February 12, 2026 • 33 mins
If you’ve ever felt like a delayed reply, a change of tone, or a bit of feedback ruined your whole day, you might have a tendency to take things personally. In this episode, we’re looking at why your brain is wired to do it in the first place, and why it doesn’t automatically mean we’re self-centred and egotistical.
We explore:
• Why we interpret normal things as an attack
• The spotlight effect and personalisation
• The role of the id, ego and superego
• How to tell when the ego is being helpful or harmful
• 5 tips to stop taking things personally
Listen now!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:26):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here, back for another episode
as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties.
This episode feels very timely, very necessary for the moment
that I'm in right now. Since moving to London, I
(00:47):
have found myself becoming very self centered, a much angrier person.
And part of what this has done to me and
my personality is that, for the first time in a while,
every slight thing feels like a personal insult. Every person
who is pushing me on the tube, every canceled plan
(01:11):
even though I know the city is busy, every slightly
weirdly worded email. I have become very hyper vigilant towards
it and ready to really see the worst in people
and in situations, and that scares me because that's not
like me, and that's not the person I am. I
think part of being a self conscious kid was that
(01:33):
at some stage, I just realized it costs too much
to care what others thought about me. And I've operated
from that mentality for so long, so to have had
this resurgence of this like weird making everything about me,
reading into everything, taking it all personally attitude is It's
not something I'm interested in, and I don't think you
(01:55):
guys are particularly interested in it as well. I think
we could all use a bit of a psychological breakdown
of how to release these feelings, because they definitely create
significant blockages for us when we start to make everything
about ourselves, you know, for starters. It collapses your attention inward.
(02:17):
It eats up all your mental resources that could have
been devoted to things you actually care about. It makes
you ignore valuable information such as feedback and healthy criticism,
because it all just feels like the same kind of threat.
And quite frankly, I think it just makes you miserable.
It makes you self conscious, It doesn't make you a
(02:40):
nice person to be around, and that is not something
that I'm aspiring to be this year or any year.
So today, let's answer the question why do we so
often place ourselves at the center of things, especially things
that have very little to do with us, and why
(03:00):
that is the case, why our brains operate in this
sometimes annoying fashion, and of course, how to stop taking
things so personally before I guess it goes too far,
stay with us. So the first thing you need to
understand is that your consciousness is built through quite a
(03:24):
narrow subjective lens. You don't experience the world from a
bird's eye view where you have equal visibility of everyone's experiences.
You experience it from inside one body, behind one pair
of eyes, with just one stream of thought and subjective
feeling that is running through every single experience that you're having.
(03:47):
It is very reflective of that classic quote. You know,
you don't see the world as it is, You see
the world as you are. So what that means is
that when you're feeling insecure, everything comes evidence of that insecurity.
When we see the worst in people, it's because we're
not feeling our best. When we see criticism, it's because
(04:08):
our inner critic is already so loud. You are your
only reference point, because that's the only perspective that you
have direct access to your needs, your feelings, your interpretation,
That becomes urgent and it becomes central by design, and
(04:29):
this isn't your brain malfunctioning. This is actually the explicit
role of the ego at play. And it's exactly why
you have an ego, ego literally being the Latin for I.
You have an ego to prioritize you. Now, when we
hear the word ego, I think we typically associate it
(04:50):
with obviously, like egotism and bravado and the loud guy
at the bar, or like the obnoxious no it or
person at work, or like somebody who's very image obsessed.
The ego is actually our sense of self and our
sense of self identity, personal awareness. You don't either have
(05:12):
an ego or don't we all have one, In line
with psychodynamic theory, which built on Freud's original ideas, Basically,
the ego is what balances our unconscious primal desire to
be important and to be known and to be seen
and to indulge with our moral compass, which is called
(05:34):
the super ego. And that our super ego kind of
I guess, represents our karma side, the side that acts
based on what we are expected to act like. So
our ego is actually the thing that's in the middle
of those two things. It's the mediator that takes what
we really want to do and what we know we
should do and finds a nice middle ground. When you
(05:57):
start taking something personally, what might be happening is that
your ego cannot manage the row of the id, the
roar of who we think we are, and that we're
at the center of the universe with the super ego,
the part of us that says, you know, kind of
(06:19):
torn it down and act in accordance with what others
expect in how you should act. Now. Again, ideally, the
ego steps in and it does a really good job.
It reality tests, it balances both perspectives. It sees a
situation from a healthy standpoint. But when our emotions are high,
(06:39):
the ego actually gets a lot less effective in those
situations because it takes a lot of effort to fight
against instinct and impulse and anger. And when the ego
can't mediate well, this is where we often start to
jump to conclusions and to feel a certain kind of
like rage and resentment because we take everything personally. Now,
(07:00):
the situations that are the ripest for assumptions and confusions
are those which are ambiguous and which present a threat.
And this is why our reaction often spikes in moments
where other people are involved and there is a perceived
social threat, whether that is rejection, humiliation, exclusion, disapproval. This
(07:26):
is always going to register to us as meaningfully dangerous
because of evolution, because of our past. So because of that,
it gets shifted up the priority poll because it's tied
to something that's precious, feeling rejected or humiliated. It's tied
to things like acceptance and belonging, things that we really
care about. So the irony is we make quick judgments
(07:52):
when we'd actually be better off having a more controlled,
active thought process because of how important the situation is
to us. When someone is short with you, when they're quiet,
when they're distracted, your brain basically has to infer what
that means for you, and it wants to do that quickly.
(08:12):
So what information does it have access to quickly? Your interpretation,
your information, not all the actual evidence of factors. This is,
we know what this is. This is a speed over
accuracy trade off. What gets I don't know, I don't
want to say ignored, but maybe neglected, glazed over due
(08:35):
to the operation of our own mental shortcuts is Empathy
is thinking about other people's mood is thinking about the
internal world they're living in and their past and their interpretation,
because in the moment, it takes a lot of extrapolation
and thought process to think about their perspective. What you
(08:56):
have to remember, and this is hard, but what you
have to remember is that every situation actually has three layers.
