Why Rejection Hurts and How To Get Over It.

Do you know what the real trap in life is? Self-rejection. When someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody."... I am no good... I deserve to be forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Sometimes it makes me think how truly wanted, am I? Does this sound familiar? How you ever felt the same way? 


Today we'll talk about rejection. I want us to take some time to explore why the feeling of rejection is so painful and why for some people, it's so tough to get over rejection. We'll discuss rejection in relationships, and we will examine the impact of social rejection too. We'll also understand how being rejected can trigger the same neural circuits that process physical injury, and as a result, translate rejection into the experience that we call pain.  


I'm Dimitris and as everyone on this earth knows, rejection is something close to me too. Whether personal or professional, it has been there, and the hurt it’s caused is not reducing. This is why I became fascinated in understanding how childhood traumas leave a lifelong impact on us and our triggers. Because that’s where rejection stems from!

If you want to know more about how childhood affects our entire lives, check out the new program I created, “Understanding Childhood Psychology.” This course will help you uncover the real reasons why rejection hurts you so much, and will also give you plenty of insights into how your childhood experiences have affected your adult life.

Back to our story. Some people say that rejection is not something real. They say rejection is subjective and that it's only in your head. I'm not sure I agree with that because, as we'll see in a bit, the feeling of rejection can affect your brain's biochemistry.


The truth is that one way or another, all of us are going to get rejected at some point in our lives. In relationships, at work and in society, rejection is something we cannot escape. However, too much rejection can make people feel like their failing in life. So before we move on, let's make it clear that rejection is not the same as failure. I would say that rejection is something temporary. It's usually feedback we get, and if we use it wisely, it can lead to increased confidence as we sharpen our skills. Failure, on the other hand, is what we feel when self-rejection has managed to get under our skin. So it's when other people's feedback has become this little voice in our head saying, "you're not enough", "you're a failure," and all that stuff. Both of them hurt and both of them can break your heart. 

Why Rejection Hurts?

Have you ever wondered why we often describe being rejected in terms of physical pain? Such as; 'My heart was broken', 'I felt crushed', 'It was like a slap in the face'? Naomi Eisenberger is a social psychologist and had the same question. So she conducted an experiment where participants put on virtual-reality headsets and played a game of catch (called CyberBall). While the participants were playing, the researchers measured their brain activity through fMRI scans. While playing catch, the participants could see their own hand, a ball, and two other virtual characters. As the game went on, the two virtual characters would stop throwing the ball to the participant – excluding them from the game. As you can imagine, this set up allowed the scientists to see how the 'social pain' of being left out, of rejecting someone, impacted the brain.


To understand the results of the experiment, you need to know that physical pain involves a number of areas in the brain. Some detect the location of the pain, others, like the anterior insula (AI) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ok Let's call this one dACC), process the subjective experience. So there's one part of the brain that locates where the pain is, and another part that gives pain an emotional context. That's why we experience pain as something unpleasant.


In Naomi's experiment, the fMRI scans showed both the Anterior Insula and the dACC light up when participants were excluded from the game. So those who felt the most emotional distress, also showed the most pain-related brain activity. The results showed that the feeling of rejection triggered the same neural circuits that process physical injury and translate it into the experience we call pain.


And this is why the human brain does not distinguish between a broken bone and an aching heart. Rejection actually hurts – and it is not just something in your head. 


The original CyberBall experiment was conducted in 2003, and since then several studies have replicated its results again and again. What's even more remarkable is that since then, researchers have found that social rejection does not have to be explicit to trigger the pain regions in the brain. For example, just seeing a photograph of your ex-partner activates the same neural circuit as physical pain. 
 
So this led Naomi and her team to wonder "if physical and emotional pain are related, could a painkiller help with the feeling of despair after rejection? To test this theory, half of the participants in a study took two daily doses of Tylenol painkiller for three weeks while the other half took a placebo. Each group recorded their day-to-day emotions in a diary, and by the end of the three weeks, Naomi and her team compared the results. The placebo group result showed high activity in the pain regions of the brain, and they reported a lot of distress after being rejected. But the group that had taken Tylenol reported less distress and showed limited activity in the pain regions of the brain after being rejected. 


