English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

My first encounter with this quote, or at least some permutation of it, was in 2004 while facilitating a social anxiety disorder (SAD) group at the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. One of my clients piped up in the session and said she’d heard a “great quote” that really fit with her experience. It certainly seemed to eloquently capture what the group had been learning during a series of within-session behavioural experiments. My client attributed the quote to the American television psychologist Dr Phil McGraw. A few years later I opened a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant with the same quote. Given that Confucius lived from 551-479 BC, I had assumed that Dr Phil had learned this phrase from him rather than the other way around. However, a quick internet search revealed that a jokesmith named Olin Miller (1937) may have been the true source. Regardless of its origin, the quote beautifully captures the fact that people with SAD overestimate the probability and cost of others’ having opinions about them. In truth, people seldom spend inordinate amounts of time scrutinising others, and if they do it seldom matters. When clients learn this in therapy I sometimes read into their (ambiguous) facial expressions that it is at once both thrilling that they no longer need to be preoccupied by others’ opinions, and yet strangely disappointing that others are generally too caught up in their own lives to care much about them.

Innovations in our Understanding of the Development, Maintenance, and Treatment of Social Anxiety: Introduction to the Special Issue