Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts
Guy Winch
Practical treatments for the psychological wounds we are taught to push through and ignore.
You'd never ignore a broken arm, but most people walk around with untreated psychological wounds for years. Winch provides specific, evidence-based interventions for loneliness, failure, rejection, guilt, and rumination.
Everything Winch wants you to walk away with
We need emotional first aid just as urgently as physical first aid. Treating rejection, failure, and loneliness promptly prevents small wounds from becoming diagnosable conditions like anxiety and depression.
Our reason and logic are usually ineffective at mitigating rejection pain because the response is wired for survival. We compound it by becoming self-critical — kicking ourselves when we're already down.
The most frequent reasons for romantic or job rejection are lack of general chemistry or not matching a specific need. Write counterarguments to every self-critical thought and articulate them fully whenever the criticism returns.
Chronic loneliness increases early death risk by 26%. It causes you to become overly critical, judge relationships too negatively, and behave in self-defeating ways that push people away — creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
When you falter in early efforts after isolation, you blame yourself rather than recognizing rusty skills. The fix is to remove negatively tinted glasses, identify self-defeating behaviors, and practice taking others' perspectives.
Mentally rehashing what happened makes the wound worse, not better. Interrupting rumination quickly is one of the most important emotional health skills you can develop. Distraction techniques that require concentration work best.
Treat yourself with the same compassion you'd offer a close friend. Revive self-worth by writing about your most valued character traits and why they matter. This isn't weakness — it's evidence-based emotional repair.
Concentrate your exposure into a limited time frame. Accept that rejection is frequent and normal. Once you expect it, any single instance becomes more manageable. Spreading out the practice dilutes the effect.
Social support mitigates stress of all kinds, but friends often underestimate your rejection pain. Photographs of loved ones are among the most emotionally nutritious snacks. Even spending time with a group without speaking can replenish belonging.
Many diagnosable conditions could be prevented with early emotional first aid. When the wound is serious, these techniques don't replace professional help — just as a medicine cabinet doesn't replace hospitals. But most wounds respond to prompt self-care.
These notes are inspired by direct excerpts and woven together into a readable guide you can follow from start to finish.
By Guy Winch
Just as you wouldn’t pitch a tent outside your family doctor’s waiting room at the first sign of a cough, you can’t run to a therapist every time you get rejected by a romantic prospect or your boss yells at you. Yet while every household keeps a medicine cabinet full of bandages, ointments, and pain relievers for basic physical ailments, we have no equivalent cabinet for the minor psychological injuries we sustain in daily life.
Many diagnosable psychological conditions for which people eventually seek professional treatment could be prevented if emotional first aid were applied to wounds when they were first sustained. A ruminative tendency can quickly grow into anxiety and depression; experiences of failure and rejection can erode self-esteem. Treating such injuries early not only accelerates healing but also helps prevent complications and reduces their severity when they do arise.
It’s time we practiced mental health hygiene just as we do dental and physical hygiene.
Of course, when a psychological injury is serious, emotional first aid should not replace seeing a mental health professional—any more than having a well-stocked medicine cabinet abolishes the need for physicians and hospitals.
Of all the emotional wounds you suffer in life, rejection is perhaps the most common. By the time you reach middle school, you’ve been turned down for play dates, picked last for teams, not invited to birthday parties, dropped by friends who joined new cliques, and teased by classmates. Adulthood brings an entirely new array: you get turned down by potential dates, refused by employers, and snubbed by potential friends. Spouses rebuff your advances, neighbors give you the cold shoulder, and family members shut you out of their lives.
Rejections elicit emotional pain so sharp it affects your thinking, floods you with anger, erodes your confidence and self-esteem, and destabilizes your fundamental feeling of belonging. What separates rejection from almost every other negative emotion is the sheer magnitude of the pain it causes—people often describe it as analogous to being punched in the stomach or stabbed in the chest. One reason rejection is so devastating is that reason, logic, and common sense are usually ineffective at mitigating the pain.
Rejections often trigger anger and aggressive impulses—a powerful urge to lash out, especially at those who rejected you, but in a pinch, at innocent bystanders. Studies of school shootings, including the 1999 Columbine tragedy, found that thirteen of fifteen incidents involved perpetrators who had experienced significant interpersonal rejection and ostracism; in many cases, shooters specifically targeted students who had bullied or rejected them.
You likely compound rejection experiences by becoming extremely self-critical—essentially kicking yourself when you’re already down. There is a universal tendency to take rejections too personally and draw conclusions about your shortcomings when there is little evidence such assumptions are warranted.
The most frequent reasons people get turned down as romantic prospects or job applicants are a lack of general chemistry, not matching the person’s or company’s specific needs at the time, or not fitting the narrow definition of who they’re looking for—not because of critical missteps or fatal character flaws.
Rejections can inflict four distinct emotional wounds, each of which may require some form of emotional first aid: lingering visceral pain, anger and aggressive urges, harm to self-esteem, and damage to the feeling that you belong.
