there's less left over to listen, notice what the other person is feeling, or think of a good response. That's part of why the people in the liking gap studies missed the signs that their partners liked them: their attention was on themselves.

And the cost doesn't end when the conversation does. Going back over a conversation afterward, looking for everything that went wrong, keeps the worry alive and makes the next situation feel even more threatening.

Kai's drive home, replaying the joke that didn't land, teaches his mind that work events are dangerous, so he'll walk into the next one even more on guard.

Over a lifetime, this adds up to ideas that never get said in meetings, people you never get to know, and opportunities you talk yourself out of. Streisand lost 27 years of concerts, and most of us lose smaller things, again and again.

Many people notice they feel more confident after a drink or two. They talk more, laugh more, and stop worrying about how they're coming across. It's worth understanding why, because it shows a lot about what being in your head is.

In the early 1980s, the psychologist Jay Hull proposed that alcohol reduces self-awareness: it makes it harder to process information about yourself, so you spend less attention watching and judging yourself.

Later, in 1990, Claude Steele and Robert Josephs described what they called alcohol myopia. Alcohol narrows your attention, so you focus on whatever is right in front of you and lose track of things further away, like long-term consequences or, in this case, how you might look to others.

In other words, alcohol narrows your attention so much that there's less room left for watching yourself. That tells you something important: much of the person who shows up after a drink, relaxed and talkative and funny, was there the whole time. A big part of what changed was where their attention was going.

The problem is that alcohol does this by dulling your mind, and it comes with real costs: worse judgment, things you regret saying, health effects, and for some people, dependence. If the only way you can be yourself around others is with a drink in your hand, you may never learn that you can be that person without one. This article isn't about drinking, and the rest of it is about getting the same shift, attention pointed outward, while your mind stays clear.

Kai had noticed this about himself. After three beers at a party, he'd tell stories, ask people questions, and make people laugh. Sober, at the same party, he'd stand by the wall. He'd always assumed the beer made him a different person. It was the same person, with his attention pointed somewhere else.

Underneath all of this, for many people, there's an assumption they've never looked at directly. It goes something like this: other people belong in this room more than I do. They have more right to speak, to take up space, to be seen, to ask for things, to go after what they want. I'm here as a guest, so I'd better not be a bother.

That assumption can make every room feel like a test. If you believe you need to earn your place, then every conversation becomes a chance to fail, and of course you watch yourself closely.

In 1927, the American writer Max Ehrmann wrote a prose poem called "Desiderata," a short list of advice for how to live. One line in it speaks directly to this:

The room you walk into, the conversation you're part of, and the opportunity in front of you are as much yours as anyone else's. The person who seems so sure of themselves across the room was born into the same world you were, with no more right to it than you have.

Thinkers have been saying versions of this for a long time. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal about how much trouble a person avoids "who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself."

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay "Self-Reliance": "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think." Both were describing a person whose attention isn't spent watching how others see them.

The liking gap research also makes something else clear. The other people in the room aren't sitting in judgment while you're on trial. Many of them are carrying the same worries you are, wondering whether they said the wrong thing and underestimating how much you like them. Everyone in the room has the same right to be there, and that includes you.

Being in your head is a problem of where your attention goes. So the way out is to move your attention, and there are several research-backed ways to do it.

Simply knowing about the illusion of transparency can help. In their 2003 study, Savitsky and Gilovich told one group of speakers, before their speeches, that people's nervousness is usually much less visible to others than they think. Those speakers felt less nervous, and observers rated their speeches as better than the speeches of people who weren't told.

At least one later attempt to repeat the study didn't find the same effect, so it may not work for everyone. But it costs nothing to remind yourself, before you walk into a room, that people can't see your nerves as clearly as you feel them, and that they probably like you more than you'll think afterward.

The most direct fix for self-focused attention is to give your attention somewhere else to go. Clark and Wells's approach to treating social anxiety includes training people to shift their attention away from themselves and onto the situation and the people around them.

Research from sports shows why this matters for performance, too. The movement scientist Gabriele Wulf has spent decades studying where people put their attention while they perform. Across many studies, people did better at physical skills when they focused on the effect of their movement, like where the ball goes, than when they focused on their own body, like what their arm is doing. Focusing on yourself while you perform tends to get in the way.

In a conversation, the best place to put your attention is the other person. Get curious about them: what they're saying, what they care about, and what you'd like to know about them. Questions are a good tool for this. In a well-known 1997 study, the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues had pairs of strangers spend about 45 minutes asking each other a set of questions that slowly became more personal.

By the end, the pairs felt much closer to each other than pairs who had only made small talk. When your attention is on the other person, there's much less of it left for watching yourself.

Remember the McManus study: the things people do to protect themselves made them less likeable, and dropping them made people rate them better.

Pick one safety behavior you use, like rehearsing every sentence, avoiding eye contact, staying at the edge of the group, or reaching for your phone, and try going without it.

It will feel risky at first, and that's the reason to do it. Without the safety behavior, you get to find out that the disaster you were protecting yourself from usually doesn't happen.

Much of the fear underneath being in your head is "What if I mess up in front of them?" In a classic 1966 study, Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman, and Joanne Floyd had people listen to a recording of a man answering quiz questions.

In some versions he was highly competent, and near the end of the recording he accidentally spilled a cup of coffee on himself. Listeners liked the highly competent man more after the spill than when there was no spill. This became known as the pratfall effect.

