How To Stop Overthinking What People Think Of You
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Why does my body react to criticism like it's a physical threat?
Your brain can't differentiate if it's a social threat or whether a tiger walks into this room right now. Our body reacts the same way. So it's actually so crazy how you have that feeling and physically nauseous, you know, that fight flight response of kind of for some people that might be nauseous, heart rate racing, breathing changing because we detect social threats in the same way as we would any other physical threat. So it is a very emotional and physical response.
Hi, I'm Ashany Dante, and this is But Are You Happy? No one likes criticism. It stings, it bruises the ego, and emotionally it can hit harder than we expect. But there's a difference between feeling impacted and taking these deeply personal. Because at a certain point, it's not just the big moments. It's the slightly off tone in an email, the way someone brushes past you on the train, a cancelled plan that suddenly feels loaded. And before you know it, you're scanning for meaning, reading between the lines, assuming the worst. Our brains are wide to make sense of social information. But in that process, ambiguity often gets translated into, this is about me. So why do some of us take things more personally than others?
And when does the shift from sensitivity into something that starts to impact how we move through the world? In this episode, I'm joined by Sydney-based clinical psychologist Anita Shimmons. We explore how early experiences can shape the way we respond to criticism, whether we can take it on board in a healthy way or whether it cuts just a little too deep. And we talk about what helps practical tools that you can actually use in the moment, like learning how to reframe what's happening so it doesn't automatically become personal. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much, Anita, for joining us for another conversation. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm really excited about this topic because it's one I think, again, I feel like every topic is very relatable, but this one.
This one. Everyone has experienced this, right? Yes. So why do we take things personally? Like what's going on in the body and the mind?
Yeah. Okay. So we've got to unpack this a little bit. Yeah. So it's normal that we relate everything that happens around us back to how it concerns ourselves. So it's normal that we kind of have this, it's got a negative connotation, but it doesn't really, egocentric kind of, an egocentric kind of perspective. where we relate what's happening in the world back to how it makes sense for us. So that's a normal default for all of us. We're also really good at detecting any potential social threats. And the reason why that is is because if you think, you know, back to evolutionary history, If I am ousted by my group, I will literally die. So I have to be quite attuned to what's going on. Are these guys, you know, am I okay here or are people kind of taking issue with me?
So it's better to be overly sensitive to that than miss a cue and have a really dire kind of consequence from missing it. So we are all already naturally geared to make things about ourselves and to be really attuned to what other people are thinking about us and to have a more sort of negative lens or threat lens on what others are, what signals others are sending us.
Yeah. It's interesting you talk about the threat thing because I think about the times when, you know, my boss might be like, hey, can we have a chat? Or even just that alone, I notice my body, it feels like it's threatened. It's tense. So like, can you unpack what's going on there? Like what's the emotional process like from a mind perspective, but also like what we're feeling? Yeah. Yeah.
It's so good because it's actually your brain can't differentiate if it's a social threat or whether a tiger walks into this room right now. our body reacts the same way so it's actually so crazy how um you know you have that feeling physically nauseous you know that fight flight response of kind of for some people that might be nauseous heart rate racing um your your breathing changing um because we detect social threats in the same way as we would any other physical threat so it is a very emotional and physical response
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