List in writing any negative or self-critical thoughts you have about the rejection, then formulate personalized counterarguments to each one. Whenever a self-critical thought arises, immediately articulate the relevant counterargument fully and clearly in your mind.
People reject romantic partners and prospects for many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with anyone’s shortcomings. Most often it is a simple matter of chemistry—either there is a spark or there isn’t. Timing can also be crucial. Similarly, getting rejected by prospective employers usually has less to do with your mistakes or inadequacies than with your fit with the company or the job description. Some job listings are required to be publicized but were always meant to be filled internally; other times employers seek a specific skill set; and sometimes they already know who they plan to hire.
Social support mitigates stress of all kinds but is especially valuable after rejection. Getting support from close friends can be challenging, though, because they are likely to underestimate the pain the rejection caused you.
Your need to belong has some substitutability: new relationships and memberships can psychologically replace those that ended, especially if they provide a better fit for your personality and interests. Painful as rejections are, you can view them as opportunities to evaluate whether the romantic partner, social circle, friend, or employer was a good fit for you in the first place.
Sometimes merely spending time with a group you feel connected to can replenish social connectedness even if few words are spoken—shooting hoops with friends, or seeing a movie together. “Social snacking” also helps: scientists have found that photographs of loved ones are among the most emotionally nutritious snacks after rejection. Reading meaningful emails or letters, watching videos of loved ones, or using valued mementos of those to whom you feel most connected also have nutritional value.
If you rarely put yourself in situations where rejection is possible, each rejection hits harder. Those who face rejection frequently—like actors who audition several times a week—find it much easier to let each one go, thanks to a psychological process called desensitization. Once you accept that you will be rejected a lot, any single rejection feels more manageable. The most important aspect is to concentrate your efforts into a limited time frame, since spreading the task over time dilutes the effect and renders desensitization ineffective.
Despite this era of unprecedented global human connection, more people than ever suffer from severe loneliness. What determines loneliness is not the quantity of your relationships but their subjective quality—the extent to which you perceive yourself to be socially or emotionally isolated.
Loneliness inflicts damage through two main channels. First, it causes you to become overly critical of yourself and those around you, judging existing relationships too negatively, which poisons your interactions. Second—and more insidiously—loneliness drives self-defeating behaviors that diminish the quality and quantity of your social connections even further. The very fibers of your “relationship muscles”—social and communication skills, the ability to see another’s perspective, and the capacity for empathy—grow weak and function poorly when you need them most.
Simply recalling a time when they felt lonely was enough to cause college students to assess their current social support more negatively, boost their shyness, increase social anxiety, drop their mood and self-esteem, and impair their optimism.
Many journeys into loneliness begin during periods of transition. College freshmen feel extremely lonely surrounded by unfamiliar faces far from home. Divorce, separation, and bereavement—especially when unexpected—leave people unprepared for the loneliness that follows. When work provides your primary social engagement, losing your job can mean losing your entire social support system when you most need it.
Sometimes the grip of loneliness extends far beyond the normal adjustment period. You become trapped—paralyzed by emotional pain, defeated by worthlessness and hopelessness, overcome by devastating emptiness. This happens because loneliness drives you into cycles of self-protection and avoidance, creating self-fulfilling prophecies that push away the very people you hope to engage. When early dating efforts after a long dry spell falter, you rarely attribute it to rusty skills and weak relationship muscles; instead you take the rejection personally and assume it reflects your fundamental undesirability.
Recovery from loneliness involves three steps: identify and change the misperceptions that lead to self-defeating behaviors; strengthen your relationship muscles so efforts to forge new connections succeed; and minimize the ongoing emotional distress loneliness causes, especially when options for new connections are limited.
Although you cannot prevent pessimistic scenarios from elbowing into your thoughts, the best way to fight fear and pessimism is to purposefully visualize scenarios of success that are both reasonable and realistic. By picturing successful outcomes, you are more likely to recognize such opportunities when they arise. For example, acknowledge that people at a party may be friendly, welcoming, and happy to chat. Even if you don’t meet new people, you might have a perfectly nice time catching up with one or two people you already know—and end the night making plans to see them again.
There are always steps you can take to improve your situation, and taking action of any kind will make you feel better about yourself and your prospects:
Common self-defeating behaviors include: finding poor excuses to turn down social invitations; skipping spontaneous get-togethers because you feel “unprepared”; neglecting birthday wishes or celebratory messages; taking friendly ribbing too personally; using defensive body language (folding arms, hands in pockets, exaggerated rummaging through your purse, faking intense interest in nonexistent text messages); responding with curt, monosyllabic sentences or overtalking and hogging the conversation; neglecting to ask others about their lives and opinions; and confessing your faults and insecurities to people you’ve just met.
Once you’ve identified what you might be doing incorrectly, be extremely mindful of avoiding such behaviors going forward.
Accurately reading another person’s point of view is a vital relationship muscle. It allows you to understand their priorities and motivations, anticipate their behavior, predict their reactions, negotiate and cooperate successfully, communicate effectively, and access compassion, altruism, and empathy.
