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How to Overcome a Fear of Rejection

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How to Overcome Fear of Rejection

• Common Behaviors

Psychological Outcomes

Frequently asked questions.

The fear of rejection is a powerful feeling that often has a far-reaching impact on our lives. Most people experience some nerves when placing themselves in situations that could lead to rejection, but for some people, the fear becomes overwhelming.

This fear can have many underlying causes. An untreated fear of rejection may worsen over time, leading to greater and greater limitations in a person's life.

This article discusses how to overcome your fear of rejection, and also how rejection sensitivity can affect your life and behavior.

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If you are experiencing a fear of rejection, there are steps you can take to learn how to cope better and stop this fear from negatively impacting your life. You may find the following strategies helpful for learning how to overcome a fear of rejection.

Improve Your Self-Regulation Skills

Self-regulation refers to your ability to identify and control your emotions and behaviors. It also plays an important role in overcoming your fear of rejection. By identifying negative thoughts that contribute to feelings of fear, you can actively take steps to reframe your thinking in a way that is more optimistic and encouraging.

Face Your Fears

Avoidance coping involves managing unpleasant feelings by simply avoiding the things that trigger those emotions. The problem with this approach is that it ultimately contributes to increased feelings of fear. Instead of getting better at dealing with your fear of rejection, it makes you even more fearful and sensitive to it.

So instead of avoiding situations where you might experience rejection, focus on putting yourself out there and tackling your fear. Once you have more experience facing your fear , you'll begin to recognize that the consequences are less anxiety-provoking than you anticipated. You'll also gain greater confidence in your own abilities to succeed.

Cultivate Resilience

Being resilient means that you are able to pick yourself up after a setback and move forward with a renewed sense of strength and optimism. Strategies that can help foster a greater sense of resilience include building your confidence in your own abilities, having a strong social support system, and nurturing and caring for yourself. Having goals and taking steps to improve your skills can also give you faith in your ability to bounce back from rejection.

Taking steps to overcome your fear of rejection can help minimize its detrimental impact on your life. Learning how to manage your emotions, taking steps to face your fears, and cultivating a strong sense of resilience can all help you become better able to tolerate the fear of rejection. 

Where It Can Impact Your Life

Although not every person experiences the fear of rejection in the same way, it tends to affect the ability to succeed in a wide range of personal and professional situations.

Job Interviews

Fear of rejection can lead to physical symptoms that can sometimes be interpreted as a lack of confidence. Confidence and an air of authority are critical in many positions, and those experiencing this fear often come across as weak and insecure. If you have a fear of rejection, you may also have trouble negotiating work-related contracts, leaving valuable pay and benefits on the table.

Business Dealings

In many positions, the need to impress does not end once you have the job. Entertaining clients, negotiating deals, selling products, and attracting investors are key components of many jobs. Even something as simple as answering the telephone can be terrifying for people with a fear of rejection.

Meeting New People

Humans are social creatures, and we are expected to follow basic social niceties in public. If you have a fear of rejection, you may feel unable to chat with strangers or even friends of friends. The tendency to keep to yourself could potentially prevent you from making lasting connections with others.

First dates can be daunting, but those with a fear of rejection may experience significant anxiety. Rather than focusing on getting to know the other person and deciding whether you would like a second date, you might spend all of your time worrying about whether that person likes you. Trouble speaking, obsessive worrying about your appearance, an inability to eat, and a visibly nervous demeanor are common.

Peer Relationships

The need to belong is a basic human condition, so people often behave in ways that help them fit in with the group. While dressing, speaking, and behaving as a group member is not necessarily unhealthy, peer pressure sometimes goes too far. It could lead you to do things you're not comfortable with just to remain part of the group.

The fear of rejection can affect many different areas of life, including your success in the workplace and your relationships with friends and romantic partners.

How It Affects Your Behavior

When you have a fear of rejection, you may engage in behaviors focused on either covering up or compensating for this fear.

Lack of Authenticity

Many people who are afraid of rejection develop a carefully monitored and scripted way of life. Fearing that you will be rejected if you show your true self to the world, you may live life behind a mask. This can make you seem phony and inauthentic to others and may cause a rigid unwillingness to embrace life’s challenges.

People-Pleasing

Although it is natural to want to take care of those we love, those who fear rejection often go too far. You might find it impossible to say no, even when saying yes causes major inconveniences or hardships in your own life.

If you are a people-pleaser , you may take on too much, increasing your risk for burnout . At the extreme, people-pleasing sometimes turns into enabling the bad behaviors of others.

People with a fear of rejection often go out of their way to avoid confrontations. You might refuse to ask for what you want or speak up for what you need. A common tendency is to try to simply shut down your own needs or pretend that they don’t matter.

The fear of rejection may stop you from reaching your full potential. Putting yourself out there is frightening for anyone, but if you have a fear of rejection, you may feel paralyzed. Hanging onto the status quo feels safe, even if you are not happy with your current situation.

Passive-Aggressiveness

Uncomfortable showing off their true selves but unable to entirely shut out their own needs, many people who fear rejection end up behaving in passive-aggressive ways . You might procrastinate, "forget" to keep promises, complain, and work inefficiently on the projects that you take on.

The fear of rejection might drive you to engage in behaviors like passive-aggressiveness, passivity, and people-pleasing. It can also undermine your authenticity and make it difficult to be yourself when you are around others.

The fear of rejection leads to behaviors that make us appear insecure, ineffectual and overwhelmed. You might sweat, shake, fidget, avoid eye contact, and even lose the ability to effectively communicate. While individuals react to these behaviors in very different ways, these are some of the reactions you might see.

Ironically, the fear of rejection often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is well-known in pop psychology that confidence enhances attractiveness. As a general rule, the lack of self-confidence that is inherent in a fear of rejection makes us more likely to be rejected.

Research shows that confidence is nearly as important as intelligence in determining our income level.

Manipulation

Some people prey on the insecurities of others. Those who suffer from a fear of rejection may be at greater risk of being manipulated for someone else’s personal gain.

Expert manipulators generally come across as charming, suave, and caring—they know what buttons to push to make others trust them. They also know how to keep someone with a fear of rejection feeling slightly on edge, as if the manipulator might leave at any time. Almost invariably, the manipulator does end up leaving once they have gotten what they want out of the other person.

Frustration

Most people are decent, honest, and forthright. Rather than manipulating someone with a fear of rejection, they will try to help. Look for signs that your friends and family are trying to encourage your assertiveness, asking you to be more open with them, or probing your true feelings.

Many times, however, people who fear rejection experience these efforts as emotionally threatening. This often leads friends and family to walk on eggshells , fearful of making your fears worse. Over time, they may become frustrated and angry, either confronting you about your behavior or beginning to distance themselves from you.

A Word From Verywell

If you find that fear of rejection is negatively affecting your life and causing distress, it may be time to seek out psychotherapy . This can help you explore and better understand some of the underlying contributions to your fear and find more effective ways to cope with this vulnerability.

Past experiences with rejection can play a role in this fear. People who experience greater levels of anxiety or who struggle with feelings of loneliness , depression, self-criticism, and poor self-esteem may also be more susceptible. 

Talking to people can be challenging if you have a fear of rejection. The best way to deal with it is to practice talking to others regularly. Remind yourself that everyone struggles with these fears sometimes and every conversation is a learning opportunity that improves your skills and confidence.

Some signs that you fear rejection include constantly worrying about what other people think, reading too much into what others are saying, going out of your way to please others, and avoiding situations where you might be rejected. You might also avoid sharing your thoughts and opinions because you fear that others might disagree with you.

Fear of rejection might be related to mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression. If your fear is affecting your ability to function normally and is creating distress, you should talk to your healthcare provider or a mental health professional.

Ding X, Ooi LL, Coplan RJ, Zhang W, Yao W. Longitudinal relations between rejection sensitivity and adjustment in Chinese children: moderating effect of emotion regulation . J Genet Psychol . 2021;182(6):422-434. doi:10.1080/00221325.2021.1945998

Ury W. Getting to Yes With Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents . HarperOne.

Epley N, Schroeder J. Mistakenly seeking solitude . J Exp Psychol Gen. 2014;143(5):1980-99. doi:10.1037/a0037323

Houghton K. And Then I’ll Be Happy! Stop Sabotaging Your Happiness and Put Your Own Life First . Globe Pequot Press.

Potts C, Potts S. Assertiveness: How to Be Strong in Every Situation . Capstone.

Brandt A. 8 Keys to Eliminating Passive-Aggressiveness: Strategies for Transforming Your Relationships for Greater Authenticity and Joy . W.W. Norton & Company.

Leary MR. Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection . Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2015;17(4):435-41.

Judge TA, Hurst C, Simon LS. Does it pay to be smart, attractive, or confident (or all three)? Relationships among general mental ability, physical attractiveness, core self-evaluations, and income . J Appl Psychol . 2009;94(3):742-55. doi:10.1037/a0015497

Hopper E. Can helping others help you find meaning in life? . Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  (5th Ed.). American Psychiatric Association.

By Lisa Fritscher Lisa Fritscher is a freelance writer and editor with a deep interest in phobias and other mental health topics.

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Fear of Rejection: Signs, Effects, & How to Overcome

Author: Michelle Risser, LISW-S

Michelle Risser LISW-S

Michelle specializes in maternal mental health, trauma, and EMDR, aiming to enhance confidence and performance. She has a strong focus on overcoming burnout through coaching and consultation.

Naveed Saleh MD, MS

Dr. Saleh is an experienced physician and a leading voice in medical journalism. His contributions to evidence-based mental health sites have helped raise awareness and reduce stigma associated with mental health disorders.

People who have a fear of rejection are afraid of not being liked, being abandoned, not fitting in or being alone. People who fear rejection may struggle with low self-esteem, lack of confidence, shame, or guilt, and spend a lot of time and energy worrying about what others think of them. They will often neglect their own needs or let people take advantage of them to be liked.

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Signs You’re Afraid of Rejection

Someone who is afraid of rejection may find themselves in situations where they put others’ needs and wants before their own. They may feel uncomfortable speaking their mind or expressing their opinions, or they may struggle to set boundaries and say no. They can also have a tendency to stay in unhealthy relationships for too long.

Signs of fear of rejection can include:

• Being a people-pleaser
• Taking on too many responsibilities
• Having trouble saying no
• Working too hard
• Hiding your true thoughts/feelings from others
• Staying in unhealthy relationships
• Fear of failure
• Perfectionism
• Codependency
• Putting up with poor treatment from others

What Causes Fear of Rejection?

Fear of rejection is a common and understandable fear and can be a normal part of being human. Our ancestors relied on being accepted in the group for survival, so ancient parts of the human brain including the amygdala can register a rejection as life-threatening. Common fears related to rejection such as the fear of public speaking can be normal and expected but can cause problems when they start to negatively impact a person’s life or get in the way of opportunities.

Social anxiety can be related to fear of rejection, due to the fear of doing or saying something embarrassing, not being liked, or not being able to connect with others. 1 Other mental health concerns can cause fear of rejection as well. OCD , for example, can cause rumination and obsessive thinking about whether someone is liked or accepted by their romantic interests, peers, or coworkers.

PTSD is known to not only trigger the fight or flight response, but also the fawn response, which is related to fear of rejection. Fawning is the act of desperately trying to smooth things over and please others in order to avoid conflict or rejection. 2

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Effects of Fear of Rejection

Fear of rejection can harm personal and professional relationships. People with a fear of rejection may put unrealistic expectations on others. They may be clingy, need constant reassurance, become jealous or suspicious, or compare themselves negatively with others.  Fear of rejection can become serious enough to result in rejection sensitive dysphoria , which has been linked to ADHD. 3

Fear of Rejection in Careers

Fear of rejection can cost people a great deal in their careers, including missing out on good opportunities, not asking for pay increases or discussing needed changes to work responsibilities, or staying stuck in their current position due to fear.

