How do you not let people judging you affect your psyche?

Hi there, glad you reached out.

Because of COVID, all of us have had reduced contact with others and are "out of practice" so to speak when it comes to social interactions. Any skill or situation that we don't have exposure to will start to dwindle. And that's totally normal and ok! It is the experience of so many of us during this time. For some of us, social anxiety was already an issue that we were struggling with or working on before the pandemic.

When it comes to being worried about people judging us, I would say that it is a two pronged approach. First, using CBT to work on reframing our thoughts. Our thoughts about how much people are thinking about us or what they are thinking about us are often very wrong. It's helpful to practice CBT to begin to cultivate a realistic view of what's happening around us without letting our brains constantly go to the worst case scenario.

On the other hand or prong, there has to be work around accepting yourself exactly as you are, for better or worse. When you come to accept yourself, it's easier to go into a setting and not worry so much about others not accepting you. Because, inevitably, there will be times that others do not accept you or judge you. That is going to happen at some point in your life and in the life of everyone in the world. We will not be able to please or satisfy everyone and not everyone is going to like you. Just as you don't like everyone. We all have free will to like and not like who we want. And sometimes we end up being wrong about others and others end up being wrong about us. But, as long as the foundation of self respect and self love is built in your life, these moments of judgment from others won't have such a big impact on us.

I would suggest that you seek counseling and work on these concepts more and/or join a support group for self esteem and/or purchase a book/workbook on self esteem and social anxiety. I wish you all the best!