Always ask yourself how the other person’s perspective might differ from your own. Give weight to what you know about their priorities and preferences, the history of the relationship, and the context of the current situation. Taking a few minutes to answer these questions can save hours of relationship talks to smooth over a situation that could have been prevented.
The best way to assess another person’s emotional experience is to visualize yourself in their situation in as immersive a manner as possible. Notice the surrounding environment, who else is there, the time of day, the person’s mood, and any physical pains they may be experiencing. Imagine how you come across to them—not how you actually feel, but what you actually convey.
Context is key. Understanding someone’s feelings involves having at least a rough sense of their frame of mind at the time.
Insight into another person’s feelings only matters if you can convey your understanding convincingly and compassionately. Knowing how someone feels but communicating it poorly is like buying them flowers and leaving them on the kitchen counter. Be as descriptive as possible—the more the other person realizes you’ve put thought and effort into appreciating their point of view, the more impact your empathy-informed communications will have.
By pursuing activities with an additional agenda—a hobby, a creative goal, a fitness challenge—you come across not as someone who is lonely but as someone who is passionate about what they do. Having a larger goal also reduces insecurity and self-consciousness because your attention is focused on the task at hand.
Online dating is now the second most common way couples meet (after being introduced by mutual friends), surpassing bars, clubs, and other traditional venues. Another option for creating new social bonds is to volunteer: helping others reduces feelings of loneliness, increases feelings of self-worth, and makes you feel more socially desirable. By setting out to give rather than get, you can focus on the person in need instead of on yourself, which makes you feel less self-conscious, less insecure, and less vulnerable.
People with limited mobility, geographic isolation, or other barriers to social connection frequently adopt pets to soothe loneliness. Dogs are especially effective at easing loneliness in people who are isolated, elderly, or dealing with significant illness or psychological injury such as PTSD. Dogs also make excellent people magnets.
Much like broken bones that need to be set correctly, how you go about putting the pieces of your life back together after loss or trauma makes a huge difference in how fully you recover. Treating the psychological wounds that loss and trauma inflict can accelerate recovery and, in some cases, enable you to emerge with meaningful changes in priorities, a deeper appreciation of existing relationships, an enhanced sense of purpose, and greater life satisfaction—a phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth.
Loss and trauma create four psychological wounds. They cause overwhelming emotional pain; they undermine your basic sense of identity and the roles you play; they destabilize your belief systems and understanding of the world; and they challenge your ability to remain present and engaged in your most important relationships.
The emotional distress in the first days following loss or trauma can be utterly paralyzing. You may lose the ability to think straight or perform even basic self-care like eating or bathing. Engulfed in pain, you experience every detail of life anew through a wrenching series of “firsts”—your first meal without the person you lost, your first night alone after violent crime, your first look in the mirror after life-altering events. Time is a hugely important factor in recovery.
You may have defined yourself by your career and lost your job, by your couplehood and lost your partner, by your athletic ability and lost your health, or by your parenthood and watched your last child leave home. In each case, you need time to rediscover who you are, search within for what you find meaningful, and express aspects of yourself that lay dormant. Failing to do so leaves a terrible void that amplifies the loss, fragments your sense of self, and sets you adrift in self-doubt and self-loathing.
One of the most compelling human drives is the need to make sense of experience. You filter most experiences through your own understanding of how the world works, and your beliefs guide your actions and decisions. Loss and trauma can challenge those basic assumptions, causing significant additional distress. Your struggle to make sense of what happened compounds the initial shock and sends you on a quest to integrate new realities into a belief framework that no longer provides the security it once did. “Crises of faith” are common—floods of questions, doubts, and a desperate search for answers.
The sooner you reconstruct your worldview in ways that integrate your experience of loss or trauma, the quicker the intensity and frequency of ruminations will diminish, the better your psychological adjustment will be, and the less likely you will be to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In time, most people begin to let go and move on, reengaging with existing people and activities or investing in new ones. But some become stuck—maintaining vivid representations of the person they lost, clinging to the memory, and investing emotional resources in the dead instead of the living.
Treatment A (soothing emotional pain) offers guidelines for managing emotional pain and discusses common fallacies that delay recovery. Treatment B (recovering lost aspects of self) focuses on reconnecting to aspects of life that have been lost and reestablishing identity; it should be administered only once you’ve returned to normal functioning at home, work, or school. Treatment C (finding meaning in tragedy) focuses on making sense of events and finding meaning; it should be reviewed first but completed only after enough time has passed for initial emotional pain to subside.
Although many people believe it is essential to talk about traumatic events to minimize the risk of complications, this is not the case. A wave of recent research has demonstrated that many cherished notions about coping—the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) and the idea that expressing feelings is essential while keeping them bottled up is dangerous—are largely incorrect.
