CONTEXT: If you are reading this, you have probably read my earlier article on this topic. In that article, I discussed our inherent need to seek attention and why it is important to be aware of it when interacting with society.
In response to it, I received several queries from readers asking to provide more insights into it. I have been able to summarize these queries into the following questions –
- How to identify attention-seeking behaviour? Are there any specific points to look for?
- Is attention-seeking behaviour specifically related to introversion/extroversion?
- How can we self-assess and avoid addiction?
- If all humans need attention to survive and grow, why is seeking attention considered a bad virtue?
In this article, I will try to address the above questions to an extent that gives you a path to introspect your attitude and awareness towards the need for attention. Before we begin, please read the disclaimer below:
Disclaimer: Before we proceed, I would like to mention that the following are my personal views and should not be used as expert advice. If you are here to seek help with your psychological/social issues, I recommend consulting a professional practitioner.
Why do you need attention?
There can be many reasons for seeking attention of others around us, which mostly can be categorized into three primary needs –
1. To Get Validation
2. To Gain Sympathy
3. To Get Attention (only!)
To Get Validation
As children, we all were taught and trained to fit into a certain model of lifestyle and society around us. Being a social animal, it is imperative for the actions of any participating human to be validated by peers in a civilized community. Such validation-seeking practices are put in place to ensure the safety, harmony and growth of the community. However, such implications are mostly based on ill-defined yet mutually accepted cultural parameters. Therefore, partly due to this ambiguity and partly due to cultural influence, we develop a native need to seek validation from others for most things we do.
As an example, if your answer to any of the following questions is a Yes, you probably understand what it means to seek validation from others –
1. Do you ask your colleagues to review your work constantly?
2. Do you discuss all your ideas/situations with friends/family members before taking any decision?
3. Do you value the opinion of seniors/bosses/elders in relevant matters?
4. Do you try to learn standard procedure or get approval before attempting anything new?
and so on.. If you visualized yourself in the above situations, you may have already felt bad about one or two of them. Possibly, some of you may also completely hate the idea of seeking validation. However, in real life, it is rather intellectual and in some cases, a privilege, to be able to get the correct validation (or feedback) from the right people.
Let’s give you an alternate perspective now! Read the following questions –
1. Do you feel unappreciated for your work at your home/office?
2. Do you feel all your colleagues are competing with you or misleading your boss against you?
3. Do you feel your family members don’t understand you or your needs?
4. Do you constantly try to impress your friends/relatives/social media followers?
5. Do you think you need to practice/work more than others to achieve the same reputation?
6. Do you think the attention, praise, and appraisal you receive are more affected by your surroundings than your actions?
7. Do you need to discuss even trivial decisions (such as, buying a casual dress) with others?
and there could be many similar scenarios…
If your answer to even a few of the above questions is true and you are not going through a bad phase in life, then you are addicted to seeking validation from others. There are many reasons based on our childhood, culture, community & upbringing for developing such behaviour. In my opinion, it is better to reflect upon our own observations before we hold others responsible for our current situation. It may require expert advice to identify the exact correlation. For now, let’s move on to the next one!
To Gain Sympathy
Sympathy is defined by Cambridge Dictionary, as an expression of understanding and care for someone else’s suffering. If we think about it, doesn’t it sound like the most important fabric that keeps all of us connected? Whether intended or not, all of us recognize and try to maintain a balanced set of sympathetic transactions with all fellow humans including our parents, spouse, friends, colleagues, clients and even children around us.
The “Survival of the Fittest” theory can be attributed as the most appropriate intuition behind the development of this trait in humans. In the absence of sympathetic behaviour, you may have heard of animals who may choose to eat their own species for survival. Fortunately, this ability to exchange sympathetic emotions has allowed our civilizations to develop the social structures that we see around us today. These social structures are widely dispersed based on location (neighbourhoods, villages), interests (religious beliefs, professional groups, corporates), safety (blood relations, families), individual & social needs (friends, life partner, communities), political issues (districts, countries, continents) and so on.
All these structures are primarily based on a small set of emotions comprising fear, sympathy, trust and love. Out of these, fear, trust and love are either too complex, too volatile or too ambiguous. As a child, we do not have the required intelligence or emotional stability to be able to utilize the emotions of love, fear or trust while interacting with fellow humans.
Consequently, we rely on our native skills to gain Sympathy from others to fit into these complex social structures. For e.g. a newborn may start crying when (s)he feels hungry, when (s)he doesn’t feel good, etc. Moving on, learning from the earlier experiences, the child starts using Sympathetic exchanges for more complex interactions, for e.g. the child would cry when (s)he breaks something and gets caught, when (s)he couldn’t get a certain score in a test, when (s)he don’t get the expected affection/response from the people (s)he knows etc.
