Caring Too Much About What Other People Think

In my current role in special education, overseeing students getting their appropriate services and supports based on their disability, a certain situation has played out a million times.

The teacher wants to embrace very high standards of academic performance and achievement. The student is struggling with the difficulty of the teacher and the consequences of their student failing this teacher’s class on their future. The parent is unhappy and is complaining. My administration is looking to me and my team for a resolution to the situation and a plan to move forward to increase the chances of student success.

In that situation, I have had to be the person who has had to keep others happy a million times. I need to not step on the toes of the teacher and respect their autonomy in their instruction and systems. I need to make sure the student is getting adequate support. I need to make sure the parent is as happy as possible and that I acknowledge their grievances while moving forward towards a solution to their grievances.

But that is my job, and I have long been that way in my personal life for many years, as well as a marathon runner, writer, and also as a friend and husband.

I’m someone who cares way too much about what other people think. Other people’s opinions factor way too much into my own decision-making. Someone else not liking me or an action I take can single-handedly change some of my actions or determine the way my day is going to go. I can be a bit of a people pleaser, and have been for some time (and I am working on that). Sometimes, the people I am trying to please aren’t people who have any sort of supervisory power over me, like a boss. In my personal life, my friends and family’s opinions can matter a bit too much in my endeavor to keep everyone happy.

Part of being a people pleaser comes from my upbringing as an Asian American. It was what I saw my parents do at parties as a form of maintaining their reputation, but like me, they also just wanted all their friends to like and respect them. Culturally, their culture and part of the culture I grew up with prioritizes maintaining that harmoniousness as well, and not individuality. So much of the culture can be putting the needs of others above your own, which does conflict with the internal validation that individuality prizes.

But I can attribute this as much to culture and upbringing as much as I want. Part of it is just who I am, and I can trace the origins of caring too much about what other people think to certain phenomena from a young age.

In elementary school, I did not care at all what other people thought about me. This only changed in the third grade when I had a crush on a classmate for the first time, and then in the fifth grade when I had a crush on a different classmate and started caring more about being a nice person. But at that age, I largely always yearned to impress others, to be the smartest person in the room, to prove that I was better than other people, and sometimes, I was not the best or most likable person.

This is very normal child behavior, but the need for external validation really accelerated in middle school. I started to be very self-conscious in the eighth grade because my stomach started making very strange noises in the middle of class, even when I wasn’t hungry. It sounds stupid, but I started to be conscious of my breathing, and I started to get very nervous about whether I was breathing too loudly in class and whether everyone could hear it.

Because I was nervous about it, it would manifest into a self-fulfilling prophecy where I would have a panic attack in class because I worried I would breathe too loudly and everyone would judge me. I knew this was happening because suddenly, three other classmates around me would start breathing more loudly as well. It may have been and most likely was in my head for the most part, but that wasn’t how it felt at the time.

It was during this time that social approval started to become incredibly important to me. That changed in middle school when I actually cared about them liking me, and I would argue today that the latter is more important than the former.

Social anxiety, according to therapist Jenny Maenpaa, can manifest in someone constantly assuming that others do not like them, through often ruminating on what others say, through hiding an authentic self, a racing heart, shallow breathing, and a lack of concentration during social interactions.

I recognize what it was at the time, but I just didn’t know what to do about it. Finding out what social anxiety was validated what I was going through — there was a name for this phenomenon and other people went through it, too. I did my best to avoid situations when this anxiety could exacerbate, like quiet classrooms.

At 13 years old, I looked into whether I had any major gastrointestinal issues like intermittent bowel syndrome (IBS) or whether I had a deviated septum that was causing my loud breathing. I worried about whether there were bad odors coming from these noises. These thoughts and fears would persist for the next few years and even into early college, but just fade in intensity.

Eventually, the mental framework that helped me overcome this social anxiety was “so what?” So what if my stomach was making loud noises? So what if I was breathing loudly? Was it really that much of a disruption to other people’s days that they couldn’t concentrate? And even if it was, what could I even do about it? I started caring less and less over time, and maybe just hormones and puberty had something to do with it.

But something interesting happened — the less I cared, the less I thought about my breathing or stomach noises, the less they happened. I’ve been teaching in high school and middle school for the last six years. I have learned, largely, that many teenagers often say exactly what’s on their mind, and will not be as sympathetic as teachers if they think someone has bad body odor or hygiene, per se. It wasn’t IBS or a deviated septum — it turns out most of it was just in my head.

Again, it took years to really break out of this cycle. A lot of it did come from caring too much about what others thought, almost to an abnormal extent. These days, a ton of people I know, including myself, go to therapy. But 15 years ago, I knew absolutely no one who had a therapist, or at least no one who told others they were in therapy. Stigma against seeking treatment for mental health was much higher than it is now. I knew no one who took any medication.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which develops coping mechanisms for challenging and managing difficult emotions, was something I thought seemed like it could be my magic bullet online. But it seemed like almost a foreign concept at the time, not like the universally popular treatment it is now. I may have mentioned it once or twice to my parents, both of whom had no clue what it was and who may not have realized anxiety is a thing. I don’t blame them for the lack of understanding — they’ve come a long way now, and it was a different time.

If I could do it differently, I would have gotten some help — maybe it could have just been strategies to relax when I was panicking and caring too much about what others think. But I can’t do it differently, and looking back, I do wish I could internalize the message of “so what?” and not care as much what other people in the room thought a bit sooner.

Since that time period, that need for external validation and approvalhad manifested in other parts of my life in a less severe away. I rely on what people think of me as a runner, rely on what people think of me as a teacher, as a law student.

In my personal life, this manifests in any event I host, especially the ones that are supposed to celebrate me. At my bachelor party, I really worried about whether the people at my party, especially the ones who came from very different backgrounds and had never met each other, got along. This was my biggest worry for two straight days.