Interview anxiety can cause someone to not apply for the job they want, to dread the interview process, or to struggle through the interview. Someone dealing with new job anxiety may stay in a job that is a poor fit for far too long and miss out on career growth. Someone with a fear of rejection at work may also work way too hard or for too long to try to prove themselves.

Fear of Rejection in Relationships

Fear of rejection in romantic relationships can lead to not showing interest or sharing feelings with a potential partner, or result in jealousy, insecurity, or neediness. People may also push others away before they get close, to try to avoid this fear.

When one partner in a committed relationship has relationship anxiety and is not able to feel secure or comfortable, their constant need for reassurance often becomes a strain on the relationship. When this happens, fear of rejection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fear of Rejection in Social Settings

Many people struggle with social anxiety and fear of being rejected in social settings. Someone with this fear may avoid social gatherings or stand against the wall and avoid talking to others. Some of the fears that may come up are fear of not knowing what to say, fear of saying something stupid, forgetting someone’s name, or feeling awkward. The problem with this is that humans need connection. As scary as it may seem to put oneself out there, avoidance can lead to isolation and loneliness. This effect can be especially profound for people in stigmatized groups. 4

Fear of Rejection in Business

Fear of rejection in business can stop people from following their dreams and helping the people who need their products and services. Someone can have the best business idea in the world, but unless they put themselves out there, no one will ever know about it. Being successful in business requires hearing no many times to get to the yes.

Fear of Rejection in Creativity

Fear of rejection can stifle creativity. Someone with this fear may hesitate to try something new or explore a creative pursuit. Those who are creative may hesitate to share their work with anyone, or ask for the help they need to master their skills. This fear can keep people stuck and stop them from sharing their creativity and talent.

Fear of Rejection in New Friendships

Making new friends can be tough. Fear of rejection can prevent people from putting themselves out there, meeting new people, and making connections. Making new friends requires a certain amount of vulnerability. People with a fear of rejection may avoid these situations to try to keep themselves safe, but ultimately it keeps them isolated and lonely.

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How to Get Over Your Fear of Rejection

There are ways to get better at dealing with rejection . It is important to practice self-care and build confidence, in order to break the vicious cycle of isolation and avoidance that keeps people stuck, fearful and lonely. Fear of rejection goes away when one starts to believe that they are enough, and they stop relying on others for their self-worth.

The following are 13 tips for how to overcome a fear of rejection:

1. Accept It

One way to deal with fear of rejection is to accept it and simply notice that it’s there. People often beat themselves up for their feelings, which inevitably makes everything worse. For instance, imagine someone who is feeling nervous about going to a party. They fear that people won’t like them or will reject them.

So instead of just noticing and acknowledging that fear, this person starts to beat themself up with negative self-talk. They berate themselves for being so fearful and not being able to just be “normal”. They may go down a spiral of thinking about all of the things they struggle with. Instead, try noticing that the fear is there without judging it or making it mean something more.

2. Build the Habit of Positive Self-Talk

Positive self-talk can actually rewire the pathways in the brain to be more positive. Positive self-talk can improve mood and boost confidence. It may sound silly, but it works! Try a mantra like “I am enough” or “I can do hard things”.

3. Don’t Let Rejection Define You

There are so many things that make a person unique and special, and everyone has their own gifts. Fear of rejection is only one small part, not the whole person. Remember that just because the fear is there doesn’t mean you have to listen to it or make it part of your identity. 5

4. Build Confidence

Building confidence helps people feel more sure of themselves and more grounded. Confident people know that their worth is not dependent on the opinion of others, and they are more able to be themselves.

5. Have Self-Compassion

Self-compassion means treating oneself as they would a close friend. Remember that people with a fear of rejection live with anxiety, uncertainty, and fear every day. These are not easy things to live with. Put your hands over your heart and send yourself some compassion for all that you have been through and overcome.

6. Let Go of Guilt

Guilt about the past can cause people to feel bad about themselves and fear rejection or abandonment from others. Making amends where necessary and letting go of guilt can be a huge weight off your shoulders.

7. Practice Meditation

People who meditate  are more able to be present in the moment, and it can help with not getting wrapped up in fears and negative self-talk. Start with 2 minutes a day and work up from there. There are many great, free resources available for getting started with meditation.

8. Prioritize Self-Care

Self-care is critical if one is going to build confidence, feel more self-assured and be less fearful. It’s hard for someone to value and stick up for themselves if they don’t treat themselves well. Prioritizing self-care is a way to show yourself that you matter.

Research shows that fear of rejection can increase stress in the body, including the stress hormone cortisol. Try taking several slow breaths to decrease the stress response. 6

10. Exercise

Exercise is shown to decrease stress, increase endorphins and improve self-esteem. All of these benefits can help reduce the fear of rejection and increase self-confidence. A good rule of thumb is to start with 20-30 minutes of exercise most days to get these benefits, but even as little as a 5-minute walk can make a difference! 7

11. Notice What the Fear Feels Like in Your Body

When someone is dealing with an unpleasant emotion, they tend to either try to make it go away or obsess about it. Try approaching the feeling with curiosity about how it shows up in the body. Find a quiet place to sit and take a few breaths to get grounded. Then, scan the body from feet to head.

Notice any sensations, discomfort or even parts of the body that feel neutral or pleasant. Notice where the fear lives in the body and focus on the physical sensations, for example, “I notice that my chest feels tight”.

12. Remember That People Aren’t Focused on You

Many people walk into a room and immediately feel self-conscious or embarrassed. They feel like everyone is looking at them. In reality, people are also likely to be thinking about what others are thinking of them!

13. Meet New People

The more someone does something, the easier and more comfortable it can get. Start introducing yourself to people you meet. Shake their hand and ask them their name. This might seem really simple, but for someone with social anxiety or fear of rejection, this can feel really scary.

How Can Therapy Help?

Therapy can help someone with a fear of rejection get past that fear and start to feel more confident. Therapy can treat any underlying issues like social anxiety, OCD, PTSD, or ADHD, and can also help with confidence and self-esteem. It’s helpful to explore the options for finding a therapist who has experience with this issue. Therapists of many different backgrounds, geographic areas, and clinical focus are available in an online therapist directory . 8

Final Thoughts

Fear of rejection can be hard to overcome, but there are ways to move forward and it is so worth it. This fear can stand in the way of so many wonderful opportunities, relationships, and connections in life. People who have lived with fear of rejection have struggled enough, and deserve to feel happy, free, and secure.

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Voncken, M. J., Alden, L. E., Bögels, S. M., & Roelofs, J. (2008). Social rejection in social anxiety disorder: The role of performance deficits, evoked negative emotions and dissimilarity. British Journal of Clinical Psychology , 47 (4), 439-450 https://doi.org/10.1348/014466508X334745

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Scharf, M., Oshri, A., Eshkol, V., & Pilowsky, T. (2014). Adolescents’ ADHD symptoms and adjustment: The role of attachment and rejection sensitivity. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 84 (2), 209–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0099391

Williams, S. L., & Mickelson, K. D. (2008). A paradox of support seeking and rejection among the stigmatized. Personal Relationships , 15 (4), 493-509. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2008.00212.x

Howe, L. C., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Changes in Self-Definition Impede Recovery From Rejection. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 42 (1), 54–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215612743

Wirth, M. M., & Schultheiss, O. C. (2006). Effects of affiliation arousal (hope of closeness) and affiliation stress (fear of rejection) on progesterone and cortisol. Hormones and Behavior , 50 (5), 786-795. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2006.08.003

Abou Elmagd, M. (2016). Benefits, need and importance of daily exercise. Int. J. Phys. Educ. Sports Health , 3 (5), 22-27. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306118434_Benefits_need_and_importance_of_daily_exercise 

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What Students Are Saying About Rejection, Overcoming Fear and Their ‘Word of the Year’

Teenage comments in response to our recent writing prompts, and an invitation to join the ongoing conversation.

By The Learning Network

This week on The Learning Network, our writing prompts asked teenagers to dig deep. One invited reflection on times they have benefited from rejection, another asked about how they have overcome their fears, and a third challenged them to come up with one word to encapsulate their aspirations for the year ahead.

Thank you to all those who joined the conversation this week from around the world, including teenagers from Savannah, Ga. ; Loveland, Colo. ; and Jiangsu Province, China.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

Have You Ever Benefited From Rejection?

An aspiring actor named Axel Webber went viral on TikTok recently — not for achieving his goal of getting into the Juilliard School, but for being rejected from it. His story led to thousands of reassuring comments from strangers and celebrities alike.

Mr. Webber’s post inspired us to ask teenagers if they had experienced rejection — and if the consequences had been different from what they expected. Over 200 told us about times when being turned down spurred them to work harder, reflect, grow and find a new path. Here is a selection.

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Rethinking Rejection: The Surprising Key To Personal Growth

Most of us have encountered rejection in life. Whether it manifests in our professional endeavors or personal relationships, experiencing rejection can lead to discomfort and leave us feeling confused, hurt, and filled with self-doubt. We might find the emotional intensity of rejection overwhelming, and, as a result, our instinct might drive us to avoid or suppress it. However, this well-intentioned self-protection can limit our ability to understand and grow from these experiences. What if we reconsider the concept of rejection, transcending beyond our default fear-based perception and start viewing it as a critical, albeit challenging, component of our evolution? As you rethink the concept of rejection, a licensed therapist can offer insight and guidance through in-person or online therapy sessions.

Life beyond the comfort zone

There is a widely acknowledged saying, perhaps somewhat clichéd yet imbued with a profound truth: "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone." This statement can encapsulate an essential aspect of human growth and evolution. 

Our comfort zones, often characterized by predictability and familiarity, tend to be where we feel most at ease and secure. However, we usually don’t experience the most personal growth within these comfortable, well-trodden paths. Instead, we may find the most potential for self-development in the unfamiliar and uncomfortable territories, the zones fraught with fear and uncertainty.

Rejection can instinctively make us want to retreat into our safe havens. The discomfort associated with being denied or dismissed can be a powerful deterrent that may push us toward the perceived safety of our comfort zones. This instinctual retreat, while offering immediate emotional solace, can limit our opportunities for growth and learning.

However, when we resist this instinctual urge to hide away and choose to stay present and engage with the discomfort of rejection, we can provide ourselves with an invaluable opportunity to learn, evolve, and strengthen. The decision to face rejection head-on rather than evade it may enable us to develop emotional resilience, cultivate self-awareness, and adapt to life's unpredictable nature.

Rejection and the fear factor

Intrinsic to our collective discomfort with rejection may be the potent emotion of fear . This fear often comes in various forms: the fear of not measuring up to societal or personal expectations, the fear of ridicule, and the fear of being perceived as a failure, for instance. It can frequently become an invisible barrier, inhibiting us from taking risks, expressing our innovative ideas, or living a life that reflects our true selves.

Yet, fear, in all its forms, can be a complex emotion with protective and limiting aspects. On the one hand, it can keep us from making harmful decisions or taking unnecessary risks. On the other hand, it can hold us back from seizing opportunities that could lead to growth and self-discovery. This dichotomy may highlight the importance of understanding and managing our fear of rejection.

However, it can be critical to note that fear is not necessarily inherently detrimental. When harnessed appropriately, fear can act as a powerful motivator, pushing us to stretch our limits, strive harder, and reach our potential. It can serve as an internal compass, guiding us toward areas that require attention, growth, or change. Therefore, part of rethinking rejection may involve transforming our relationship with fear, turning it from a debilitating force into a catalyst for improvement.

To navigate this transformation, we may first need to acknowledge the presence and influence of fear in our lives. Recognizing fear as a part of our human experience rather than an element to avoid or suppress is often crucial to this process. Once acknowledged, we can dissect our fears, understanding their roots and triggers. This self-awareness may enable us to challenge and question our fears, reducing their power over our actions and decisions.

