Author and Psychologist Guy Winch takes us through the psychological experiment that illustrates why rejection hurts us so badly, and the steps we can take to heal our wounds through emotional first aid.
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00:00 And that's the thing that fascinated scientists at the beginning when it came to rejection.
00:04 Why do they hurt so much? Why does it hurt so much?
00:08 There's just so many ways in which we can get rejected.
00:12 We get turned down by potential dates, we get turned down by potential employers,
00:17 our friends go to lunch without us, our parents don't approve of our lifestyles,
00:22 but all of them have one thing in common, and that is they really, really hurt.
00:27 So they wanted to study it. The thing is, you have to be able to catch rejection in action if you want to study it.
00:33 You know, you can't just take your research assistant to a local singles bar and go,
00:37 "Oh look, that dude just got shot down. Quick, give him the questionnaire."
00:41 That's not going to work. So how do you recreate it?
00:44 So here's what they did. And you're sitting in the waiting room,
00:48 and there are two other people in the waiting room.
00:51 And there's a ball on the table, and one of them takes the ball and goes, "Ah," you know,
00:54 and throws it to the other person. And the other person catches it and goes, "Eh," and throws it to you.
01:00 And you catch it, and you throw it back to the first person, who then goes, "Hmm," throws it to the second,
01:06 and the second doesn't throw it to you, throws it back to the first person.
01:10 And now they are tossing the ball, and you're excluded.
01:13 Now, how would that make you feel?
01:15 Now, most people think, "Two strangers in a waiting room didn't toss me a ball. Big whoop. I don't care."
01:22 But it turns out we care quite a bit, because this is a paradigm that has been used dozens and dozens of times.
01:30 And everyone who goes through it reports feeling significant emotional pain.
01:35 So they said, "Let's run the experiment again."
01:37 They took them in, and they go, "Okay, we're coming clean."
01:39 Those are research assistants. "It wasn't real. The whole thing was rigged. Now does it hurt?"
01:45 And people were like, "Yeah, it still hurts."
01:49 So scientists were like, "What is going on in our brain here with this rejection thing?
01:53 How come it's so unreasonable? I mean, we're telling people it wasn't real, and they're still hurting."
01:58 So they put people in a functional MRI machine.
02:01 They wanted to see literally what happens in the brain.
02:03 And what they found was shocking to them, because what they saw was that the same pathways in the brain
02:09 light up when we get rejected as light up when we experience physical pain.
02:16 They ran the experiment again, and they gave half the group of people Tylenol,
02:19 and the people who got Tylenol reported less emotional pain.
02:23 Now, I'm not suggesting that you go out on your next date packing Tylenol.
02:28 Why are we wired to experience rejection so severely? Why?
02:33 And the answer is because of our evolutionary past, because we grew up in tribes,
02:39 and we couldn't survive outside them.
02:41 Being ostracized from your tribe was a death sentence.
02:45 But it also explains why we feel things so harshly.
02:49 And today, we don't live in small pockets of humanity, so the opportunities for rejection are innumerable.
02:55 So let's look at how people typically respond to rejection.
02:59 Vodka! They reach for the bottle. Not a good idea.
03:02 Turns out that when you stuff your feelings down with alcohol, they often come back up again.
03:07 And the other thing we often do is we turn to food. We try and drown our sorrows with food.
03:13 Now, needless to say, these responses don't really work very well.
03:18 So what do we need to do? There are several wounds we need to treat.
03:22 But the most urgent of them is that we need to do something to revive our self-worth.
03:27 One of the ways that is most common in terms of how people do that is positive affirmations.
03:34 Those are statements like, "I am attractive and worthy. I'm going to be a great success."
03:40 But when we do studies about them, what we find is that positive affirmations don't work.
03:46 Well, why is that? Why is it that when your self-esteem is low,
03:49 telling yourself that you're going to be successful and people are going to love you and everything is going to be great,
03:54 why would that make you feel bad?
03:56 Well, when a statement falls within the boundaries of our belief system, we'll accept it.
04:01 And when a statement falls outside the boundaries of our belief system, we'll reject it.
04:08 And so when you're feeling really unworthy of love and you're telling yourself,
04:12 "I'm worthy of love. I'm worthy of success," your unconscious mind will reject that statement.
04:17 So what should you do? Well, there is another kind of affirmation that actually does work.
04:23 And that's the one I'm going to suggest. It's called self-affirmations.
04:26 And the thing about self-affirmations is they are generated by you.
04:30 So you know they fall within the boundary of your belief system because you're the one that has to come up with them.
04:36 You make a list of five qualities, attributes that you have, that you really believe are valuable in whatever the domain is.
04:45 And then you write a brief essay, one or two paragraphs about one of the items on your list.
04:50 You really elaborate why that's an important thing.
04:54 And that will actually remind you of the self-worth that you actually have.
04:59 That will make you feel better doing that.
05:01 Now, some people say to me, "I've tried it. It didn't work."
05:04 And I'm like, "You've made the list and you wrote the essay?"
05:07 No, no, no. I just thought about those things and I thought about why they were important.
05:12 And I'm like, "Well, you know, that's like saying I was hungry, so I thought about the food I had in my fridge.
05:16 Turns out I'm still hungry."
05:18 You know, no. You have to write the essay. You have to make the list.
05:21 Because making the list is like taking the food out of the fridge and cooking it.
05:25 And writing the essay is how you eat it. It's how you absorb it.
05:29 Your brain needs for you to think about it, to process it, to write it.
05:33 That's how the message gets absorbed because it's so obvious to us that we need to monitor our physical health.
05:39 We need to monitor our bodies. That's very, very clear to us.
05:42 But it's not clear to us at all that we need to monitor our psychological health.
05:47 I really hope that the next time you experience some kind of psychological injury,
05:52 you won't just hurt, but you'll try applying emotional first aid.
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