FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Health

Being Socially Rejected Is a Lot Like Getting Slapped

As in, your brain registers it the same way.
Hulton Archive / Getty

Early on in the evolution of humankind, the survival of our species depended on our ability to live in cooperative groups where food, warmth, and safety were easier to come by. Since exclusion from a group often meant death, it was in the best interest of our ancestors to be deeply, intensely afraid of it. That fear was motivating. It encouraged early humans to adapt in ways that allowed them to stay in a clan—and therefore stay alive.

Advertisement

So over the millennia that humans have existed, natural selection has favored those who loathe the feeling of rejection. What we have now is a breed of modern humans that desperately want to be accepted. Sometimes, this is still useful—though we don't necessarily need to live in groups in order to get food and protection, we still thrive in communities, and we need to form bonds with other humans in order to propagate the species, shelter our young, and prepare them for a safe and healthy life.

But other times, our fear of rejection is not useful anymore. It doesn't serve a social purpose to get deeply sad and anxious when someone doesn't answer our emails, or become dejected and worthless when a stranger looks right through us. Yet we do, from time to time. We can't help it.

One major issue with our lasting fear of rejection is this: Nowadays we may have many, many more opportunities to get ostracized than we did thousands of years ago. When our ancestors were developing their fear of rejection, they lived in groups of about 50 to 100 people. Today, the average family is much smaller than that—about three people per family, according to the most recent US Census. But we know lots more people than we did back in the day. The average American knows 600 people.

And that's just accounting for real-life friends. Currently, the average Facebook user is connected with 338 people—I've amassed a slightly-above-average 577 Facebook friends over the ten-plus years that I've had my account, thank you very much. I probably know somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 people, all of whom I could reach out to if I felt so inclined. On the one hand, that's good news: I know more people, and have the capacity to foster more social connections than ever before. On the other hand, if I did decide to reach out to all the people I know, there's the possibility that every single one of them could ignore me. And, if they did, there's a pretty strong chance I wouldn't like it.

Advertisement

"The average person often interprets things like a delay in getting an email response or a text message [as ostracism], or maybe they don't get a like right away, or something like that," says Kip Williams, a social psychologist who has done extensive research on the causes and impacts of our sensitivity to rejection. "Then they think that people don't like them, or they did something wrong, or that people are excluding them in some way or another."


More From Tonic:


When we are ostracized, even online, we experience some degree of pain. The psychological response to being rejected activates the same brain functionalities that are fired up when we're physically hurt, according to Williams. Some experts believe that humans just "piggybacked" their response to social pain onto the neural parts of the brain that were developed to sense physical pain, Williams says. Others believe that the two types of pain overlap a great deal in our minds, but do not come from the exact same place. Either way, the distress that you experience when you're ostracized is a lot like the distress you experience when you're physically hurt. There's truth in the phrase that says a snub is like a slap in the face.

When we feel this pain, we often react in one of three ways: Either we adapt our behavior to be accepted, lash out in an attempt to get more attention, or shut down completely to avoid further instances of rejection. Each of these behaviors is considered normal in response to ostracism and, generally, would be deemed socially acceptable. But if the rejection that we're reacting to is minor, or if we're misinterpreting something as ostracism and aren't even being rejected at all, these behaviors start to become gauche.

Advertisement

So if you're like me and you hate being left hanging despite a "Read," for instance, you may respond more quickly when you think you're being slighted. Maybe sometimes your boyfriend doesn't text you back fast enough, and you get really angry and upset so you text him 44 consecutive follow-up messages at 11:30 on a Wednesday. But that is not human nature at play. Technically, that is what Williams (and my boyfriend, or any boyfriend I'd ever had, or anyone who is even remotely familiar with my behavior) would call an overreaction, caused by oversensitivity.

"There are people who are rejection-sensitive. They are especially fast to detect ostracism," Williams says. "They're much more likely to view ambiguous events as rejection. And they're more likely to cope ineffectively with it." (I.e. launch into a meltdown when they can't get a text back.)

We're all a little tender when it comes to alienation, but if you overreact, you're behaving outside the norm, Williams says. And that's what people have little patience for. So what does this mean? It seems daunting that I, perhaps, am going to accidentally scare people away forever because I can't stand being ignored. Or that we are all resigned to a life of being Sensitive Sallies who hate being left out. It could take millennia for us to unlearn our sensitivity to ostracism, after all—how can we live in the meantime?

According to Williams, there are a few ways humans can get better at dealing with ostracism, real or perceived. Amazingly, you can take Tylenol or some other kind of over-the-counter painkiller to help ease the anguish; research shows that extended use of these kinds of medicines reduce the sting of rejection, just like it reduces any other pain. Mushrooms and weed would also work for the very same reason, Williams says, though he didn't imply that this was even remotely a good idea.

His more pragmatic solution, which is a little less fun, is to just find ways to cope. "I don't think that we should go about trying to encourage people to take drugs and to do things that will reduce their feelings of pain," he says. "Because it's a useful experience. Pain is useful. Pain is adaptive."

Maybe there's a reason people aren't texting you back. Look for it. That's what your ancestors would have done.

Read This Next: How to Get Someone to Let Their Guard Down