This Should Be Your New Life Motto

This phrase is one of the most important things that I tell myself every day:

What other people think about you is none of your business.

Read it one more time. Let it sink in a little bit.

Sound a little harsh? Yep, it’s meant to. Let me tell you why, and what it can mean for you if you adopt this saying as part of your everyday thinking.

Worrying what other people think about you is, at the simplest, a waste of your time. It probably happens a lot though, and of course you can’t really help it when you don’t know any better. But what if there was a way to make this not bother you anymore? And you could go about your business without ever worrying again?

Good news: there is. And it’s that little phrase up there.

Disclaimer: I’m not a mental health professional. But I do know a lot about living life and having a brain, and I’ve come up with a lot of ways to navigate the hard bits. That phrase, though it wasn’t my original thought, was something I was able to harness after hearing it from an Instagram influencer on a livestream. Probably not what was meant to happen with the small utterance, but I knew it was something I could run with, and so I did.

So think about it: imagine you’re at the grocery store. Instead of focusing your energy, say, on the ingredients that you need to pick up, you’re panicking that the woman at the end of the aisle is judging your colored hair. Because you’re so worried about that, you forget to grab a couple of the ingredients on your list, and you don’t realize it until you get home and you try to cook the dish.

Those thoughts at the grocery store clouded your mind so much that they affected you hours later, and even worse is that you don’t even know if that woman was thinking about you at all. If she for some reason was, how would that have affected your shopping list?

Spoiler alert, it wouldn’t affect them at all.

“Mind reading” is a pretty standard CBT skill that you’d learn from just about any therapist; essentially, it’s a way to check your thoughts when you find your mind wandering to a place where you are certain that you know what other people are thinking about you.

The reality is, other people are not only not thinking negative things about you, they’re actually probably not thinking about you at all. They’re thinking about themselves, just like you are.

But what about a different scenario, when you do know what they’re thinking, and it isn’t making you feel good? Here’s where the motto really comes in handy.

Say you start chatting with someone on social media, and the chatting is going so well that you ask the person to go on a date with you somewhere out in the real world. And then they say no.

You might find yourself spiraling down a hole of thoughts, trying to figure out why they don’t like you, what you did wrong, what they even really think about you, and so on and so on.

But that’s none of your business.

Just like that woman in the grocery store aisle has no bearing on the food you’re picking up from your list, that friend you wanted to take on a date has no bearing on who you are as a person. Whether they think you’re good or bad is not your concern, because you know whether you’re good or bad, and you prove what you know through your actions.

It’s an extremely liberating feeling once you’re able to adopt this. We’re so steeped in a call-out culture that sometimes we forget to work on our own ways of thinking. Think about this motto as a call-in to understand yourself better and the way you interact with others in the world.