Next, we may need to reinterpret fear—to see it as a signal for growth rather than considering it an insurmountable obstacle. It can be advantageous to leverage fear for our benefit. In general, we shouldn't let fear hold us back but rather employ it as a motivator to push our boundaries, challenge our status quo, and chase personal and professional growth.

Learning the art of acceptance

As we embark on the journey of rethinking rejection, a crucial milestone can involve mastering the art of acceptance . Acceptance, in this context, can extend beyond mere resignation or passive acknowledgment. It usually involves actively embracing the reality of rejection as a shared human experience and recognizing that it is not an absolute reflection of our worth or capability as an individual.

However, acceptance is not always synonymous with complacency. Embracing rejection in our lives does not necessarily mean we cease striving for our goals or begin to settle for less than we deserve. Instead, it can mean understanding and acknowledging that not every opportunity, relationship, or pathway is intended for us.

Sometimes, the rejection we face merely signifies a redirection. Instead of being a blockade, a closed door might be an invitation to explore other paths, to discover open doors we may have overlooked in our initial pursuit. Through acceptance, we can see these closed doors not as endings but as signposts directing us toward potentially better paths and opportunities that align more closely with our authentic selves.

Rejection: A personal take

Personally, experiencing rejection can be profound and transformative. The initial sting can lead to introspection and self-awareness, helping us understand our strengths, weaknesses, and areas where we can improve.

Assigning a positive meaning to rejection generally involves taking what could initially be viewed as a negative experience and turning it into a tool for self-improvement. It can be about growing resilience and cultivating a mindset that views challenges as opportunities.

Rethinking rejection often involves turning what many view as a negative experience into an opportunity for growth. It can be about stepping outside our comfort zones, using rejection as a learning tool, embracing fear, and practicing acceptance.

Whether you're preparing for job interviews, co-authoring a book, or navigating the trials of everyday life, rejection can be a powerful motivator. It can serve as a reminder that every “no” brings us closer to a “yes,” and that the seed of success may lie within every failure.

How therapy can help you overcome rejection 

Engaging in therapy can offer a safe, non-judgmental environment to explore our feelings of rejection. It can provide the space to delve deeper into our emotional responses, understand their roots, and unravel any ingrained patterns of thought that may amplify rejection's negative impact. With their professional training and objectivity, therapists can guide us through this process of self-discovery, potentially helping us gain insights that may be difficult to achieve in isolation.

Therapy can also equip us with effective coping strategies to handle the discomfort associated with rejection. These can include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques that challenge negative self-beliefs, mindfulness practices that cultivate present-moment awareness, or emotion-focused strategies that facilitate healthy emotional expression. By learning and applying these techniques, we can enhance our emotional resilience and capacity to navigate feelings of rejection more effectively.

Moreover, therapy can aid in reframing our understanding of rejection. With a therapist's help, we can shift our perspective from viewing rejection as a personal failure to recognizing it as a catalyst for personal growth and redirection. This reframing can be instrumental in reducing the fear and stigma associated with rejection, fostering a healthier and more adaptive relationship with this universal experience.

In addition, engaging in therapy frequently promotes the development of self-acceptance. A therapist can provide guidance and support in cultivating a strong sense of self-worth independent of external validation. This foundation of self-acceptance can empower us to handle rejection with more self-compassion and less self-judgment, facilitating a more constructive approach to personal growth.

Benefits of online therapy

Online therapy can offer significant benefits, especially when navigating feelings of rejection. It often provides a platform for individuals to explore their emotions, understand their reactions, and develop coping strategies in a safe, accessible, and potentially less intimidating environment than traditional in-person therapy. This platform can benefit those hesitant to seek treatment due to stigma, geographical limitations, or logistical constraints.

Effectiveness of online therapy

Studies have indicated that online therapy can be as effective as traditional face-to-face therapy in addressing various psychological challenges, including fear, self-doubt, and the emotional distress often associated with rejection. Online therapy platforms often employ cognitive-behavioral approaches, mindfulness techniques, and emotion-focused therapies, all of which can be effective in managing feelings that arise from rejection.

• How To Handle Rejection From A Crush: Five Ways To Support Your Health And Healing Medically reviewed by Andrea Brant , LMHC
• Rejection And Self-Esteem: How To Preserve Your Confidence After Getting Turned Down Medically reviewed by April Justice , LICSW
• Relationships and Relations

Fear Of Rejection: Its Origin, Effects, And How To Overcome It

Home | Blog | Self-esteem | Fear Of Rejection: Its Origin, Effects, And How To Overcome It

• Published: August 7, 2020

Many of us have a fear of rejection and tend to avoid rejection by all means. Being rejected, and feeling rejected, is one of the most painful experiences most of us go through at some point in our lives. It makes us feel like a failure, judged, and not accepted by the people we care about.

Avoiding rejection, however, does come at a great cost. It can limit you from reaching your goals in many areas of life. Think about it – you could have written a book, but you didn’t because you fear people will not buy your book. You could have landed a business deal, but it failed because you are too nervous and thought, “What if they do not like me or my ideas?”

In her 30 years of experience working with clients all over the world, time and again, Marisa has been observing how avoiding rejection is only making the fear stronger. According to Marisa, the most effective and fastest way to overcome the fear of rejection is by working with the root cause that is hidden in your mind . 

In this article, you will learn:

• What fear of rejection is
• How it can affect your life
• Why are we afraid of rejection
• How to use the power of the mind to overcome the fear of rejection

Let’s get started by discussing exactly what a fear of rejection is.

What Is Fear Of Rejection?

The fear of rejection name is Anthropophobia. It is being afraid of unacceptance by the people around you. It could be you are scared of people not accepting your appearance, behaviors, the way you speak, or even your presence. 

In real-life, being scared of rejection could look like this:

‘ I am going to talk to my manager today and see if she is willing to raise my salary. Oh, but James has better results than me. What if my manager does not think I deserve the raise? What if I cannot convince her? I should just keep this to myself… ’

There are many other ways this fear can show up in your life. 

Some of the common signs and symptoms of being scared of rejection are:

• Difficulty saying ‘no’ 
• Taking on too many tasks
• Refusing to ask for what you want and need
• Procrastinating or working inefficiently on projects
• Being overly sensitive to criticism
• Difficulty making new friends unless you are sure they will like you
• Being reluctant to commit to and make a relationship work
• Working too hard to please others
• Blaming yourself when things don’t work out
• Staying in an unhealthy relationship
• Hiding your true self from others

How Can Fear Of Rejection Affect Your Life?

This fear could negatively affect various facets of our lives, including our careers , relationships, and self-confidence. 

• In business dealings. Instead of negotiating with a big client who is willing to pay more for your services, you lowered the fee and earned less than you deserve.
• In performance reviews. Instead of supporting your request for salary increments with performance data and asking to speak to the management, you decided to leave it up to their judgment. Therefore, you did not receive the appropriate bonuses and increments.

Relationships:

• In love and relationships, you do not speak up when your spouse tells you to do things against your will. As a consequence, your emotional needs do not get fulfilled and with time both of you may become distant.
• In friendship, you choose to adapt your communication style and behavior to blend within a group of friends and be accepted. Over time, you may feel like you are betraying yourself as you are not living by your true values. 

Self-confidence:

• When people criticize the way you look or talk, you feel inadequate or like a failure. As a result, you can have low self-esteem.
• You procrastinate taking action towards your dreams because you are afraid that people might reject your ideas. You think it is better to stay where you are because it is ‘safer.’

Why do Humans Fear Rejection?

Have you ever wondered where fear of rejection comes from, and why is it so strong? 

It turns out that this fear is deeply ingrained in our minds because, evolutionarily speaking, it used to help us survive. 

An evolutionary survival mechanism

Our need to belong and be accepted is rooted in human evolution. Thousands of years ago, it took an entire village to work together in order to survive in harsh conditions. Humans needed to be a part of a tribe to survive. If a person was socially rejected or kicked out of the village, they would die alone in the wild.

Although we do not live in dangerous environments anymore, our minds still associate rejection with death.

The reality is, rejection will not cause us death in this time and age. However, it still can bring forward feelings associated with the fear of dying. 

According to the way the mind works , what we say and imagine in our minds influences how we feel. Whenever rejection happens , the mind instantly thinks, ‘ I am going to die of shame if they reject me ’ or create images of you dying in shame. This is one of the main reasons why the possibility of being rejected can stir various negative emotions and prevent you from acting on your goals.

We are built to avoid pain

If you have touched a boiling kettle by accident before, you will most likely never repeat the same mistake again. From a young age, we learn to avoid pain to survive. For every painful experience, our mind remembers the pain and fires alarms whenever we face a similar situation. It will tell you ‘Do not touch that boiling kettle’ when you see one again. 

Similar to avoiding physical pain, humans would take any necessary measures to avoid the emotional pain associated with being rejected. In fact, a study by Naomi Eisenberger, a social psychologist, showed that rejection triggers the same brain regions that physical pain does . This means we avoid rejection just as we would avoid touching a boiling kettle.

Even though rejection causes us pain and discomfort, it does not harm us physically. It is a temporary emotion that comes and goes. If you choose to take action in spite of the fear, it will shrink in size, and you will become less afraid of rejection over time. 

We tend to be risk-averse

Imagine this scenario: a friend offers to flip a coin and give you $20 if it lands on tails. If it lands on heads, you give them $20. Would you take that risk?

You would probably consider taking the risk if you were sure you would win. This tendency reflects risk aversion — reluctance to take risks unless the payoff is certain. 

In the context of potentially experiencing fear of rejection, we are reluctant to risk our ‘lives’ being rejected by others because we are unsure of what people think of us . If we are sure we will not get rejected, most likely we would be brave enough to take action. 

You see, life is unpredictable and risks are bound to appear in every decision. It may feel scary to risk yourself being rejected, but taking risks is part of the journey towards success. If you are not willing to take risks, you cannot get anywhere. 

How To Overcome Fear Of Rejection Forever

Many people struggle with overcoming rejection because their subconscious minds and conscious minds are playing a constant tug of war. The conscious mind is fully aware that we want to conquer this fear and take action towards our dreams. The subconscious mind, however, does not know what we want. Its primary job is to keep us away from danger, including rejection.

Unfortunately, the subconscious mind wins the tug of war most of the time because it controls 95% of our thoughts and actions. When the time we need to act comes, the subconscious mind takes over with thoughts such as, ‘ Hey, you might get rejected. If you do, it is going to hurt you and kill you. Let’s go back to our comfort zone. ’ 

During the three decades as a therapist, Marisa Peer has helped thousands of people overcome their fear of rejection and get free from other limitations that were holding them back. According to Marisa, you are able to train your own mind to overcome the fear of rejection and you also can choose to use a therapeutic technique known for helping people with similar issues. 

3 ways to deal with the fear of rejection on your own

It is possible to learn how to handle rejection by taking the time to reflect on your experiences, think about how you approach them, and work out what you can take away from each experience to help you when facing future problematic situations. So read on to find out the 3 ways you can learn how to get over rejection.

1. Reframe rejection as opportunities

For every rejection you experience, there is a redirection to a different opportunity yet unknown to you. Whether you are rejected by an interviewer or a love interest, a new door is opened for you at the same time, leading you towards other opportunities.

Whenever you face rejection, remind yourself, ‘ I am not rejected, I am redirected to something greater. ’

2. Talk to yourself like a dear friend

Do not beat yourself up when things do not work out as you have planned. Treat yourself kinder and shower yourself with praises as if you are cheering a dear friend. 

Rather than allowing negative self-talk to happen, talk to yourself using more compassionate, affirming messages such as, ‘ I have what I need to get through this, ’ or ‘ I am stronger than I think. ’

3. Refuse to let rejection define you

Being rejected does not mean you are a failure. If one company turns you down, do not think that you are incompetent. If one person rejects you, do not think that you are unlovable.  

Other people’s opinions and incidents do not define you. The only person who can define you is you alone. An effective way to do this is to praise yourself daily and boost your self-esteem. The higher self-esteem you have, the more resilience you will develop against rejection.