At my wedding, I worked the room of over 200 people over and over again to see if everyone was having a good time, over and over again. Recently, I graduated from law school, and at my graduation party, I did the same thing. Any party at my house is one where I host as well as I can to make sure everyone has had enough to eat and drink.

Yes, that’s correct. Even in the most celebratory and important milestones of my life, my biggest concern was that everyone in the room was happy. I’m not saying it should have been, but that’s just how I am. If this were a group of strangers I knew I’d never see again, maybe I wouldn’t feel that way. But these were all friends and family that had supported me somewhere along the way, to which I felt, to some degree, indebted. My wife often reminds me that some other people won’t always give the same effort into friendships or relationships as I do, and sometimes, from an outsider looking in, my commitment to the happiness of others isn’t always reciprocated.

The fact that I am so sensitive to feedback means I tend to take it pretty well and am very receptive to various ways I can improve myself as a person and professional. That has a lot of value, to some degree. It helps me read the room and know the right thing to say and when to say it and when not to say anything. When I get passionate about a certain topic or fixated on something I’m interested in, this need can go out the window. But building the skill of working the room and being able and trying very hard to keep everyone happy has been a good professional asset, but perhaps not the best personal one.

Now, however, I am working on changing to rely more on internal validation rather than external validation.

There are times when I need to make a decision that absolutely no one besides myself approves of. This happened when I started teaching. While a lot of my friends in college and mentors thought going to teach in Baltimore and then teaching special education was noble, my family thought it was a waste of my education and not prestigious enough of a profession. Everyone thought I should be a doctor in my family, and a lot of my friends did too, but I decided to be a teacher and now a lawyer instead. There was a time when this still was not good enough for my family.

This was a reminder that when my whole life and day to day experience can get consumed by a major decisions, I can start to take charge and tune out what others think as just noise.

Over the years, I started to learn the reason I care too much about what other people think is that I didn’t value what I thought. I’m sure a lot of people think the same way, but the way I talk to myself in my head is a way I would never talk to others. I tell myself things expletive-laden refrains questioning my toughness and masculinity, all the time. It is the type of internal dialogue that motivates me to extreme effort and high levels of achievement, that helps me succeed in a lot of high-stress situations, but that becomes hard to turn off and sometimes unhealthy. I think that kind of mindset would have served me well if I joined the military, but there is a time to push powering through and being tougher, and a time to relax and give grace.

I struggle a lot with the latter. Because I could be so cruel to myself, so critical of my every step, and my worst enemy in almost every part of my life, I had to rely on that external validation. Part of that, yes, comes from an upbringing where sometimes it felt like nothing I did was ever good enough, and part of that was also who I was, the standards that I held myself to, demanding perfection or nothing when it came to accomplishing my goals. A lot of that is, yes, a determination to never blame other people for my problems and always think of ways I can solve the situation and come out on the other side.

Part of this might just be growing up as a man in America, being on sports teams, where this type of thinking wasn’t necessarily wasn’t always encouraged by teachers or coaches, but was at times encouraged by peers. And part of it might just be who I’ve always been as someone with ADHD who sometimes is more engaged in the thrill of a super high-stakes, high-pressure situation, like a looming deadline, rather than someone who does well with times of rest or downtime.

But I am building a healthier mindset. I recognize what sets me apart from the people around me — my effort. Even if I do not get the desired outcome, I always go down swinging and try as hard as I can to get the goal. I have focused a lot more on that effort lately and celebrated that part of myself as a way to reinforce internal rather than external validation. I have celebrated it every day if I gave the day my best effort. If I did everything I could in accordance with my faith and resolved to do better in the ways I fell short, then that’s good enough for the day, too.

For example, in my job, if I did everything I could for a student and they are still not successful, if I called the parent every week, if I pushed the student’s teachers and other staff that work with the students to help the student too, and they still do not come to school, then I did everything I could and need to recognize it was just out of my control. If a parent is still unhappy with my team after efforts where we went beyond where we were obligated to go, I have learned to let that go and recognize I tried and did what I could for their child, and will continue to do so.

Personally, as a runner, I sometimes draw feedback from other runners in my local community regarding my training and what I should do as a runner. I might solicit some feedback that I need to run more. I have some feedback that I need to run less. I might need to do more speed workouts, or do my easy runs faster. The most common point of feedback is my easy runs can sometimes be too slow.

This was more common when I was on teams, but now that I run recreationally for myself, I can take some of this feedback, choose what I want to accept, and discard the rest. Ultimately, since I determine my own training plan and what I want to do as a runner, I follow my own plan and then live and die by the consequences, because complete autonomy and freedom in something as important as my running is very important to me.

As a writer, I get feedback all the time on ways my writing could be better — my opinion is wrong and horrible, I ramble too much and too long, and I could have structured some paragraphs or sentences to be clearer. I acknowledge my critics usually have a point, and I will read and might respond thoughtfully to the first few comments and take the feedback to heart, but eventually, I will stop checking what other people say and focus on just doing better in my next writing. If I keep working hard and keep trying to improve, that’s all I can do.

I am still working on this internal validation in my personal life. It doesn’t necessarily come with personal decisions — I chose to be a teacher, and recently, I chose to be a lawyer. However, I can do better still by not obsessing over whether everyone in the room is happy and having a good time at a social event, particularly one that I’m hosting. Sometimes, I just need to worry about whether I’m happy and having a good time and enjoying myself.

There is a balance — I don’t think it’s the healthiest to swing in the opposite direction, either, of not caring what others think at all. But there is a middle ground I am looking for. I will, of course, keep every interaction as kind and polite as possible, and some external validation and approval is nice, too. But true validation has to come from within