It has the objective reality of the event, It has
the meaning that we assign to the event, and it
has the meaning that someone else assigns to the event.
The meaning we assign is an appraisal, and our appraisals
(09:17):
are rarely and I don't think they're never neutral. We
know this from something called cognitive motivational relational theory, and
this theory of emotion basically describes and explains how emotions
arise through an interaction between our past and how we
interpret a situation, along with our goals and our values,
(09:41):
and then what concerns others and what concerns our well being.
Very complicated way of saying. In other words, our appraisals
dictate how we see something, and they a great peak
into what we really fear, what we really want, what
we really care about. You've got to remember again, human
(10:03):
behavior is highly complex, it's highly individualized, so we end
up relying on shortcuts that have formed in our minds,
in our brains over many, many years. So if you
have any tender places or sow emotional spots, any old fears,
if you encounter a situation that even looks slightly like that,
(10:24):
your brain will try to resolve the ambiguity by snapping
that moment onto the nearest familiar story. And that is
why normal events begin to feel like you're being attacked,
because they match something you already believe could be true.
There is another word in psychology for this schema or schemas.
(10:46):
This is the way we organize our current experience based
on past experience, schema therapy, which was developed I think
only like in the seventies or eighties. Basically, what it
says is that there are a few main schemers, a
few main ways of seeing information that will skew neutral
information into a dangerous interpretation based on our past experience.
(11:11):
I'm going to describe a few, and you can kind
of see what I mean. So, for example, a really
common one is an abandonment schema. What that basically means
is that the past has told you people are going
to leave. People aren't to be trusted, they're unpredictable, they
will abandon you. So it essentially says any situation that
(11:35):
looks like that is going to be that, and you
should be wary of any signs that they're going to
leave so that you can prepare to leave. First. You
have an abandonment schema. Then there is a mistrust schema
kind of similar. You know, this is when the past
has really taught you that people will take your shortcomings
and use them against you, so you shouldn't give people
(11:58):
the ammo to kind of do so. Another well known
one as a shame schemer. This is when in the past,
you know, you've revealed certain things about yourself and people
have blamed you, made you feel bad, criticized you. So
now you learn to keep parts of your identity to yourself.
One final one the failure to achieve schemer. I actually
(12:20):
think this one is very interesting. This is a situation
where because you have failed in the past, you inevitably
now believe that you will continue to fail again into
the future. Therefore, this is an indication that you are untalented,
you are not successful, and you should never try. There
are I think from Jeffrey Young's original work. There's about
(12:41):
eighteen schemers, so you can go and look these up,
and there is one for literally every single situation. Another
one is the pessimism schemer, like believing that life will
always return to being bad. Therefore anything good will soon
be taken away. You shouldn't trust anything. I know. One
of my own schemers I have to be aware of
is social isolation schema. You know, I've talked about this.
(13:04):
Had a really hard time when I was a kid.
I was bullied really badly. Nowadays, I know that means
my brain is always going to read too much into
small social slights or silence from friends. I know that
because in these situations, I always feel like a kid again,
and I always have this urge to panic, to withdraw,
to get angry. And it means that I take neutral
(13:26):
situations and I make them about me in a very
unique way, a very individualized way, based on my past hurt.
We all do this. So if you want to stop
taking things too seriously or personally, you firstly need to
understand this schema. You need to understand should I actually
(13:47):
say the schema is plural that you are bringing to
the table Being aware of that is so crucial so
that you can interrupt that self focused rationalization of neutral
events and have a more healthy, positive interpretation. That is
my first step for taking things less personally. But we
(14:07):
are going to take a short break here and then
dive into a few others. Stay with us. I'm sure
we are all kind of sick of hearing this, but
when you start taking things too personally, sometimes you need
a reminder of the facts. And the facts say very
(14:28):
little of other people's time is concerned with anything but themselves.
Simply put, nobody's thinking about you thinking about them, and
when they are thinking about you, or they are thinking
about an interaction they've had with you, often they're thinking
about their own side of the story. Here are two
(14:48):
studies that provide literal evidence for this being the case.
The first is from possibly the most famous social psychologist
in the world. You will have heard his name on
the this podcast, probably more than my own, Robin Dunbar,
my dream guest. He conducted this study in the nineties
where he analyzed the conversations of thousands of individuals and
(15:14):
he coded the conversations to be like how often the
people talking about themselves versus others, and he found that
seventy eight percent of all of our conversations involved people
talking about themselves and their own perceptions. That leaves only
what quick math, twenty two percent, yeah, twenty two percent
(15:35):
of conversations where we are talking about other people. A
similar study from twenty twenty one ran eight experiments actually
with over two thousand people and found that even if
we sometimes underestimate how much people are thinking about us,
when people are thinking about us again, they still remain
(15:59):
the center of their own thoughts. They replay what they said,
what they did, how they felt. They probably couldn't tell
what outfit you were wearing if it wasn't something that
was personally related to them. About evidence to evidence here,
there was a study on literally that exact idea. In
(16:20):
the early two thousands. Researchers at Cornell University asked participants
to wear a T shirt with like an embarrassing, crude,
funny image in front of the entire class, and before
they went in, researchers asked the participants, like, how many
people do you think are going to notice that you're
wearing this terrible, terrible, embarrassing shirt. The participants were like,
(16:42):
I think around fifty percent of people are going to
notice my T shirt, but actually it was only around
twenty five percent. Only about twenty five percent of their
fellow classmates actually noticed the T shirts, and even then
they didn't necessarily have negative opinions of it. The great
way to stop taking things personally is to remember people
(17:04):
don't care about you that much. They care very little
about you. That could be one of the most terrifying thoughts,
and I also think one of the most empowering. Part
of why we obsess over people's opinions and their perceptions
of us is because we believe in this so called
spotlight effect, which says that the thing you just like
(17:25):
deeply about yourself that you are insecure about that you
see the first thing. It's the first thing you see
when you look in the mirror. Everybody else there's a
spotlight on it. They can see it too. The thing is,
other people are experiencing you as just one stimulus amongst
many other stimuli, alongside things that are much more pressing
(17:48):
to them, such as their own worries and their own stress,
and their own spotlight on what they think you're seeing
in them. The spotlight effect is basically your brain making
an error in logic. It's saying because I notice it,
it must be noticeable to everybody else as well. The
psychology says probably not. And even if they do notice
(18:11):
it and it is the center of their attention, isn't
it more indicative of them that they're able to pinpoint
somebody else's insecurities with that much accuracy. I just feel
like that's a if somebody is able to do that
for a group of people in front of them, and
it is able to be like, you're insecure about that feature,
(18:32):
You're insecure about that feature that says so much more
about them. So that's my tip here, to stop taking
things personally. Identify yes, how you may be reading into things,
but then also identify how often you're probably incorrect about
what other people are noticing about you, and how little
a problem that you have with yourself is to everybody else. Next.
