Rejection hurts. Whether in a professional, social or romantic setting, there is a particularly painful sting to the discovery that one has been judged undesirable in some way. If you have ever experienced proper rejection – and that would be most of us – it may stand out in your mind for a long time, like a boulder lodged in the landscape of memory.
And it can hurt literally. The late anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studied human behaviour in the context of romantic love, showed that rejection and physical injury have much in common. In 2010 she led a study of people who had been recently rejected romantically. Functional MRI scans of their brains revealed that areas associated with distress and physical pain were more active. The passage of time did seem to reduce the pain response for Fisher’s participants, but for some people rejection can resonate for months or years. This overlap in the brain’s response to what we think of as physical and mental pain isn’t limited to romance. Social psychologist Naomi Eisenberger scanned the brains of people who were socially excluded from a ballgame in an experiment. Her results showed that “social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, alerting us when we have sustained injury to our social connections”.
From an evolutionary perspective, it is easy to understand why rejection hits so hard. The realisation that one has been socially excluded induces a sudden chill, like being cast out from a Palaeolithic campsite and left at the mercy of sabre-toothed predators. To be exiled from the warmth of the communal fire could have meant death for our ancient ancestors – so it was something to be avoided at all costs. While the spurned of modern Britain won’t usually have to contend with the dangers that social rejects of 30,000 years ago faced, the impulse to seek shelter in the company of others is strong and enduring. We yearn to be accepted. For 21st‑century Homo sapiens, though, recoiling from rejection may do more harm than good. In fact, strong and lasting negative emotional reactions to rejection often cause more damage than the rejection itself. In order to lead fulfilling lives, to figure out what we enjoy and are good at, we have to be prepared to try things – and to fail at them. Make avoiding rejection your priority and you’ll find yourself becoming more risk-averse and less spontaneous, with a paradoxically narrower social world.
What if, rather than shrinking from rejection, we attempted to embrace it? What if instead of being slapped down by the wave, we tried to ride it? Not only is it possible to overcome the fear of rejection, but doing so can improve our psychological health too, leading to better social functioning and greater wellbeing. The key moves are acceptance and cognitive reframing: rejection happens to everyone, and can’t actually be avoided. Not only that, but it can be the means by which you learn and become more resilient. Keep that in mind, and you’ve already softened the blow. Cultivating equanimity in the face of disappointment has a long pedigree: in spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, meditation aims to bring about an attitude of lucid openness to the slings and arrows of life. But there are other, novel ways to respond, as one American entrepreneur showed.
In 2012, Jia Jiang received a “no” from an investor that left him feeling crushed. Rather than wallow in his pain, he decided to learn to embrace his greatest fear by accumulating rejections over 100 days. He uploaded videos of himself making ridiculous requests, starting off by asking a total stranger if he could borrow $100. Over the course of his project, Jiang noted that his anxiety around rejection quickly diminished as he became desensitised. “It reminded me of the ancient Iron Fist technique in kung fu,” he wrote, “where a person repeatedly pummels hard objects with his or her fist to gain resistance to pain.” But beyond this increased psychological resilience, he also found that his sense of agency, awareness of possibility, social skill and delight in engaging with other people all flourished. Not only that, but as his outlook and demeanour shifted to one of greater openness and positivity towards the strangers he was approaching, he found that more and more people were actually saying yes to his absurd proposals. When one doughnut chain employee agreed to his request for a set of doughnuts iced and arranged to look like the Olympic rings and gave them to him free, Jiang’s mission went viral.
Throughout history, rejection has often functioned as a crucible, helping to forge some of the most extraordinary artistic movements, from impressionism to punk. A reject has less to lose and doesn’t have to behave in the way the group dictates, and from this can come a delicious freedom to play and make. The most dramatic form of rejection, exile, can generate the greatest innovation. Would the brilliance and influence of the Bauhaus group, or the strange sublimity of the surrealists, have been quite the same had they not been rejected at some point or another? And while there is plenty of evidence that social rejection has harmful cognitive effects, for those with a particular kind of self-conception, it can act as artistic rocket fuel. In 2013 academic Sharon Kim led a study showing that people with a strong sense of their own uniqueness as individuals experienced a boost in creativity after social rejection.
Whatever your temperament, rejection is inescapable. Nobody gets to swerve it entirely, however rich, famous or beautiful they may be. Training ourselves to abandon the tendency to catastrophise after a setback – reacting as if we have been cast out from our encampment into the freezing tundra, when in reality we have merely been NFI’d to a birthday party – can transform the way we move in the world. Reframing things in a more optimistic way, while practising exposure, gives us the freedom to play. Embracing rejection means embracing being thrown back. So let us endeavour to bounce like a rubber ball, perhaps in an unforeseen direction, but comforted by the fact that we are in excellent company.
Further reading
Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang (Harmony, £10.99)
The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (Allen & Unwin, £10.99)
The Power of Letting Go: How to Drop Everything That’s Holding You Back by John Purkiss (Aster, £16.99)
