Sometimes I feel watched, but why?

It is possible that, throughout your life, you have felt watched more than once. For example, when you walk alone down the street, without paying much attention to your surroundings, lulled by your intimate thoughts and listening to the hypnotic sound of your steps and suddenly, carried away by a sudden intuition, you turn your head and see someone who is standing next to you. staring.

How did you know there was someone watching you? Do you have powers? Is there a scientific explanation for that “intuition” that made you turn around and surprise the other person?

The fact of feeling observed happens frequently and, depending on the causes and parameters with which this sensation manifests itself, it can be something normal or a psychopathological symptom. To delve deeper into this, we will approach the phenomenon from different perspectives, all of them important when it comes to explaining something that we have all experienced at some point.

An adaptive function

Normally, every psychological phenomenon that the nervous system is capable of making us experience has come to us through evolution. As a good product of natural selection, it will have an adaptive function, this is beneficial for us or for our genes, either because it increases our probability of surviving or because it helps us procreate.

From the point of view of survival, feeling observed or rather, Knowing when someone has their gaze on us allows us to better evaluate threats. Indeed, realizing that we are being watched can save us from many dangers, because that look might not portend good intentions and, therefore, we would do well to prepare to flee or fight.

Looking into the eyes is a behavior that offers us a lot of information about our fellow human beings. The gaze reveals emotions, thoughts, attitudes, motivations… Not in vain, the eye area is the one that attracts the most attention of newborn babies, once they learn to recognize the human face. Nature has programmed us from a very young age to look for each other’s eyes.

For its part, from the reproductive point of view, many glances dedicated to our fellow human beings are motivated by a healthy sexual interest. The fact of being able to know who looks at us with desire informs us of possible sexual partners and in turn, allows us to evaluate them. If the interest is mutual, being able to detect that furtive glance makes our survival as a species more likely.

In short, there is no doubt that looks are a sign of interest, for better or worse. Therefore, it is not surprising that the brain has generated psychological mechanisms to help us detect them.

A question of perception

We do not have the capacity to consciously process everything that comes to us through our senses. It is evident that We neither can nor are we aware of everything we perceive. In fact, only a small part of the set of stimuli that we perceive enters our consciousness and, subsequently, only a small part of the content of consciousness becomes relevant enough to be stored in memory.

Therefore, Most of what we perceive we do unconsciously. For example, when we are at a party, we may be listening to a multitude of simultaneous conversations, but our attention will filter all that information and only what is important will reach our consciousness, such as hearing our name in someone’s mouth. This phenomenon is known as “the cocktail party effect.”

In the same way, our visual field collects a lot of information that we are not aware of. In reality, only We consciously attend to a very small part of everything we see. This means that, without us knowing it, the brain can pick up that someone is looking at us and then force us to focus our attention on that person. It will seem that we have guessed that he was looking at us, but in reality we had realized subliminally.

The word subliminal It refers to that which remains below the threshold of consciousness. Subliminal signals can sometimes be very subtle.

Our non-conscious attention can detect certain body movements, suspicious attitudes, proxemic signals, gestural information, unexpected sounds and other stimuli that can awaken our alert and make us look towards the person who is probably observing us. Although it is physically impossible for us to have seen his eyes, we have processed other types of relevant information.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

The phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when we think that something is going to happen and, by the mere fact of thinking about it, it ends up happening. Again, this has nothing to do with magic. What happens is that, By thinking that something is going to happen, we begin to act in a way that makes it more likely that said event will end up happening.

For example, if we are convinced that an official is going to serve us in an unfriendly manner from his window and we approach it fearfully or with bad manners, we will make it more likely that the official will actually respond to us as we thought would happen. In the same way, if we think that others have good intentions, our smile will make it more likely that they will treat us better, just as we anticipated they would.

If a person walking in front of us suddenly turns around abruptly to critically evaluate us, it is very likely to cause us to stare into their eyes. This person may think that she has caught us “watching” her, and she may feel harassed, when In fact, it was his own defensive movements that caught our attention. With this example, we can see that feeling watched does not always go hand in hand with a real threat.

Paranoidism: does it apply in all cases?

At any given moment, we can all act in ways paranoid Most likely, when we feel small and weak. The most psychologically healthy person in the world can feel watched if they are alone, at night, in the middle of an unknown forest.

However, There are psychopathologies and personalities that are more prone to paranoid thinking and they live it continuously, which causes them significant discomfort and adaptation problems in different areas of life.

The essential characteristic of paranoidism is distrust, a feeling that forces us to always be alert. A person with paranoid thinking may have felt repeatedly attacked in their past, usually in their childhood and by people in their close environment, that is, precisely by those people they should trust, so that they have adopted distrust as a shield. to relate to the world.

Avoidant, paranoid, antisocial and narcissistic personalities tend to distrust others excessively and always appear alert. They overestimate the threats around them, due to a deep feeling of weakness, deeply rooted within them, of which they are often not even aware. They are egocentric, defensive personalities and, therefore, tend to feel observed.

For its part, paranoid schizophrenia is characterized, among other symptoms, by distrusting the intentions of others to the point of generating delusions of persecution.

There are also other psychotic states, such as those induced by substances or those derived from depression, which can make us believe that others are watching us.

People who suffer from any of these psychopathologies feel more observed, generating in them the feeling of being different or of being judged. Besides, By acting strangely, they can attract the attention of others to themselves, committing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Any human being can feel observed on many occasions throughout their life, the key to determining whether that is something healthy or not is knowing how to discern beyond the fact as such.

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