The mere act of recalling an event changes your actual memory of it. When you recall traumatic experiences while still flooded with intense emotion, you cement the link between the memory and the emotional reaction, making flashbacks more likely and the memory more psychologically central. However, you should not repress such memories or refuse to discuss them. Most experts now believe there is no “right” way to cope. Deal with loss and trauma exactly as your proclivities, personality, and worldview dictate: if you feel the need to talk, do so; if you don’t, do not push yourself.
Those who prefer to discuss their feelings may find it difficult without social support, while those who prefer not to discuss them may struggle when surrounded by vivid reminders.
By working through the list you will reconnect to meaningful aspects of yourself and your personality, and by doing so, move forward.
Since Viktor Frankl wrote , it has been accepted that finding meaning in loss and trauma is essential for effective coping, and thousands of studies have confirmed this. Finding meaning proved crucial in recovery from every kind of loss and trauma studied—spinal cord injuries, bereaved parents, victims of violence, frontline veterans. To recover, you need to set your broken psychological bones correctly and weave your experiences into the larger fabric of your life story (Man’s Search for Meaning).
refers to your ability to fit events into your existing framework of assumptions and beliefs so they become more comprehensible. You can usually begin making sense of tragic events within six months, though completing the process can take months or even yearsSense making
refers to your ability to extract whatever silver linings you can—greater appreciation of life, recognition of your own strength and resilience, realigned priorities, new purpose, and new paths. Benefit finding occurs only in later stages of recovery, as it is not something most people can or should do while still in the grips of severe emotional painBenefit finding
One of the most common ways people derive meaning from tragedy is by taking action directly related to the loss or trauma they sustained, though not every loss affords these options and they are not appropriate for everyone.
Written responses are strongly recommended:
While identifying potential pathways for benefit is valuable, it is the real-world application of these benefits that does your recovery the most good. You might come away with a greater appreciation of family, but if you don’t take action on that insight, the benefit remains limited.
Imagine yourself ten years in the future, having achieved something meaningful and significant. You have a quiet moment to look back and reflect. Complete the following:
While guilt can be heroic in small doses, in larger ones it becomes a psychological villain, poisoning both your peace of mind and your most cherished relationships. Once the toxins of unhealthy guilt are circulating in your system, extracting the venom is no easy task.
is the most common and often most damaging form. One main reason guilt remains unresolved is that we’re much less skilled at rendering effective apologies than we tend to realizeUnresolved guilt
is especially hard to purge because there are no actions for which to atone, no relationship ruptures to mend, and no apologies to render. The guilt serves no relational purpose—its warning signals are nothing more than a deafening false alarmSurvivor guilt
(and the closely related ) involves feeling guilty about moving forward and pursuing your own life when doing so means leaving others behind. Disloyalty guilt arises when such binding ties of loyalty to family or friends make pursuing your own goals feel like a hurtful condemnation of their values and a betrayal of family loyaltySeparation guilt (and the closely related disloyalty guilt)
Unresolved or excessive guilt is urgent to treat because such feelings often intensify and devolve into remorse and shame. Once that happens, you begin to condemn not just your actions but your entire self, leading to self-loathing, low self-esteem, and depression. Things that used to bring pleasure, joy, or excitement lose their appeal—not because you no longer enjoy them, but because you no longer permit yourself to do so.
By making others aware of your emotional distress, you redistribute the pain your “victims” felt, even the score, and hopefully restore your standing. But the ongoing toxicity of unresolved guilt can damage relationships even more substantially than your original offense did.
The main reason people seek to induce guilt in others is to influence their decisions and behavior. But guilt trips have a boomerang effect: along with guilt, they also induce resentment. In one survey, 33 percent of people felt resentful toward those who made them feel guilty, while only 2 percent of guilt inducers mentioned resentment as a potential consequence.
Treatment A (effective apologies) focuses on repairing damaged relationships by crafting psychologically effective apologies that detoxify ill will and promote repair. Treatment B (self-forgiveness) applies when circumstances prevent a direct apology or when the relationship cannot be repaired; it provides other ways to alleviate guilt and reduce self-condemnation. Treatment B is not as effective as Treatment A but does provide a form of “psychological antitoxin” that delivers much-needed emotional relief. Treatment C (reengaging in life) addresses survivor, separation, and disloyalty guilt, where there are no relationship ruptures to mend.
When apologies are perceived as insincere they can backfire and make a situation worse, spreading more poison into an already toxic dynamic. Fortunately, researchers have identified the specific ingredients that make apologies effective and more likely to elicit authentic forgiveness.
Most people conceive of apologies as including three basic ingredients: (1) a statement of regret for what happened, (2) a clear “I’m sorry” statement, and (3) a request for forgiveness—all delivered with sincerity. Scientists have discovered three additional components that play a vital role: (4) validating the other person’s feelings, (5) offering atonement, and (6) acknowledging that you violated expectations.
is a powerful toxin remover. You generally find it hard to forgive people who hurt you unless you believe they truly “get” how they made you feel. But when an apology demonstrates clear understanding of the emotional pain caused and takes full responsibility, you feel substantial relief and can let go of resentment far more easily. To validate effectively, put yourself in the other person’s shoes: understand the specific consequences of your actions, how they were affected, and the feelings those actions caused. Conveying that you “get it” does not imply you meant for them to feel that way—it merely acknowledges they felt wronged, regardless of your intentions.Emotional validation
The most important factor is accuracy. The more accurately you convey your understanding of the wronged person’s feelings, the more relationship poison you remove.