Now let's make something clear, if someone rejected you and you feel it's too painful to deal with, please do not start taking pain killers, right? This will not solve the issue. Painkillers can't simply cure us of emotional pain –and you can do much better than taking Panadol each time someone rejects you. 


But what we can take from the Tylenol study is that rejection is not just something emotional. It goes straight into the core of our physical body. Our brain. 


Naomi Eisenberger believes that the reason why our brain reacts like this to the feeling of rejection, is linked to our evolutionary history. I mean, think about it. Across our history as a species, we have been dependent on others to survive – we have been hunting in groups to find food. We have been relying on others to protect ourselves against beasts. We have been cultivating the land together and exchanged what we produced amongst us. Being part of a group is what kept us alive. So it makes sense to think that the pain of rejection is processed by our minds in the same way as physical pain because if we got rejected from society, our lives would be under threat. So, instead of finding a new way to communicate emotional pain, nature just used the existing mechanism for physical pain. In fact, it is so ingrained in us that even the most insignificant comments can affect those brain regions. What I want you to get out of this is that this ancient pain response is designed to keep you alive. Your body goes into automatic distress only to let you know that you might be in great danger. 



The Ego-Shock

So, what happens when we experience major blows to our need to belong? You'd expect that, the more significant the rejection, the worse the pain would be. But this is not how it works. It turns out that when we get rejected by those closest to us, something else happens too. And it can help us understand two things. The first one is our struggle for acceptance. And the second one is the desperation to be liked. Listen to this, next study it's fascinating.


So, there's another social psychologist whose name is Roy Baumeister. Baumeister conducted a series of experiments where he found that after experiencing social rejection, people become a lot more aggressive, they are much more likely to cheat and take risks, while they also become indifferent to helping others. What fascinated me when I read the study is that at the same time, the person who had been rejected showed no actual evidence of showing hurt. There was no data to show that the person was hurt. The team had predicted that rejection would trigger negative emotions, that would then trigger unusual behaviour. But this never happened. 


So how did they come up to this conclusion? This is what they did. They divided students into groups, they gave them some time to mingle and then they separated them and asked them to pick two other studetns as partners for the next assignment. They told some of them that everyone had chosen them, and to others that no one had. After the experiment, students rated their feelings, and the rejected group showed no change in emotions. Instead of feeling sad that no one had picked them, what happened was that they had become emotionally numb. 


And now I want you to think, how many times have you felt the same? How many times you felt your emotions to shut down after you felt rejected? Click the poll up here to answer the question


They repeated the experiment so many times, and they got the same results. Baumeister thought that the negative feelings were there but the students were shy to admit them. So he decided to changed the experiment. In the new version, the students still mingled, asked to pick partners then either accepted or rejected, but after this had happened, the students were asked to rate how they felt about a fellow student who was experiencing significant pain after a leg injury or a romantic breakup. The researchers thought that even if the students couldn't allow their own emotions to show, they should still be empathetic towards someone else. What do you think happened? The socially rejected people showed very little empathy. And what does this mean? That their emotions had shut down after rejection.


Remember sometimes when you hurt yourself and the part you hurt feels numb? It's exactly the same thing with your psyche. It's like for a brief moment, your body shuts down to protect you against the pain. Baumeister called this "the ego-shock". Just like when the body shuts down to protect you from pain, he says that your psyche can freeze up in order to protect you against emotional pain.


And now it all makes sense. It makes sense that rejection or even the fear of rejection can lead to codependent, obsessive, jealous, and even angry behavior in relationships. It makes sense that it can make you drive others away from you. It makes sense that it can cause you to reject others to avoid being rejected yourself. 


The feeling of rejection can leave us incapable of feeling anything at all. 


No matter how fast these moments of ego-shock may pass they tell us something about rejection and belonging we don't usually see.


They tell us that we don't just live with other people, we also live through them and live in them as well. Other people are what ground us into this world. We get our identity when other people see us. And let me ask you this, what is identity but the slow, build-up of opinions - us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, essentially, what we think they see. And when they can't see us, in a way we cease to be.


Rejection doesn't have to come from someone close to us or come in a particularly obvious form to harm – in many ways, it hides in our day to day lives.