The most effective way to overcome fear of rejection forever

The most effective way to overcoming rejection once and for all is to reprogram the subconscious mind to work with you and not against you using Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT®) , a complete solution-based approach created by celebrity therapist Marisa Peer over 30 years of working with people all over the world.

Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT®) combines the most powerful aspects of hypnosis, psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and more to help release your fears. It helps you go deep into your subconscious mind, access the root causes of issues you have been struggling with, and change the stories, words, and pictures in your mind.

RTT® can help you to overcome a fear of rejection in 3 simple steps:

• Hypnosis is used to help you get into a trance-like state and guide you to explore where the fear of rejection comes from.
• Rewriting pictures and words your mind associates with rejection with empowering ones.
• Making the new pictures and words familiar to your mind by repeating them to yourself every day and taking action. As a result, you will perceive things differently in your everyday life. 

With the guidance of a certified RTT® therapist , you can replace negative pictures and words associated with rejection with the ones that bring positive emotions such as happiness and fulfillment related to achieving your goals. 

This way, your subconscious mind will start associating rejection with safety and pleasure, and eventually, you will not be scared of rejection. 

What is RTT®?

RTT® is a revolutionary therapy method from world-renowned therapist Marisa Peer, who combines over 30 years of experience with the very best elements of today’s modern approaches to therapy, such as NLP, CBT and Hypnotherapy, to produce a focused method that can produce results a faster than you would expect.

How to get in Contact with an RTT® Therapist

Are you interested in receiving RTT® therapy? Do you think therapy is the best choice for you in helping you to overcome your blocks when it comes to self-esteem? Getting in touch with an RTT® therapist is easy. Simply click here to start your journey.

A Take-Home Message

According to Marisa, “ The mind has the most powerful healing potential on the planet .” It can help you live a fulfilled and successful life, and it can also hold you back in many ways. It all depends on the words you say and the pictures you imagine in your mind. 

Once you know how the mind works, it is easy for you to tap into its power and make it work with you and not against you. 

You can learn how to overcome feeling rejected by changing the words and pictures in your mind and relating the fear to pleasure. 

Rejection-proof yourself and unlock your inner confidence with a pre-recorded hypnotic audio bundle . These audio tracks will help you reprogram your mind, regain your natural confidence, and rebuild your self-esteem. 

If your fear of rejection stems from low-self esteem, you will benefit from Marisa Peer’s I Am Enough Masterclass , which can help you get to the root of that experience, let go of the negative emotions, and rewrite them with empowering ones.

You can improve your psychological and emotional well-being by developing better self-acceptance. All you need to make some mental shifts that open up your mind to accept yourself more. Sign up for the FREE I Am Enough Masterclass by clicking the banner below .

We hope this article has helped you learn how to handle rejection, and provided you with methods you can use to face tricky situations with a renewed confidence in the future. If you would like more from Marisa Peer, remember to subscribe to her regular newsletter by entering your email in the box at the bottom of this page.

• Fears and Phobias , Self-esteem

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A Psychology Professor Explains The Best Way To Deal With Rejection

Psychologist mark leary deconstructs the pain we feel when we experience rejection and how to feel better about it..

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | April 18, 2022

A new study published in Advances In Motivation Science examines the root causes behind the pain of rejection and our relentless pursuit to be accepted by other people .

I recently spoke to psychologist Mark Leary, a former faculty member at Duke University and co-author of the new research, to understand how our value fluctuates depending on our need to belong. Here is a summary of our conversation.

What inspired you to investigate the topic of acceptance and belonging and how did you study it?

My original interest in graduate school involved self-presentation — how people's behavior and emotions are affected by their concerns with others' impressions of them. After studying self-presentation for several years, it dawned on me that, although people manage their impressions for many practical reasons, such as to get a job or repair an embarrassing event, one primary reason that people are concerned with what others think of them is that they want to be accepted and belong to groups.

Making "bad" impressions on other people lowers the likelihood that we will be accepted, develop friendships and romantic relationships , be valued as a group member, and obtain other social rewards.

This realization led me to pivot toward studying how people seek social acceptance and belonging and the impact of acceptance and rejection on people's emotions, behaviors, and views of themselves. Over the past 30 years, we have conducted dozens of research studies that dealt in one way or another with acceptance and rejection, using several research methodologies.

For example, we have conducted controlled laboratory experiments in which we led participants to feel accepted or rejected and measured their responses. We also used questionnaires to ask people about their personal experiences with rejection, and we have studied personality variables that are related to differences in how people seek acceptance and react to rejection.

What sorts of things did you find in this research?

Let me mention just two things that consumed a good deal of our attention after we accidentally stumbled on them.

Being rejected obviously evokes strong negative emotions. However, as we studied emotional reactions to rejection, we realized that researchers had more-or-less overlooked a very important response to rejection: the emotion that we commonly call "hurt feelings."

After conducting several studies of hurt feelings, we concluded that, in fact, hurt feelings is the primary emotional response to rejection, the emotion that occurs most reliably when people feel rejected.

Our research showed that people's feelings are hurt by six primary kinds of events:

• Active disassociation (for example, a romantic breakup)
• Passive disassociation (not being included)
• Being unappreciated
• Being teased

All of these are events that make people feel rejected. Put simply, hurt feelings are the "rejection emotion."

Of course, people who are rejected often have other emotions as well, such as sadness , anxiety , and anger .

Our research showed that these emotions are not reactions to rejection itself but rather to the nature or implications of the rejecting event. For example, rejections that produce a sense of loss cause sadness, rejections that include a threat to well-being or uncertainty about the future cause anxiety, and rejections that are viewed as unjustified cause anger. Only hurt feelings are caused by perceived rejection itself.

A second set of unexpected findings involved self-esteem. As we studied reactions to acceptance and rejection, we found that rejection consistently lowered people's state self-esteem — how they felt about themselves at the moment.

Changes in self-esteem were so strongly and consistently associated with rejection that we concluded that self-esteem is part of the psychological system that monitors and responses to social feedback.

We proposed a new theory, sociometer theory, that suggested that state self-esteem is a subjective gauge of interpersonal acceptance and rejection, an internal reflection of others' feelings about the person.

Not only does state self-esteem reflect people's perceptions of the degree to which they have relational value to others, but increases and decreases in state self-esteem may calibrate people's interpersonal aspirations.

Acceptance increases self-esteem, emboldening people to be more socially confident, whereas rejection lowers self-esteem, leading people to be more socially cautious.

Taking this idea one step further suggests that, contrary to the popular view, people do not need or seek self-esteem for its own sake. Rather, people are motivated to behave in ways that increase acceptance and avoid rejection, and those behaviors are precisely those that raise self-esteem.

So, self-esteem is a psychological meter or gauge. Just as people don't put gas in their cars to simply make their fuel gauge move away from empty and toward full, people don't do things simply to make their self-esteem go up.

Can you briefly describe what makes a person accepted?

People feel accepted when they perceive that they have "relational value" to another person or group of people.

Other people value their relationships with us to varying degrees. Some people value their relationship with us very much, invest a great deal in their connection to us, and would be very distressed if the relationship ended. Other people value their relationship with us only moderately; they may like interacting with us but would be only mildly bothered if they never saw us again. Other people don't value having a relationship with us at all.

We experience "acceptance" when we think our relational value to other people is sufficiently high, but feel "rejected" when our relational value is not as high as we wish. Of course, we all know that some people naturally value us more than other people do, and not everyone values having a relationship with us. We feel rejected when we perceive that our relational value in a particular situation or to a particular person is not as high as we want it to be.

Importantly, people don't need to be actually rejected in order to have the subjective experience of rejection.

For example, people may feel rejected even when they know the other person accepts or even loves them if they believe that their relational value to the person is not as high as they wish at that moment. So our romantic partners can make us feel rejected and hurt our feelings in a particular situation even though we know that they accept and love us.

Your research talks about the far-reaching impact of acceptance and belonging motivation on human behavior. Can you expand a bit on the same? What behaviors did you analyze and what did you find?

In 1995, Roy Baumeister and I wrote an article in which we suggested that the desire for acceptance and belonging may be the most fundamental interpersonal motive — the motive that affects our social behavior more than any other motive. This doesn't mean that we are motivated to be accepted all of the time or by everybody we meet. But concerns with acceptance and belonging underlie a great deal of human behavior, motivating certain behaviors and constraining others.

After publication of this article, many researchers dove into how the motivation to be accepted and to belong affects people's behavior. This motive influences human behavior in many ways, but let mention just five important domains in which our behavior is affected by concerns with acceptance and belonging.

• First, everything people do to enhance their physical attractiveness is aimed toward increasing acceptance, whether that's daily grooming, getting a haircut, trying to lose weight, or cosmetic surgery.
• Likewise, almost everything people do to be liked is motivated by a desire for relational value and acceptance. Most conformity to group norms and social pressure is also motivated by a desire to belong. In order to be viewed as an acceptable, valuable group member, people must conform to basic group norms.
• Although many researchers have viewed achievement motivation as quite distinct from the motive to be accepted, in fact, a great deal of achievement-related behaviors are motivated by a desire to increase one's relational value and be accepted. Think of what would happen if achievement was met with criticism, devaluation, and rejection instead of praise and acceptance.
• Perhaps the most ongoing and pervasive effect of approval and belonging motivation is on all of the things we do to be viewed as a good friend, partner, employee, group member, or member of society. Interpersonal interactions and relationships are guided by social exchange rules regarding how the individuals are expected to treat one another. A number of such rules have been identified including reciprocity, honesty, fairness, dependability, cooperation , and some minimal level of concern for other people's needs.
• People obviously prefer to have connections with those who abide by social exchange rules because people who violate these rules are viewed as poor social exchange partners who might disadvantage other people. So, concerns with acceptance and belonging underlie a great deal of polite, civil, ethical, and prosocial behavior.

Note that I'm not saying that a desire for acceptance is the only reason people behave in ways that enhance their appearance, help them be liked, conform to group pressure, lead them to achieve, or follow social exchange rules. (Sometimes they do these things to manipulate or take advantage of other people, for example.) But a concern with acceptance and belonging appears to be the primary driver of these behaviors.

In this world of judgments, how do you advise people to start feeling more accepted in their own skin?

Although being accepted is exceptionally important for people's well-being, simply feeling accepted can create its own problems unless people's feelings of acceptance and rejection are accurately calibrated to their actual relational value to other people.

Like all monitoring systems, the psychological systems that monitor and respond to social cues work best when they provide reasonably accurate information about what other people think of us.

So, simply trying to feel more accepted in one's skin isn't necessarily helpful.

The problem, of course, is that it's very difficult to determine how valued and accepted you actually are. Other people usually don't provide explicit social feedback, and the social cues we use to infer what other people are thinking about us are often quite ambiguous. This leaves a great deal of room for people to either overestimate or underestimate their relational value in other people's eyes, both of which can create behavioral miscalculations and emotional problems.

To make matters worse, our research shows that people tend to underestimate their relational value, interpreting relatively neutral social feedback as if it is rejecting.

For example, we tend to have negative, rather than neutral, reactions to learning that someone feels neutral about us. What this means is that most people probably go through life feeling more rejected than they actually are.

And, a history of actual rejection — by neglectful parents or rejecting peers, for example — seems to increase people's tendency to underestimate their relational value.

Viewed in this way, the first step in addressing one's concerns with acceptance and rejection is to examine the evidence as objectively as possible, trying not to either sugar-coat others' reactions or read too much negativity into them.

With that information in hand, we can bolster our feelings of acceptance in three ways:

• By learning to dismiss the negative reactions of people whose opinions of us really don't matter,
• Seeking connections with people to whom we would have higher relational value,
• Or, if needed, making changes in ourselves that might increase the degree to which other people value having connections with us.

How does this fear of judgments impact the psychological health of a person?

