So you're saying all of those thoughts are running through your head when pretty much every person looks at you?
Not really. I'm not affected by people around me when I don't know that they are there. To me, the problem is when I have someone's attention in one way or another, and become aware of it. Some times I'm totally zoned out and not even thinking about stuff around me. And to touch on what I added in my post above, I would look at people on the street and think a lot of shit. Not necessarily negative shit, some times it could just be stupid shit. Some times it could even be positive like "that's a cool jacket." He/she doesn't know what I'm thinking though, and the other way around. It's not the actual thought or the actual person, it's the fact that
someone is looking at me and thinking
something.
Also, you have to keep in mind, most people who have these issues speak about them in great detail, but right there in the heat of the moment it's like I see the person looking my way, the anxiety kicks in like an instinct, I think that I'm nervous or anxious but it's not a formulated thought like "Okay, he is looking at me, I am nervous now". It's just an uneasy feeling I get when I'm in someone's scope.
The idea here is that the anxiety is a repercussion of something else, a bigger problem. I used to be hella judgmental, so the consequence was that at some point I started wondering if not other people think the same things about me. Then I started evaluating my flaws, realized what they were, and somewhere along the way my whole belief system just collapsed on itself. After a lot of emotional confusion and finding myself, I came out a less judgmental person. Now, if someone wants to judge me, it won't affect me because I can normally respond and shut them up. This makes me feel confident about things. So the answer to my problem was to stop being an asshole to people, to try and understand those that are different to me, and to open my mind and accept more things. Now if someone thinks I'm a loser for playing Warcraft I can chalk them up to being assholes, and I fucking hate assholes! I could go on and on about this, but it was really just about balancing my own thoughts and then all the anxiety shit fell away by itself.
Edit: The last paragraph is more the philosophy I apply to my life these days. The process is incomplete. Also, even I will say something that's judgmental. Especially on the forums here. And if there's someone I don't like I'll take anything I can about them that can be twisted into being a bad thing, and use it. I didn't stop being judgmental, like I said, I just balanced things more. I'm still human though lol.