(18:57):
Because this is definitely sometimes advice people find it hard
to practice. I definitely find it hard to practice this.
We are socially attuned. It's not like we're going to
hear these facts and be like, great, I'm cured. Instead,
if you're finding it hard to stop taking things personally,
I don't think you have to stop caring about everyone's opinions. Instead,
(19:20):
I want to ask that you pick only four people
whose opinions matter to you, Four people whose comments you
allow yourself to take personally, four people whose opinions you
take on board. Only four you can only choose force.
You have to choose wisely, and these people cannot be
subbed out. They cannot be subbed in. They are on
the team until they are permanently off the team. And
(19:43):
your second rule is that they have to be somebody
whose opinion you truly trust and who you know has
your back. You can't choose your mom if your mum
always criticizes your choices. You can't choose your boss if
your boss always disrespects you and makes you cry. Can't
choose afraid who always puts you down. I want you
to choose your team of four, a friend's family, a
(20:04):
partner whose opinions you are allowed to take personally, and
then nobody else outside of that. I really like this
method because you've most likely spent fifteen twenty plus years
absorbing everybody's thoughts or potential thoughts about you, so you
(20:25):
aren't going to be able to reverse that overnight. You're
not going to be able to go cold turkey on
caring what they think. This is like the replacement therapy
you may need. You know, instead of going sober from
taking things personally, we just go down a little bit.
We just decrease the dosage. I think another way to
(20:47):
stop taking things so personally if you find it hard
to not insert yourself into a story, is actually to
insert yourself even further. It's going to be so so.
This is such simple advice, but it's important. You need
to interrupt your interpretation of what you think they're thinking
(21:09):
with what you know you would be thinking. Again, we
only have access to our own thoughts. Use that to
your advantage. If this was you in this situation, in
their situation, how would you actually be thinking about this?
You know, why would you have made that judgment? Why
would you have spoken in that tone? You know, if
(21:31):
you had three deadlines, if you had a headache and
had a bad night's sleep, and you know you were
worried about tax time, I don't know, how would you
come off as sounding in a message if you were
really socially drained. Would you be warm and chatty or
would you be brief and quiet. If you were really
anxious overwhelmed, would you show up perfectly or would you
(21:52):
be a little bit distracted? How would you be behaving
and reacting? Asking yourself this, putting yourself even first into
the narrative can help pull you out of the trap
of what this means for you by thinking why has
somebody else been kind of forced or has had this reaction?
(22:12):
What else could be true here? It's actually kind of
a classic anxiety tip. And of course a lot of
why we take things personally is anxiety and is filling
the gaps with our own knowledge and the worst case scenario.
But this technique, this chain reaction interruption, asks you to
question what else before you ask what if? What else
(22:36):
could be going on? Here? A good rule when you
find your brain running away with assumptions. For every negative assumption,
you have to give yourself a positive one. You have
to achieve a one to one ratio of what if
and what else? Tip number four. I think we're up
to number four now. I don't know. Correct me if
(22:57):
I'm wrong, but label the things that are assumptions and
the things that you know are facts. This is a
great one to stop those spiraling thoughts when you start
to take things personally. Your brain is mixing facts and interpretations.
It's mixing them together so seamlessly they feel like they're
the same thing. How you feel about the situation must
(23:19):
be the only accurate interpretation. Try and pull these two
things apart. Maybe let's use the example of, like your
friend cancels a dinner that you had planned. An assumption
here would be that, oh, this is totally evidence they
don't like me anymore, they don't care about me, they
think I'm annoying, They're going to ditch me. The fact
(23:43):
here is simply that they canceled. Another fact might be
that they genuinely just don't have the mental capacity, or
that they really are sick, or maybe someone doesn't reply.
The assumption here might be that they're avoiding you, or
that they don't want to talk to you, or that
they're annoyed at you. But the facts, the facts are
(24:06):
if we remove all the emotion and fear driven thoughts
from this situation, it's just that they haven't replied. There
are so many other possible explanations here. Acknowledging the assumptions
versus the facts helps you to acknowledge the story you're telling.
Yourself versus the reality of the story. That's much more complex.