Excessive concerns about negative evaluations and possible rejection obviously undermine psychological well-being.

People who have a high fear of negative evaluation tend to score higher in social anxiety because social anxiety arises from the belief that one will not be perceived in ways that promote acceptance.

Fear of negative evaluation also makes people particularly vigilant to cues that might reflect rejection and to a tendency to give a worst-case reading to cues and feedback that might convey low relational value.

These concerns also lead to reticence and inhibition, to shyness, in an effort not to say or do things that might lower one's relational value further.

Can this have physical impacts as well?

Anything that increases anxiety and stress can certainly have undesired physical effects, so people who are excessively concerned with rejection have some sorts of problems as people with other ongoing sources of anxiety and stress, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal problems.

How can medical professionals like therapists and psychologists help in such cases?

When helping people deal with rejections, mental health professionals, as well as friends, parents, and others, can help the person work through a couple of issues.

First, is the person's perception of the situation accurate? Is his or her relational value as low as he or she thinks it is? If the answer is "no" — that is, the person is perceiving rejection where none exists — then steps can be taken to try to correct the misperception.

However, if the answer is "yes," the best response depends on the nature of the situation, the cause of the rejection, and whether the rejection was a one-time thing (a romantic breakup, for example) or an ongoing pattern of being excluded, ignored, or bullied by others.

We can help the person troubled by rejection understand the nature of the rejection and his or her role in it, then formulate a plan both to deal emotionally with the rejection and, if needed, to take practical steps to reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.

Did something unexpected emerge from your research? Something beyond the hypothesis?

We certainly knew from the beginning that people are universally concerned with being accepted and react strongly when they experience rejection. What surprised me is how little it takes to make people feel relationally devalued and rejected.

In our experimental studies in which we led research participants to feel rejected, we obviously had to use very weak methods to induce rejection for ethical reasons. In almost all of these studies, the participants did not know one another and had no reason to think they would ever meet again.

In fact, in some studies, participants never saw one another or learned each others' identities, and they interacted over an intercom or by exchanging written answers on sheets of people. And the nature of the rejections was quite minor.

For example, participants were told that another participant preferred to work with another person rather than them on a laboratory task or received feedback that another participant had rated them as average rather than positively. Importantly, none of these minor "rejections" had any consequences on the participants' lives.

But even though these were seemingly meaningless rejections with no consequences whatsoever by people the participants didn't know and would never see again, we consistently got strong effects.

Participants who were rejected in our studies consistently experienced more negative emotions (hurt feelings, sadness, anxiety, and sometimes anger), showed a loss of state self-esteem and had very negative views of those who had rejected them.

Given that such trivial rejection experiences had such powerful effects, it's not surprising that concerns with rejection permeate our lives.

This page has been archived and is no longer being updated regularly.

Science Watch

The pain of social rejection

As far as the brain is concerned, a broken heart may not be so different from a broken arm.

By Kirsten Weir

2012, Vol 43, No. 4

Print version: page 50

Anyone who lived through high school gym class knows the anxiety of being picked last for the dodgeball team. The same hurt feelings bubble up when you are excluded from lunch with co-workers, fail to land the job you interviewed for or are dumped by a romantic partner.

Rejection feels lousy.

Yet for many years, few psychologists tuned into the importance of rejection. “It’s like the whole field missed this centrally important part of human life,” says Mark Leary, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. That’s changed over the last decade and a half, as a growing number of researchers have turned their eyes toward this uncomfortable fact of life. “People have realized just how much our concern with social acceptance spreads its fingers into almost everything we do,” he says.

As researchers have dug deeper into the roots of rejection, they’ve found surprising evidence that the pain of being excluded is not so different from the pain of physical injury. Rejection also has serious implications for an individual’s psychological state and for society in general. Social rejection can influence emotion, cognition and even physical health. Ostracized people sometimes become aggressive and can turn to violence. In 2003 Leary and colleagues analyzed 15 cases of school shooters, and found all but two suffered from social rejection ( Aggressive Behavior , 2003).

Clearly, there are good reasons to better understand the effects of being excluded. “Humans have a fundamental need to belong. Just as we have needs for food and water, we also have needs for positive and lasting relationships,” says C. Nathan DeWall, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. “This need is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and has all sorts of consequences for modern psychological processes.”

Pain in the brain

As clever as human beings are, we rely on social groups for survival. We evolved to live in cooperative societies, and for most of human history we depended on those groups for our lives. Like hunger or thirst, our need for acceptance emerged as a mechanism for survival. “A solitary human being could not have survived during the six million years of human evolution while we were living out there on the African savannah,” Leary says.

With today’s modern conveniences, a person can physically survive a solitary existence. But that existence is probably not a happy one. Thanks to millions of years of natural selection, being rejected is still painful. That’s not just a metaphor. Naomi Eisenberger, PhD, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kipling Williams, PhD, at Purdue University, and colleagues found that social rejection activates many of the same brain regions involved in physical pain ( Science , 2003).

To study rejection inside an fMRI scanner, the researchers used a technique called Cyberball, which Williams designed following his own experience of being suddenly excluded by two Frisbee players at the park. In Cyberball, the subject plays an online game of catch with two other players. Eventually the two other players begin throwing the ball only to each other, excluding the subject. Compared with volunteers who continue to be included, those who are rejected show increased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate and the anterior insula — two of the regions that show increased activity in response to physical pain, Eisenberger says. As far as your brain is concerned, a broken heart is not so different from a broken arm.

Those findings led DeWall, Eisenberger and colleagues to wonder: If social rejection aches like physical pain, can it be treated like physical pain? To find out, they assigned volunteers to take over-the-counter acetaminophen (Tylenol) or a placebo daily for three weeks. Compared with the placebo group, volunteers who took the drug recounted fewer episodes of hurt feelings in daily self-reports. Those reports were backed by an fMRI study, which found that people who had taken acetaminophen daily for three weeks had less activity in the pain-related brain regions when rejected in Cyberball, in contrast to those taking a placebo ( Psychological Science , 2010).

The same patterns are seen in situations of real-world rejection, too. University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, PhD, and colleagues scanned the brains of participants whose romantic partners had recently broken up with them. The brain regions associated with physical pain lit up as the participants viewed photographs of their exes ( Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 2011).

The link between physical and social pain might sound surprising, but it makes biological sense, DeWall says. “Instead of creating an entirely new system to respond to socially painful events, evolution simply co-opted the system for physical pain,” he says. “Given the shared overlap, it follows that if you numb people to one type of pain, it should also numb them to the other type of pain.”

Lashing out

Being on the receiving end of a social snub causes a cascade of emotional and cognitive consequences, researchers have found. Social rejection increases anger, anxiety, depression, jealousy and sadness. It reduces performance on difficult intellectual tasks, and can also contribute to aggression and poor impulse control, as DeWall explains in a recent review ( Current Directions in Psychological Science , 2011). Physically, too, rejection takes a toll. People who routinely feel excluded have poorer sleep quality, and their immune systems don’t function as well as those of people with strong social connections, he says.

Even brief, seemingly innocuous episodes of rejection can sting. In one recent study, Williams, Eric Wesselmann, PhD, of Purdue University, and colleagues found that when participants passed a stranger who appeared to look “through” them rather than meeting their gaze, they reported less social connection than did people who made eye contact with a passing stranger ( Psychological Science , 2012).

In fact, it’s remarkably hard to find situations in which rejection isn’t painful, Williams says. He wondered whether people would be hurt if they were rejected by a person or group they disliked. Using his Cyberball model, he found that African- American students experienced the same pain of rejection when they were told that the people rejecting them were members of the Ku Klux Klan, a racist group. In other studies, participants earned money when they were rejected, but not when they were accepted. The payments did nothing to dampen the pain of exclusion. “No matter how hard you push it, people are hurt by ostracism,” he says.

Fortunately, most people recover almost immediately from these brief episodes of rejection. If a stranger fails to look you in the eye, or you’re left out of a game of Cyberball, you aren’t likely to dwell on it for long. But other common rejections — not being invited to a party, or being turned down for a second date — can cause lingering emotions.

After the initial pain of rejection, Williams says, most people move into an “appraisal stage,” in which they take stock and formulate their next steps. “We think all forms of ostracism are immediately painful,” he says. “What differs is how long it takes to recover, and how one deals with the recovery.”

People often respond to rejection by seeking inclusion elsewhere. “If your sense of belonging and self-esteem have been thwarted, you’ll try to reconnect,” says Williams. Excluded people actually become more sensitive to potential signs of connection, and they tailor their behavior accordingly. “They will pay more attention to social cues, be more likable, more likely to conform to other people and more likely to comply with other people’s requests,” he says.

Yet others may respond to rejection with anger and lashing out. If someone’s primary concern is to reassert a sense of control, he or she may become aggressive as a way to force others to pay attention. Sadly, that can create a downward spiral. When people act aggressively, they’re even less likely to gain social acceptance.

What causes some people to become friendlier in response to rejection, while others get angry? According to DeWall, even a glimmer of hope for acceptance can make all the difference. In a pair of experiments, he and his colleagues found that students who were accepted by no other participants in group activities behaved more aggressively — feeding hot sauce to partners who purportedly disliked spicy foods, and blasting partners with uncomfortably loud white noise through headphones — than students accepted by just one of the other participants ( Social Psychological and Personality Science , 2010).

Social pain relief

It may take time to heal from a bad break-up or being fired, but most people eventually get over the pain and hurt feelings of rejection. When people are chronically rejected or excluded, however, the results may be severe. Depression, substance abuse and suicide are not uncommon responses. “Long-term ostracism seems to be very devastating,” Williams says. “People finally give up.”

In that case, psychologists can help people talk through their feelings of exclusion, DeWall says.

“A lot of times, these are things people don’t want to talk about,” he says. And because rejected people may adopt behaviors, such as aggression, that serve to further isolate them, psychologists can also help people to act in ways that are more likely to bring them social success.

The pain of non-chronic rejection may be easier to alleviate. Despite what the fMRI scanner says, however, popping two Tylenols probably isn’t the most effective way to deal with a painful episode of rejection. Instead, researchers say, the rejected should seek out healthy, positive connections with friends and family.

That recommendation squares with the neural evidence that shows positive social interactions release opioids for a natural mood boost, Eisenberger says. Other activities that produce opioids naturally, such as exercise, might also help ease the sore feelings that come with rejection.

Putting things into perspective also helps, Leary says. True, rejection can sometimes be a clue that you behaved badly and should change your ways. But frequently, we take rejection more personally than we should. “Very often we have that one rejection, maybe we didn’t get hired for this job we really wanted, and it makes us feel just lousy about our capabilities and ourselves in general,” Leary says. “I think if people could stop overgeneralizing, it would take a lot of the angst out of it.”

Next time you get passed over for a job or dumped by a romantic partner, it may help to know that the sting of rejection has a purpose. That knowledge may not take away the pain, but at least you know there’s a reason for the heartache. “Evolutionarily speaking, if you’re socially isolated you’re going to die,” Williams says. “It’s important to be able to feel that pain.”

Kirsten Weir is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.

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Fear of Rejection

Adele wilde, counsellor and psychotherapist perth, western australia.

How to Conquer the Fear of Rejection

Rejection hurts but trying to prevent it comes at a higher cost..

Posted December 3, 2018 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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Rejection is a bitter pill to swallow. And most of us have had a good dose of it. Whether we didn’t get a job we applied for, weren’t admitted to our top choice college, didn’t make it to the team we tried out for, or didn’t score a second date with the person we were sure was going to become our soulmate, many of us have experienced rejection first hand. Hearing “no, not interested” doesn’t feel good. Regardless of how hard you want to look at the bright side of it, rejection doesn’t build character. It breaks hearts, it brings tears, and it raises fears. And that fear can stick and become a hard-to-remove stain.

