You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
– Olin Miller, American author
I believe very few of us will disagree with Olin Miller. And why not? He makes sense. In our busy lives, we rarely think about other people. Most of us are busy thinking about ourselves, our past, the present, and of course, our future. We rarely set aside a lot of mental bandwidth for other people. Yet, a lot many of us worry unnecessarily about what other people think about us.
Funny, right?
Deep down, you know it’s pointless to worry about what people think about you. In fact, you often advise others not to do that, don’t you? But when it comes to yourself, is it easy to switch off that part of the brain, which goes into an overdrive worrying about what people think of you? No, it’s not.
At one level, being moderately mindful of what people think about us helps us improve ourselves as we have seen. We have discussed in the past how the fear of looking bad makes us better persons. The problem arises when we recklessly and consistently exaggerate how much and how badly others think about us and our failings. As a result, we become far more inhibited and lose control over our ability to be spontaneous and be happy, reveal studies.
An interesting thing is that many of us recognise this as a problem, but it’s a gargantuan task to control those niggling and nagging thoughts that make us want to believe other have very little to do except think about us.
An article on psychology.com says:
There’s a good reason we worry so much about what others think of us. It is because we want to be in their good books, so that we can develop and nurture our relationships with them. In other words, our worrying about what others thinks of us stems from the fear that we may be bereft of friends or intimacy.
You can see it all stems from fear. As a matter of fact, each of us plagued by that kind of fear. But the matter goes out of hand only when the fear is exaggerated. In handwriting analysis, a writer’s extreme tendency to worry too much about what others will say about him is seen in the lower case d.
When you write the letter d with loops in the stem, it indicates that the writer is extremely sensitive, and his favourite pastime is worrying about what other people will say about how he dresses, how he talks, how he walks, and so on and so forth.
Should you even feel you don’t want to worry anymore about what people think of you, just get rid of these loops and retrace the d-bar. You will feel a few pleasant changes in yourself.
Disclaimer: One element of handwriting may be analysed at a time, but always look at the entire handwriting sample before arriving at any conclusion.