(24:27):
It has multiple perspectives to it. Next tip tip number five,
Remember that this feeling you're having is temporary, but your
reaction to the feeling can make the moment permanent. I
just think it's wise to always try and give people
the benefit of the doubt, because that alone will reduce
(24:49):
your emotional suffering. If for nothing else, it just means
that you don't have to go through the annoyance and
the frustration of taking something personally multiple times. This one
is pretty huge because often we will have this overwhelming
response or this overwhelming urge to respond immediately, to fix something,
(25:11):
to correct something, to defend yourself, to pull away, and
I get it again. It's this threat detection system which
is trying to close the gap of uncertainty so that
we know that we're going to survive and we know
what to do next. But the thing is, feelings and
emotions pass. They are uncomfortable, they will leave eventually. But
(25:32):
if you act on these emotions and you send a
really reactive text, or you somebody pushes you and you
push them back or something like that. You make a
passive aggressive comment, or you shrink yourself, or you escalate
the situation into something that is bigger. That's going to
create lasting tension, lasting stress, and it's gonna make the
assumption you had the fact. It's going to turn the
(25:53):
assumption into reality when it wasn't that way to begin with.
Just give the emotion, give that an sure reaction, some
space to just like move through you before you turn it,
before you create collateral damage. Acknowledge that you might actually
be wrong about the situation, Acknowledge that you might not
have all the information yet, and give people the benefit
(26:18):
of the doubt before making the situation more intense. Something
that goes hand in hand with this, and this is
some of my best advice. The best advice I've ever
received from somebody was when you truly believe that someone's
perception of you is negative, honestly, regardless of that, the
(26:41):
best thing you can do, whether they're a stranger a
random person, is to be sickeningly nice and kind to them.
That is actually the best response you can have, because
then they have no choice but to look at your
behavior and see your positive reaction, and see how nice
you're being to them, and only see a mirror of
(27:02):
what they should be acting like, and how ridiculous their
behavior actually is. A study published last summer I believe
at the University of Oregon found really sizeable evidence for
this working. They called it the perceiver elicited similarity effect. Basically,
(27:23):
our behavior elicits similar behavior in others by setting a
social standard that they then self police on. You take
people out of their world, you bring them into your world,
and you make your world a pleasant place to be,
one that has the kindness you wish to treat others
by and you wish they treated you with. I think
(27:45):
this has a bleed on effect in that it allows
us to detach from others opinions because our internal world
feels so stable and sound. If you make your internal
world a positive one and you try and bring people
in when they still decide that they're going to ruin
the moment for you, or they are gonna personally project
opinions on you, Frankly, you don't. It's not a problem
(28:07):
for you. It's not your business because your life and
your internal state of being and your mindset is so
strong and so positive that what are they trying to achieve?
Sometimes when I'm really getting pulled into thinking about what
others may think, do say, how they perceive me. I
(28:28):
try and think of myself as just another part of nature.
Try and think of myself like a tree, or a
mountain or a bird. The job of nature and of
these things is just to exist without narration. They don't audition,
they don't care, they don't imagine what story people are
telling about them. They are just there to exist. And
(28:51):
visualizing myself is just another part of nature, which I am,
which we all are, whose goal is just to experience
and to exist. Is how are you uniquely grounding? Because
it gives you that cognitive distance between the situation and
your interpretation, and it lets you just and lets you
just exist and not take it all on board. My
(29:14):
final advice if all else fails, remember the rule of five.
Will it matter in five days? Will it matter in
five months? Will it matter in five years? I think
modern day society and the kind of systems we exist
in make everything feel very urgent and enormous and significant
(29:37):
and life ending. So it's important to ask yourself this
question to give you a good perspective. If it's not
going to matter in five years, you don't need to
burn your sense of self to the ground over it.
If it's not going to matter in five years, you
shouldn't spend more than five minutes worrying about it. Have
that short amount of time that five minutes to worry
(30:00):
into stress if you really need to, and then just
commit to riding the wave and letting it go. If
you actually think, yeah, it's gonna matter in five months,
it's going to matter in five years, then it deserves
a calm conversation between you and the other person. Then
it deserves more of a time investment. You know, it
might be pointing to something bigger. There might be a
(30:21):
patent play here. There might be a boundary you've been avoiding.
Having that litmus test of like which of these three
categories five days, five months, five years is this going
to fall into? Lets you appropriately scale your response. This
just gives you an opportunity to, I think, put things
(30:44):
into a perspective, assign your response based on an honest
assessment rather than treating everything like life or death. And
I think if you strip it all down all these skills,
what we're really asking ourselves to do is to firstly
recognize that this may be an interpretation, and that your
(31:05):
interpretation may be different to theirs, and then to secondly
put it into perspective, how much does this really matter
and what is going to cost me more here taking
this personally, taking it on board, having a reaction to it,
or just letting it go and choosing to stay curious,
(31:28):
choosing to be like nature, choosing to remove myself from
the narrative. If that person's opinion is still going to
be the same and you're not going to be able
to change it, if their opinion is really that isn't
this going to be the best case choice regardless? Isn't
that level of dignity over panic going to lead you
(31:49):
to a better place anyway? If it's just such a
rational choice, And maybe that's what we're really aiming for here,
a rational choice in the face of a rationale that's
gonna lead leave you better off. So I hope these
tips have helped you. I hope this psychological explanation for
why we insert ourselves into narratives we don't belong in
(32:14):
is clarifying for you and that it just gives you
pause right when you're in a situation like this, next
you're able to really be like work your way through
the choices. It's like a build your own adventure. You're
able to work your way through the adventure and be like, Okay,
even if this person is thinking this, is it in
my best interest to take it on board? Or is
(32:34):
it in my best interest to discard this or to
be or to bring them into a nicer world, the
one that I choose to inhabit. If you have made
it this far, thank you for being a loyal listener.
You now get access to our little secret, our secret club,
where you can drop a little nature emoji down below,
so I know that you have made it this far
(32:55):
and that you have listened to the end nature emoji,
because I think that's the to mc goal of this episode,
be more like nature. I also want to thank, of course,
our researcher Libby Colbert for her assistance on this episode.