Emotional validation is something everyone seeks and craves far more than they realize. One reason so many people feel compelled to discuss feelings when upset is the hope of getting things off their chest and easing internal distress. But in order to feel true relief, they need the listener to “get it”—to understand what happened and why they feel the way they do—and to convey that understanding along with a generous dollop of empathy.
Although it may not always be relevant, necessary, or possible, making offers to compensate or atone can be extremely meaningful to the offended party, even if they turn down the offers. By conveying recognition that there is an imbalance and suggesting actions to restore equity and fairness, you communicate a deeper level of regret and remorse and a strong motivation to make things right.Offering atonement:
One huge factor preventing authentic forgiveness is that the wronged person doesn’t know whether you’ve learned your lesson—whether you’re changed or just as likely to commit the same offense again. You must clearly acknowledge that your actions violated certain expectations, rules, or social norms and offer reasonable assurances they won’t be violated again. When possible, be specific and explicit about the steps you plan to take to avoid repeating the offense.Acknowledging violated expectations:
When you cannot receive forgiveness from the person you’ve harmed, the only way to ease the torment is self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is a process, not a decision—though it starts with the decision to recognize you’ve beaten yourself up enough and that your excessive guilt serves no productive purpose.
Self-forgiveness requires first taking full responsibility for your actions and giving yourself an honest, accurate accounting of events. Coming to terms with your actions and their consequences can be emotionally uncomfortable, but without such self-examination, any self-forgiveness you grant yourself will not be authentic.
Once you’ve minimized the likelihood of repeating the transgression, purge remaining guilt by atoning or making meaningful reparations. Strike a deal with yourself and identify significant tasks, contributions, or commitments that would make your self-forgiveness feel well earned. Create a short ritual to mark completion—if you donate time or money to a charity, find a way to note the completion so as to signal to yourself that your penance is complete.
Ironically, it is easier to induce self-forgiveness when you’ve done something wrong than when your hands are clean and there is nothing for which you actually need to forgive yourself. While you cannot undo the suffering and loss of others, you can take steps to end your own. The best way to move past guilt when you didn’t do anything wrong is to remind yourself of the many reasons it is crucial to do so.
The following perspectives, drawn from people who have successfully shed survivor, separation, and disloyalty guilt, represent powerful rationales for reengaging in life:
Those who have lost loved ones often realize that the deceased would have wanted them to enjoy the life they had left, that failing to live fully would make them another victim of the tragedy, or that their children need them to be present—otherwise the kids would feel they had lost both parents. Those who survived when peers did not often recognize it would be ungrateful to deny the opportunities they were given, and that the best way to show gratitude is to take full advantage of them. Those who survived workplace layoffs channel their guilt into resolve—excelling, advancing, and reaching positions where they can ensure good people are treated better.On survivor guilt and loss:
Caregivers of disabled children or elderly parents discover that making time for satisfaction and even joy gives them much more to give. The “airplane oxygen mask” principle applies: put on your own mask first, because you can’t take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself. Rather than projecting callousness by going out and enjoying life, you are modeling optimism. Parents who feel guilty about leaving children with a babysitter come to see that the more they coddle, the less resilient and independent the children become—even if it hurts sometimes, healthy separation is necessary for everyone’s sake.On separation and disloyalty guilt:
Those facing disloyalty guilt realize that if they let a family member dictate how they live, that person would be leading two lives while they lead none—and that isn’t fair. Rather than apologizing for living authentically, they start asking for the same respect and support they once offered others. And those who make choices that deviate from family traditions recognize they are not willing to sacrifice doing what they know is right because it might hurt someone’s feelings.
When you encounter painful experiences you typically reflect on them, hoping to reach insights and epiphanies that reduce your distress and allow you to move on. Yet for many who engage in self-reflection, things go awry. Instead of attaining an emotional release, you get caught in a vicious cycle of replaying the same distressing scenes, memories, and feelings over and over, feeling worse every time. You become like a hamster trapped in a wheel of emotional pain, running endlessly but going nowhere.
What makes rumination a psychological injury is that it provides no new understandings that could heal your wounds—it serves only to pick at your scabs and infect them anew. Rumination increases the likelihood of becoming depressed and prolongs depressive episodes; it is associated with greater risk of alcohol abuse and eating disorders; it fosters negative thinking and impaired problem solving; and it increases psychological and physiological stress responses, putting you at greater risk for cardiovascular disease. When you have ruminative tendencies, revisiting the same feelings and problems repeatedly—even with a therapist—only increases the drive to ruminate and makes matters worse.
