Dr. Aziz explains self-consciousness as fear you're doing it wrong and others will judge you. His fix: deliberately do something weird in public, like walk in slow motion, to prove people don't actually care. The obsessive self-monitoring stops once you test it.
Self consciousness is that awful feeling where you're super self aware, but in kind of a negative policing way, like, I'm doing it wrong, Am I doing it right? There's a lot of anxiety and fear there. And that's the key to liberate yourself from self consciousness is the fear is I'm doing it wrong and therefore people aren't going to like me. And the key to shifting this is to actually realize that you can do things weird or wrong and it's okay. Plus the more you focus and obsess on that, the more you get stuck, stilted and absorbed and become super self obsessed. So how do we break this? Go to a busy area, a street corner, a sidewalk with a lot of people on it, and do something that is weird on purpose. I was talking about this with a client the other day. He was just sort of doing like a slow motion walk down the sidewalk. And if you hear that and you're like, I'll never do that. That's part of the problem, man, because you're afraid to just even test that boundary. Because when you do stuff like that, you realize nobody cares and it breaks the obsession.
