Why You Feel Like You’re Being Judged All The Time

Have you ever quit social media? I have. Where I'm gonna uninstall the apps, you know, make a big deal of it. I'm getting off the sauce. And then you're, you know, next day you're out on a hike with your friends or family and it's a beautiful moment. You take a picture of it and you're like, you know, maybe I'll just post this. You know, I'll reinstall the app just to share this. And then what happens? Well, then the next hour, the next day, you have this impulse to grab your phone and check the photo, not in your photo reel, but on the site that you posted it. And what are you looking at? Are you actually looking at the photo? No, you're looking at what's beneath the photo. You're looking at your engagement. Did I get likes? Did I get a response? Did I get hearts? Did I get comments? What do people say? And then we have this very specific response in your body, in your emotions. That's like if you get a certain number of responses, whatever your criteria is for enough, you're like, yeah, good. And then if you don't hit that metric, you know, low engagement, no responses. Meh. 'Ugh, I'm a loser. Nobody likes me,' right? And that— we just take that as normal, and we think that that's just how the world works now. And but actually, there's something that's being reinforced constantly in you and me and all of us. Even if you've uninstalled a lot of these apps, even if you're not like a content creator putting your stuff out there all the time, just by engaging in this world that we're in, that has installed a dangerous equation into the subconscious part of your mind that creates a lot of unease, anxiety, performance anxiety, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, social anxiety, niceness, people pleasing, and overall an insecurity and a difficulty just being your most relaxed, authentic, confident self around other people. And these are the challenges that I've been helping people with for almost 2 decades. I'm Dr. Aziz, by the way. I'm a— my background is in clinical psychology, and I've been working and teaching in this field of confidence for the last 12, 15 years since after doing many years of clinical work. And I realized that, you know, across all these domains that I'm helping people with, there's actually a singular pattern underneath all of it. Took me a lot of years to see that. And what's underneath, whether it's a social anxiety or a person who's afraid to go say the thing that they really want to say, or the person who feels like they're not good enough at work all the time in the background. And I give you dozens of examples of amazing professional doctors, lawyers, business owners, therapists, founders, executives. They're skilled, they're effective at their work, and they live with a chronic sense of, "I'm not there yet, I'm not enough yet." Or people who are intelligent and capable and interesting and attractive be like, "Ugh, no one's gonna wanna be with me, and I can't have friends or I can't have a partner." And they think like, "Oh, there's just something wrong with me," right? 'Cause they feel that insecurity and then they're like, "Ugh, this is really bad and shameful and embarrassing. I have this personal problem. I'm too weak, I'm too insecure. Maybe I lack confidence." And that's what it feels like. But what they don't realize is that there's certain equations in their brain that have been installed by the culture that they grew up in, that we live in now, that have set us up for this. And it's not your fault, and it is something that you can change. But if you don't see all this, if you don't see the ocean that we're swimming in, it becomes very hard to change it because you think it's all just some problem with me, right? But so let me, let me share what's happening. Let's zoom out for a minute and what I call the approval economy, right? And then we'll explain the trap that we're all in. So the approval economy looks like this, and it started long before social media. But it's only intensified. But if we go way back, back to when I was a kid, back in the day with the, the horse and buggy, right? No, but I was a kid in the '80s, and, you know, at that point, approval was local, right? You know, does this person like me or not? That's how it was through most of history. People have always wanted approval and always been uncomfortable with disapproval, right? So that's nothing new there. But it was kind of like, look, you'd be approved of or disapproved of at work, with your family, with people at church in your community, people you're close to. And in terms of visible, measurable approval, that was for other people. That was like celebrities, right? Like, I remember I'd go to the supermarket and I'd look at the magazine stand and see one of those tabloids and be like, Michael Jackson's great. And then the next week it's like, Michael Jackson's awful. And everyone's like, you know, eating popcorn and we love the drama of it, exalting in the tearing of him down. But that's separate from me. And then as media started to flood into our lives more and more, right? Really since the '70s, '60s, '70s, but it intensified more in the '80s and then the '90s. And so even again, this is before heavy internet days, right? But there's already a lot on TV, a lot of messages that are coming our way. And I remember a distinct moment where I was sitting in a Supercuts and I was about 11 or 12, maybe 13 years old, and I was waiting around. I picked up a magazine, it was like an Us Weekly. If you're not familiar with that, it's like a kind of a trashy celebrity thing. And I've never read a magazine like that, but I'm sitting at Super Cuts, wait for my haircut, and then I'm like, well, I'll just pick this thing up. And I start flipping through it and I flip to an open page and there's an ad and it's got just a strip. It's almost like, it looks like the paper has been torn, but that's just part of the design of the ad. And so there's text above, text below, and just this where the paper strip is torn away, you see just a woman's eyes and she's got these dark circles around her eyes. And right above the image it said, are you tired of those raccoon eyes? And then down below is like whatever they're selling, right? Like our cream, you put this on your face and it'll hide those horrible gross circles around your eyes. And I remember it like shocked me because I was like, oh, wait a minute. And my dad is from Pakistan, and people from India, Pakistan, it's common to have pigmentation around the eyes where it's slightly darker around your eyes. It's just part of the way the human animal looks in a huge part of the world. And I just had this moment where I was like, oh my God. And I don't think I verbally thought this to myself, but the conclusion was very clear: I'm ugly, I'm undesirable, I am unworthy of love and connection. And I was, you know, This is like a young, early teen starting to discover like, am I attractive to the ladies or not? Right? And the answer was no, no, you're not. Now go get your haircut. Right? And so I share that example