How to stop taking things so personally

Imagine these scenarios:

• A friend doesn’t respond to your message for two days, and you assume they’re annoyed with you.
• In a team meeting, your colleague interrupts you before you finish your point. You interpret it as disrespect.
• You tell your partner a story at dinner, and they check their phone halfway through. You feel dismissed.
• As you’re walking around the block, you wave to a neighbor who doesn’t wave back. You feel annoyed, and you think of a party they held without inviting you.

Have you ever had a similar experience? It’s awfully easy to find yourself getting angry, as though the person slighting you is doing it out of malice. You can feel harshly, implicitly criticized, or even rejected, even though you might realize—if you took a few moments to think—that you’re reacting to behavior that’s more ambiguous than it seems. As human beings, most of us react in this way: We impose our own emotional filters onto other people, and we jump to conclusions about their intentions. But with a little more consideration, we can learn to view and interpret these misleading moments in more neutral, less critical ways.

We don’t misinterpret others because we’re bad people or because we want to feel hurt. Being human means feeling the need to be part of something larger than oneself, like a social group or a community. The possibility of being excluded from such a group, therefore, presents a constant threat to our well-being. “Social pain” stemming from this kind of rejection or exclusion has been found—in a 2004 experiment by Eisenberger & Lieberman—to activate the same or similar areas of the brain as physical pain. Plus, our cognition further orients us toward the perceived danger of alienation with what’s called the personalization bias, which is to say, the common and automatic assumption that other people are thinking about us, when instead, they may simply be living their own lives. And of course, people who have been rejected in the past (or people who grew up with perfectionistic parents) may have created schemas—mental frameworks that help organize their experiences—in which they expect others to see them as bad, unlovable, or “defective” in some ways (Mathews & MacLeod, 2005).

Even so, despite these evolutionary and cognitive biases that are pushing us to overinterpret what others say and do, and to react angrily or defensively, it’s still possible to stop taking things so personally. This can be accomplished via the use of two practical strategies. (To be clear, not every interpretation is incorrect or excessive. Sometimes a slight that you’ve noticed is not actually “all in your head,” because people do sometimes behave unkindly. The key is to learn to distinguish real interpersonal snubs from actions that only seem rude or dismissive.)

First, instead of responding right away to something that provokes you, try to pause long enough to notice how you’re feeling. Are you feeling hurt, angry, or embarrassed? How do these surges of (admittedly very strong) emotions usually influence your behavior? Remember that your feelings are not always crystal-clear interpretations of the world around you. With a little distance on the emotions of the moment—coupled with the knowledge that these feelings might push you to react without thinking—you can try to catch yourself before you act them out.

Next, you can check for evidence of a real, intentional slight. Can you find anything that amounts to “proof” of the other person’s desire to one-up you, criticize you, or ignore you? This is a common technique in cognitive-behavioral therapy: the search for facts and the effort to distinguish them from your momentary, emotionally influenced interpretation. Perhaps when you consider the sum total of what you’ve perceived, you’ll be able to attribute their behavior to a more neutral attitude. “What else could this mean?” you may ask yourself. A concept known as attribution theory can explain this, too: According to that theory, people often make internal attributions (that is, decide that things happen because of us) rather than external ones. For instance, maybe you noticed a distinct lack of eye contact from another person, and imagined that meant they felt annoyed with you—but then again, it could just be because they’re shy, or because they felt uncertain about the topic you were talking about.

If, the next time you feel slighted or brushed off, you’re able to take a moment to think it through, perhaps those too-familiar feelings of hurt, embarrassment, or irritation can be moderated. Taking the instances mentioned above as examples, you might be able to reframe them like this: