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00:00 And that's the thing that fascinated scientists at the beginning when it came to rejection.
00:04 Why do they hurt so much? Why does it hurt so much?
00:08 There's just so many ways in which we can get rejected.
00:12 We get turned down by potential dates, we get turned down by potential employers,
00:17 our friends go to lunch without us, our parents don't approve of our lifestyles,
00:22 but all of them have one thing in common, and that is they really, really hurt.
00:27 So they wanted to study it. The thing is, you have to be able to catch rejection in action if you want to study it.
00:33 You know, you can't just take your research assistant to a local singles bar and go,
00:37 "Oh look, that dude just got shot down. Quick, give him the questionnaire."
00:41 That's not going to work. So how do you recreate it?
00:44 So here's what they did. And you're sitting in the waiting room,
00:48 and there are two other people in the waiting room.
00:51 And there's a ball on the table, and one of them takes the ball and goes, "Ah," you know,
00:54 and throws it to the other person. And the other person catches it and goes, "Eh," and throws it to you.
01:00 And you catch it, and you throw it back to the first person, who then goes, "Hmm," throws it to the second,
01:06 and the second doesn't throw it to you, throws it back to the first person.
01:10 And now they are tossing the ball, and you're excluded.
01:13 Now, how would that make you feel?
01:15 Now, most people think, "Two strangers in a waiting room didn't toss me a ball. Big whoop. I don't care."
01:22 But it turns out we care quite a bit, because this is a paradigm that has been used dozens and dozens of times.
01:30 And everyone who goes through it reports feeling significant emotional pain.
01:35 So they said, "Let's run the experiment again."
01:37 They took them in, and they go, "Okay, we're coming clean."
01:39 Those are research assistants. "It wasn't real. The whole thing was rigged. Now does it hurt?"
01:45 And people were like, "Yeah, it still hurts."
01:49 So scientists were like, "What is going on in our brain here with this rejection thing?
01:53 How come it's so unreasonable? I mean, we're telling people it wasn't real, and they're still hurting."
01:58 So they put people in a functional MRI machine.
02:01 They wanted to see literally what happens in the brain.
02:03 And what they found was shocking to them, because what they saw was that the same pathways in the brain
02:09 light up when we get rejected as light up when we experience physical pain.
02:16 They ran the experiment again, and they gave half the group of people Tylenol,
02:19 and the people who got Tylenol reported less emotional pain.
02:23 Now, I'm not suggesting that you go out on your next date packing Tylenol.
02:28 Why are we wired to experience rejection so severely? Why?
02:33 And the answer is because of our evolutionary past, because we grew up in tribes,
02:39 and we couldn't survive outside them.
02:41 Being ostracized from your tribe was a death sentence.
02:45 But it also explains why we feel things so harshly.
02:49 And today, we don't live in small pockets of humanity, so the opportunities for rejection are innumerable.
02:55 So let's look at how people typically respond to rejection.
02:59 Vodka! They reach for the bottle. Not a good idea.
03:02 Turns out that when you stuff your feelings down with alcohol, they often come back up again.
03:07 And the other thing we often do is we turn to food. We try and drown our sorrows with food.
03:13 Now, needless to say, these responses don't really work very well.
03:18 So what do we need to do? There are several wounds we need to treat.
03:22 But the most urgent of them is that we need to do something to revive our self-worth.
03:27 One of the ways that is most common in terms of how people do that is positive affirmations.
03:34 Those are statements like, "I am attractive and worthy. I'm going to be a great success."
03:40 But when we do studies about them, what we find is that positive affirmations don't work.
03:46 Well, why is that? Why is it that when your self-esteem is low,
03:49 telling yourself that you're going to be successful and people are going to love you and everything is going to be great,
03:54 why would that make you feel bad?
03:56 Well, when a statement falls within the boundaries of our belief system, we'll accept it.
04:01 And when a statement falls outside the boundaries of our belief system, we'll reject it.
04:08 And so when you're feeling really unworthy of love and you're telling yourself,
04:12 "I'm worthy of love. I'm worthy of success," your unconscious mind will reject that statement.
04:17 So what should you do? Well, there is another kind of affirmation that actually does work.
04:23 And that's the one I'm going to suggest. It's called self-affirmations.
04:26 And the thing about self-affirmations is they are generated by you.
04:30 So you know they fall within the boundary of your belief system because you're the one that has to come up with them.
04:36 You make a list of five qualities, attributes that you have, that you really believe are valuable in whatever the domain is.
04:45 And then you write a brief essay, one or two paragraphs about one of the items on your list.
04:50 You really elaborate why that's an important thing.
04:54 And that will actually remind you of the self-worth that you actually have.
04:59 That will make you feel better doing that.
05:01 Now, some people say to me, "I've tried it. It didn't work."
05:04 And I'm like, "You've made the list and you wrote the essay?"
05:07 No, no, no. I just thought about those things and I thought about why they were important.
05:12 And I'm like, "Well, you know, that's like saying I was hungry, so I thought about the food I had in my fridge.
05:16 Turns out I'm still hungry."
05:18 You know, no. You have to write the essay. You have to make the list.
05:21 Because making the list is like taking the food out of the fridge and cooking it.
05:25 And writing the essay is how you eat it. It's how you absorb it.
05:29 Your brain needs for you to think about it, to process it, to write it.
05:33 That's how the message gets absorbed because it's so obvious to us that we need to monitor our physical health.
05:39 We need to monitor our bodies. That's very, very clear to us.
05:42 But it's not clear to us at all that we need to monitor our psychological health.
05:47 I really hope that the next time you experience some kind of psychological injury,
05:52 you won't just hurt, but you'll try applying emotional first aid.
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