The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Treating the Pain of a Broken Heart

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Being shunned by a lover, a school or an employer hurts - but we're only just beginning to understand how real this pain is and what steps we can take to administer a bit of emotional first aid to stop the experience scarring us for good.Dr Laurie Santos talks to leading experts in the science of rejection... and to actor/marine/golfer Tim Colceri about one of the most extreme real life stories of humiliation and dashed hopes you're ever likely to hear. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Tim, if you're hurting this bad, maybe you should go to church. And I said, church? Why would I want to go to church? Why would God do this to me? I'm mad at God. This is Tim Colseri. Tim is telling me about the worst day of his life. A day that tested his faith, and one that, as you'll hear, still feels like an open wound. Well, it just crushed me. I was in such shock. And I thought, I gotta get out of here. I need to go walk and be by myself. A lot of time has passed since the awful day that changed Tim's life forever.

But as Tim and I chatted, it was clear that the pain he felt that fateful day was still very fresh in his mind. You go through shock first, what just happened. And then you're wondering why. And then I was just, oh my God, the whole time for so long. So what was the event that caused such awful and such long lasting pain for decades? Tim got rejected. As you'll soon hear in some historic detail, Tim suffered one of the most incredible, protracted and over the top rejections I'd ever heard of. But even though

Tim's story of rejection is probably more extreme than anything you or I have experienced, I bet you can still relate to the hurt he's describing, which raises some questions. Why does rejection feel so awful? And what strategies can we use to blunt the sharp emotional pain that it brings. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy?

The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. When I began planning this episode about the science of rejection, I'd never actually heard of Tim Colseri or his story. And when I finally did hear his tragic tale, I honestly couldn't quite believe it. Tim had already endured a pretty dynamic and adventure-filled life, even before the epic rejection that changed his path forever. I went in the Marines on my 18th birthday, went to Vietnam, spent 13 months in Da Nang,

and got out on my 20th birthday. And then two months later, I was enrolled in college. And after about my senior year, one of my good friends turned pro in golf and wanted me to caddy for him on the tour. And I turned pro about a year later. I played for about three years. And then I thought, what am I going to do with myself? Ended up in Miami waiting tables. And then I got on as an airline flight attendant. And actually, I've been to Guam as a Marine, a flight attendant and a stand-up comedian. I don't think anybody can say that. Lots of people have their hearts broken trying to make it as a stand-up comedian or a professional golfer. But not Tim.

That wasn't where his anguish came from. He also wasn't beaten down as a low-paid waiter or a sleep-deprived flight attendant. Tim's real tale of woe started when he embarked on a new career path. On a whim, he decided to join a friend for an acting class. The teacher said, this is what we call a born natural. Everybody came up to me afterwards and said, you're really good. I go, I'm good at acting? That's what I'm good at?

Tim was determined to find his way into the movie business. But it was hard for a veteran living in Florida with no acting experience to break into Hollywood. So when Tim heard about an open casting call for a big-budget war movie, he decided to rent a camera and make an audition video. Despite his lack of acting credentials, Tim was still hoping to land one of the biggest roles in the war film, a boot camp drill instructor.

He had, after all, been a real Marine. So I knew I could play it in my mind. Tim scraped together enough money for the stamps. $10.87. I remember that distinctly. And mailed off his audition tape. I hope it gets to where it's supposed to go. That's all I thought. And then three years went by.

I completely forgot about the tape. Completely. One fateful day, the phone rang. Hello, Tim. This is Louis Blough, president of Warner Brothers. Tim, I have a tremendous amount of faith in Stanley Kubrick. Tim, Stanley Kubrick has a tremendous amount of faith in Tim Colesary. I ran over to the window and I put my head out the window and I went, Stanley Kubrick has a tremendous amount of faith in me! That's right, Stanley Kubrick.

The director of Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and The Shining. That Stanley Kubrick had picked Tim, a complete acting newbie, to star in his next project. I was so happy. So happy. Tim learned that he'd not only been cast in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick's epic about the horrors of the Vietnam War, but also that he'd landed the lead role of the brutal drill instructor. If you haven't seen the movie, this character is pretty incredible. He takes a bunch of raw Marines through their basic training, making some and breaking others.

No spoiler, but he eventually meets a tragic end in one of the most memorable moments of the movie. Tim was over the moon at landing the part, but he didn't have much time to celebrate. He was quickly flown off to England, where he had to learn page after page of dialogue. It was a stressful and a lonely time. Because I was the drill instructor, they kept me away from the rest of the actors because they didn't want them to get to know me because they wanted me to be menacing and mean in front of them when I did the scene. Tim spent hours alone in his hotel room learning

his lengthy monologues, screaming like a drill instructor at no one in particular, week after week after week. It was really tough dialogue, really hard to do. Tim stopped sleeping and even had to see a doctor because of all the stress. But he thought all the isolation and anxiety and insomnia were worth it. After all, he had the film's most important part, a role that he had dreamed about for years. But what Tim didn't know was that he wasn't the only one who'd been dreaming about the drill instructor role. Another former Marine, Lee Ermey, had wanted to land that very same part, but Lee was chosen instead as the film's technical advisor. And Lee had a plan. Unlike Tim, who was locked away learning his dialogue, Lee got to spend a lot

of time with the cast. As technical advisor, Lee's job was to work with the other actors, which meant that he got to ad-lib a bunch of lines from the movie. And whenever Kubrick was around, Lee made sure to come up with as many colorful new drill instructor lines as he could. He tried to embody all the nastiness of a real Marine sergeant, which got Kubrick thinking. Eventually, he sent his assistant to find him. And I opened the door and his face looked like death. And I said, immediately, has he taken my role away from me? He said, read the letter.

