>>1065Nobody Matters or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowds
1. Remind yourself that you don't matter to anybody. With a few exceptions (family, close friends), nobody actually cares about you. They have no reason to be talking about you.
2. Remind yourself that nobody matters to you. With a few exceptions (family, close friends), other peoples' opinions and gossip have no impact whatsoever upon your life. Even if they are talking about you, what practical difference does it make? After you leave the room, will these people play any role whatsoever in your life?
3. Remind yourself that you blend in. If you were one of the few people in a room, people might notice you, they might even focus on you. In a crowd, you do not stand out. Even if you did stand out in some way, people would only take notice for a moment before moving on. A crowd is a very stimulating environment - you know this because you become, so to speak, oversaturated. Other people in the crowd are receiving all the same stimuli as you; they just process them differently, ignoring and repressing most inputs, including the ones that might cause their eye to be caught on you.
Obviously, this won't prevent the initial reaction right off the bat, but it should help you pick yourself up and keep going if the panic does hit. Like
>>1066 said, practice makes perfect. Get out there, push your boundary, pick yourself up when you crash, and push through for as long as you can.
As for hearing your name, that's normal. Our minds are trained from a young age to react to our names being called, to perk up and pay attention. A false positive is better than a false negative, so our minds will sometimes pick up on sounds that are similar enough.
