What it does to the room

There's a cost you don't pay, or don't only pay, and it's the one the beam never shows you. It goes to the people in the room, and particularly to the ones you'd like to be noticed by.

Spurr and Stopa's review makes a point that's easy to skip. Self-focused attention stops you taking in external information, including the information that would contradict the fear. Turn that round. When your attention is on your own walk across the bar, it isn't on your friends at the far end, and it isn't on the person at the next table who looked up and half-smiled. You go to rooms hoping to be received well, and the beam makes sure you can't see it when you are. The smile you were looking for was there and you were looking at your shoes.

Mansell and Clark's correlations from chapter 8 had a second half. The more anxious speakers didn't only overestimate how anxious they looked. They underestimated how well they'd come across. What the room actually thought of them was better than they believed, and they didn't collect it. That's my reading of a correlation from one study at the anxious end, but the everyday version is familiar enough. You leave the party sure it went badly, and later a friend mentions that someone liked you, and it's news.

And self-focus shows, though not the way you fear. Not as the mark. A person whose attention is inward reads, from outside, as slightly absent. Not looking at people. Not quite following. Hard to catch the eye of. I'm interpreting rather than reporting, but I'd guess you've met the version of this in someone else, the person at the table who seems somewhere else, and I'd guess you didn't think they were odd. You thought they didn't want to talk to you. That's what the beam does to the room. It makes the person under it look uninterested in everyone else, when the truth is they're desperate to be interested and can't get their attention free to do it.

So the room isn't watching you, mostly, and where it is, it's kinder than you think, and where your attention is on yourself, the room gets a version of you that's looking away. The next chapter is about what the room is actually doing, and then the methods start.