The Controller
How the need to make sure "everything is fine" reinforces anxiety instead of reducing it
Marina, 34, is a middle manager at a large company. She is the only woman on the executive team. Every morning, before her first video call, she spends five minutes adjusting her setup: the lighting, the camera angle, the background, her hair. During the meeting, her eyes dart to her own window every twenty to thirty seconds. It’s a rapid scan-and-check: Is my face calm? Do I look confident? Am I squinting? Is my forehead wrinkled? If a "defect" is detected, she corrects it instantly: smoothing her brow, slightly raising her chin, adjusting her expression.
After the meeting, Marina experiences a familiar blackout: she cannot remember what her colleagues were talking about for the last twenty minutes. The content of the conversation completely bypassed her. But she remembers with absolute certainty that at 10:47 AM, a tense expression appeared on her face, and she managed to fix it in time.
After six months of this routine, Marina notices that meetings have begun to trigger a vague anxiety even before they start—not so much because of the agenda, but because of the camera. She believes (or rather, as she would put it, she feels) that without constant visual monitoring, "everything will collapse": her colleagues will notice her insecurity, her boss will doubt her competence, she will make some facial slip that reveals her internal state, or, worst of all, she will show her wrinkles. The self-view is her safety net, the only thing standing between her and catastrophe.
Marina is a Controller. This is the most common archetype of Self-View Fixation, and its mechanism is detailed extensively in clinical literature—albeit in a completely different context.
Safety Behaviors: From Classic to Digital
In Chapter 3, we described Clark and Wells' cognitive model of social anxiety—the six stages of a vicious cycle in which a central role is played by so-called safety behaviors: defensive actions aimed at preventing an imagined catastrophe [1]. In everyday life, these actions for social anxiety are well-cataloged in CBT literature: avoiding eye contact, mentally rehearsing sentences, gripping one's hands, speaking quietly, trying to "not attract attention," engaging in mental rituals, and a myriad of other ways to "protect" oneself from seemingly unbearable anxiety and discomfort (e.g., during public speaking, meetings, parties, or any social interaction).
Video conferencing has spawned an entirely new set of defensive actions—digital equivalents of classic safety behaviors. They are not yet described in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) textbooks because the environment in which they occur did not exist on a mass scale until 2020, and the research is happening right now. But their structure is identical: each one subjectively reduces anxiety in the moment—and objectively reinforces it in the long run.
Classic Safety Behaviors → Digital Equivalents on a Video Call
- Avoiding eye contact → Fixating gaze on the self-view instead of the interlocutor's face.
- Mental rehearsal of every phrase → Checking one's facial expression on the self-view before speaking.
- Controlling posture and gestures (rigidity) → Restricting movement to "look good on camera."
- Quiet voice, mumbled speech → Muting the microphone between remarks "just in case," even when actively participating in the conversation.
- Attempting to "blend into the background" → Turning off the camera as an avoidance tactic (not to be confused with a conscious boundary-setting decision).
- Excessive monitoring of audience reactions → Excessive scanning of the gallery view: "Who is looking at me? Who turned away?"
Pay close attention to the first pair. In an in-person setting, a person with social anxiety simply looks away from their conversation partner. On a video call, they also look away—but not into the void; they look at themselves. The self-view takes the place that the floor, a wall, or one's own hands would occupy in a physical room. But unlike a floor or a wall, the self-view offers no respite; instead, it adds a highly specific and measurable neurocognitive load (as discussed in Part I). The person flees from one source of anxiety (the faces of others) and runs straight into another (their own face, subject to constant evaluation).
The Paradox of Control
All safety behaviors share one characteristic that makes them so resilient: they actually "work." Albeit subjectively and only in the moment, they provide relief. (For those familiar with operant conditioning, this is classic negative reinforcement). Marina checks her self-view, sees a tense expression, corrects it, and her anxiety drops briefly. The meeting ends without incident. The conclusion Marina makes (or rather, her amygdala, since what pop-science book is complete without it?): "The catastrophe didn't happen because I controlled my face."
This is the ultimate trap. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, this is known as blocking a corrective experience [1]. For an anxious belief to weaken, a person must acquire an experience that refutes it. If I am convinced that without monitoring my facial expressions my colleagues will notice my insecurity, the only way to test this is to go through a meeting without monitoring and see that nothing terrible happens. But this is exactly what the safety behavior prevents. Marina never learns what would happen without her checks—because she never stops checking. Her anxious belief remains untouched. Furthermore, it strengthens: "I checked, and everything went fine—therefore, the checks are necessary."
