Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. Someone near you is quiet, or short, or slow to reply, or gives you a look, and before you've thought about it you know what it means. It's about you. Something you did, or something they think of you, and the rest of the evening goes on working out which. Most of the time you never find out, and by the next day they're fine, and you've spent four hours on a thing that turned out not to exist.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. Sometimes it is about you, you've been right before, and reading the people around you feels like the opposite of not caring. The second is that the reading is mostly a trick of position. You're at the centre of your own day, so you appear at the centre of everyone else's, and there's research that measures this as a bias, not a sensitivity. We read other people's minds by adjusting from our own and stopping early. We explain their behaviour by what they think of us when their day explains it better. The third is practical. When you take something personally, you write the other account before you believe your own, and if it matters, you ask. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how.

This book never says that nothing is about you. Some things are. It says that most of the readings you make are wrong in a predictable direction, that they cost you evenings and cost the people around you something too, and that there's a cheaper way to find out.

Two cautions.

If the feeling of being watched and judged is constant, across every social situation, with dread before and worry long after, and it's shaping what you'll do and where you'll go, that may be more than a habit. The NHS describes social anxiety in those terms and says it's common and treatable. See a GP, or in England refer yourself to NHS talking therapies.

And if the moods in your house really are aimed at you, with contempt in them or fear, this book isn't about that. It's about ordinary people of good will misreading each other. If you're frightened of someone you live with, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free and open day and night on 0808 2000 247.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.