Fear of rejection, or rejection sensitivity , as it is often referred to in the psychology literature, can become an obstacle to success and happiness . Research shows that fear of rejection can have a negative impact on emotional well-being, interpersonal relationships, and psychological functioning. It affects the way we feel about ourselves, the decisions that we make, and the goals we choose to pursue. Fear of rejection can make us think small and act even smaller.

All fears are evoked when after we appraise a stimulus, we find it dangerous and potentially harmful. Fear is the internal alarm system that we are equipped with and which exists to warn us against threats to our survival. In the past, survival meant staying alive. It meant not getting killed by a predator, a disease, a rival, or a natural disaster. And threats included anything that could literally cause death or serious harm.

But in a relatively safe, socially complex, and intellectually demanding world, the meaning of both survival and threat has changed significantly. For most people in the developed world, it is no longer our biological survival that we are preoccupied with on a daily basis. Our worries extend to beyond just staying alive. We still care about our physical health, but we also care about our mental, emotional, financial, relationship, or spiritual health and we want to protect them from any threats. And when any of these are threatened, fear arises.

So what is it that fear of rejection protects us from?

There are many answers to this question, the specifics of which only you can provide, based on what’s important to you and what your life looks like. Is there something, however, that is common in all rejection and that motivates us to want to keep it out of our realm of experience?

The commonality may be pain. We are generally hardwired to avoid pain, whether it is physical or emotional. Pain is associated with harm, invasion, and potential damage. Pain is a signal that we should avoid, correct, or withdraw from a situation. It is easy to imagine how this plays out with physical pain. If your coffee is so hot that it burns your tongue, you wait until it cools down. And the beautiful thing about our brains is that they register those painful events, so we can avoid them in the future, and prevent harm. We learn what’s causing us pain and we take steps to protect ourselves from it. The same is true about emotional pain. We, consciously or unconsciously, avoid entering situations or creating circumstances that could get our feelings hurt. In fact, the brain centers that register the magnitude of pain and the subjective experience of pain are closely connected.

What does that have to do with rejection? Rejection hurts. There is evidence that rejection is, in fact, a painful experience. In a study conducted in 2010, DeWall and colleagues tested the effect of a painkiller on the emotional pain caused by social rejection. Their participants were randomly assigned to take either a painkiller or a placebo pill each day for three weeks. Those who took the active pill, reported a reduction in hurt feelings over time, in contrast to those who took the placebo, whose intensity of hurt feelings remained unchanged. They took their study a step further and used neuroimaging to see what happens in the brain during a situation that they set up to create feelings of social exclusion. They found that the participants who took the painkiller showed less activity in the brain regions associated with the subjective experience of pain than those who took the placebo.

This doesn’t mean that the cure for fear of rejection is taking painkillers. It means that emotional pain is a natural response to rejection. This may also explain why we tend to avoid situations in which we expect to be rejected. Consciously or unconsciously, we stay away from people, places, and events that we have associated with rejection either through experience or based on expectation. And that fear and the subsequent avoidant behavior can have a serious impact on the goals we seek to accomplish and the life we aim to build.

So, what can we do to handle fear of rejection?

First, identify the fearful stimulus. That is, become aware of the situations or circumstances that we are actively avoiding because we worry that they will lead to rejection. What ideas are we not sharing because we worry that others won’t embrace them? What requests are we not making because we worry they will be denied? What steps are we not taking toward a goal because we worry that we will be exposed and vulnerable? What “no’s” are we afraid to hear?

Second, turn avoidance into action. If a goal still seems important and meaningful, take steps toward achieving it, even if that increases the risk of rejection. Avoiding is safer and less painful. Without an “ask,” there is no rejection. But without it, there is no acceptance either.

Third, remind ourselves that the pain caused by rejection is a normal feeling and that it will pass, just like any other painful sensation or feeling. We can’t fully control whether our ideas, our proposals, our applications, or our pitches will be rejected because rejection is in the hands of others. But we can control the intensity of our emotions and we can train ourselves to become emotionally stronger. Being a good emotion regulator is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence .

And finally, reframe rejection as an opportunity to improve our approaches and tactics. There are many reasons why we did not get a “yes” this time. The timing might not have been right, we may not be a good fit, we may not have been thorough enough in our preparation, we may not have presented the best sample of our work, the people who rejected us may have their own needs, biases or limitations. The list of situational factors is endless. It is easy to personalize rejection and think of it as a reflection of who we are and what we are capable of, as opposed to what we did and how can we do it better next time. Changing what we do is easier than changing who we are. And people will evaluate us by what we do.

All in all, rejection doesn’t feel good. But letting the fear of rejection dictate what we accomplish in our lives can make us feel even worse in the future. After all, no pain, no gain.

Theo Tsaousides, Ph.D. is a neuropsychologist, assistant professor, and author of the book Brainblocks: Overcoming the Seven Hidden Barriers to Success .

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Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection

Respuestas emocionales al rechazo interpersonal, réponses émotionnelles au rejet interpersonnel, mark r. leary.

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

A great deal of human emotion arises in response to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection by other people. Because acceptance by other people improved evolutionary fitness, human beings developed biopsychological mechanisms to apprise them of threats to acceptance and belonging, along with emotional systems to deal with threats to acceptance. This article examines seven emotions that often arise when people perceive that their relational value to other people is low or in potential jeopardy, including hurt feelings, jealousy, loneliness, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and embarrassment. Other emotions, such as sadness and anger, may occur during rejection episodes, but are reactions to features of the situation other than low relational value. The article discusses the evolutionary functions of rejection-related emotions, neuroscience evidence regarding the brain regions that mediate reactions to rejection, and behavioral research from social, developmental, and clinical psychology regarding psychological and behavioral concomitants of interpersonal rejection.

Una parte importante de la emoción humana surge en respuesta al rechazo de otras personas, el cual puede ser real, anticipado, recordado o imaginado. Dado que la aceptación por otras personas mejoró la aptitud evolutiva, los seres humanos desarrollaron mecanismos psicobiológicos para darle valor a las amenazas contra la aceptación y la pertenencia, junto con los sistemas emocionales para manejar las amenazas contra la aceptación. Este artículo examina siete emociones que aparecen a menudo cuando las personas perciben que su valor relacional con otros es bajo o está en potencial peligro; incluyendo sentimientos de lástima, celos, soledad, vergüenza, culpa, ansiedad social y bochorno. Otras emociones, como la tristeza y el enojo, pueden presentarse durante los episodios de rechazo, pero son reacciones a las características de la situación más que al bajo valor relacional. El artículo discute las funciones a través de la evolución de las emociones relacionadas con el rechazo, la evidencia neurocientífica sobre regiones cerebrales que median las reacciones al rechazo, y la investigación conductual de la psicología clínica, del desarrollo y social acerca de los concomitantes psicológicos y conductuales del rechazo interpersonal.

Une grande partie des émotions humaines provient de la réponse au rejet réel, anticipé, mémorisé ou imaginé par les autres. Parce que l'acceptation par les autres a amélioré l'aptitude au cours de l'évolution, les êtres humains ont développé des mécanismes biopsychologiques pour les informer des menaces contre l'acceptation ou l'appartenance, ainsi que des systèmes émotionnels pour gérer les menaces contre l'acceptation. Cet article analyse sept émotions qui surviennent souvent lorsque les gens sentent que leur valeur relationnelle pour les autres est faible ou potentiellement en danger : préjudice moral, jalousie, solitude, honte, culpabilité, anxiété sociale et gêne. D'autres émotions comme la tristesse et la colère peuvent apparaître pendant les épisodes de rejet mais ce sont des réactions à des caractéristiques d'autres situations qu'une valeur relationnelle faible. Cet article examine les fonctions pour l'évolution des émotions liées au rejet, les arguments des neurosciences en ce qui concerne les régions cérébrales qui véhiculent les réactions au rejet, et la recherche comportementale en psychologie sociale, clinique et du développement sur les corollaires psychologiques et comportementaux du rejet interpersonnel.

Interpersonal rejections constitute some of the most distressing and consequential events in people's lives. Whether one considers a romantic rejection, the dissolution of a friendship, ostracism by a group, estrangement from family members, or merely being ignored or excluded in casual encounters, rejections have myriad emotional, psychological, and interpersonal consequences. People not only react strongly when they perceive that others have rejected them, but a great deal of human behavior is influenced by the desire to avoid rejection.

This article begins with a brief primer on the adaptive significance of emotions and discusses the interpersonal functions of rejection-related emotions in particular. It then examines specific emotions that are involved in the management of social acceptance and rejection—including hurt feelings, jealousy, loneliness, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and embarrassment—as well as others that often arise during rejection episodes, but that are not specific to rejection.

The adaptive significance of emotions

Since the publication of Darwin's seminal book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 1 theorists have regarded emotions as evolved adaptations that provide an advantage to survival and reproduction. 2 , 3 In particular, emotions signal the presence of events that have potentially major implications for an animal's well-being—specifically, important threats and opportunities in its environment—thereby causing the individual to focus on concerns that require immediate attention. Once aroused, emotions involve not only subjective feelings, but also a motivational readiness to respond in a particular fashion to the threat or opportunity (the emotion's “action tendency”). Some emotions also involve expressive movements that communicate the animal's state to others and that lead conspecifics to respond in desired ways, as when an animal's threatening stare frightens intruders out of its territory.

Many emotions can be precipitated by either impersonal or interpersonal events. For example, people may become frightened, angry, or sad due to either impersonal acts of nature or the actions of other people. Other emotions, however, are experienced only with respect to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined encounters with other people. For example, embarrassment, hurt feelings, and loneliness are inherently social emotions that involve threats and challenges that arise in interpersonal interactions and relationships.

We focus here specifically on emotions that are caused by the prospect or presence of rejection by other people. The fact that rejection consistently evokes strong emotional reactions suggests that acceptance and rejection had important adaptive implications throughout human evolution that led to the promulgation of the genes of our hominid ancestors who experienced emotions in response to signs of rejection. On the savannas of east Africa where most human evolution occurred, survival and reproduction depended heavily on living within a group that provided resources, protection against predators, and care for offspring. Because individuals who lived within the protective confines of the group fared far better than those who did not, natural selection favored prehuman and human beings who formed and maintained supportive relationships with others. As a result, a drive to form and maintain some minimum number of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships—a need for acceptance and belonging—evolved as a fundamental aspect of human nature. 4

However, successfully living within a group requires that individuals be accepted (or at least tolerated) by other members of the group. To remain in the good graces of other group members, people have to behave in ways that foster their acceptance by others, whether they are coalition members, friends, family members, mates, acquaintances, or whoever. In addition, they need to be vigilant to indications of disapproval and devaluation, both to avoid behaving in ways that might lead to rejection and to address any problems that arise. Because rejection had serious, potentially fatal, consequences in the ancestral environment, a person would have needed to avoid social exclusion and ostracism at nearly all costs and had to be attuned to cues indicating that his or her positive standing in other people's eyes might be in jeopardy. Thus, human beings developed bio-psychological mechanisms to apprise them of threats to acceptance and belonging, an emotional aversion to cues that connote rejection and exclusion, and motivational systems to deal with threats to acceptance.

This psychological system has been characterized as a “sociometer” 5 that monitors the social environment for cues relevant to one's relational value—the degree to which other people regard their relationship with the individual to be valuable or important. Indications of low relational value can range from explicit indications of rejection, such as a romantic breakup or expulsion from a group, to subtle expressions of disinterest, disapproval, or dislike, such as low responsiveness, distant body language, and avoidance. Perceiving that others do not adequately value one's relationship triggers the sociometer and its concomitant emotional and motivational responses. Even the possibility of relational devaluation can cause negative emotions, as does realizing that one may have behaved in ways that might lower one's relational value and, thus, jeopardize one's acceptance by others.