He had an envelope. And I opened it up and the very first line said, Dear Tim, after a painful lot of deliberation, I decided to use Lee Ermey to play Sergeant Hartman. I have two starting quarterbacks. I need to choose one.

Apparently, Kubrick had decided that he no longer had tremendous faith in Tim Coleseri. It was a crushing rejection. Whatever your job is in the world, if you could think the highest place you could get to at that time, that was me. The best role I could get with the best director and the best film, and it was mine. So when that became taken away, it hurt me big time.

Tim was totally bereft. But then fate seemed to intervene. Lee Ermey was in the hospital. I get a phone call saying Lee was in a very serious car accident. Don't go anywhere. You got the role back. Tim was going to play the drill sergeant again. Suddenly, his dream role was back. Until it wasn't. He got another phone call. It turns out the film was required to allow Lee Ermey to recover and complete filming. Tim was given a quick, never mind, sorry to get your hopes up. And I had to fly back to the United States. Now everybody's going, well, how'd it go over there? Well, I lost my big role, but I got this other role I really want to play. In the aftermath of losing his dream part, twice, Kubrick decided to toss Tim a sort of consolation prize, a bit part in the movie

that didn't even have a name. Tim was asked to play a helicopter door gunner. The door gunner had like three lines of dialogue and spent most of his scene gleefully mowing down innocent women and children in the fields rushing by below. It was a tiny, tiny part, but the violent scene had left an impression on Tim when he'd first seen a copy of the script. I immediately said to myself, man, whoever plays that role is going to have a ball.

I never thought it was going to be me. So Tim would be in a Kubrick film after all. He waited for the call to return to the set. But when the call came, it was yet another disappointment. The door gunner scene had been cut. And I remember hanging up the phone and going, here we go again. Wow, I had like an Oscar-dominated role,

the best role I could think about, to another great role, to no role. Wow. Tim's story, amazingly, isn't over yet. But what struck me during our chat was just how raw this rejection still feels decades later. Being shunned by Kubrick felt painful and disorienting at the time. But the wound Tim received as a young man still hurts him deeply, well into his 70s. His scars never really healed. That was the dream thing of my life. Take that away.

Anything else is secondary after that, and nothing shocks you anymore. When we get back from the break, we'll explore the science of why rejection can leave such deep wounds. We'll learn a surprising truth about how rejection works in the brain and what understanding this strange truth means for how we can protect ourselves from the pain of being shunned. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Unlike most human beings, Naomi's never been rejected. That is not true. I'm talking to UCLA social neuroscientists Naomi Eisenberger and Matt Lieberman. The married couple studies how the brain processes rejection.

But the couple differs in their personal experience with this phenomenon. The closest is like, if our teenage son doesn't hug her enough, then she feels rejected. But keep in mind, he still hugs her, and that's what she considers to be an experience of rejection. So I think as much as she's an expert on the science of rejection, she doesn't know anything about the experience of actual rejection. Matt, however, has had more than his fair share of this painful experience. I have had like major rejection. I had, you know, a six-year relationship and completely out of the blue, like just had no idea it was coming. It was definitely one of the most painful experiences of my life. I think up until I had kidney stones, I would have said that

was the most painful experience of my life. It was really brutal. And the pain from that was not only awful then, but it lasted for, you know, a solid six months. Early on in their careers, Naomi and Matt knew that they wanted to study this painful emotion better. So they decided to embark on a neuroscientific study of rejection to figure out how being shunned was processed in our brains. But they weren't totally sure how to start. Because when you think about it, rejection isn't all that easy to study in the laboratory, let alone inside a brain scanner. I mean, researchers can't just assign subjects to a condition in which they suddenly break off a decades-long romance or get fired from a major motion picture. Naomi and Matt were stumped about

how to get their subjects to experimentally experience a sense of spurning. That is, until they met psychologist Kip Williams and learned about his new invention, cyberball. Cyberball has now become an important scientific tool for studying people's social emotions. But it kind of looks like a bad arcade game from the early 80s. Here's how it works. Cyberball is a three-person game. You and two other players, real people who are allegedly sitting in another room, have to toss a virtual ball back and forth. For a while, the ball tossing goes in the way you'd expect. You throw the ball to the first player, that player throws it to the second player,

and then the second player throws it back to you. And so on and so on. But then, something changes. You're playing this game with two other people, and all of a sudden, they completely leave you out, and they're just playing with each other. All of a sudden, and totally without warning, the other players stop throwing you the ball.