Make sure that if you are listening and you're in
the US, you check us out on Netflix, because video
episodes are now screening over there, and we'd love for
(33:16):
you to watch and to see what the vibe is
like and what it's like being in the studio with
me rather than just listening. But of course it is
up to you make sure as well that you are
following us on Instagram and also on substack if you
want access to more studies. All those links will be
down below. But until next time, be safe, be kind,
(33:38):
be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very
soon
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:26):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here, back for another episode
as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties.
This episode feels very timely, very necessary for the moment
that I'm in right now. Since moving to London, I
(00:47):
have found myself becoming very self centered, a much angrier person.
And part of what this has done to me and
my personality is that, for the first time in a while,
every slight thing feels like a personal insult. Every person
who is pushing me on the tube, every canceled plan
(01:11):
even though I know the city is busy, every slightly
weirdly worded email. I have become very hyper vigilant towards
it and ready to really see the worst in people
and in situations, and that scares me because that's not
like me, and that's not the person I am. I
think part of being a self conscious kid was that
(01:33):
at some stage, I just realized it costs too much
to care what others thought about me. And I've operated
from that mentality for so long, so to have had
this resurgence of this like weird making everything about me,
reading into everything, taking it all personally attitude is It's
not something I'm interested in, and I don't think you
(01:55):
guys are particularly interested in it as well. I think
we could all use a bit of a psychological breakdown
of how to release these feelings, because they definitely create
significant blockages for us when we start to make everything
about ourselves, you know, for starters. It collapses your attention inward.
(02:17):
It eats up all your mental resources that could have
been devoted to things you actually care about. It makes
you ignore valuable information such as feedback and healthy criticism,
because it all just feels like the same kind of threat.
And quite frankly, I think it just makes you miserable.
It makes you self conscious, It doesn't make you a
(02:40):
nice person to be around, and that is not something
that I'm aspiring to be this year or any year.
So today, let's answer the question why do we so
often place ourselves at the center of things, especially things
that have very little to do with us, and why
(03:00):
that is the case, why our brains operate in this
sometimes annoying fashion, and of course, how to stop taking
things so personally before I guess it goes too far,
stay with us. So the first thing you need to
understand is that your consciousness is built through quite a
(03:24):
narrow subjective lens. You don't experience the world from a
bird's eye view where you have equal visibility of everyone's experiences.
You experience it from inside one body, behind one pair
of eyes, with just one stream of thought and subjective
feeling that is running through every single experience that you're having.
(03:47):
It is very reflective of that classic quote. You know,
you don't see the world as it is, You see
the world as you are. So what that means is
that when you're feeling insecure, everything comes evidence of that insecurity.
When we see the worst in people, it's because we're
not feeling our best. When we see criticism, it's because
(04:08):
our inner critic is already so loud. You are your
only reference point, because that's the only perspective that you
have direct access to your needs, your feelings, your interpretation,
That becomes urgent and it becomes central by design, and
(04:29):
this isn't your brain malfunctioning. This is actually the explicit
role of the ego at play. And it's exactly why
you have an ego, ego literally being the Latin for I.
You have an ego to prioritize you. Now, when we
hear the word ego, I think we typically associate it
(04:50):
with obviously, like egotism and bravado and the loud guy
at the bar, or like the obnoxious no it or
person at work, or like somebody who's very image obsessed.
The ego is actually our sense of self and our
sense of self identity, personal awareness. You don't either have
(05:12):
an ego or don't we all have one, In line
with psychodynamic theory, which built on Freud's original ideas, Basically,
the ego is what balances our unconscious primal desire to
be important and to be known and to be seen
and to indulge with our moral compass, which is called
(05:34):
the super ego. And that our super ego kind of
I guess, represents our karma side, the side that acts
based on what we are expected to act like. So
our ego is actually the thing that's in the middle
of those two things. It's the mediator that takes what
we really want to do and what we know we
should do and finds a nice middle ground. When you
(05:57):
start taking something personally, what might be happening is that
your ego cannot manage the row of the id, the
roar of who we think we are, and that we're
at the center of the universe with the super ego,
the part of us that says, you know, kind of
(06:19):
torn it down and act in accordance with what others
expect in how you should act. Now. Again, ideally, the
ego steps in and it does a really good job.
It reality tests, it balances both perspectives. It sees a
situation from a healthy standpoint. But when our emotions are high,
(06:39):
the ego actually gets a lot less effective in those
situations because it takes a lot of effort to fight
against instinct and impulse and anger. And when the ego
can't mediate well, this is where we often start to
jump to conclusions and to feel a certain kind of
like rage and resentment because we take everything personally. Now,
(07:00):
the situations that are the ripest for assumptions and confusions
are those which are ambiguous and which present a threat.
And this is why our reaction often spikes in moments
where other people are involved and there is a perceived
social threat, whether that is rejection, humiliation, exclusion, disapproval. This
(07:26):
is always going to register to us as meaningfully dangerous
because of evolution, because of our past. So because of that,
it gets shifted up the priority poll because it's tied
to something that's precious, feeling rejected or humiliated. It's tied
to things like acceptance and belonging, things that we really
care about. So the irony is we make quick judgments
(07:52):
when we'd actually be better off having a more controlled,
active thought process because of how important the situation is
to us. When someone is short with you, when they're quiet,
when they're distracted, your brain basically has to infer what
that means for you, and it wants to do that quickly.
(08:12):
So what information does it have access to quickly? Your interpretation,
your information, not all the actual evidence of factors. This is,
we know what this is. This is a speed over
accuracy trade off. What gets I don't know, I don't
want to say ignored, but maybe neglected, glazed over due
(08:35):
to the operation of our own mental shortcuts is Empathy
is thinking about other people's mood is thinking about the
internal world they're living in and their past and their interpretation,
because in the moment, it takes a lot of extrapolation
and thought process to think about their perspective. What you
(08:56):
have to remember, and this is hard, but what you
have to remember is that every situation actually has three layers.