Social Rejection

"The best predictor for who will be depressed is not a gene, and its not a measure of your brain, it's whether you are poor" This was said by Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard University and it's something that many researchers know for years now. That poor people have worse health.


Poverty exposes people to several risk factors: bad nutrition, lacking health care, crime and unemployment, and so on – and all these are known to cause physical and mental illnesses.  Many studies in the last twenty-thirty years have shown that low socioeconomic status is a crucial predictor of early mortality and poor health. From cardiovascular diseases and diabetes to schizophrenia and anxiety.


But, poverty doesn't solve the whole puzzle alone. See, in the past decades we have seen average incomes and living standards to have improved, but health problems have continued to challenge everyone – not just the poor. There's a great book called The Spirit Level. The authors argue that there have to be other reasons why societies with greater inequality levels have worse health outcomes. There seems to be something about our social position, they say, that gets under our skin.


According to the authors, one potential reason for this is what they call “status anxiety”. The idea here is that our value of ourselves changes depending on where we stand on the social ladder. People around us show more respect the higher up we are in society. On the flip side, the lower we are in society's hierarchy the more we feel we have failed to live up to society's standards of success. In a way we are seen as inferior and we are judged and marginalised. In other words, we get rejected.


Social rejection has been built into our understanding of how society works, so we often don't even question it, making it even more harmful. The fact is that people who find themselves near the bottom report severe feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and helplessness.


Which reminds me of Dr. Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life. So in his first chapter Peterson explains how lobsters, being our evolutionary ancestors, share the same neurological structures as humans. Especially those areas of the brain affected by social hierarchies. And like humans, lobsters have a nervous system attuned to status which "runs on serotonin". Studies show that lobsters who lose enough fights and therefore lose their social status, stop producing serotonin, which leads to deep depression.
In other words, lobsters, like humans, become clinically depressed as they tumble down the social hierarchy.


This is from Peterson's book, "Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency - as anything whatsoever may happen, at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan -among humans, just among crustaceans."


And if you think it's only our emotions that are affected, you have to listen to this. There's clear evidence that some crucial neurobiological systems are severely affected when our social identity gets questioned, for example, when someone evaluates us negatively. 


There was a study that showed that people who were negatively evaluated after giving a speech, were triggered to the level that their body started the inflammation process. Inflammation is the body’s innate response to physical injury. Just like when we experience a physical threat, such as seeing someone with a knife coming at us, social threats and social rejection signals to our bodies that we are in danger. This signal then sets off the same defensive system that our body uses at the microbial level. Now, while this defensive system helps us fight infection, in the case of social rejection, the consequences of this can get out of hand, spiking inflammation to dangerous levels. And chronic inflammation has been linked to diabetes, some cancers, Alzheimer's, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and depression, among others. 


So now things start to make more sense. It's easy to see the link between social inequality and poor health. The more socially rejected you are, the more your body goes into a prolonged state of inflammation. 



The Impossible Game of Social Status

Now, the worrying thing about social status is that it is always relative – where you stand on the social ladder has more to do with how you compare yourself with others, rather than your actual circumstances. Especially now with the rise of social media, it has become easier to compare yourself to others who have more than you. And even to others who you think they have more than you. You open instagram or Facebook and you see all these perfect lives, the money, the gorgeous looking people and this constant comparison produces more losers than winners (even if you know that many of them have miserable lives), and so you end up feeling like someone who has come last in a race.


Going up the social ladder does not mean that you are solving your problem of social anxiety. All it means is that you just put the bar higher. Your reference point keeps changing the more your status changes. So, if you think about it, we all judge ourselves usually based on our peer group right? So let's say that you and your peers operate within some defined social criteria (about money, about prestigious job, your car, whatever) and you are somewhere here. What you innevitebly do is compare yourself with your peers that have more. And you want to reach that. Now, when you actually manage to reach their level and even go beyond, what happens is that you don't get the satisfaction that you hoped for, because now you compare yourself with another person who is higher in the new box you find yourself into. In the end, this is an impossible game to win. Every winner, in way, is also a loser at the same time.


