#30: Rejection stings less when you channel your inner toddler

Rejection stings - literally (kind of). But you can make it sting a bit less. Part of what makes it so hard is that we're so keen on kicking ourselves when we're down. We don't even realise we're doing it, let alone how to stop. Your imperfect friend is here to sort that shit out.

You're going to learn:

  1. What makes rejection so hard

  2. How we make it even harder for ourselves

  3. Why toddlers are your new rejection-resistant role models

  4. A simple mental hack to help stop your inner critic going into overdrive when rejection strikes


References:

Eisenberger NI, Lieberman MD, Williams KD. Does rejection hurt? An FMRI study of social exclusion. Science. 2003 Oct 10;302(5643):290-2. doi: 10.1126/science.1089134. PMID: 14551436.

Guy Winch's TED talk on emotional first aid.

Episode transcript:

Learn to deal with rejection by screaming yourself sick … and then moving on.

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

Being turned down for a job you applied for. Having a paper rejected from a journal you submitted to. Getting dumped. Being ghosted by someone you went on a date with. Not being invited to a friend’s wedding. I’ll stop there, before you turn off this episode and find something more uplifting to listen to, because I’m making you shudder, right? Rejection stings. But why? And is there anything we can do to make it sting a bit less? Well, yes there is - and that’s what we’re looking at in this episode.

What is it that makes rejection so painful? Part of it is simply not having something we want, especially when we thought we had it, or hoped that we’d get it. We hoped we’d get that job we applied for, but we don’t. We thought we were in a satisfying romantic relationship, and then we’re not. What a bummer. What a knock-back. Of course that’s disappointing and frustrating and upsetting. It’s even - maybe, and with the right sort of theoretical assumptions that I won’t go on about here - literally physically painful: a 2003 neuroimaging study by Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues published in Science found that the brains of people experiencing rejection behave a lot like the brains of people who are in pain. Rejection also leads us to draw certain sweeping, negative conclusions about ourselves - that we’re not good enough, that in some important sense we don’t belong. This sense of belonging is important. The psychologist Guy Winch, who’s published a book and given a TED talk about coping with rejection and other aspects of what he calls ‘emotional first aid’, has said: ‘Rejection destabilizes our need to belong, leaving us feeling unsettled and socially untethered’.

I’m not going to claim that you can fix rejection so that it doesn’t sting. It’s real pain. But I’m hoping that I can convince you that you can make rejection sting much, much less than it probably currently does.

Let’s start off by walking through what it feels like to be rejected. Let’s say you applied for a job that you were pretty enthusiastic about, you spent quite a bit of time on your application, you ticked all the right boxes relating to qualifications and experience, you allowed yourself to feel cautiously confident - and then you receive a formulaic ‘thanks but no thanks’ rejection email. No interview, no explanation, no feedback. How do you feel? Well, disappointed, right? Frustrated. Upset. Hurt. You put in all that work and got emotionally invested. You might have had the odd daydream about what it would be like to have that job. Perhaps it would have meant better financial security than you have now, more opportunities to develop your CV, and the luxury of being able to take a break from jobhunting. And then suddenly you’re back to square 1. Your efforts have come to nothing. You don’t have the job. You thought that maybe, possibly, hopefully, you might be approaching the finish line - but then you’re back at the start of the race. Time to pick yourself up and start all over again. Nobody would welcome that outcome. Of course it’s frustrating.

But it’s not only frustrating, is it? Something more unsettling is going on. Someone’s glanced at what you have to offer, and said: ‘nah’. Someone who could have included you has excluded you. Someone has found you not quite up to scratch. Someone has had a better offer than you. And so what do you do? I’m going to bet that you, in your hurt, unhappy, excluded state, take all those nasty implications and run with them. Perhaps you tell yourself that you’ll never get a decent job, that of course other people are better than you, that you were deluded ever to think that you’d be in the running, that everyone’s disappointed in you, that you’re an embarrassment, that you’ll never make it, that you should probably just give up now because obviously this is just going to keep happening, and when will you ever learn? You know, it’s almost physically painful for me to say all this, because it’s so close to the bone, and it’s close to the bone because I’ve said these things to myself many times after experiencing rejection. The crazy thing is that often, when we say things like this to ourselves following a rejection, there’s part of us that knows that we’re over-reacting, and that we’re just making ourselves more miserable by saying these things to ourselves - which we are, of course. But, especially if you’re in the habit of negative self-talk - which we all are, of course, at least sometimes - and especially if you’re reeling from the punch to the guts you’ve just received in the form of a rejection, it can take a large amount of self-discipline to stop yourself from going down that self-flagellating road. When you’re trying to pick yourself up after a rejection, you might not have the strength for that. We can tell ourselves to stop saying these horrible things to ourselves, to keep things in perspective, to think positive thoughts - but it’s a bit like shooing a cat off the kitchen counter. She might jump down, resentfully and in no particular hurry, but then as soon as you look away, she jumps back up again, and she’s going to keep on doing it unless you stand there and make keeping her off the counter your main focus. Exhausting. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to deal with rejection if wasn’t so much effort to keep everything in perspective?

