Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

For example, a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley discovered that when we perform a task in front of others, we believe we’re being judged far more harshly than we are. We also think people take single moments of our lives and make sweeping generalizations. So let’s say we misspeak one line of an hour-long presentation. We afterward tend to believe that everyone in the crowd is not only mentally rerunning our mess-up over and over (just as we are!) but also thinking that we’re a terrible public speaker across the board. And because they think we’re a terrible public speaker, we assume they must also think we’re terrible at everything else in life. We’re laughably wrong. The scientists found that most people aren’t all that judgmental and quickly forget single errors. But because we overblow the implications of every social move we make—because we believe that everyone cares so deeply about our every public action—it causes us anxiety and stress. The scientists call this the “overblown implications effect.” It’s a wing of the “spotlight effect,” which is how we overestimate how much other people think of us. It’s as if we believe we were living in our own prime-time television show—The [Insert Your Name] Show—with the spotlight always on us. But the reality is this: we’re usually too blinded by our spotlight to stare at anyone else’s. There’s also what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” It’s how we attribute other peopl...