Many of us are familiar with impostor syndrome – as you’re shown to your desk at a new job, you’re overcome by feeling like a fraud. Psychologists often attribute this to a lack of confidence, but there’s an even more basic explanation: the reason it feels like you’re the only one with an anxious internal monologue is that yours is the only one you can hear. We don’t have access to other people’s minds – so we’re forced to judge their emotional state by their behaviour. Unless they’re openly sobbing, or shaking with fear, others are always going to seem more in command than you. The punchline is that you seem exactly the same way to them.
And impostor syndrome is only one of the ways situations are distorted by our inability to get inside other people’s heads. In all sorts of other contexts, we ‘compare our inside to other people’s outside’, as the phrase goes, but that’s an unfair double standard. On the outside, most people will seem to have their lives more together than you do, or to be less blindsided by a breakup or a bereavement. But you can’t see inside them. You don’t even get to see how they behave when they’re alone – lying on the sofa paralysed by sadness, or drinking too mucof course, they wouldn’t be alone.h wine – because, if you were there,
The problem isn’t always that we’re too harsh on ourselves, though. Sometimes, we end up being too hard on others instead. For example, when we see someone acting obnoxiously in public – snapping at a shop worker, or honking their car horn impatiently – we tend to assume that they have a rude personality and act that way all the time.