Well, yes it would, and the good news is that there is something you can do to help. I’m going to give you a hack - a mental trick you can use when you’re reeling from rejection. It’s not going to make rejection a walk in the park, but it can take the sting out of it by preventing you from getting carried away with those horrible negative conclusions about your general worth as a human being. To put it another way, it’s going to make it easier for you to keep your inner critic cat off the kitchen counter of your self esteem … that’s a horrendous metaphor, sorry, but it does mention cats behaving badly, so it’s staying in.

Let’s go back to that rejection scenario I cooked up a moment ago. You get rejected from a job you wanted. You’re hurt and upset, and your inner critic is getting carried away with the ‘I just don’t have what it takes’ and the ‘I’m an embarrassment’ and the ‘Maybe I should just give up’. Now, suppose that while you’re still licking your wounds, you’re offered a different job. Another one you applied for, which is just as good as the one you didn’t get. How would you feel then? Well, no longer hurt and upset. You’ve got the thing you wanted, after all. And what’s more, this success is going to stop the inner critic in her tracks - though admittedly only temporarily, because you know what she’s like. You got the job, so you’re not an embarrassment, you’re not deluded to have thought you could make it, you’re not doomed to fail time after time after time, and so on. Take that, inner critic.

Now, isn’t this interesting? Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here. You get rejected from one job you applied for, you feel bad in various ways, but then you get offered another job, and you feel better. Some of the ways that getting offered the second job makes you feel better are unsurprising, because some of the ways you felt bad were linked to not having something you wanted, and then you get the thing you wanted - a job - so you don’t feel bad any more. Simple. But what about the other ways that the initial rejection made you feel bad - the ways that were linked to your negative self-talk? If the rejection made you tell yourself that you’re an embarrassment, that you’ll never make it, that everyone is disappointed in you, and so on, then why do you stop telling yourself those things when you get offered the second job? You still got rejected, after all. It’s still true that someone decided that you weren’t up to scratch, that they chose someone else instead of you, that they excluded you. That doesn’t stop being true just because you were offered the second job. So, what’s made the difference? Exactly how did that job offer manage to shut up your inner critic?

Here’s what I think is going on. That job offer shuts up your inner critic by bringing some perspective to the situation. The offer of the second job doesn’t stop it being true that you were rejected from the first job - but it does change your response to that rejection. Before you were offered the second job, you were allowing yourself to get carried away with bonkers inferences like ‘They didn’t want me, therefore nobody will want me’, and ‘I failed at this job application therefore I’m going to fail at everything I try to do’, and ‘I didn’t get what I want this time therefore I’m never going to get what I want’. Those inferences are bonkers because they involve you using your rejection on a particular occasion to support wildly generalised unflattering claims about yourself. And of course, being rejected one time, or even ten times or a hundred times, doesn’t entail that you’ll always be rejected. It doesn’t really entail anything about you. As that wise philosopher, Dita von Teese once wrote, ‘You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches’. I know that you know all this, even if you don’t always feel like acknowledging it when you’re going full post-rejection sulk.

And, as an aside, let’s take a moment to recognise that, in moderation, there’s nothing really wrong with refusing to recognise the sensible things. Who wants to be the Pollyanna-ish, reasonable, optimistic self-advocate all the time? It’s exhausting, especially when you’re already emotionally pushed to the edge by a rejection. You don’t have to feel bad about feeling bad. I talked about this way back in episode #3: Rage against the positivity. Sometimes your inner critic moonlights as your inner toddler, and her ‘I’ll never make it’ and ‘I’m just an embarrassment’ are the equivalent of the toddler who throws herself to the ground wailing ‘It’s not fair!’ when she doesn’t get what she wants. That’s all fine - but remember that with toddlers, it often happens that five minutes after their tantrum, they’ve moved on and forgotten all about it. They’re contentedly playing with Lego or doing some colouring even before their puffy red eyes have calmed down. They’re certainly not living by the ‘life’s not fair!’ philosophy they were screaming at the top of their lungs a few minutes earlier - not until the next time, at least. You need to channel some of that toddler resilience. But how?