It has the objective reality of the event, It has
the meaning that we assign to the event, and it
has the meaning that someone else assigns to the event.
The meaning we assign is an appraisal, and our appraisals
(09:17):
are rarely and I don't think they're never neutral. We
know this from something called cognitive motivational relational theory, and
this theory of emotion basically describes and explains how emotions
arise through an interaction between our past and how we
interpret a situation, along with our goals and our values,
(09:41):
and then what concerns others and what concerns our well being.
Very complicated way of saying. In other words, our appraisals
dictate how we see something, and they a great peak
into what we really fear, what we really want, what
we really care about. You've got to remember again, human
(10:03):
behavior is highly complex, it's highly individualized, so we end
up relying on shortcuts that have formed in our minds,
in our brains over many, many years. So if you
have any tender places or sow emotional spots, any old fears,
if you encounter a situation that even looks slightly like that,
(10:24):
your brain will try to resolve the ambiguity by snapping
that moment onto the nearest familiar story. And that is
why normal events begin to feel like you're being attacked,
because they match something you already believe could be true.
There is another word in psychology for this schema or schemas.
(10:46):
This is the way we organize our current experience based
on past experience, schema therapy, which was developed I think
only like in the seventies or eighties. Basically, what it
says is that there are a few main schemers, a
few main ways of seeing information that will skew neutral
information into a dangerous interpretation based on our past experience.
(11:11):
I'm going to describe a few, and you can kind
of see what I mean. So, for example, a really
common one is an abandonment schema. What that basically means
is that the past has told you people are going
to leave. People aren't to be trusted, they're unpredictable, they
will abandon you. So it essentially says any situation that
(11:35):
looks like that is going to be that, and you
should be wary of any signs that they're going to
leave so that you can prepare to leave. First. You
have an abandonment schema. Then there is a mistrust schema
kind of similar. You know, this is when the past
has really taught you that people will take your shortcomings
and use them against you, so you shouldn't give people
(11:58):
the ammo to kind of do so. Another well known
one as a shame schemer. This is when in the past,
you know, you've revealed certain things about yourself and people
have blamed you, made you feel bad, criticized you. So
now you learn to keep parts of your identity to yourself.
One final one the failure to achieve schemer. I actually
(12:20):
think this one is very interesting. This is a situation
where because you have failed in the past, you inevitably
now believe that you will continue to fail again into
the future. Therefore, this is an indication that you are untalented,
you are not successful, and you should never try. There
are I think from Jeffrey Young's original work. There's about
(12:41):
eighteen schemers, so you can go and look these up,
and there is one for literally every single situation. Another
one is the pessimism schemer, like believing that life will
always return to being bad. Therefore anything good will soon
be taken away. You shouldn't trust anything. I know. One
of my own schemers I have to be aware of
is social isolation schema. You know, I've talked about this.
(13:04):
Had a really hard time when I was a kid.
I was bullied really badly. Nowadays, I know that means
my brain is always going to read too much into
small social slights or silence from friends. I know that
because in these situations, I always feel like a kid again,
and I always have this urge to panic, to withdraw,
to get angry. And it means that I take neutral
(13:26):
situations and I make them about me in a very
unique way, a very individualized way, based on my past hurt.
We all do this. So if you want to stop
taking things too seriously or personally, you firstly need to
understand this schema. You need to understand should I actually
(13:47):
say the schema is plural that you are bringing to
the table Being aware of that is so crucial so
that you can interrupt that self focused rationalization of neutral
events and have a more healthy, positive interpretation. That is
my first step for taking things less personally. But we
(14:07):
are going to take a short break here and then
dive into a few others. Stay with us. I'm sure
we are all kind of sick of hearing this, but
when you start taking things too personally, sometimes you need
a reminder of the facts. And the facts say very
(14:28):
little of other people's time is concerned with anything but themselves.
Simply put, nobody's thinking about you thinking about them, and
when they are thinking about you, or they are thinking
about an interaction they've had with you, often they're thinking
about their own side of the story. Here are two
(14:48):
studies that provide literal evidence for this being the case.
The first is from possibly the most famous social psychologist
in the world. You will have heard his name on
the this podcast, probably more than my own, Robin Dunbar,
my dream guest. He conducted this study in the nineties
where he analyzed the conversations of thousands of individuals and
(15:14):
he coded the conversations to be like how often the
people talking about themselves versus others, and he found that
seventy eight percent of all of our conversations involved people
talking about themselves and their own perceptions. That leaves only
what quick math, twenty two percent, yeah, twenty two percent
(15:35):
of conversations where we are talking about other people. A
similar study from twenty twenty one ran eight experiments actually
with over two thousand people and found that even if
we sometimes underestimate how much people are thinking about us,
when people are thinking about us again, they still remain
(15:59):
the center of their own thoughts. They replay what they said,
what they did, how they felt. They probably couldn't tell
what outfit you were wearing if it wasn't something that
was personally related to them. About evidence to evidence here,
there was a study on literally that exact idea. In
(16:20):
the early two thousands. Researchers at Cornell University asked participants
to wear a T shirt with like an embarrassing, crude,
funny image in front of the entire class, and before
they went in, researchers asked the participants, like, how many
people do you think are going to notice that you're
wearing this terrible, terrible, embarrassing shirt. The participants were like,
(16:42):
I think around fifty percent of people are going to
notice my T shirt, but actually it was only around
twenty five percent. Only about twenty five percent of their
fellow classmates actually noticed the T shirts, and even then
they didn't necessarily have negative opinions of it. The great
way to stop taking things personally is to remember people
(17:04):
don't care about you that much. They care very little
about you. That could be one of the most terrifying thoughts,
and I also think one of the most empowering. Part
of why we obsess over people's opinions and their perceptions
of us is because we believe in this so called
spotlight effect, which says that the thing you just like
(17:25):
deeply about yourself that you are insecure about that you
see the first thing. It's the first thing you see
when you look in the mirror. Everybody else there's a
spotlight on it. They can see it too. The thing is,
other people are experiencing you as just one stimulus amongst
many other stimuli, alongside things that are much more pressing
(17:48):
to them, such as their own worries and their own stress,
and their own spotlight on what they think you're seeing
in them. The spotlight effect is basically your brain making
an error in logic. It's saying because I notice it,
it must be noticeable to everybody else as well. The
psychology says probably not. And even if they do notice
(18:11):
it and it is the center of their attention, isn't
it more indicative of them that they're able to pinpoint
somebody else's insecurities with that much accuracy. I just feel
like that's a if somebody is able to do that
for a group of people in front of them, and
it is able to be like, you're insecure about that feature,
(18:32):
You're insecure about that feature that says so much more
about them. So that's my tip here, to stop taking
things personally. Identify yes, how you may be reading into things,
but then also identify how often you're probably incorrect about
what other people are noticing about you, and how little
a problem that you have with yourself is to everybody else. Next.