Rumination causes four primary wounds: it intensifies sadness and allows it to persist far longer than it otherwise would; it intensifies and prolongs anger; it hogs substantial emotional and intellectual resources, inhibiting motivation, initiative, and your ability to focus and think productively; and the need to discuss the same events or feelings for weeks, months, or years taxes the patience and compassion of your social support system and puts your relationships at risk.
Rumination causes you to stew in negative feelings until you become so consumed that you see your entire life, history, and future more bleakly. This negative outlook makes problems seem less manageable, produces fewer solutions, and compels you to give up or stop trying. Intense ruminations can make you so focused on your own emotional needs that you become blind to those of the people around you, and your relationships often suffer as a result.
To break the self-reinforcing nature of ruminative thoughts, you must interrupt the cycle once it gets triggered, weaken the urge to ruminate by diminishing the intensity of the feelings that fuel it, and monitor your relationships to ease the emotional burden you may be placing on loved ones.
Treatment A (changing perspective) reduces the intensity of the urge to ruminate. Treatment B (distraction) reduces the frequency of ruminative thoughts, which is easier once the urge is less intense. Treatment C (reframing anger) targets aggressive impulses ruminations can evoke. Treatment D (managing friendships) monitors relationships with those who provide emotional support.
When scientists investigated what distinguishes adaptive from maladaptive self-reflection, one factor emerged as hugely significant: the visual perspective you use when going over painful experiences in your mind.
When researchers asked people to analyze painful experiences from a —a third-person point of view, seeing themselves within the scene as an outside observer—something remarkable happened. Instead of merely recounting events and how they felt, people tended to reconstruct their understanding and reinterpret the experience in ways that promoted new insights and feelings of closure. This effect was amplified further when they reflected not on things happened but on . Subjects who used this approach experienced significantly less emotional pain, and their blood pressure was less reactive, indicating lower stress responses and less cardiovascular activation. These findings held for both depressive and anger ruminations.self-distanced perspectivehow**why
The main reason you tend to indulge the urge to ruminate—even once fully aware of how damaging it is—is that you often catch yourself ruminating only once your emotions are already churning. Trying to simply suppress ruminative thoughts is not only difficult, it is inadvisable: decades of research on thought suppression demonstrates that nothing compels you to think of something more than trying desperately not to think of it.
Dozens of studies have demonstrated that distracting yourself by engaging in absorbing or concentration-demanding tasks—moderate to intense cardiovascular activity, socializing, puzzles, computer games—disrupts ruminative thought processes. Distraction also restores the quality of your thinking and problem-solving abilities, because once you cease ruminating, you recover your intellectual skills rather quickly. Brief, less labor-intensive distractions can also be effective in cutting off ruminative thoughts.
Venting anger by assaulting benign objects only reinforces aggressive urges. The most effective strategy for regulating anger involves reframing the event in your mind so you change its meaning to one that is less infuriating. Reframing requires switching your perspective to perceive the situation in ways that change its meaning and, consequently, how you feel about it.
Although your ruminations are unique to your circumstances, certain themes and principles are common to many reframing situations. Use these four suggestions to reframe your situation so it elicits less anger or sadness: find the positive intention behind the other person’s actions; identify the opportunities the situation creates; embrace the learning moment; and view the offending person as someone needing spiritual help—deserving not your anger but your compassion.
To monitor whether you are overtaxing your social support system, regularly ask yourself the following questions: How much time has passed since the event in question? How many times have you discussed these issues with this person? Does this person feel comfortable bringing up their own issues and problems? What percentage of your communications with this person is dominated by the subject of your ruminations?
Trying, failing, and trying again is one of the main ways toddlers learn. Fortunately, toddlers are generally persistent and determined—otherwise we’d never learn to walk, talk, or do much of anything.
Failure inflicts three specific psychological wounds. It damages your self-esteem by inducing highly inaccurate and distorted conclusions about your skills, abilities, and capacities. It saps your confidence, motivation, and optimism, making you feel helpless and trapped. And it can trigger unconscious stresses and fears that lead you to inadvertently sabotage future efforts. When a failure is especially significant, leaving it untreated puts you at risk for complications such as shame, crippling helplessness, and clinical depression.
Failure not only makes your goal loom larger—it makes you feel “smaller.” Failing can induce you to feel less intelligent, less attractive, less capable, less skillful, and less competent, all of which have a hugely negative impact on confidence and future outcomes.
If your six-year-old failed a spelling test and announced, “I’m a stupid loser who can’t do anything right,” you would immediately refute every word and forbid such self-talk. You’d have no doubt that such negative thoughts would make the child feel worse and make it harder to succeed. Yet you frequently fail to apply that same logic to your own situations.
Criticizing your attributes so globally makes you hypersensitive to future failures, can lead to deep feelings of shame, and threatens your entire well-being. It also prevents you from accurately assessing the real causes of failure. For example, blaming character shortcomings means you’re unlikely to identify and correct crucial errors in planning and goal setting that are far more likely responsible.