Unfortunately, some of us get so much comfortable with gaining Sympathy from people around us that we either do not want to use (or learn to use) other emotions or use people’s sympathy to our advantage without thinking about the need to reciprocate the same to others. Eventually, we either trap ourselves in the constant need to seek sympathy or end up being avoided by others around us. In the latter case, the problem aggravates, since now, you would try to get more of it from others without realizing why they started avoiding you in the first place.
As with validation, there can be many reasons for someone to require sympathy from fellow humans. For now, below are some questions to self-assess yourself –
1. Have you ever posted pictures of your wound/bandage/broken tooth on social media and expected a sympathetic response from your followers?
2. Do you brag about office politics or conflicts with your colleagues to your friends/family too often?
3. Do you complain about your workload, daily schedule or lack of appreciation to your colleagues/sub-ordinates?
4. Do you think your friends/family should give more importance to your problems without ever thinking about the issues they may be facing?
5. Do you try to be over-friendly with your friends/colleagues/boss to hide the fact that you are not good at or don’t want to learn a certain skill expected from you?
and you probably got the idea! So now, let’s move to the next section.
To Get Attention
Sympathy and Validation help us fit into society and maintain reasonable relations with fellow humans. People who are totally resistant or unable to exchange sympathy and validation with other humans are usually considered unfriendly, rude, egoistic and unsocial. Therefore, people who want to go the extra mile or be quantitatively successful in building relationships with as many people as possible, have to be very good at it.
Getting the attention of a fellow human is the first step in establishing any meaningful communication or relationship. In the rush to win over the other person fast enough or to reach out to many people with little effort, most of us spend a lot of energy on getting and keeping the attention of our target audience. However, if you are not willing to put enough time and effort into understanding your audience, their emotional need and their state, you end up missing the whole purpose of it.
In such situations, some of us our mature enough to gather our mistakes (arrogant children, broken friendships, lost audience, bitter relationships, bad image, unpleasant personality etc.) and steer them with the help of sympathy, validation, trust, love and fear to a safe green island; waiting for the favourable winds to be able to sail again.
Unfortunately, many people around us are either emotionally incapable, unaware or ignorant of it. As a result, more often than not, either they or people depending on them develop a subconscious need to get more and more attention (yes, pure, adrift, disoriented, purposeless attention) from any and every human around us. Luckily for most of us, our emotional intelligence and social conditioning helps us identify and define an upper limit to it. However, for some of us, this results in serious complications and personality disorders that require expert observation and help.
To help you differentiate it from the former two behaviours, below are some questions for your reference –
1. Have you ever felt that you need to be the center of attention among your friends/colleagues every time?
2. Do you feel bad or left out when your siblings/colleagues/friends get appreciated for something that you were not competing for?
3. Do you think your choice in fashion/hairstyle/accent/language etc. always ensures that you feel different, pleasing, demanded or superior to others around you?
4. Do you want to win every competition or be appreciated for everything you do? Do you avoid doing things that you are not good at?
5. How often do you end up talking to, going shopping with or discussing your personal matters with others when you did not want to?
6. How aware do you think you are of the need for validation and sympathy in your relationships with people around you (friends, spouse, parents, colleagues, employees, social media followers etc.)?
If you find yourself or someone you care about to be addicted to this type of attention, surely something has to be done about it. However, be careful; self-assessment and realization are very important in being able to find out the deeply buried reasons behind such escalations. I would strongly recommend not to enforce or suppress any particular behaviour solely based on the information given in this article. In most cases, you should seek personalized help from your mentors or a professional expert in this matter.
A trait of Introverts or Extroverts?
In response to one of the questions I received, I would like to mention that attention-seeking behaviour can be observed equally in introverted as well as extroverted personalities. Some of us are good at proactively pursuing our need for attention while others experience it internally without initiating any actions for it. In both cases, individuals can be completely unaware of it, and the effects are equally prominent. However, ironically, people who secretly/silently pursue others’ attention are quick and confident about pointing out and keeping grudges for the behaviour of their proactive counterparts.
Verdict
Attention-seeking is an integral part of human personality. We all do it, and there is no reason to consider it unacceptable, unnatural or unpleasant. We all have our own unique lives and therefore different psychological and emotional needs. Unfortunately, most of us are not aware of it and therefore, in the pursuit to better fit into society, we develop behaviours which may be unfavourable for our emotional and mental health in the longer run. By experiencing this need within ourselves as well as others around us, and putting in the required time & effort, we can definitely improve upon it and create a better society for all of us.
Food for thought
- Do you know of any situations that can cause the development of attention-seeking behaviour in children?
- Do you think social media is the reason for the increase in the development of such behaviour in millennials and GenZ?
- Contrarily, do you think social media may be providing a platform to be able to express and pursue the unfulfilled need for sympathy and validation in children?
- Can nuclear families, busy parents or decreased outdoor activities contribute to it?
- Do you think it is somehow related to the increased cases of anxiety and depression in society?
Let me know your views in the comments!
