When you’re anxious, neutral faces can look annoyed. Read the room twice before deciding it’s against you.

Anxiety shifts the threshold at which you call an expression hostile, so neutral starts registering as irritated and mild irritation as fury. The room has not changed, your reading of it has, which is how you can leave somewhere convinced everybody was against you when nothing happened. The fear writes the caption and you believe it because it came from inside.

Take a second reading before you act. Check whether your hands are shaking or your chest is tight, because if they are, your face-reading is badly calibrated right now. Wait ten minutes, look again, or ask one person a plain question. Decide after rather than during.