"...the reason it feels like you're the only one with an anxious internal monologue is that yours is the only one you can hear. We don't have access to other people's minds - so we're forced to judge their emotional state by their behaviour."

When I read this in Psychologies Magazine, it honestly blew my mind. I do often look at people and think that they have their life together; they look confident, they seem like they don't care what people think. The key words in that are "look" and "seem" - looking or seeming, and actually how you feel are two completely different things. To others, I may look confident and sure of myself on the outside, but I'm not afraid to admit that on many an occasion I have gone home and cried because someone's tiny comment made my mind go into overdrive.

Social media is also a big cause of this judgement and assumption - we see someone's seemingly "perfect" life on Instagram with their happy smiles, beautiful clothes in wonderful locations. We yearn for a life like that, when in reality, every picture is orchestrated, and most of these people post their highlight reel to give out a positive vibe. Although it's nice to air your worries and thoughts sometimes on social media, you don't want your feed to be constantly filled with negativity, as it will make you feel even worse.

Your friends, influencers and celebrities online may look as though they lead the "ideal" life, but I would bet anything that they also have their insecurities, worries and fears as much as you and I. You just can't judge it because you don't have access to their minds and that's something you will NEVER have...unless sometime in the future we invent some crazy mind reading machine 🤷‍♀️but for now, we don't, haha! But, you know what I mean!

Even when people are telling us information about themselves, we have no idea if they're withholding anything else or if they have any other deeper feelings about any given subject because you do exactly the same with your own thoughts. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment, and take a second to reflect that not everything is as it looks on the outside. Don't judge someone so harshly for having a short temper, for example, when you have no idea what life is like for them at the moment and how they're dealing with it.

We just all need to be a little more kinder to one another and a little bit more sympathetic to the fact that life can be shit sometimes, and that's okay. We can work through it together.