Hi so I have… well very bad social skills. I have pretty bad anxiety which makes it worse. Something I have a problem with is eye contact. The only people I can really make eye contact with is my siblings and one of my friends.
I know it’s proper to make eye contact while talking to someone but it’s very difficult and my eyes will usually fart to the ground every couple seconds or so. I also well… I tend to give people to vibe that I don’t like them. I have been told by many friends that they thought I didn’t like them when we first met but I just don’t know how to talk to people and have a pretty… well rude face and voice.
Anyway back to the point. I would like to make more friends and be more like able so does anyone have any tips on how to maintain eye contact with someone. I believe it may help me seem less mean.
4 comments
The reason why eye contact is important is for you to read people.
Be interested in reading people. Understand their intentions, feelings, and perception. You might as well call this as empathy.
Don’t focus too much on eye contact. Focus on learning how to read people and eye contact will come naturally. I suggest reading books about this.
Trust me. Mastering the art of reading people and acting based on what you have read will change your life. In this way, you’ll know the appropriate topics to talk about.
If someone is trying to befriend you, ask yourself WHY? Assume the reason. Then act and speak appropriately. It does t have to be serious all the time. A person could share to you about something, and you can look for relevant questions based on the reason.
If someone is smiling to you, most likely, they want to be your friend. So what should you do? You reciprocate. If someone’s tells you there problems. What does that mean? They trust you. What do you do? You maintain what you did that made them trust you. If someone wants to hang around after a bad event, what should you do? You don’t talk about negativities. Play with them. Talk to them about anything.
We find it difficult to talk to people because we are too focused on our objectives. We want to make friends. But we should think about other people’s obejctives.
So the eye contact thing, social skills thing and description of giving off a vibe where people assume you don’t like them, paired with how none of that is your intention suggests you may be on the Autism Spectrum. Now, that may not mean you have diagnosable autism or aspergers but you may have a couple of the contributory neurodivergent conditions like dyspraxia or adhd etc. Or maybe you haven’t had a diagnosis of anything. I very much recommend reading up on neurodivergent conditions, it may help you feel less alone in this.
For context, neurotypical brains seek out eye contact because it is the best focal point for reading thoughts and feelings context data. If you are looking up and at the person, you pick up whole face expressions, shoulder shrugs etc. And for neurotypical brains, that data helps them understand a whole lot more about what the other person is saying or feeling. Now the problem is, neurodivergent conditions are primarily categorised as an over or under reaction to stimulus. Adhd people will jump from one stimulus to another with limited ability to take it in, process deeply and may struggle to connect one concept with another. While alternatively dyspraxic people take in every single stimulus with limited ability to filter anything out and will process every stimulus so to much stimulation can get overwhelming and concentrating on one major stimulus and forcibly avoiding others can help with processing, kind of like only having one tab open at a time on a slower computer.
So in answer to your questions: how can you make eye contact and is it important?
I can give advice like: focus of their forehead instead of their eyes or keep your head and eyes up but flick to the side rather than the ground. But that will only just mask the problem. Not making eye contact is something that neurodivergent people do to better focus on what is being said because eye contact and reading all the facial reactions and body language may be too much stimulus to process.
About 40% of the population are neurodivergent and so education about the conditions is filtering in and schools are slowing down on teaching forced eye contact.
Some things you can do to come across as more friendly:
Practice making your neutral face friendly. This takes time but if you practice and can be difficult as a lot of neurodivergent people naturally express what they are thinking so if they are thinking ” I am concentrating really hard on listening and processing” it can look like a bit of a frown.
See a specialist who may be able to give some more advice or at least direct you to resources that can help.
Try and use routine interactions to give a smile and if you can, look at their face in general “hi, my name is xyz” “hi, how are you” these are phrases that we say every day. If you practice having the intro phrases and “bye, see you later” style phrases come with a big smile, people get a positive start and end and mostly get the vibe you are friendly and like them.
Try and make friends with neurodivergent people. As a group, we kind of all have reasons we don’t make eye contact so it’s less expected in social settings.
Yes it’s important (not 100 percent eye contact, but 50-60 percent). If you have trouble looking people in the eye, look at the spot on the bridge of their nose between the eyes. It gives the same effect as eye contact.
Also try using a ‘hint of a smile.’
You might wanna at least try regulating how often you watch porn and masturbate. This has influenced both anxiety as well as eye contact in my case. A lot. Granted, it was a long time ago, but hey maybe it works for you!