Dr. Aziz offers brief, practical advice for people who worry that others are angry with them. He describes his own habit of imagining others are upset, then recommends flipping that default: assume people are fine and only check in if someone signals upset (by telling you or behaving oddly). The goal is to reduce living in constant threat and to handle occasional conflicts calmly when they arise.
Are you afraid of people being mad at you? Maybe you even feel worried about that all the time. Like, oh, did I not get back to so and so? Or, oh, was that email okay, and you're fretting about maybe someone somewhere being mad at you. Here's a shift that might be useful for you. I decided at some point that I'm constantly imagining that people are upset with me. What if instead of assuming the worst and then being relieved every day, like, I made it through the day and no one was upset with me, what if I flipped it and I said, you know what? I'm just going to assume that everyone's fine, and then maybe sometime someone will let me know. And that's the key thing. If someone's upset with me, I'll know. They'll either tell me or they'll get all weird and passive aggressive. And then I can find out, like, hey, are you okay? You seem like you're upset with me, but instead of just assuming that the default setting is that somewhere, sometimes, oh, my God, all those people are upset with me. I email that person. That's probably fine. If it's not, I'll find out. And the beautiful thing is, so many days in my life has gone by where it turns out it's all fine. I don't need to live in constant threat. And then occasionally someone's upset and, you know, we talk it through, we figure it out, and you can absolutely handle that.