Every New Year people list resolutions hoping to improve their lives, only to abandon them by February—often by January 2. Instead of self-esteem being strengthened by accomplishments, you’re left feeling weakened by failure and attributing it to a lack of motivation or ability: “I guess I don’t want to change” or “I’m just too lazy.” What makes such conclusions inaccurate is that the primary reason so few resolutions are completed is the neglect to think through how to achieve them. Without a carefully crafted plan, resolutions are unlikely to make it out of the starting gate no matter how motivated or capable you are.
Another common error is goal bingeing—having multiple goals without prioritizing them by urgency or attainability. People also neglect to break long-term goals into smaller, realistic subgoals, making goals appear daunting and overwhelming. And they rarely develop action plans for dealing with obstacles, hurdles, and setbacks, leaving them ill-equipped when those arise.
Failure can be very persuasive. Failure can also be very misleading. Failing to win a national lottery rarely sends anyone into depression—context determines how much psychological damage failure inflicts.
The prospect of failing can be so intimidating that you make unconscious efforts to lower expectations, but the way you go about it can result in unwittingly sabotaging yourself and bringing about the very outcome you fear. Studies show that parents who suffer from fear of failure often transmit such fears to their children—children pick up on their parents’ withdrawal, which triggers feelings of shame and teaches them that failures should be feared and avoided. Choking under pressure tends to happen because stress makes you overthink tasks, drawing attention away from the part of the brain that executes them automatically or fluidly.
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that the most effective way to treat the psychological wounds failure inflicts is to find the positive lessons in what happened. Providing social and emotional support alone often makes people who experienced a failure feel , because receiving concern and emotional support when still reeling can actually validate your misperceptions about character deficits and shortcomings.worse
Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before inventing the lightbulb and viewed each failure as a learning experience: “I haven’t failed once. I’ve learned ten thousand things that don’t work.” Failure always tells you something about what needs to change in your preparation or execution.
Failure also provides new opportunities. Henry Ford’s first two car companies failed; had they succeeded, he might never have tried a third, which was when he hit on assembly line manufacturing and became one of the richest men of his time. Ask yourself: In what ways might your failure make you stronger?
Some failures are also successes—no matter how disappointed you feel, acknowledge the ways you were successful even if you ultimately failed. In what ways could you view your failure as a success? Further, failure makes future success more meaningful: studies show that the harder you work and the more challenges you overcome, the greater the meaning, joy, and satisfaction when you eventually succeed.
Success is not always necessary. In most situations, making steady progress toward your goals contributes more toward sustained happiness and self-fulfillment than actually reaching them. The satisfaction, sense of pride, and personal accomplishment of inching ever closer to your target create a mix of satisfaction and joy that does wonders for mood, motivation, and psychological well-being.
In one study, scientists taught sedentary seniors to attribute their inactivity not to age but to factors entirely in their control, such as how much they walked daily. One month later, this simple intervention led to seniors increasing their walking by two and a half miles a week and reporting equal improvements in stamina and mental health.
The best way to regain a sense of control is to reexamine both your preparation (goal planning) and your performance (execution) to identify elements you perceived as out of your control that could be within your control if approached differently.
When stress and anxiety threaten to steal your attention, you need to steal it right back. Studies have demonstrated that whistling can prevent you from overthinking automatic tasks you’ve done many times before and then choking as a result—whistling requires just enough additional attention to leave none left over for overthinking.
Anxiety can cause shallow breathing that limits oxygen intake and increases panic. To restore normal breathing, put down your pen, look away from the exam, and focus on breathing for one minute, inhaling and exhaling to a count of three. Notice how the air feels filling your lungs and as you exhale. Roughly a minute should stabilize your breathing and take the edge off your anxiety.
Next, redirect attention to the task and prevent your mind from worrying about how well or poorly you’re doing. The best way to maintain focus on specific steps is by reasoning through them aloud—vocalizing questions and reasoning uses just enough attentional resources to deprive the part of your brain that wants to focus on worrying.
The best medicine for performance anxiety triggered by previous failure is to neutralize worries by affirming your self-worth. If you feel susceptible, take time before the exam to write a brief essay about an aspect of your character you value highly and feel confident about. This small investment can make you more resilient to irrelevant worries and anxieties a previous failure might trigger.
Studies indicate that most people today are of two minds when it comes to self-esteem: feeling inadequate as individuals on one hand, yet believing they’re better than “average” on the other. How you feel about yourself in the specific domains you consider personally meaningful or important has a big impact on your general self-worth.
Low self-esteem inflicts three types of psychological wounds: it makes you more vulnerable to many of the emotional and psychological injuries you sustain in daily life; it makes you less able to absorb positive feedback and other “emotional nutrients” when they come your way; and it makes you feel insecure, ineffective, unconfident, and disempowered.
Straightforward observations of cortisol have demonstrated that people with low self-esteem respond to stress more poorly and maintain higher cortisol levels. High cortisol is associated with high blood pressure, poor immune system functioning, suppressed thyroid function, reduced muscle and bone density, and poor cognitive performance. Stress can also substantially weaken willpower and self-control, making you revert to automatic old habits without realizing it—a stressful day might make a dieter leave the supermarket having purchased a bucket of fried chicken instead of a salad. When your self-esteem is low, you are far less likely to attribute such slips to mental and emotional fatigue (the more likely culprits) and far more likely to assume they reflect fundamental character deficits.