(18:57):
Because this is definitely sometimes advice people find it hard
to practice. I definitely find it hard to practice this.
We are socially attuned. It's not like we're going to
hear these facts and be like, great, I'm cured. Instead,
if you're finding it hard to stop taking things personally,
I don't think you have to stop caring about everyone's opinions. Instead,
(19:20):
I want to ask that you pick only four people
whose opinions matter to you, Four people whose comments you
allow yourself to take personally, four people whose opinions you
take on board. Only four you can only choose force.
You have to choose wisely, and these people cannot be
subbed out. They cannot be subbed in. They are on
the team until they are permanently off the team. And
(19:43):
your second rule is that they have to be somebody
whose opinion you truly trust and who you know has
your back. You can't choose your mom if your mum
always criticizes your choices. You can't choose your boss if
your boss always disrespects you and makes you cry. Can't
choose afraid who always puts you down. I want you
to choose your team of four, a friend's family, a
(20:04):
partner whose opinions you are allowed to take personally, and
then nobody else outside of that. I really like this
method because you've most likely spent fifteen twenty plus years
absorbing everybody's thoughts or potential thoughts about you, so you
(20:25):
aren't going to be able to reverse that overnight. You're
not going to be able to go cold turkey on
caring what they think. This is like the replacement therapy
you may need. You know, instead of going sober from
taking things personally, we just go down a little bit.
We just decrease the dosage. I think another way to
(20:47):
stop taking things so personally if you find it hard
to not insert yourself into a story, is actually to
insert yourself even further. It's going to be so so.
This is such simple advice, but it's important. You need
to interrupt your interpretation of what you think they're thinking
(21:09):
with what you know you would be thinking. Again, we
only have access to our own thoughts. Use that to
your advantage. If this was you in this situation, in
their situation, how would you actually be thinking about this?
You know, why would you have made that judgment? Why
would you have spoken in that tone? You know, if
(21:31):
you had three deadlines, if you had a headache and
had a bad night's sleep, and you know you were
worried about tax time, I don't know, how would you
come off as sounding in a message if you were
really socially drained. Would you be warm and chatty or
would you be brief and quiet. If you were really
anxious overwhelmed, would you show up perfectly or would you
(21:52):
be a little bit distracted? How would you be behaving
and reacting? Asking yourself this, putting yourself even first into
the narrative can help pull you out of the trap
of what this means for you by thinking why has
somebody else been kind of forced or has had this reaction?
(22:12):
What else could be true here? It's actually kind of
a classic anxiety tip. And of course a lot of
why we take things personally is anxiety and is filling
the gaps with our own knowledge and the worst case scenario.
But this technique, this chain reaction interruption, asks you to
question what else before you ask what if? What else
(22:36):
could be going on? Here? A good rule when you
find your brain running away with assumptions. For every negative assumption,
you have to give yourself a positive one. You have
to achieve a one to one ratio of what if
and what else? Tip number four. I think we're up
to number four now. I don't know. Correct me if
(22:57):
I'm wrong, but label the things that are assumptions and
the things that you know are facts. This is a
great one to stop those spiraling thoughts when you start
to take things personally. Your brain is mixing facts and interpretations.
It's mixing them together so seamlessly they feel like they're
the same thing. How you feel about the situation must
(23:19):
be the only accurate interpretation. Try and pull these two
things apart. Maybe let's use the example of, like your
friend cancels a dinner that you had planned. An assumption
here would be that, oh, this is totally evidence they
don't like me anymore, they don't care about me, they
think I'm annoying, They're going to ditch me. The fact
(23:43):
here is simply that they canceled. Another fact might be
that they genuinely just don't have the mental capacity, or
that they really are sick, or maybe someone doesn't reply.
The assumption here might be that they're avoiding you, or
that they don't want to talk to you, or that
they're annoyed at you. But the facts, the facts are
(24:06):
if we remove all the emotion and fear driven thoughts
from this situation, it's just that they haven't replied. There
are so many other possible explanations here. Acknowledging the assumptions
versus the facts helps you to acknowledge the story you're telling.
Yourself versus the reality of the story. That's much more complex.
(24:27):
It has multiple perspectives to it. Next tip tip number five,
Remember that this feeling you're having is temporary, but your
reaction to the feeling can make the moment permanent. I
just think it's wise to always try and give people
the benefit of the doubt, because that alone will reduce
(24:49):
your emotional suffering. If for nothing else, it just means
that you don't have to go through the annoyance and
the frustration of taking something personally multiple times. This one
is pretty huge because often we will have this overwhelming
response or this overwhelming urge to respond immediately, to fix something,
(25:11):
to correct something, to defend yourself, to pull away, and
I get it again. It's this threat detection system which
is trying to close the gap of uncertainty so that
we know that we're going to survive and we know
what to do next. But the thing is, feelings and
emotions pass. They are uncomfortable, they will leave eventually. But
(25:32):
if you act on these emotions and you send a
really reactive text, or you somebody pushes you and you
push them back or something like that. You make a
passive aggressive comment, or you shrink yourself, or you escalate
the situation into something that is bigger. That's going to
create lasting tension, lasting stress, and it's gonna make the
assumption you had the fact. It's going to turn the
(25:53):
assumption into reality when it wasn't that way to begin with.
