People don't notice you or your screwing up as much as you think they do.
The belief that people are constantly scrutinizing your behavior and the resultant paranoia and self-doubt that arises from it is called the spotlight effect.
Even if you do something embarrassing, like spilling a drink down your front or falling flat on your face, other people don't notice/criticize you as much as you think they do.
In an experiment conducted by Thomas Gilovich et al, test subjects were made to wear embarrassing T-shirts and asked to estimate how many people giggled about it behind their back (read: noticed that they had an embarrassing T-shirt on). The subjects overestimated the number of people they thought had observed their clothing- their predictions were twice as big as the actual number.
So what can you learn from this? Take a deep breath and look around. You are surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people who are more or less just like you. Nobody is paying specific attention to you, waiting for you to slip up so that they can make fun of you.
Get over it.
This also means that the positive things you do will be forgotten over time, but oh well...the spotlight doesn't shine on any of us no matter what we do.
From a Quora Post by Varsha Iyer
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