It has a real limit, and it's worth knowing. In the same study, when the man was presented as average rather than highly competent, the spill made people like him less. So a mistake doesn't automatically make you more likable.

But it does show that one small slip, from someone who is otherwise doing their part, is usually not the disaster it feels like. Streisand forgot the words, and her career went on to last more than half a century.

If you're going to talk to yourself before a hard moment, how you do it matters. In a series of seven studies with 585 people published in 2014, Ethan Kross and his colleagues found that people who used their own name or "you" when they thought through an upcoming stressful situation, like "Kai, you can do this," instead of "I," handled it better.

When they had to make a good first impression or give a speech, outside raters judged their performance as better, and they felt less shame and dwelled less on it afterward. Using your own name puts a little distance between you and the moment, which makes it easier to see clearly.

Your heart will probably still pound before the hard moment, no matter what you do. Most people try to calm down, but research suggests another way works better. In a 2014 study, Alison Wood Brooks had people sing the song "Don't Stop Believin'" on a karaoke game that scored how accurately they sang.

Before singing, some said out loud "I am excited," some said "I am anxious," and some said nothing. The people who said "I am excited" sang more accurately. In another of her experiments, people who said "I am excited" before giving a speech, instead of "I am calm," gave longer speeches and were rated by independent judges as more persuasive, competent, and confident.

Brooks's explanation is that anxiety and excitement feel very similar in the body: both come with a fast heartbeat and a burst of energy. It's hard to go from that state straight to calm, but it's much easier to reinterpret it as excitement, which treats the moment as an opportunity instead of a threat. So when your heart is pounding before you walk into the room, don't fight it. Tell yourself, using your own name, that you're excited.

Getting out of your head is a skill, and skills get easier with practice. In a 2022 study, Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby, and Gus Cooney asked people to talk to strangers every day for a week.

Compared with people who only observed strangers, those who had the conversations became less worried about being rejected and more confident in their ability to have a good conversation, and they still felt that way a week after the study ended.

Small, low-stakes conversations, like with a barista, a coworker you don't know well, or someone in line, build the evidence that being yourself around people is safe.

When you catch yourself going over a conversation afterward, looking for everything that went wrong, remember the liking gap: the other person probably liked you more than you think, and the more negative thoughts you dwell on, the worse your estimate gets.

Instead of replaying the worst moment, ask yourself what went fine, and then move on to something else. You don't need to settle whether it went well.

Finally, act like the room is yours too, because it is. Speak up early in a meeting before you have time to talk yourself out of it. Introduce yourself first. Ask for what you want. Each time you take up the space that's already yours, you give yourself evidence that you belong there, and the next time is a little easier.

Getting out of your head in conversations is one part of this. The bigger part is how you move through the rest of your life: the places you walk into, the things you ask for, and the opportunities you go after or leave for someone else.

Many people hold back in exactly the same way there. They don't ask for the raise, the introduction, or the favor. They don't apply for the job because they assume someone more qualified will get it. They don't walk into the event, the restaurant, or the room full of people further along than them, because it feels like it belongs to someone else.

Research shows this holding back can come from the same kind of mistake as the liking gap. In 2008, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake ran a series of studies in which people asked strangers for small favors, like filling out a questionnaire, lending a phone, or walking them to a building.

Before they started, the people asking predicted how many strangers they'd have to approach to get a certain number of yeses. They consistently guessed they'd need to ask about 50 percent more people than they actually did. In other words, people underestimated by as much as half how likely others were to say yes.

The researchers also found why. The people asking thought mostly about what it would cost the other person to say yes, like their time and effort. They paid much less attention to what it costs someone to say no to a direct request, which can feel awkward. The people asking also wrongly believed that hinting would work better than asking directly.

That pattern goes well beyond small favors. When you assume the world is closed to you, you stop asking, applying, and walking in, and so you never find out how open it actually is. Living like the world is yours too means testing that assumption on purpose:

• Ask directly. Ask for the raise, the introduction, the meeting, or the chance to lead a project, and ask clearly instead of hinting. A direct request is more likely to get a yes than you expect.
• Apply anyway. When a job, a program, or an opportunity looks like it's meant for someone more qualified, apply if you're close. Let them decide.
• Walk in. Go to the event, the place, or the room you've been telling yourself isn't for people like you, and use the tools from section 07 once you're there.
• Go first. Introduce yourself, make the call, send the message. Waiting to be invited can mean waiting for years.

Each of these gives you evidence. Every yes, and even every polite no that turns out to be no big deal, chips away at the belief that the world belongs to other people. Over time, walking into rooms and conversations as if you have every right to be there starts to feel normal.

For Kai, the conversations at work were only the start. A few months later, he did something he'd been putting off for a year: he asked his manager directly if he could lead a new project instead of hinting that he was interested.

His manager said yes. That fall, Kai went alone to an industry conference he'd always assumed was for people more senior than him, introduced himself to people, and came home with a few new contacts.

Here's how it went for Kai. Before the next work happy hour, he told himself, "Kai, they can't see how nervous you are, and they'll like you more than you think." He left the drink on the table so it wouldn't become something to hold onto, and he went in with one goal: find out what three coworkers were working on.

Asking questions gave his attention somewhere to go. He stayed for two hours instead of forty minutes. On the drive home, he started replaying an awkward pause, then stopped and listed three things that went well instead.

Over the next month, he made a point of saying something in the first ten minutes of each team meeting. It got easier each time. He still has nervous moments, but they don't decide how he acts anymore.