Just give the emotion, give that an sure reaction, some
space to just like move through you before you turn it,
before you create collateral damage. Acknowledge that you might actually
be wrong about the situation, Acknowledge that you might not
have all the information yet, and give people the benefit
(26:18):
of the doubt before making the situation more intense. Something
that goes hand in hand with this, and this is
some of my best advice. The best advice I've ever
received from somebody was when you truly believe that someone's
perception of you is negative, honestly, regardless of that, the
(26:41):
best thing you can do, whether they're a stranger a
random person, is to be sickeningly nice and kind to them.
That is actually the best response you can have, because
then they have no choice but to look at your
behavior and see your positive reaction, and see how nice
you're being to them, and only see a mirror of
(27:02):
what they should be acting like, and how ridiculous their
behavior actually is. A study published last summer I believe
at the University of Oregon found really sizeable evidence for
this working. They called it the perceiver elicited similarity effect. Basically,
(27:23):
our behavior elicits similar behavior in others by setting a
social standard that they then self police on. You take
people out of their world, you bring them into your world,
and you make your world a pleasant place to be,
one that has the kindness you wish to treat others
by and you wish they treated you with. I think
(27:45):
this has a bleed on effect in that it allows
us to detach from others opinions because our internal world
feels so stable and sound. If you make your internal
world a positive one and you try and bring people
in when they still decide that they're going to ruin
the moment for you, or they are gonna personally project
opinions on you, Frankly, you don't. It's not a problem
(28:07):
for you. It's not your business because your life and
your internal state of being and your mindset is so
strong and so positive that what are they trying to achieve?
Sometimes when I'm really getting pulled into thinking about what
others may think, do say, how they perceive me. I
(28:28):
try and think of myself as just another part of nature.
Try and think of myself like a tree, or a
mountain or a bird. The job of nature and of
these things is just to exist without narration. They don't audition,
they don't care, they don't imagine what story people are
telling about them. They are just there to exist. And
(28:51):
visualizing myself is just another part of nature, which I am,
which we all are, whose goal is just to experience
and to exist. Is how are you uniquely grounding? Because
it gives you that cognitive distance between the situation and
your interpretation, and it lets you just and lets you
just exist and not take it all on board. My
(29:14):
final advice if all else fails, remember the rule of five.
Will it matter in five days? Will it matter in
five months? Will it matter in five years? I think
modern day society and the kind of systems we exist
in make everything feel very urgent and enormous and significant
(29:37):
and life ending. So it's important to ask yourself this
question to give you a good perspective. If it's not
going to matter in five years, you don't need to
burn your sense of self to the ground over it.
If it's not going to matter in five years, you
shouldn't spend more than five minutes worrying about it. Have
that short amount of time that five minutes to worry
(30:00):
into stress if you really need to, and then just
commit to riding the wave and letting it go. If
you actually think, yeah, it's gonna matter in five months,
it's going to matter in five years, then it deserves
a calm conversation between you and the other person. Then
it deserves more of a time investment. You know, it
might be pointing to something bigger. There might be a
(30:21):
patent play here. There might be a boundary you've been avoiding.
Having that litmus test of like which of these three
categories five days, five months, five years is this going
to fall into? Lets you appropriately scale your response. This
just gives you an opportunity to, I think, put things
(30:44):
into a perspective, assign your response based on an honest
assessment rather than treating everything like life or death. And
I think if you strip it all down all these skills,
what we're really asking ourselves to do is to firstly
recognize that this may be an interpretation, and that your
(31:05):
interpretation may be different to theirs, and then to secondly
put it into perspective, how much does this really matter
and what is going to cost me more here taking
this personally, taking it on board, having a reaction to it,
or just letting it go and choosing to stay curious,
(31:28):
choosing to be like nature, choosing to remove myself from
the narrative. If that person's opinion is still going to
be the same and you're not going to be able
to change it, if their opinion is really that isn't
this going to be the best case choice regardless? Isn't
that level of dignity over panic going to lead you
(31:49):
to a better place anyway? If it's just such a
rational choice, And maybe that's what we're really aiming for here,
a rational choice in the face of a rationale that's
gonna lead leave you better off. So I hope these
tips have helped you. I hope this psychological explanation for
why we insert ourselves into narratives we don't belong in
(32:14):
is clarifying for you and that it just gives you
pause right when you're in a situation like this, next
you're able to really be like work your way through
the choices. It's like a build your own adventure. You're
able to work your way through the adventure and be like, Okay,
even if this person is thinking this, is it in
my best interest to take it on board? Or is
(32:34):
it in my best interest to discard this or to
be or to bring them into a nicer world, the
one that I choose to inhabit. If you have made
it this far, thank you for being a loyal listener.
You now get access to our little secret, our secret club,
where you can drop a little nature emoji down below,
so I know that you have made it this far
(32:55):
and that you have listened to the end nature emoji,
because I think that's the to mc goal of this episode,
be more like nature. I also want to thank, of course,
our researcher Libby Colbert for her assistance on this episode.
Make sure that if you are listening and you're in
the US, you check us out on Netflix, because video
episodes are now screening over there, and we'd love for
(33:16):
you to watch and to see what the vibe is
like and what it's like being in the studio with
me rather than just listening. But of course it is
up to you make sure as well that you are
following us on Instagram and also on substack if you
want access to more studies. All those links will be
down below. But until next time, be safe, be kind,
(33:38):
be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very
soon
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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