Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries

by Guy Winch

We all have a tendency to take rejections too personally and to draw conclusions about our shortcomings when there is little evidence that such assumptions are warranted.

we are wired with a fundamental need to feel accepted by others.

finding our place in the world and feeling as though we belong can be the hardest struggle of all.

it is far more useful to err on the side of self-kindness when evaluating our role in a rejection experience than it is to criticize ourselves for any mistakes or shortcomings.

Whenever you have a self-critical thought, make sure to immediately articulate the relevant counterargument(s) fully and clearly in your mind.

Painful as rejections are, we can always view them as opportunities to evaluate whether the romantic partner, social circle, friend, or employer in question was a good fit for our personalities, interests, lifestyles, or careers.

not everyone who lives alone is lonely and not everyone who is lonely lives alone.

Unfortunately, despite its contagiousness and despite the severity of the health risks it poses, loneliness remains one of the most neglected psychological injuries we sustain in daily life.

Loneliness also causes us to evaluate others more harshly and to perceive our interactions with friends and loved ones more negatively than we would if we were not lonely.

Although we are unlikely to prevent pessimistic scenarios from elbowing their way into our thoughts, the best way to fight our fears and pessimism is to purposefully visualize scenarios of success that are both reasonable and realistic.

we should always ask ourselves how the other person’s point of view might differ from our own. We should give weight to what we know about their priorities and preferences, to the history of the relationship between us, and to the context of the current situation.

Improving our empathy skills will do wonders for our most important relationships.

The best way to overcome feelings of vulnerability, reduce our hesitancy, and avoid being labeled as lonely is to approach situations with a larger goal in mind.

Emotional validation is a powerful tool when used correctly, and a great toxin remover when used in apologies. Consequently, we need to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and understand the specific consequences of our actions, how the person was affected by them, and the feelings they caused.

for many of us who engage in this process of self-reflection, things go awry. Instead of attaining an emotional release we get caught in a vicious cycle of rumination in which we replay the same distressing scenes, memories, and feelings over and over again, feeling worse every time we do. We become like hamsters trapped in a wheel of emotional pain, running endlessly but going nowhere.

when the researchers asked people to analyze a painful experience from a self-distanced perspective (a third-person perspective) and actually see themselves within the scene from the point of view of an outside observer, they found something quite remarkable. Instead of merely recounting the events and how they felt about them at the time, people tended to reconstruct their understanding of their experience and to reinterpret it in ways that promoted new insights and feelings of closure.

distracting ourselves by engaging in tasks we find absorbing or ones that demand our concentration, such as moderate to intense cardiovascular activity, socializing, doing puzzles, or playing computer games, will disrupt a ruminative thought process.

view the offending person as someone who might be troubled and in need of psychological help or psychotherapy.

Failure not only makes our goal loom larger, it makes us feel “smaller” as well. Failing can induce us to feel less intelligent, less attractive, less capable, less skillful, and less competent—all of which have a hugely negative impact on our confidence and on the outcome of our future efforts.

when we set too many goals for ourselves we are unlikely to complete any of them.

In most situations, making steady progress toward our goals contributes more toward our sustained happiness and self-fulfillment than actually reaching them.

Ironically, while we’ve been developing an aversion to being average, self-esteem scientists have been amassing one piece of evidence after another indicating that where our self-esteem is concerned, being average (not too high, not too low) is the best thing for us.

how we feel about ourselves in the specific domains we consider personally meaningful or important has a big impact on our general self-worth.

When our self-esteem is low, the resistance we have to positive experiences and information is quite sweeping. Unfortunately it includes exactly the kind of feedback that could play a vital role in rebuilding our self-worth and confidence

When our self-esteem is low, we are quick to perceive any signs of rejection and disapproval from our partners. We not only interpret many such messages too negatively, we also tend to overgeneralize them and read far greater disapproval into them than is intended.

Regardless of how parched we might be for positive feedback and affirmation, when our self-esteem is low, compliments, reassurances, and praise from our partners makes us feel pressured to live up to their heightened expectations.

Practicing self-compassion actually strengthens our emotional immune systems.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of our willpower and use it to build our self-esteem we need to do three things: strengthen our basic willpower muscles, manage the energy reservoirs that fuel our self-control so they don’t get depleted, and minimize the impact of the many temptations that exist around us.

being a good self-practitioner means developing our own individualized set of mental-health-hygiene guidelines and you should endeavor to personalize your medicine cabinet whenever possible.