The cycle is sealed: Negative belief ("Without control, everything will collapse") → Self-view as the primary safety behavior → Detection of an imagined "defect" → Correction → Temporary relief → Attribution ("I survived because I checked") → Belief reinforced.
And the longer this cycle runs, the harder it is to break. Not because the anxiety becomes inherently stronger (though it often does), but because the subjective value of the safety behavior—in Marina's case, the checking and controlling—grows. Every successful meeting is just more "proof" that she cannot survive without the self-view.
The Illusion of Transparency
In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec from Cornell University described a cognitive bias they dubbed the illusion of transparency: people systematically overestimate how visible their internal states—nerves, deception, insecurity—are to others [2]. A person is already terrified of looking bad, and on top of that, they are convinced that their anxiety is plastered across their face like a billboard, obvious to everyone.
In experiments, participants asked to lie were convinced the audience saw right through them. Those who drank a bitter beverage were certain their disgust was glaringly obvious. In reality, observers noticed significantly less than the participants assumed.
I can offer an amusing example from my own therapeutic experience. Recently, I participated in an open experiment on treating fears and phobias (using spiders and snakes) organized at the Moscow Center for Cognitive Therapy by Yakov Kochetkov (who, incidentally, is David Clark's Russian co-author). I was certain I had absolutely zero control over my expression of sheer disgust while holding a massive, furry, black tarantula in a plastic lunchbox. Yet, to my surprise, the photographs showed my face looking far more restrained and socially acceptable than it felt in the moment.
The illusion of transparency is one of the most stubborn errors in social cognition. It is highly reproducible and doesn't depend on baseline anxiety levels; even calm, confident people demonstrate it. But in individuals with elevated social anxiety, it is far more pronounced [3]. And—crucially for our topic—the self-view radically amplifies it.
The amplification mechanism is simple. In normal life, the illusion of transparency is based on imagination: a person assumes others see their anxiety, but has no proof. On a video call with the self-view on, they get visual "proof." They look at their own face and see what they interpret as anxiety: tense muscles, an insecure gaze, an awkward expression. They conclude: "If I can see it, they can see it." The self-view upgrades the illusion of transparency from a hypothesis to a "fact."
But this is, of course, a cognitive distortion. For starters, your conversation partners are just as absorbed in their own little windows. And even if they are looking at you, their brains are processing the image with far less detail: to them, your face is just one of many, not a priority stimulus. Furthermore, the optics themselves distort reality: bad lighting and low resolution create an image that differs significantly from how people see you in person.
However, the Controller does not have access to this rational information in the moment they look at themselves (or if they do, they "can't feel it" through the fog of anxiety). They see a face that looks tense, and their anxiety system registers it: threat confirmed.
If you are a Controller, the best way to prove to yourself that your anxiety is not "written all over your face" is to watch a recording of your own presentation (Clark's video-feedback technique). Do this with a therapist or a trusted colleague. You will see a fundamental disconnect between how you felt in the moment (trembling, tense, losing words) and how it looks from the outside (a reasonably competent and calm speaker, or at worst, specific areas for growth). This experience, properly structured, can significantly reduce the perceived need for exhausting real-time self-monitoring.
The Spotlight Effect
It is worth mentioning another well-documented distortion: the spotlight effect, described by the same Gilovich in collaboration with Savitsky [4]. People systematically overestimate how much attention others pay to their appearance, mistakes, and behavior. We feel like we are standing in a literal spotlight. In reality, every participant on a video call is standing in their own spotlight, and everyone else is on the periphery.
For the Controller, this means that the immense effort they pour into monitoring and correcting their face is aimed at solving a problem that largely does not exist. No one is scrutinizing their facial expressions with the same intensity that they are. Their colleagues are busy with their own self-views—or, at best, the content of the meeting. The performance the Controller is putting on for the camera largely has no audience.
But, as fellow psychologists understand all too well, intellectually knowing this is not a panacea. The rational knowledge that "no one is looking at me" does not shut off an automatic anxiety response. It helps cognitively, of course, which is why we explain it here. But to truly change an anxious belief, you don't need an argument; you need an action. You need a counter-experience.
What to Do
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for social anxiety, following Clark's protocol, offers a specific tool for this: the behavioral experiment [5]. The format is incredibly straightforward and concrete. While it is an excellent exercise for individual psychotherapy, in many cases, it can be successfully applied as self-help.
- Step One: The Prediction. Before a meeting, the Controller writes down exactly what they believe will happen if they do not look at the self-view. The prediction must be specific and testable. Not "It will be bad," but "My colleagues will notice I'm nervous, and someone will ask if I'm okay." Or: "I'll make a weird face, and Peter will exchange a glance with Olga." It is vital to write this down beforehand, as human memory tends to edit expectations after the fact.