Persuasion studies have long established that messages falling within the boundaries of our established beliefs are persuasive, while those that differ too substantially are rejected. If you believe you’re unattractive, you’re much more likely to accept “You look very nice today” than “Your beauty is breathtaking!” When people with low self-esteem are exposed to positive affirmations that differ too widely from their existing self-beliefs, the affirmation is perceived as untrue, rejected in its entirety, and actually their belief that the opposite is true.strengthens
In one study, people with low self-esteem agreed that watching a funny video would improve their mood but declined to do so nonetheless—illustrating how low self-esteem leads to the rejection of even clearly available emotional nutrients.
Most people only put in as much effort as a situation requires. If they can “get away” with being less considerate or less reciprocal, many will—not because they’re evil, but because they can. When your self-esteem is low and you expect very little of others, you are likely to get very little from them as well.
Imagine witnessing an emotionally abusive parent berating a child for a poor report card—mocking, belittling, without a shred of empathy. The child’s face registers utter devastation. Most people would find this scene extremely distressing and vow never to treat their own children that way. Yet when your self-esteem is low, that is exactly how you treat yourself. You blame yourself for mistakes, failures, rejections, and frustrations in the harshest, most self-punitive terms—calling yourself a “loser” and “idiot,” giving stern self-lectures, replaying scenes while ruminating on your inadequacies. You treat yourself even worse than an emotionally abusive parent would.
Purging the emotionally abusive voices in your head and adopting kinder, more supportive ones is an absolute imperative.
Complete this exercise three times over three consecutive days, each time describing a different event from your past (include at least one recent event):
A much more effective approach than positive affirmations is —affirming valuable and important aspects of yourself that you already know to be true, such as trustworthiness, loyalty, or work ethic. Unlike positive affirmations (which affirm qualities you’d like to possess but don’t believe you do), self-affirmations remind you that you have significant worth regardless of perceived shortcomings, providing an immediate boost to self-esteem and rendering you less vulnerable to rejection or failure.self-affirmation
Several studies have demonstrated that by affirming aspects of yourself related to your worth as a relationship partner, you can bolster your “relationship self-esteem.” This renders compliments from your partner less discrepant from your current self-views and makes you less likely to reject or rebuff them.
For personal empowerment to impact your self-esteem, it must be supported by evidence of actual influence in various spheres of your life—relationships, social or professional contexts, as a citizen, or even as a consumer.
Although many people assume willpower is a stable character trait, self-control actually functions more like a muscle. Understanding how this muscle works will allow you to use it wisely, strengthen it, and build self-esteem as a result. The most important thing to know about your self-control muscles is that they are subject to fatigue.
To maximize willpower effectiveness and use it to build self-esteem, you need to do three things: strengthen your basic willpower muscles, manage the energy reservoirs that fuel self-control so they don’t get depleted, and minimize the impact of the many temptations around you.
The downside of willpower being a general muscle is that exerting it in one area causes fatigue and makes it harder to exert it in another. But this limitation has an upside: exercising willpower by practicing acts of self-control in areas will increase the strength and endurance of your willpower muscles in more meaningful and important areas as well.insignificant
One essential fuel your willpower muscles require is glucose. When glucose levels are low, effortful mental processes such as asserting willpower are impaired (automatic processes like washing dishes are not). In one study, participants whose glucose was depleted were given lemonade—half with real sugar, half with artificial sweetener. After fifteen minutes, those who received real sugar recovered from their mental fatigue and displayed significantly greater willpower than those who got the artificial sweetener.
While you can’t lower the volume on cravings and urges, you can turn up the volume on your risk assessment. View slips as simple alerts that willpower is fatigued and needs to recover—rather than as indications of failure—and you can acknowledge the lapse without getting further off track.
Your habits always have triggers—lighting a cigarette with a beer, doing recreational drugs with certain friends, biting fingernails on the couch watching TV. To change the habits, you have to avoid the triggers.
Mindfulness involves a form of meditation in which you observe your feelings without judging them—becoming an anthropologist in your own mind. You act as an outside observer, noting the strength of your emotions and the sensations they create in your body without dwelling on them or their implications. Focusing on your breathing, visualizing a seismographic readout, and noting bodily sensations can help you ride out the “quake” and resist acting on cravings, urges, and impulses until they pass.
The treatments in this book represent a psychological medicine cabinet starter kit—a set of emotional balms, ointments, bandages, and painkillers you can apply to emotional and psychological injuries when you first sustain them. Being a good self-practitioner means developing your own individualized set of mental-health-hygiene guidelines, and you should endeavor to personalize your medicine cabinet whenever possible.
Anyone who wishes to lead an emotionally healthier and happier life need only open their psychological medicine cabinet and reach for the treatments within.