because it's only been intensifying since then. Then the internet came out. And then when we hit social media, we hit YouTube, right? Everyone could put everything on Facebook, on YouTube, and you could share it. And then everything is measured. Thumbs up, approval, likes. Originally on YouTube, you could give something a thumbs down. I think they took that out, right? So thumbs up, yes. Comments: I like it, I don't like it, you're great, you're dumb, I disagree with you. There could be 1,000 different responses and it's all visible and it's all tracked. So even if you're not a heavy content creator, you've existed in this world and you see everything is reviewed and rated, right? Audiobooks, Amazon products, everything. I'm just waiting for a dating site where people can give you reviews based upon the date that they were on. Oh, he's a 3.8. Meh, I don't know. I'm gonna wait for a 4.7, right? And there's a guy who's got the 5-star reviews, but he's only got 1 review and you're like, "Meh, your friend probably gave that to you," right? So it's only a matter of time, I'm sure, until the approval economy gets there. And that's why I call it the approval economy is because we realize that your value, the currency of our world has become approval. And again, this doesn't mean it's just on social media. You could have uninstalled everything at this point, but maybe listening to me now, so you got something here, but it doesn't matter. It's already in our consciousness. And what it's done is it's taken one specific equation and amplified it to a place that makes us very vulnerable and unfortunately more insecure than any other time in history, which is that approval doesn't just equal approval. Approval equals worth as a person, as a human, right? That's why when you post that image and you don't get that many responses, you don't just be like, "Oh, no one saw that photo." You feel a deflation inside, a deflating of your sense of self-worth. That's really intense. Moment to think about that. Let me tell you a story. This is crazy. Just the other day, my kids were playing a little basketball with each other, and it's this little hoop in our house that they can dunk on, right, with a foam ball. And one of them's like, "Oh, let's take a video of you dunking on it." And the other is like, "Yeah." And it gets no views, and they both crack up. "Hahaha, a video getting no views. That's so pathetic," right? And so in their mind, they're 10 and 12 years old, by the way, and they know that if a video has no views, it has no value. If it has less views, it has less value. And they'll say all the time, oh, this person, this person has a million subscribers, this video's got a billion views, or whatever. And in their understanding, that means it's a really amazing person, it's a really amazing book, it's a really amazing video. Look at all those reviews, it's amazing. And that means that we, even though we know on some level, like, I'm a complete human, I have strengths and weaknesses, I have a soul, I am, I'm all these different parts, people could love me in all these ways, Sure, but zing, right top of mind, we've plugged into the approval economy where it's like, yeah, if they disapprove of me, my worth is in the toilet. And this is what people are living in. We're swimming in it. And that gets us caught into the approval trap, which means I go through my day, whether I'm not even on social media, I go to work, I go to a date, I go to a social gathering, whatever it is. And now I am not there to— well, I'm there to talk to people, I'm there to connect, I'm there to share my ideas or do my work ostensibly. But what I'm kind of really there to do, or at least my higher priority, is to make sure that I maintain approval. I get approval, but that's actually secondary to avoiding disapproval, right? Because as humans, we always want to avoid the threat more than we want to go for the goodies. So pretty much everyone I work with is not like, you know, doing their song and dance, tap dance, and hey everybody, I'm so great, right? Look at me. No, they're more like, don't look at me, don't eff this up, just get through this, don't make any mistakes, right? I want to avoid disapproval. And so we go through our day, our week, our lives lives, being someone other than who we are, holding ourselves back, hiding who we really are, softening what we really want to say, avoiding the conversation we really want to have, not asking for things, not having needs, not having a boundary, not saying no, not being direct, not just sharing freely because this is a fun or interesting thing that I want to share with you. But everything is evaluated just like in the approval economy. We're running it on ourselves. We grew up in that. We think in those terms. We live those terms? Everything. We're living under chronic evaluation, and it seems like it's coming from the outside, but the biggest enforcer of it is self-evaluation. We're chronically policing ourselves. Am I okay? Is this enough? Is this going to get approval? Is this going to get disapproval? And that's why before you go give something, a talk, a sharing, or whatever, it's hyper-focused. It's like it gets turned up to the nth degree, right? Like, is this going to be good? Oh my God, why do I get disapproval? Why do I get disapproval? Oh my Oh my God, we could be anxious for weeks ahead of time or after a situation, a job interview, a date, something. There's that chronic replay like, oh God, oh, I should have said this, or why didn't I say that, or oh, that was so stupid. We're scanning for all the moments where there could be disapproval and we're feeling bad, like our worth is in threat. And so it becomes impossible to be your authentic, confident self when you're plugged into this approval economy. So I'm so curious how this is landing for you. And if what I found is that This approval economy installs a certain pattern in all of us, and there's really only 4 ways that we respond to it, 4 ways that we try to avoid disapproval and make sure we keep approval. And I call them your approval type. So if you want to find out your specific approval type, core details about it, we have a whole deep dive report you can get about your type and what's going on, where it comes from, and how to change it. It also has this amazing predictive power of if you keep running this pattern, what your work life is going to look like, what your social life is going to look like, what your dating life is life is going to look like, your relationships. So you want to find all that out and more, go to www.draziz.com, D-R-A-Z-I-Z dot com. The link is in the description down below, and you can take that— takes about 2 minutes, a short quiz— and you can find this out. You can discover this for yourself. And keep staying with me because I'm gonna be sharing more about this, how to break these patterns, how to free this, how to reclaim a core sense of worth that's not based upon other people's approval or disapproval, so you can be freely, fully yourself in world. And until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.