Of Course You Care What People Think

It’s not realistic to always be unbothered

“I’m so disappointed in your post. This is harmful. Do better.”

I don’t remember what I had posted about, but the words are still seared into my brain. I told myself I wasn’t going to let it get to me. I’m a therapist with a public account. I share my ideas with strangers, and some of them aren’t going to like what I have to say. I know this is part of the deal. But that logic never helps.

Within an hour I’d refreshed the comments three times. I was searching for who else might agree and what their points were. By that evening I was scrolling back through my own content, re-reading captions, checking myself. How can I do better? Could I have said it differently? It felt like I was just trying to learn and grow (and sometimes I genuinely was), but mostly I was trying to figure out how to make sure nobody ever called me harmful again, which is not possible on the internet.

For most of my life, people have told me I need thicker skin. I’m too sensitive. I care too much about what other people think of me. I’ve read probably every book on the topic, hoping I could overcome this defect if I just tried hard enough. Spoiler alert, it didn’t help.

Because it’s not just in your head. It’s in your body. Before you can even begin to reason with yourself, your heart rate spikes, your stomach drops, cortisol floods your bloodstream. By the time you’re thinking, “This shouldn’t bother me,” your nervous system has already decided that it does. You can’t think your way out of a reaction your body had before your brain caught up.

For most of human history, other people’s opinions of you determined whether you survived. Social rejection wasn’t embarrassing, it was dangerous. If your tribe cast you out, you were alone against predators, starvation, and everything else that could kill you. The people who cared deeply about what others thought of them were the ones who survived. We are literally the descendants of people who cared.

And yet we treat caring like a character flaw. We hold up people who seem unbothered on pedestals, praise them for being mentally tough, and make fun of people who are “try-hards.” The message is clear: if you’re affected by what people think of you, something went wrong in your wiring.

The real problem isn’t that you care. It’s what you do with that caring. Most of us have been taught to do the worst possible thing with it: suppress it. Stop caring. Don’t take it personally. Tune everyone out. This advice sounds empowering, but it’s asking your brain to shut off a threat detection system that has kept humans alive for thousands of years.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner studied what happens when people try to suppress a thought: the brain actually monitors for it more closely, which means you end up thinking about it more than if you’d never tried to stop. Try it for yourself. Don’t think about a white bear for the next thirty seconds.

How did it go? My guess is you failed because your brain had to think about the white bear to check whether you were thinking about it. Now replace “white bear” with “what people think of me” and you have the exact cycle most of us are trapped in — scanning every room for evidence of disapproval, replaying conversations, refreshing comments at midnight.

There’s a middle path between suppressing the thought and spiraling into it: notice the reaction without obeying it. Of course certain comments will hurt you. Your body is allowed to respond to that. But what you do next is the difference between, on one hand, spiraling, and, on the other, honoring your feelings and moving on. Not every opinion deserves the same response. There’s a big difference between listening to your partner’s concern and listening to some faceless stranger on the internet with “Live Laugh Love” in their bio. So before you go looking for proof that you should feel worse, close the app. Put the phone in another room. Walk away. Every time you go looking, you’re training your brain to need more reassurance next time.

I don’t think my skin has gotten any thicker over the past few years. I just stopped being mad at myself about it. My sensitivity isn’t broken. It’s my nervous system doing its job. The sting still comes. But now when it does, I pause. I breathe. I let the reaction pass instead of chasing it down a rabbit hole. And then I ask myself: Is this person someone whose opinion I would seek out? Would I even take advice from them? Usually, the answer is no. And that’s enough.