In Greece we say, "κάλλιο πρώτος στο χωριό παρά δεύτερος στην πόλη". It roughly translates to this: "it's better if you are number one in your village than number two in the city". 


So, does this all mean, that only the lucky few at the top of our society can be well, while the rest of us fight for the crumbs? 


Well, not necessarily, because as we will see, it's not money that matters but the social structure you create around you. My grandmother was a wise woman. I remember her telling me when I was little, "Dimi, that's how she use to call me, Dimi it's better to have ten good friends around you than ten golden coins". I use to reply jokingly, "how about 10 million, grandma?". Yeah…well, it took me 38 years, 10 of which I'm away from my country, away from my family and away from my friends to understand exactly what she meant. 


This one study stands out when it comes to the social structure around you and how it affects your health. The two authors of the book we mentioned earlier, measured the average income per person in 21 countries against an index of each country's well-being and social problems, and there was no connection found between them. But, when they ranked the countries from most equal, like Japan and Norway, to the least equal, like the UK and US, they found something fascinating. The most equal countries had half the levels of mental illness and half the levels of obesity as the most unequal ones; three to five years higher life expectancy; six to ten times lower teenage birth-rates; and 12 times reduced number of homicide.


In another study of social rejection, scientists found that social isolation increased the likelihood of death by 29%


So we know that socially integrated people live happier and more fulfilled lives. That's a fact. No matter where you stand on the social ladder if you are within a loving and caring environment, you're good.


The sense of belonging to a social network gives people a sense of purpose, it motivates them to take better care of themselves and provide social support. And giving rather than receiving social support is another antidote. Proven! There was a study that followed older married couples, and those who were helping out their family and friends had lower mortality rates.



How To Get Over Rejection in 6 Steps

And now that we know all this, what are we going to do about it? What are the most effective ways to get over rejection? 


1. Well, as we said, rejection IS actual pain. So give time to yourself to feel that pain. Make space for it to exist, no matter how hard it seems. Accepting the fact that you are a human being with emotions, allows you to process your feelings more constructively. 


2. This leads us to the second point of not judging yourself. This inner critic, this voice inside your head that tells you "oh I told you so" "you are worthless" "you are not attractive enough for this relationship, or you're are not competent enough for this job", this little voice is what adjusts your mindset, which in turn defines the outcome of any situation you find yourself into. Be compassionate to that part of yourself. Don't try to quiet it down. Don't try to suppress it because it will kick back with great power. Try, instead, to understand whose voice that is. It's not yours I'm telling you. It comes from somewhere in your childhood where you got conditioned to judge yourself that way. 


3. Then try to explore other possible reasons of why you got rejected. What happens every time we get rejected is that we unconsciously choose the most painful reason for us as an explanation. And we do that because of our own insecurities. But if you can see the situation as objectively as you can, you then see that there are hundreds of other reasons why this happened and most of them are not related to you. Only if you are able to do that you can then move to the next step, which is to focus on what you can learn from this experience. 


4. Ask yourself these two simple questions:
1. What's the one thing I can learn from this?
2. What's one thing that I can do differently next time I'm in a similar situation? Focus on one thing only.


5. The next step is to surround yourself with people you know they love you and want the best for you. As we explained, rejection shakes our need to belong, and that's why it is crucial to be within an environment, and amongst people you feel you belong with. Hang out with people who accept your values and remind you of how values and accepted you are. 


6. And lastly, make time to help someone in need. Generosity promotes social connection and it's an act that evokes gratitude. It's a way to show your values, and the bottom line is that it makes you more likely to judge yourself based on who you really are, rather than on whether others accept you. 


Rejection hurts us only if we allow our minds to dwell over it. That way, it lives on and on, making us feel like an outcast in our own mind. Rejection hurts by making us hurt ourselves and there's a reason for that. It's because the feeling of rejection is indisputably linked with our need for approval.


Do you know how pearls are made? Natural Pearls form when an irritant - usually a parasite - works its way into an oyster. As a defense mechanism, the oyster produces a fluid to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating, called 'nacre', is deposited until a glorious pearl is formed. So, if rejection is your irritant, what is your defense mechanism against it, and what would be your pearl that will come out of it? 


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I'm Dimitris and thanks for watching.