Here’s how. Next time you get rejected - by a job application, a journal, someone you were dating, whatever - let rip with the feeling sorry for yourself. Do that first. Don’t keep things in perspective. Don’t look on the bright side. Don’t go all ‘every problem is an opportunity’. Go nuts with the self-pity blow-out. Don’t worry about logic. Fuck logic. Feel as miserable as you like. But do it temporarily. Set a timer if you have to. ‘I’m going to reflect on what a failure I am until lunchtime’ or ‘I’m giving myself an hour to explore the idea that I should just give up on ever getting what I want’. Whatever it takes.

Then, when your time’s up, I want you to ask yourself two questions. The first is: What would need to happen to me today to make me feel significantly better about this rejection? So, if the rejection involved not getting a job you wanted, the answer here might be something like: I’d be offered a different, equally great job. Or, if you’ve just been dumped, the answer might be: I’d hit it off with someone fantastic. But bear in mind that you might not need to replace like with like: perhaps you’d feel better about a rejection if you had success in some completely unrelated area of your life - so, you might feel better about getting dumped if you were to get promoted at work, or you might feel better about a job rejection if you booked a holiday with a good friend. But it does need to be something that makes you feel significantly better, by which I mean that it needs to be something that would make the rejection you’ve just suffered much less important to you. So, a glass of wine or a chocolate bar probably isn’t going to cut it - not that that’s a reason to deny yourself those things if you fancy them.

Ok, so you’ve given some thought to that first question: What would need to happen to me today to make me feel significantly better about this rejection? And you’ve come up with an answer. The second question I want you to ask yourself is this: What negative things am I telling myself now, as a result of this rejection, that I’d stop telling myself if that thing were to happen to me? So, let’s suppose you’ve just been dumped, and you’ve worked out that you’d feel significantly better about this if you were to get promoted at work. What nasty things are you currently saying to yourself, that you’d stop saying to yourself if you got that promotion? Perhaps they’d be things like, ‘Nobody interesting likes spending time with me’, or ‘I’m going to end up all alone’. The fact that you think you’d stop telling yourself those things if you were to get promoted isn’t because the promotion would somehow prove those things wrong. This isn’t about logic or evidence. Let’s face it, the horrible generalisations we draw about ourselves when we experience rejection are not dispassionate, logical inferences, any more than a toddler’s ‘It’s not fair!’ tantrum is a well-reasoned and empirically-supported assertion. You’d stop saying those things to yourself after experiencing something nice because you’d gain some perspective on the rejection that you’re so upset about.

Will that make you feel better about rejection? Well, I think the answer to that is: no and yes. It’s not going to fix the fact that you don’t have that thing you want - whether that thing is a job, a relationship, or something else. That part is still going to hurt. And it’s not going to fix the fact that it still sucks to have to keep applying for jobs when you hoped that was behind you, or to be re-installing Tinder when you think you might scream if you ever have to look at another Machu Picchu selfie. But this strategy can help with the runaway negative generalisations we make about ourselves when we’ve been rejected. Simply recognising that we’d stop making those generalisations about ourselves if something nice were to happen to us goes a long way towards neutralising them. And the good thing is that you don’t even need to go to any effort to stop yourself believing them. If you’re telling yourself that you’re someone who fails at everything she does, I’m not trying to get you to force yourself out of that. I mean, maybe it would work, but equally, when you’re smarting from a rejection, doing that might end up being as exhausting and frustrating as sitting on the floor of the supermarket next to your screaming toddler and reeling off a list of reasons why she really ought to withdraw her claim that it (whatever it is) is not fair. All you need to do, at this stage, is to recognise that if something good were to happen to you today, you’d stop thinking those horrible things about yourself. And then just sit with that recognition. Your inner critic: she’s a bit deranged sometimes, isn’t she? She’s fickle. She blows hot and cold, bless her. And so, even if you can’t stop her saying what she’s saying, you can chip away at her credibility. She’ll tire herself out eventually, or she’ll find some Lego to play with.

Rejection stings, my friends. But it doesn’t need to sting that much.

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!

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#31: Hedonism and other paradoxes

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#29: You need to date your career choices, not marry them