Gemma Speig
speaker
1,085 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 7 May
Gemma Speig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I'm sure you've all heard this before, but loneliness, rejection, not feeling socially included affects your body in ways, in almost identical ways to true physical, tangible pain.
We have to remember pain is not felt in the body.
It is felt in the mind.
When you scrape your knees,
the part of you that goes, ouch, that hurts, let's deal with that, is not actually your knee.
It is your brain that's interpreting and feeling the sensation that is arriving from the neurons in your knee.
Those same internal systems
that are happening in your mind are equally activated by things like loneliness, meaning that not feeling liked is literally the equivalent of being physically wounded.
Your brain cannot tell the difference.
The feelings you are having, they're not dramatic.
The desire to be liked by everybody is not dramatic, it is backed by science.
This is why we develop people-pleasing tendencies and why we try and chameleon ourselves for everyone we meet or everybody we engage with.
We are essentially trying to ensure that no matter what, we won't be left out in the cold.
If we are for everyone...
There will be no shortage of people who will like us, who will be our friend, who will support us, who will think of us.
And that feels like insurance because if the people we are currently aligned with suddenly drop us, the fact that we are liked by everybody, the fact that we have these backups feels significant and feels safe and reduces the likelihood in our mind of being ostracized.
What's also interesting is that our tendency to worry about what other people think is also partly because we actually overestimate how much other people think about us.
And we overestimate that because...
Centering other people's opinions more strongly allows us to preempt, again, this deep social threat of being rejected.
Now, this phenomena of believing that everybody at all times is thinking only about you has a name.
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