They think I am boring. She could tell I was nervous. He is annoyed with me. You state these to yourself as facts, and you feel them as facts, and then you act on them. But you have no actual access to anyone else's mind. This is mind reading, one of the most common distortions behind social overthinking, and seeing through it can lift a real weight.
Mind reading is the conviction that you know what other people are thinking, and specifically that what they are thinking is bad. The trouble is not that you make guesses about others, which everyone does. The trouble is treating those guesses as knowledge, when they are generated by your own anxiety, which reliably assumes the worst. As an overview from the NCBI Bookshelf describes, it is these interpretations, not the situations, that drive how you feel, so a worst-case guess produces real distress even though it is only a guess.
Two things make mind reading so convincing from the inside. First, it feels like perception rather than interpretation, as if you are simply seeing that they disapprove, when you are actually inventing it. Second, your anxiety supplies only the negative reading and hides the dozen neutral ones. Their short reply feels like coldness, when it could just as easily be busyness, tiredness, distraction, or their normal texting style.
There is a reassuring fact that undercuts a lot of mind reading: other people are thinking about you far less than you imagine, because they are busy thinking about themselves. In the research that named the spotlight effect, people consistently overestimated how much their actions and appearance were noticed by others. So not only are your guesses about what others think biased toward the negative, they also overestimate how much others are thinking about you at all. Mostly, they are not.
The correction starts with catching the move. When you notice yourself certain about someone's inner state, name it: that is mind reading, I am assuming I know what they think. Naming it creates distance, because it reminds you that a guess is not a fact. Then ask the direct question: how do I actually know that? Almost always the honest answer is, I do not, I am inferring it from very little.
Next, generate alternative explanations deliberately, because your anxiety offered you only one. Their quiet mood could mean a hard day, a headache, money stress, a bad night's sleep, or nothing at all. Their curt email could mean they were rushing between meetings. Force yourself to list five neutral possibilities, and notice that your worst-case reading is just one of many, and usually not the likeliest.
If it genuinely matters, there is a radical option the anxious mind forgets: you can ask. Rather than interrogating the silence in your own head for hours, a gentle, direct question, is everything okay between us, gets you real information instead of a guess. Most of the time you will not even need to, but knowing you could takes the pressure off the private spiral, because it reminds you that the truth is actually available if it matters, rather than being locked away where only your anxiety can guess at it.
The deeper move is to accept that you cannot control or fully know what others think of you, ever, and that this is survivable. People form their own impressions from their own moods and histories, most of which have nothing to do with you. Genuinely accepting that you will occasionally be misread, and that everyone is, drains a lot of the fuel out of mind reading. We cover that acceptance in how to stop overthinking what people think of you, and the personalization cousin of this distortion in how to stop taking everything personally.
If the fear of being negatively judged is intense enough to make you avoid social situations, that can be social anxiety, which responds well to treatment, and a professional can help. For everyday mind reading, though, the combination of naming it, asking how you actually know, and listing the neutral alternatives works reliably. We put the full method together in The Overthinker's Manual. You are not a mind reader, and that is genuinely good news, because the mind you were reading was mostly your own anxiety.