Neuroscientific investigations suggest that much of the activity of the sociometer is mediated by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula. Among other functions, these neural regions are also associated with physical pain, which may help to explain why people report that they are “hurt” when others devalue or reject them. Not only does rejection lead to increased activity in the dACC and anterior insula, 6 , 7 but people who score high on measures of rejection sensitivity show greater activity in these areas in response to rejecting stimuli than people low in rejection sensitivity, 8 , 9 and activity in these regions correlates with self-reported social distress in response to rejection. 10 - 12 Interestingly, activity in these regions during rejection is also associated with changes in people's feelings about themselves at the moment (ie, state self-esteem), which is consistently affected by rejection and may be an internal, psychological gauge of one's relational value. 13 A recent meta-analysis shows that the ventral and dACC are most consistently involved in reactions to rejection. 14

Several specific emotions arise from the prospect or presence of rejection, including hurt feelings, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, shame, social anxiety, embarrassment, sadness, and anger. However, as we will see, some of these emotions are elicited by perceived low relational value per se, whereas others are caused by other different features of the rejection episode.

Hurt feelings

The emotion that is most consistently and incontrovertibly associated with low perceived relational value is the one that people colloquially call “hurt feelings.” 15 , 16 In many ways, hurt feelings can be regarded as the “rejection emotion” 17 in that people's feelings are hurt by events that connote that other people do not regard their relationship with them to be as valuable or important as the individual desires, thereby leading them to feel rejected.

In a study of 168 hurtful episodes, 18 all but two of the episodes appeared to be caused by participants' perceptions that one or more other people did not sufficiently value their relationship. Furthermore, participants' ratings of how hurt they felt in the situation they recounted correlated highly with the degree to which they felt rejected. Criticism was the most common cause of hurt feelings. Not only does criticism convey that another person thinks that one possesses negatively valued attributes, often with implications for one's relational value and acceptance, but the simple action of voicing a criticism, even one that is justified, sometimes implies that the criticizer does not value his or her relationship with the target. (People often refrain from strongly criticizing those they care about.) In addition, people in this study also reported being hurt by betrayal (which indicates that the betrayer does not adequately value his or her relationship with the betrayed person), passive disassociation (ignoring or avoiding the individual), and, of course, explicit rejection, exclusion, ostracism, and abandonment.

In brief, evidence shows that people's feelings are hurt when they believe that others do not sufficiently value their relationship. 17 People typically experience hurtful events as rejection, although people's feelings can be hurt even when they know that other individuals accept or care about them at some level if they believe that the others do not value their relationship as much as they desire.

People feel jealous when they believe that another person values his or her relationship with them less than they desire because of the presence or intrusion of a third party. Although people usually think of jealousy in the context of romantic and sexual relationships, 19 people may feel jealous whenever they believe that a third party has caused them to have lower-than-desired relational value to another person. For example, children may be jealous of the attention that a parent devotes to a sibling, or an employee may feel jealous because the boss seems to favor another employee. Jealousy is often accompanied by fear about the possibility of losing the relationship entirely and anger toward the relational partner and the rival. 20

The action tendency associated with jealousy involves a motivation to eliminate the influence of the third party. Jealous people may try to increase their desirability (and, thus, their relational value and acceptance) to the target and/or diminish the third party's influence by disparaging the rival to the target or threatening one or both of them. Ironically, jealous people sometimes behave in ways that are anything but endearing to the target, including outbursts of anger, threats, and physical abuse. 19 - 21 Such behaviors appear intended to intimidate the partner into disassociating from the rival, but they may further reduce the jealous person's relational value, undermine the relationship, and lead to explicit rejection.

Loneliness and homesickness

People experience loneliness and homesickness when they believe that people who greatly value their relationship are not available for social interaction and support. In some instances, people may not have a meaningful relationship with anyone, but at other times, the people who value and support them are simply not available to interact and offer their support. Homesickness is characterized primarily by acute feelings of loneliness and sadness when one is not only separated from loved ones, but is also away from familiar circumstances. 22 (In fact, homesickness is perhaps best regarded as a blend of loneliness and sadness rather than as a distinct emotion.)

Research shows that loneliness is linked to factors that cause a sense of having low relational value to other people. Children who are not accepted by their peers tend to be lonelier than those who are accepted, and peer rejection prospectively predicts subsequent loneliness. 23 , 24 Geographical relocation also causes loneliness by causing a loss of relationships in which people feel relationally valued. 25 Loneliness is particularly common among people who have recently experienced bereavement, divorce, or the dissolution of a close relationship and who believe that other people do not regard them as desirable friends and partners. 26 Not all loneliness arises from explicit rejection, but rejection is a common antecedent of loneliness.

Guilt and shame

Guilt and shame are typically conceptualized as reactions to moral or ethical violations (which they are), but they are tied closely to people's concerns about relational value and rejection. Indeed, these emotions may have evolved to manage situations in which one has violated group standards in ways that, if not remediated, might decrease one's relational value, damage one's relationships, and even result in social rejection or group expulsion. Although the terms guilt and shame are often used interchangeably, they are psychologically different emotions: people feel guilty about engaging in a “bad” behavior, whereas they feel ashamed about being a “bad” person. 27 Because being a bad person is generally worse than merely engaging in an undesirable behavior, shame is typically a more intense experience than guilt.

Most theorists have traced shame and guilt to violations of one's personal standards. However, guilt and shame appear to be inherently social emotions rather than merely reactions to violations of personal standards. 28 (The fact that people can make us feel guilty or ashamed even when we believe we did nothing wrong demonstrates the centrality of interpersonal concerns in guilt and shame.) Both guilt and shame arise in situations that have potential implications for people's relational value to other people, but they arise in response to slightly different concerns. When people believe that they have done something that might lead others to relationally devalue them—which is typically the case in instances in which they behave unethically or immorally—they feel guilty. When they think that others' judgments of them as a person , particularly judgments of their character, may lead to relational devaluation and possible rejection, they experience shame. Of course, people sometimes experience guilt or shame even when no one else knows about their undesirable behaviors or thoughts. In order to help people avoid rejection, the sociometer can trigger guilt and shame proactively to discourage them from doing things that, if later discovered by others, might lead to devaluation and rejection.

Guilt and shame are associated with different motivations or action tendencies. Guilty people are motivated to repair the damage that their undesired behavior has caused. They apologize, ask for forgiveness, engage in remedial behaviors and restitution, and take other steps to improve their social image and repair their interpersonal relationships. 29 In contrast, shame is associated with a desire to withdraw from social interactions, often because nothing can be done immediately to repair the damage to one's image and relational value. 27

Social anxiety and embarrassment

Social anxiety—feelings of nervousness in social encounters—is an anticipatory response to the possibility of conveying undesired impressions of oneself that will lower one's relational value in other people's eyes. 30 People realize that the degree to which others value and accept them as relational partners, group members, and social interactants depends heavily on how they are perceived. For example, being viewed as attractive, competent, likeable, and ethical generally results in higher relational value than being viewed as unattractive, incompetent, unlikeable, or immoral. Thus, when people believe that they might not make the impressions they desire to make in a particular situation (or, worse, believe that they will make undesired impressions), they experience social anxiety. Social anxiety may have evolved as an “early warning system” that deterred people from behaving in ways that might compromise their social image and relational value. 30

Embarrassment also involves a concern for how one is perceived by other people; however, whereas social anxiety is anticipatory in nature, embarrassment occurs when people think that they have already conveyed an undesired impression of themselves to others. 31 Although people dislike appearing embarrassed, research shows that expressions of embarrassment after making an undesired impression help to improve people's public image and relational value by indicating to others that they are aware of their undesired behavior and that they regret behaving in a socially undesirable or nonnormative fashion. 32 Facial blushing often plays an important role in this process, conveying the person's awareness that he or she has behaved unacceptably in an involuntary, nonverbal fashion that is impossible to fake. 33 In many ways, human displays of embarrassment—which often include blushing, averted gaze, and mirthless smiling—are analogous to the appeasement displays of other primates when they have displeased a higher-ranking member of the group. 33

Sadness and anger

Each of the emotions discussed thus far expressly involves events that have implications for people's relational value and social relationships, and each appears designed to deter actions that might result in rejection or, if such actions have already occurred, to manage the interpersonal threat to one's social connections. However, people who feel rejected often experience other emotions that are not tied specifically to concerns with relational value per se, including sadness and anger. Neither sadness nor anger is caused by perceived low relational value. Rather, sadness arises from perceived loss, and anger arises when people perceive that another agent (usually, but not always, a person) has unjustifiably behaved in an undesired fashion that threatens their desires or well-being. 34

Although sadness can result from nonsocial losses—of a prized possession or a desired opportunity, for example—people also experience sadness when they lose an important interpersonal relationship. For example, people become sad when loved ones move away, when relationships end, when they grow apart from friends, and when trusted others betray them. In each instance, sadness is caused specifically by the loss of a valued connection to a particular person. In fact, when asked to write about a typical instance in which people feel sad, roughly two thirds of the participants in one study wrote about the loss of a relationship or separation from a loved one, and a quarter of the participants wrote specifically about rejection. 35 Even the sadness of bereavement may reflect, in part, the fact that one has lost an important relationship and source of relational value. People may also experience sadness from the loss of a potential relationship, as when one's affection for another person is not returned or a person is not accepted into a team or group that he or she desired to join. Although sadness is obviously an aversive experience, the emotion may be functional in leading people to protect both their relationships and the people with whom they have those relationships. Because lost relationships cause painful sadness, people are motivated to behave in ways that protect their relational value in the eyes of those with whom they desire to maintain close relationships.

In extreme cases, particularly momentous or prolonged rejection can contribute to depressive episodes. Of course, depression has many causes, but ostracism, romantic breakups, and other forms of severe or chronic relational devaluation are common precipitators of depression in both adolescents and adults. Not only does rejection contribute to depression, 36 but also people who are already depressed are more sensitive to indications that others do not adequately value having relationships with them 37 and have greater difficulty recovering from rejection. 38

People also sometimes become angry when they feel rejected but, as with sadness, anger is not caused by perceived low relational value per se. Rather, anger arises during rejection episodes when people interpret the rejection as unjustified harm. 17 , 34 In some cases, people who feel rejected not only become angry, but also react aggressively. Indeed, anger may be designed to prevent, terminate, or punish specific behaviors that are perceived as an immediate threat. 39 Jilted lovers sometimes lash out, domestic violence commonly erupts when people feel devalued by family members, and school shootings are usually perpetrated by students who feel ostracized by their peers. 40 Whether people aggress when rejected depends on a number of factors; for example, aggression is more likely when people value the relationship, believe that the rejection was unfair, and believe that the relationship cannot be repaired. 41

Several interpersonal emotions reflect reactions to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection. Hurt feelings, jealousy, loneliness, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and embarrassment occur when people perceive that their relational value to other people is low or in potential jeopardy. Other emotions, such as sadness and anger, may accompany these rejection-related emotions, but are reactions to features of the rejection episode other than low relational value. As aversive, if not downright painful, as the subjective features of these emotions sometimes are, they nonetheless serve an important function, motivating people to behave in ways that maintain their relational value and protect their interpersonal relationships, alerting them to threats to those relationships, and prompting them to take action when relational problems arise. A person who was unable to experience these emotions would be incapable of managing his or her interpersonal interactions and relationships and would likely experience wholesale rejection.

Of course, self-perception of one's relational value is sometimes inaccurate, and a good deal of research has examined instances in which people underestimate or overestimate their relational value in other people's eyes. Importantly, like other systems that monitor the environment for threats, the sociometer seems to be biased in the direction of false positives. This bias reflects a functional feature of the system, decreasing the likelihood that people will miss cues that their relational value is low or declining. However, the downside is that this bias generates unnecessary distress and sometimes leads people to overreact to relatively benign signs that others do not value their relationship as much as they desire.

This article has focused on negative emotions that arise from perceived low relational value, but positive emotions also arise from interpersonal events. People experience intense happiness, if not joy, when they feel admired, appreciated, or deeply loved, and explicit evidence that one has high relational value—such as being accepted into desired groups, forming friendships, and developing other kinds of social bonds—evokes pleasurable feelings as well.

