If you spend a lot of energy worrying about what people think of you, monitoring how you come across, replaying interactions for signs of disapproval, bracing against imagined judgment, you are carrying a heavy and largely unnecessary weight. It is exhausting, and it rests on an assumption that turns out to be mostly false. Here is how to set it down.
Start with the false assumption, because dismantling it lifts a lot of the weight at once. You assume other people are watching you closely and forming detailed judgments. They are not. They are mostly thinking about themselves. In the research that named the spotlight effect, people consistently overestimated how much their appearance and actions were noticed by others, guessing that far more people registered them than actually did. Everyone is standing in their own spotlight, preoccupied with their own performance, not tracking yours.
This is genuinely freeing once it lands. The audience you are performing for so anxiously is barely watching. The thing you said that you have been cringing over was, for almost everyone else, unnoticed or forgotten within minutes, because they moved on to their own concerns immediately, as everyone always does. You are, for the most part, a minor character in other people's stories, which sounds bleak for two seconds and then becomes a relief, because it means the constant self-monitoring was never necessary.
Much of the worry also runs on mind reading, assuming you know that others are judging you negatively. But you have no actual access to anyone's mind, and the judgments you imagine are generated by your own anxiety, which reliably assumes the worst. As an overview from the NCBI Bookshelf describes, these interpretations drive your distress, and they can be caught and questioned rather than obeyed. When you catch yourself certain that someone is judging you, ask how you actually know, and the honest answer is usually that you do not.
The deeper move is to accept that you cannot control what others think of you, ever, and that this is survivable. People form their own impressions based on their own moods, histories, and preoccupations, most of which have nothing to do with you and none of which you can manage from inside your own head. The project of ensuring everyone thinks well of you is not just exhausting, it is impossible, and giving it up is a genuine liberation rather than a loss.
It helps to notice that being occasionally misperceived is normal and bearable. Some people will occasionally misread you, dislike you, or form an inaccurate impression, and this happens to everyone, constantly, and everyone survives it. You do not need universal approval to be okay, and chasing it means outsourcing your sense of self to an audience that is not even paying close attention. Letting a few people misjudge you is the price of living without the exhausting performance.
Redirecting your focus outward helps too. Self-consciousness is, by definition, self-focused, and one of the best ways out of it is to genuinely attend to the other person or the task at hand rather than monitoring yourself. When you are truly interested in the conversation, or absorbed in what you are doing, there is simply less of you left over to spend on anxious self-observation. Curiosity about others is a reliable antidote to self-consciousness.
There is a values angle worth naming. Instead of orienting around what will they think, you can orient around who do I want to be, and act from your own values rather than an imagined audience's approval. This shifts the reference point from an external, unknowable judgment to an internal, knowable one, which is far more stable ground to stand on. We cover that in how your values can pull you out of your own head.
A note on when it is more than everyday self-consciousness: if the fear of being judged is intense, persistent, and makes you avoid social situations or causes real distress, that can be social anxiety, which is treatable and worth taking to a professional. For the everyday version, though, remembering the spotlight effect, catching the mind reading, and accepting that you cannot control others' impressions will lighten the load considerably. We connect this to the spotlight effect in the spotlight effect, and build the full approach in The Overthinker's Manual. Most people are far too busy worrying about themselves to be judging you.