Difficulty making friends all my life

I have been asking myself about the difficulty I have making friends, has been like that all my life? Or is it just in the last couple of years when it really has become more conscious.

I mean before I didn't really realize the complexity of it, I was just living my life, was most of the time with my family, had occasional friends (never had any lasting relationships), people came and went out of my life.

I think that one of the problems with social anxiety is that one is over conscious of things that happen around, I am always thinking too much over things like if somebody looked at me, why did this person looked? Is this person laughing about me? Is this person talking about me? And on and on and on, my mind goes into creating a whole “movie” with my thoughts, and then I start to feel really anxious.

I am always thinking people wants to hurt me, or that people is talking bad about me, or that they are planning things to upset me, that is why I am scared of getting close to people. It has been like that most of my life, just that it was not as conscious as it is now.

How to stop my exaggerated thoughts about others wanting to hurt me? Why does my mind goes into those thoughts?