The fact that a large portion of human emotion is devoted to the maintenance of interpersonal connections points to the importance of acceptance and belonging in human affairs. People are inherently motivated to be valued and accepted by other people, and many of the emotions that they experience reflect these fundamental interpersonal concerns.

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What Collecting 100 Rejections Taught Me About Creative Failure

The accidental rejection expert revisits her viral essay.

My official New Year’s resolution, this year, was to drink more water. My unofficial (i.e., secret and therefore unenforceable) New Year’s resolution was to lose some weight before my wedding this summer. My super-unofficial-very-secret-and-even-embarrassing New Year’s resolution was to become more accepting of rejection and creative failure in my writing. This last one feels borderline hypocritical, since I’m most known in the literary world for an essay called “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year.” When the piece was published at this website, and went viral in 2016, I became an accidental rejection expert.

Being an accidental rejection expert means that the internet knows me best as someone who’s been rejected a lot. It’s my platform, my area of expertise. The vast majority of my mentions on Twitter, Facebook, in newspaper articles, or in blog posts refer to my collection of rejections. I was invited to guest lecture at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in a class on “Failure” (a dubious honor), and now I teach classes in submitting freelance work and collecting rejections as a means of getting published at Catapult, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute. Yet the reason for my expertise is laughably simple: I have been rejected a lot, and I’m not afraid to talk about it.

Rejection is trendy these days; as a culture, we have finally latched onto rejection as one means of getting to success. It probably began long before 2016, but after my essay was published, I became part of the burgeoning movement fueling attempts to “fail better” in the startup, tech, and literary worlds (Beckett would probably shudder at becoming a meme, but maybe he would just laugh). So here we are today: artists and professionals embracing rejection. There’s the “100 Rejections Challenge” (#100rejections), Jia Jiang’s TED Talk about 100 days of rejections , and a Binders group called “Binders Full of Rejections.” As 2018 drew to a close, Emily Winter published an opinion piece in The New York Times called “I Got Rejected 101 Times.” Across the digital literary landscape over the last month, numerous writers posted their 2018 rejection counts and 2019 rejection goals.

I’ve been privately counting my rejections and shooting for 100 rejections for six years now (I’ve never successfully made it to 100, though it remains my goal). None of this was new to me. Yet for some reason, this year, I felt left out of the counting frenzy, and instead of being proud of my modest numbers (40 submissions, 28 rejections, 1 publication, 6 teaching offers, 6 nice rejections, and some submissions still pending), I didn’t join in on the public proclamations of rejection. Instead, I was embarrassed about how ashamed I felt of this year’s rejections, having so publicly endorsed the belief that collecting rejections can help us be more effective writers. I still believe this—that the single best way to be a writer in this world is to actively collect rejections. However, as my writing career has evolved and as I’ve started teaching others about the joys and pitfalls of collecting rejections, I’ve also realized that sometimes it’s more complicated than that.

Rejection still hurts. My skin is not as thick as I thought it was, and becoming accustomed to something is not the same thing as enjoying it. Also, not all rejections are created equally. Tallying every rejection as 1 out of 100 doesn’t account for the fact that some rejections barely even register, while others feel like the sky is collapsing. So what happened in 2018 that made me feel so vulnerable about rejection?

S ometimes a tiny, dangerous, hopeful thought creeps in: maybe now my writing is finally good enough to be accepted .

First of all, I got rejected a lot —relative to my acceptance rate. Last year, my only publication appeared in The Millions in January, so I had an 11-month dry spell. While I still submitted some shorter work, I spent the greater part of the year working on a novel revision instead of focusing strongly on other publications.

Also, rejections didn’t always pave the way to an acceptance. The sad truth is that sometimes rejections are warranted. Sometimes they are indications of creative failure, or a sign that the piece needs another draft. One short piece whose rejections I spent more than a year dutifully collecting might just be fatally flawed. I developed a nagging feeling that I might just be too sentimentally attached to it. Sometimes a piece just isn’t working, and needs to be re-envisioned.

The other problem with finding small semblances of success is the curse of high expectations. Sure, we’re collecting rejections , but sometimes a tiny, dangerous, hopeful thought creeps in: maybe now my writing is finally good enough to be accepted . Could it be possible that I have become a skillful enough writer, so this time I’ll find a shortcut to acceptance?

Ironically, it was my 100 rejections essay that catapulted me to the most success I’ve had yet as a writer. Finally, it felt like people were reading my words and talking about my work—albeit as a Rejection Expert, not as America’s Next Great Literary Talent. ( But hey , I thought, I could always make a creative pivot! ) After that publication, I signed with a pair of literary agents, I published other short essays, and received an acceptance to spend a month at Jentel, my first fully funded writing residency. With my agents’ editorial feedback, I revised my novel manuscript for nearly two years, inching towards submission to major publishers. I joined an incredibly generous and insightful writing group, and I made friends with writers who trafficked in literary circles where I hoped to someday belong. I felt like it was just a matter of time before I would break through my chrysalis of “emerging writer” wrappings and burst onto the literary scene as a fully formed “Writer writer.” Yet with my hopes, so too grew my expectations, steadily churning towards that ever-dangerous ambition of success.

Rejection is not always triumphant or empowering. Growing a tough skin isn’t always fun.

Spoiler alert: I was heading for a giant belly flop. Last year, I got rejected from every single residency I applied to. While I thought that I was finally “good enough” to get accepted to fully funded residencies, this particular year it was not to be.

In addition to getting rejected a lot, I discovered that my agents hated my novel. When I finished it, I was convinced it was the best thing I had ever written. It might still be. And yet they didn’t like it. Like, really didn’t like it. There were apparently giant problems that I had not managed to resolve through my sweeping revisions of plot, character, structure, and voice—or maybe each creative choice that I made to solve one problem just created another one. The novel might be dead. It might be on life support. I didn’t agree with the agents, per se, but I also felt like they weren’t wrong.

Sometimes the worst rejections are the moments when a gentle observer draws your attention to difficult truths that you just couldn’t see in your own work.

For weeks, I was convinced that I’d never write fiction again. Now I wonder if the novel might have some life left in it after all. Maybe it just needs a rest, and some time to simmer.

In Writing Down the Bones , Natalie Goldberg tells us that if you fully commit to something, then it will become clear when it’s time to move on. She says: “Doubt is torture. If we give ourselves fully to something, it will be clearer when it might be appropriate to quit. It is a constant test of perseverance.” I see this as both encouragement to stick with a project during tough times and also permission to let something go after you have given yourself fully to it.

In 2019, I will finally tackle the next revision of another book: my long-simmering family memoir of the Taiwanese Independence Movement. Years ago, after I finished the last draft that was a zillion pages too long, I was afraid to revise it. The manuscript tackled both my family’s entanglement with a harrowing time in Taiwanese history and the journey to Taiwan that turned me into a writer. But I didn’t know how to make the manuscript entertaining for the reader. Five years later, I’m not afraid anymore. I’m ready to return.

With the family memoir, I was afraid that if it were rejected—if it failed as a book—that I wouldn’t recover as a writer. Now, I’m facing that fear head-on: a book that I have now spent years writing and revising doesn’t work, and it’s lucky, I suppose, that it’s not the memoir. So I’m going to take those lessons—to let go of choices that don’t serve the story—to make the next book better.

Rejection is not always triumphant or empowering. Growing a tough skin isn’t always fun. There’s a reason why scar tissue exists—it forms to protect our body as a wound heals, but it also indicates traumatic changes to cellular tissue. Rejections are a bit like scars, and they tell stories of creative growth in their own way.

Maybe simply counting rejections and shooting for 100 isn’t enough. Maybe we need to somehow metabolize our rejections too—digest them, understand them, and let them go. In 2019, I resolve to continue collecting rejections and invite others to join me. But let’s not just blindly collect the rejections; let’s also let rejection be our teacher and our creative compass to check pride and high expectations. None of us “deserves” to be published. Publication is a gift.

This year, may we acknowledge that rejection stings, even when it is necessary for creative growth. May we collect rejections bravely and defiantly, while giving ourselves permission to hide under the covers from time to time. May we also remember that when we succeed, our writing is ultimately a gift we give to our audience—a surrender of our deepest selves onto the page to offer up a small sliver of glowing truth.

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A Three Step Process to Overcome the Fear of Writing Rejection

This post continues our series  The Smart Scholar  by Ramon Goings .

“I just don’t want to submit my work because I’m scared of rejection.”

When conducting doctoral and faculty writing support sessions, I consistently get some form of the above quote. Often, for dissertation writers, it stems from being afraid that their chair will give them harsh feedback. Those writing for peer-review publication often discuss a fear of critique from the infamous “reviewer number two” who often provides challenging and conflicting reviews of their work when compared to the other reviewers.

Based on my CV, folks may assume that I have figured out academic writing as I have been successful writing for publication. However, I too struggle and have certainly had my fair share of harsh critiques from “reviewer number two.” Additionally, when I started my career, I was scared of rejection.

Recently in a webinar I had a participant ask, “Well, how did you overcome fear of rejection?” This blog post is in response to this question as I share a three-step process I use to work through the fear of rejection.

Step 1: Address the Root of the Fear

From my work supporting academic writers I have found that a fear about rejection is never about the process of writing and submitting the work itself. In many instances the fear of rejection is a symptom of a deeper issue. Thus, in order to overcome the fear of rejection I have found that it is important to first address the root of the fear.

Early in my career there were three main reasons I had a fear of rejection:

• I did not believe in myself as a writer and that I had something unique to contribute to the scholarly conversation.
• I was intimidated that my work could be published and in conversation with the great authors that I was referencing in my paper.
• I internalized the rejection as it holding some value about who I was and the quality of my work.

As you can see from my experience the root causes of my fear of writing rejection had nothing to do with the process of writing, but had everything to do with my mindset. Once I got clearer about what was causing my fear it became easier to plan for and address the fear (see Step 2 below).

Step 2: Plan for the Rejection

The psychology of academic writers is rather interesting as we are motivated and plan for the success of our academic writing. However, why do we not plan for rejection as well? I have found it beneficial  to put a plan in place so that if a piece is rejected, I know what my next steps are with the paper.

In a doctoral seminar course I am teaching this semester titled “Seminar in Research Writing, Publication, and Communication in Education,” one of my assignments asks for students to write an Op-Ed. During our conversation, we discussed rejection, and I gave this advice on how to plan for it:

• Before you write your piece, have three venues in mind that you want to submit to.
• Submit to venue #1. If rejected, immediately submit to venue #2. If rejected from venue #2, submit immediately to venue #3.
• If your piece does not get accepted at the first three venues, find three more outlets and repeat the process.

As I teach my students: there is always a venue for your work. Sometimes it is just exploring all of your options to find the right fit. As a result, by planning for rejection you are actually planning for the success of your writing project. Again, this is not about writing, but just shifting your thinking.

Step 3: Build Your Writing Community

Do you have a scholarly community who you can vent to and strategize with?

Having this scholarly cohort has been critical to my ability to overcome the fear of rejection of my academic writing. Whenever I have thoughts or fears about submitting my work, I go to my community and do the following:

• Talk: I dialogue and vent about my apprehension on submitting my work.
• Write: After my conversations with my community, I turn that fear into energy to write–even if only a little. This helps me to not let my fears of rejection paralyze me from writing.
• Submit: I have adopted the mantra “You can’t score a basket if you don’t shoot.” In other words, I can never get a paper accepted if I never submit, so if I want an acceptance I must submit.

Based on your experiences, how have you overcome a fear of rejection of your academic writing? Connect with me on Twitter to discuss!

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

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Personal Reflection: Overcoming Fear and Growing as a Person

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Published: Feb 7, 2024

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My experience with overcoming fear, the importance of self-reflection, the role of relationships in personal development, the value of personal responsibility.

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