How to take Things Less Personally

What to do

Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts
If you tend to take things too personally, it’s important to recognize your mind-reading or personalization patterns before deciding what to do with them. However, this can be challenging as the line between feelings and thoughts is often blurred. A good way to distinguish feelings from thoughts is to remember that feelings can often be summed up in one word: nervous, happy, surprised, anxious, and thoughts are the ideas that drive or follow the feelings. This is an important distinction, because while uncomfortable emotions are difficult to change or control, you can choose from a number of coping strategies to respond productively to your thought traps.
To help you understand and break the connections between feelings and thoughts, practice naming them whenever you get the chance. For example, if your guest at a dinner party suddenly went quiet and thought,

“He doesn’t like talking to me,”  acknowledge that you’re working with a thought that may or may not be true, and then reflect on the mood. who came up with this thought. An example of a more accurate description of what happened is, “When he was quiet at dinner, felt sad because I thought he didn’t like talking to me.” Even if you wish you did not done. Your thoughts, on the other hand, can be questioned, revised, or replaced with more realistic and helpful ones.

Look for signs that you are Personalizing or Mind Reading

The next time you experience a strong or difficult emotion, tune into your thoughts. For example, imagine that you meet an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a while while shopping and after a short and somewhat embarrassed conversation you suddenly feel sad. This might seem like an unusual feeling when that person doesn’t play an important role in your life. At this point, notice your feelings and examine yourself. See if you can identify the thought that caused or influenced to feel that way.
If you’re prone to personalization, the feeling of sadness you experienced in the grocery store situation could have something to do with awkward moments in an unplanned conversation with someone you don’t know well, a belief like “I’m not good.” to make small talk or get people to like me.” Or if you’re a prone mind-reader and didn’t wipe your sweat on Saturday morning before rushing to the store, you might feel sad or even anxious…if you’re concerned that “She thinks I’m lazy” These thoughts may have an even greater emotional impact due to other events in your life, perhaps your brief encounter has triggered a disappointing reminder that some close friends have recently moved away and you are concerned that your interactions with people will mostly resemble small talk, the biased thoughts you just had, you can quickly conclude that your mind is playing tricks on you.

With personalization or mind reading, and that it’s best to acknowledge what happened, tolerate the background noise, and divert your attention to something more important. However, when you are dealing with thoughts that are not so clear to you, or when the meaning of a situation requires further investigation, it can be helpful to take a closer look and question the accuracy of your thoughts.

List the Evidence for and Against your Thoughts

Remember that your thoughts can reflect biases in thinking, which is an important starting point. Now you have the opportunity to review the evidence for and against your thoughts, which will help you decide whether to stick with your original understanding of a situation or opt for an alternative explanation that seems more plausible.

The best way to go through the evidence gathering process is to write down your thoughts. If you feel the urge to get over this and examine the evidence in your head, know that you risk getting caught up in an ongoing internal debate and repeating thoughts you’ve already addressed. After you’ve had a little practice, you may decide to save your writing for particularly challenging situations, but for now, give yourself a chance to see what happens if you approach this process systematically.

Take out a sheet of paper. On the left, write a brief description of the situation: “Awkward conversation with Marie in the store.” On the right side, write how you felt: “sad” or “anxious” or “upset”. Between the situation and the feeling, write your explanations of what happened and how you felt: “She couldn’t wait to stop talking to me” or “She was put off by the way I looked.”
Write your signature Situation, thoughts and feelings, what you know suggesting your thoughts are true.

For example, “Marie has been looking around the store a lot” or “I couldn’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable I felt.” Take your time, like a detective or scientist. See if you can list everything you know that supports the belief that led to such a difficult emotion.

Now write down anything that tells you your thoughts might not be true. For example, “He said he’s traveling this weekend and needs to do some quick shopping before a long drive” or “The store was packed and packed, which isn’t good for a conversation.”

See if there’s an Explanation that isn’t just About You

Write some other possible explanations for what happened. For example, your conversation may seem out of place because Marie was also anxious; that she was in a hurry; or that they were both surprised and their reactions were to be expected in the situation.

Finally, think about a “best case” explanation for your experience. Instead of resorting to untrustworthy guarantees like “Everything went well!”, make sure your explanation is realistic. Could that awkward conversation at the supermarket have been forced because you both wanted to make a positive impression and were putting too much pressure on yourself in an unexpected situation?
To give another example, if a manager interrupted you during a work meeting and you thought it happened because “nobody takes my ideas seriously,” an alternative explanation would be, “The meeting was long and everyone had to get back on the work”, and the best explanation is that “my manager thinks my suggestion is valuable and wants to address it later when we can give it the focused attention it deserves.”

Check your notes. Compare your original thoughts about the situation with your new thoughts. Should you stick with your initial assessment, or would it be better to change it to a new, more realistic explanation of what happened?

