How People Face Social Rejections

Rejection may be emotionally painful because of the social nature of human beings and the need of social interaction between other humans is essential. It can occur in a variety of circumstances. Typically, rejection describes an instance of a person or entity pushing something or someone away or out. A person may reject or refuse to accept, a gift. Mental health care, rejection most frequently refers to the feelings of shame, sadness, or grief people feel when they are not accepted by others.

• A person might feel rejected after a significant other end a relationship. A child who has few or no friends may feel rejected by peers. An individual who was given up for adoption may also experience feelings of rejection. Rejection can also result from life events not involving relationships, such as being turned down for the desired position at work or receiving a rejection letter from an Organization. While any rejection can be painful, some instances of rejection may be more impact than others.
• Social interaction with others is not enough to fulfill the need. Instead, people have a strong motivational drive to form and maintain caring interpersonal relationships. People need both stable relationships and satisfying interactions with the people in those relationships. If either of these two ingredients is missing, people will begin to feel lonely and unhappy. Thus, rejection is a significant threat. In fact, the majority of human anxieties appear to reflect concerns over social exclusion.
• The feeling of rejection is believed to have developed as an evolutionary tool to alert early humans who were at risk of being ostracized from the tribe they belonged to. A painful rejection from others in the tribe was likely to encourage an individual to modify any problematic behavior in order to avoid further rejection, from the tribe. Those who were able to avoid further rejection were more likely to survive, while those who did not find rejection to be particularly painful may not have corrected the offending behavior, making them less likely to survive. In this way, humans may have evolved to experience rejection as painful.
• People with depression may face exclusion more often because of the symptoms of their disorder and being rejected makes them more depressed. People with social anxiety navigate their world constantly worried about being socially rejected. A feeling of exclusion can also contribute to suicide. Being rejected is bad for your health. “People who feel isolated and lonely and excluded tend to have poor physical health. They don’t sleep well, their immune systems sputter, and they even tend to die sooner than people who are surrounded by others who care about them.

Social pain affects the brain. Physical pain involves several brain regions, some of which detect its location, while others process the subjective experience, the unpleasantness, of pain. The brain responds to social pain in a way that is similar to the way that it responds to physical pain. The same brain pathways that are activated by physical pain are also activated by social pain or rejection. Receptor systems in the brain also release natural painkillers when an individual experiences social pain, the same as when physical pain is experienced.

Those who felt the most emotional distress also showed the most pain-related brain activity. In other words, being socially rejected triggered the same neural circuits that process physical injury, and translate it into the experience we call pain.

We should assume that everyone is going to experience rejection on a semi-regular basis throughout their life. It’s impossible to go through your entire life with everyone being nice to you all the time. When you are rejected or excluded, the best way to deal with it is to seek out other sources of friendship or acceptance. A lot of times, people keep these things to themselves because they’re embarrassed or they don’t think it’s that big of a deal. But our bodies respond to rejection as they do to physical pain; the pain should be taken seriously, and it’s fine to seek out support. When people feel lonely, or when people feel excluded or rejected, these are things they can talk about.

• 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. The 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.<
• At the time, this was a radical idea and it still is. It essentially suggests that the brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. Rejection, it tells us, actually hurts. between physical and social pain transcends scientific interest. It reveals something to people that they probably already knew but maybe we're afraid to believe It’s not just in our head. It is in our head because it’s in our brain.
• Rejection might often contribute to pre-existing conditions such as stress and anxiety or lead to their development. Similarly, these and other mental health conditions can exacerbate feelings of rejection. the perpetration of abuse in intimate relationships was associated with the experience of higher levels of parental rejection in childhood. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress and deficits in social information processing were also linked. While rejection can hurt when people who have been excluded often lash out against others. In experiments, they give people much more hot sauce than they can stand, blast strangers with intense noise, and give destructive evaluations of prospective job candidates. it’s never healthy to take the pain of rejection out on another person through emotional abuse or physical violence.