Well... yeah. I mean, imagine you had super critical parents who picked on your every mistake as a child. Now you suffer from social anxiety and feel intense shame and fear in public because you think everyone is constantly criticizing you and talking about you.

Being able to relax and be yourself knowing that most people won’t care either way is a huge step forward.

For some people, I suppose.

For others, a non-trivial point of the work is to learn not to care that other people don't care. It's about improving yourself, changing the relationship you have with the only person you will always be with, regardless of what other people might say, think, or do — that their behavior is entirely about them and has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

And that trying to make their behavior about you is just as much an ego-trap as the more obvious things you'd associate with that notion.

It's pretty remarkable the degree to which a little compassion and self-awareness can take the sting out of other people's lacking those things.

Hence the psychological narrative may be backed by an actual psychiatric, physiochemical change. An actual change, in “reality” - in other words, assuming some form of inflammation is involved in most depressive states...

[1] DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0075426