- Step Two: Dropping the Safety Behavior. For one specific meeting, the Controller takes two clicks into the settings and hides the self-view. Not forever—just for one meeting or one presentation. The duration is limited, the load is manageable. The goal is not a heroic feat of willpower, but a small, tolerable experiment to test the predictions written in step one.
- Step Three: The Review. After the meeting, the Controller compares their prediction against reality. Did anyone ask if they were okay? Did Peter and Olga exchange glances? Did any of the things they usually try to prevent by monitoring the self-view actually happen? In the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is no. Nothing predicted occurred. The meeting went exactly as it always does—with the sole difference that the Controller didn't dissociate from reality and can actually remember what was discussed.
One experiment, naturally, does not shatter a deeply held belief. But it creates a precedent: It turns out, without the self-view, nothing catastrophic happens. A second experiment reinforces this precedent. A third makes it a habit. The goal is not instantaneous healing, but the gradual accumulation of corrective experiences that the safety behavior had previously blocked.
The Controller and Others
The Controller is easily confused with The Performer (Chapter 7)—both closely monitor their faces on the screen. The difference lies in the vector of motivation. While the Controller is driven by fear and the desire to avoid a catastrophe (not being exposed, not looking "wrong"), the Performer is driven by a desire to reach an ideal and make an impression. The first worries: "Am I normal enough?" while the second is concerned with the quality of their act: "Am I good enough?"
The Controller can also be confused with The Objectified (Chapter 6)—both fixate on their "defects." However, unlike the Objectified, who is entirely consumed by aesthetic flaws (the shape of a nose, under-eye shadows, wrinkles), the Controller reads their facial expression as a communicative signal. They are asking a different question: "What is my face saying about me right now?"
These nuances are precisely why identifying the correct motive matters for choosing a solution. The behavioral experiment (testing predictions) works brilliantly for the Controller, but will be utterly useless for the Objectified—they need to understand how camera optics distort reality. The Performer, meanwhile, needs to realize that it is impossible to do a job well while simultaneously sitting in the audience watching one's own play. Diagnosing the wrong motive inevitably leads to picking the wrong tool.
The Hidden Cost of Attention Switching
Let us return to Marina. We can practically calculate her toll on the back of a napkin. Twenty to thirty checks an hour, four meetings a day. If each check takes two seconds (glance at self-view, evaluate, return), twenty-five checks an hour equals about one minute of pure time spent staring at the self-view. It doesn't seem like much.
But we must add the switch cost described in Chapter 2: every shift from a colleague to the self-view and back takes anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred milliseconds and is accompanied by a micro-loss of context. Twenty-five switches an hour add up. And to this, we must add the biggest expense of all—the background load. Even when Marina is not looking at the self-view, it hovers in her peripheral vision, and her brain is continuously solving the equation: "switch or suppress." As Whelan's data showed (Chapter 2), this load does not decrease over time.
Therefore, Marina isn't just "wasting time" on the self-view. She is continuously spending her cognitive budget on three parallel processes: monitoring her face, suppressing the automatic hijacking of her attention, and switching between visual targets. Not one of these processes helps her accomplish the actual goals of the meeting. She is fighting a war on two fronts—managing a team while simultaneously evaluating herself—and failing to do either fully.
When, after six months of this routine, Marina feels like she is "breaking down," it is an entirely logical outcome. It is the predictable result of a chronic double burden on the cognitive apparatus. Her brain isn't tired from the meetings; it's tired from the meetings plus continuous self-monitoring. Remove the second, and the first will feel significantly lighter.
Run the behavioral experiment: go through a single meeting without a mirror in your face and test your negative predictions. Find out just how "unbearable" it truly is.
References
[1] Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment, and Treatment (pp. 69–93). Guilford Press.
[2] Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332–346.
[3] Alden, L. E., & Wallace, S. T. (1995). Social phobia and social appraisal in successful and unsuccessful social interactions. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 33(5), 497–505.
[4] Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.
[5] Clark, D. M. (2001). A cognitive perspective on social phobia. In W. R. Crozier & L. E. Alden (Eds.), International Handbook of Social Anxiety (pp. 405–430). John Wiley & Sons.
Продолжаем перевод. Я сохранил логику, стилистику и научную точность, аккуратно адаптировав терминологию (например, «порог оптимальной стимуляции» и «сенсорная чувствительность») для англоязычной среды, где эти концепты очень хорошо известны.
Структуру заголовков выдерживаем в едином стиле с предыдущими главами.