The goal here is to help you become more balanced in your thinking so that you can make the decision not to engage in personalization or mind reading just because you initially think so.

After understanding your experience differently, you may need to revise your initial thoughts. That’s to be expected. Remember that these thoughts, and the impulse to engage in them, are well-learned and you cannot control their occurrence or persistence. Let your brain do its thing and see if you can take those sticky thoughts as mental noise rather than fact. Know that these unwanted thoughts will likely live in the background for a while, but you don’t have to invest in them. Remind yourself that revisiting will prolong the struggle, and then see what happens when you leave those inner annoyances alone. With a little time, they should decline on their own.

Ask Yourself, what’s Useful?

Once you’ve had a chance to explore, challenge, and examine your thoughts, consider what you might know or do now. As before, write down your helpful thoughts and plans to make sure you remember them.
So what makes sense? If you’re taking things too personally because you regularly overlook details that would help you think objectively, it can help to acknowledge bias in your thinking, take credit for questioning and revising your beliefs, and when in doubt, look for alternative explanations. You will find yourself walking this path in the future.
Helpful thinking might also include a reminder to notice obvious examples of personalization and mind reading that don’t deserve more attention, along with a plan to gently let go of the urge to overthink things and be forgiving by struggling with yourself unwanted thoughts and the difficult emotions associated with them.
When it’s clear that you haven’t been handling a social challenge as effectively as you would like, helpful thinking can involve several plans: think objectively about what happened, don’t be too hard on yourself, and take action to make up for it address a practical problem. Output. This may mean coming back to clarify a misunderstanding, develop skills to express yourself more effectively, or remove other obstacles to future social success.
As you examine behaviors you want to prioritize in social situations, create a plan to address your biggest concerns. For example, if you think you’re not good at conversation, be prepared to make quick comments about common situations or current events, which are an easy way to see if other people want to chat. If you are concerned that you are not attending work meetings enough, you can ask a question, share an idea, or offer support to others at least once or twice in each meeting. Intentions, others, you can choose to work on it, polite assertive to be and ask for clarification when you are not sure what another person is communicating. A good approach is to point out what seems vague, point out the importance of understanding what is happening, state what you think the other person is expressing, and ask for feedback.
If you decide to practice a new and potentially helpful social behavior, remember that change can be difficult. So give up the temptation to reach for the moon and have a realistic plan to make small but consistent changes to set yourself up for success. This is important because if you’re struggling to meet your goals, you could inadvertently increase your commitment to personalization (“I’m not good at it”) or mind-reading (“You don’t care about me”). A good rule of thumb is to commit to the smallest change that you know you can make and would still consider significant. By observing yourself making these changes, you develop more confidence in your ability to deal with social challenges and provide a positive counterpoint to biased beliefs that currently stand in your way.

Accept a Reasonable Amount of Uncertainty

By their very nature, social interactions contain a degree of ambiguity or uncertainty. Although you cannot control what others think or read their minds, you can plan changes, practice social behaviors that are generally effective, and learn to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with taking social risks. Instead of diverting attention and energy to perceived limitations or concerns about what others think about you, you can bring your focus back to your behavior and how you want to act in challenging social situations. Giving your attention and energy to what you can control can make it easier to accept and tolerate what you cannot control: your automatic thoughts and the uncomfortable feelings that accompany them. (The “More Information” section below dives deep into strategies you can use to better tolerate the internal noise that comes from taking things too personally.) If you are aware of how you want to behave in social situations and practice those behaviors, you may not always be as polished as you would like or know how others react. But you’ll still be able to generate enough behavioral evidence to judge yourself more positively, and not remain so committed to personalization or mind-reading.

Key points – How to take things less personally

Thinking errors limit your emotional and behavioral options.

These include personalizing or assuming that you are the cause of a negative event, as well as mind reading or believing without evidence that someone is judging you negatively.

Misleading thoughts about social situations can become habitual.

With repetition, taking things too personally can become a reflex action. But you can change the way you react to those thoughts.

Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts.

While your feelings are not debatable, your self-critical thoughts can be challenged, revised, or replaced.

Look for signs that you’re personalizing or mind reading.

When you experience a difficult feeling, consider whether it followed the thought that it was your fault or that someone was thinking badly of you.

Make a list of the evidence for and against your thoughts.

Try to write down your difficult feeling, the situation that caused it, and how you explain what happened. What supports your statement? What challenges you?

See if there’s an explanation for why it’s not just about you.

Consider whether it makes more sense to accept an alternative account of what happened.

Ask yourself what is useful?

Proactively anticipating the risk of biased thinking and helpful social behaviors will help reduce the tendency to take the words and actions of others too personally.

Accept a reasonable level of uncertainty.

You can’t always know what people think of you, but you can choose how you want to behave.