Eva Selhub, MD
Physician | Resilience Authority | Chief of Medical Affairs at ForHumanity | Executive Coach to High-Performing Leaders | Bestselling Author | Former Harvard Medical School Faculty | Keynote Speaker
May 15, 2026
I believe I speak for many in that most of us want to be seen. I don’t mean just seen physically by people, evaluated or applauded, but truly seen — witnessed as we actually are, with our gifts and faults, our confidence and our doubt, and the gap between — and accepted for all of it. It is rare when it happens, if at all. Rather, what is more common, is the need to fight or compete your way to be seen.
Interestingly, I work with high performers, and what strikes me is how often the most accomplished among them carry a private sense that who they actually are has never been truly recognized. The truth is, to take it a step further, many of them don’t even know who they truly are, as they have spent their lives performing for others and being who others wanted them to be. While their output has been recognized reflected by a great title, high achievement, or a polished version of their story, the person underneath has remains unwitnessed. And so, they continue performing, reaching, and producing, but no success is enough to dampen the inner competitiveness and for some, the imposter syndrome that lives beneath the surface, because truly being known— to exist in a room without having to earn their place in it—has yet to happen.
Most people don’t realize that this experience has a biology. Research on social exclusion — on being ignored, overlooked, or unseen — shows that the nervous system treats it as a threat in the same way it treats physical danger. Cortisol rises as the fear center in the brain, the amygdala, activates, while the body shifts into a kind of vigilance, scanning for evidence of whether we are valued, belong, or matter. We are wired this way because for most of human history, being cast out from the group was genuinely dangerous. That wiring doesn’t disappear because we now live in cities and carry devices. It just finds new terrain.
Social media is extraordinarily well-suited terrain for it. The platforms are organized entirely around a particular kind of visibility — followers, likes, reach, engagement metrics that quantify in real time how much we are or are not being seen. For many people those numbers become a stand-in for the deeper thing they are actually hungry for, and the nervous system, which cannot easily distinguish between genuine witnessing and digital validation, keeps reaching. Research shows that using social media after experiencing a stressor actually delays the body’s cortisol recovery — meaning the place most of us instinctively turn when we feel unseen makes it physiologically harder to come down. We reach for relief and the loop deepens.
If most of us are in search of being seen and are so focused on it that we push and push, often pushing others out of the way in the process, the result is that no one truly gets seen. We compete for recognition, assert more loudly, sometimes minimize the contributions of others, because somewhere the nervous system has decided that recognition is scarce and someone else’s visibility threatens our own. The person who feels unseen makes someone else feel unseen, and it moves in cycles — in workplaces, in families, online — with most of us reaching and very few of us actually getting there.
Breaking Out of Scarcity
I don’t have a magic bullet answer to how to feel truly seen in today’s world, but I do know how to regulate the stress response so that we can feel seen from within — and perhaps break the cycle so that we exist and work together more collaboratively.
The way I have found to do that — in my own life and in my work with clients — is through witnessing magnificence, starting with the witnessing of the magnificence of others.
Witnessing the magnificence of another person means seeing what is real and extraordinary in them, with actual presence and attention, rather than through the filter of how their recognition affects our own. It is a deliberate act of moving out of comparison and into genuine appreciation — and it activates something measurable in the body. The same neurochemistry triggered by awe and wonder gets triggered by genuine appreciation for another person: oxytocin releases, vagal tone increases, the nervous system shifts out of threat mode and into connection. We move, quite literally, from fear to love.
And what I have observed often enough to trust is that the person doing the witnessing tends to feel more seen themselves — not because they demanded it or performed for it, but because that quality of genuine attention creates the conditions for real connection, which may be the only thing that actually satisfies the hunger rather than temporarily quieting it.
Getting there requires stepping out of the stress response first, and there are many ways to do that. Time in nature is among the most reliable — even brief exposure to natural environments reduces cortisol, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and increases vagal tone. Beyond the physiology, studies find that people become measurably more attuned to others and less organized around self-protection after time outside — perhaps because nature’s vastness and aliveness quiets the scarcity loop, or perhaps because of the endorphins and morphine-like substances the brain releases in natural environments that enable a sense of connection and awe. Meditation, breathwork, and other practices that engage the body’s relaxation response can do the same.
Compassion opens the door as well. Specifically, the willingness to sit with our own longing to be seen — to acknowledge it honestly rather than performing around it — long enough that it loses some of its urgency. When that urgency softens, even a little, the capacity to turn our attention outward opens. We find ourselves able to actually see the person in front of us, rather than measuring them against our own need to be recognized.
It is really an extraordinary experience— to be able to witness someone else’s beauty and greatness. The key is to do so without comparing them to oneself. For this reason, the key to this practice is to also turn the witnessing of magnificence inwards—to find something about ourselves that we can admire, see as magical, wondrous, and so forth. Now, we are truly being seen.
I invite you to go outside when you can. Let the vastness do what it does. Then find someone whose magnificence you can genuinely see, and let them know. And finally, take a moment to witness the miracle that is you.
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