In a flash, you are being rejected. Now, of course, getting dissed by two strangers in some lame arcade game isn't the same as getting dumped by your fiancé or fired by Stanley Kubrick. But Williams found that subjects who experience being left out in the game still have some amazingly strong reactions. Many subjects reported feeling deeply troubled. Some got super pissed off. Others just felt kind of sad and hurt. I don't understand. Why did they do that to me? That was so mean. I felt annoyed. I felt upset. Cyberball may look clunky, but the game causes people to feel all the hallmarks of social rejection. It was the exact sort of task that Matt and Naomi had been looking for. Wow, we could bring this into the fMRI scanner and see what is going on in the brain when people are being excluded. But even though Matt and Naomi

had been thinking about studying rejection in the brain for a while, they weren't totally sure what they'd see. One possibility was that rejection worked like other negative emotions. And so you might expect to see neurons firing in regions like the amygdala, a part of the brain that's now famous for its role in yucky feelings like anxiety and fear. But Naomi's own intense terror of being shunned got her thinking that rejection might work differently than the usual fear response. You know, what is it in our brains that is treating the possibility of rejection like, you know, the possibility of imminent death? Like, why are they connected?

So the couple began to wonder whether rejection could affect our body and brain in the same way as other physically deadly things, like a gunshot wound or cancer. We definitely talk about rejection as though it's a physical injury. We say someone hurt our feelings or broke our hearts. We talk about other people's actions as cutting to the core or leaving us emotionally scarred. Our colleagues, Jeff McDonald and Mark Leary, have sort of surveyed different languages to see, is this a universal thing? Is this specific to the English language? And they found, you know, pretty universal patterns where across all of these

different languages, you see people using pain-related words to describe rejection. And they actually argue that we have no other way to describe experiences of rejection except with these pain words. Our language might lump heartache and heart burn together, but do our brains really experience emotional hurt in the same way as physical pain? Naomi and Matt decided to test this by putting people inside an fMRI scanner and then having them play cyberball. The couple then looked at the parts of the brain that were more active when people got rejected. Their answer came one fateful afternoon, when Naomi was beginning her data analysis in a shared graduate student office.

Which meant that Naomi wasn't the only one looking at brain scan results. My office mate at the time, she had done a study looking at pain, serious pain. Like this was in irritable bowel syndrome patients who were being stimulated in various ways. So this was real painful experience. Naomi and her office mate both had pictures of their subject's brain responses up on the screen when Matt walked in. When he looked back and forth at the two computer screens, he was shocked. He couldn't tell which set of results was which. The brain responses of people who were in bowel pain looked just like the brain response of people who were rejected in cyberball. The results took the neuroscience community by storm

and made many scholars realize that we hadn't given the pain of rejection the scientific attention it deserved. Humans are set up to value connection, to value social connection so much that our brains have figured out a way to use circuitry that's typically there to keep us from injuring our bodies, to keep us from feeling physical pain. That same circuitry is being used to make sure that we don't get cut off from others. To me, that's a really amazing thing and sort of helps normalize some of the intense fears that I might have of rejection. Like, okay, that is part of how we

have evolved in humans to place such an important value on social bonds that the possibility of having those bonds broken really does put us at greater risk and maybe is why our bodies respond in this really intense way to the possibility of being separated from others. Yeah. You know, one of the takeaways from this is that, you know, in our society, we're kind of wired to take everybody else's physical pain very, very seriously. Like, oh, you sprained your ankle. Let's get you somewhere to get that treated right away. And we tend to look at other people's social pain as something that's kind of like, hey, that's your business. Just like take care of that. Don't let that interfere with your work or your classwork or whatever it is. And the thing is, is that the brain probably doesn't differentiate them in the way that we're treating them. And so I think it's probably made me a bit more sort of empathic. But Naomi and Matt's findings also got them thinking about creative ways to alleviate the pain that feeling jilted can cause. The couple's brain findings suggested a straightforward but also incredible possibility.

If the brain processes rejection like a painful physical injury, say a kidney stone, could the same drugs we take to stop physical discomfort also protect us from social hurt? What if you sort of prescribed pain medicine for people who had social pain? Wouldn't that be hilarious? Like it was almost going to be a punchline in a talk, but we never thought it would work. So we never ran that study. but we never thought it would work. So we never ran that study. But Nathan DeWall, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky,

thought it was worth trying out. He gave his subjects either pain medication, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, or a placebo pill for three weeks. Participants in both groups were asked to fill out a nightly survey on whether they'd felt teased or hurt by other people during the day. He also had a smaller group of these subjects perform Naomi and Matt's Cyberball brain scan task. What happened? By the ninth day of treatment, subjects taking acetaminophen were feeling less hurt by their daily rejections than subjects taking the fake pill. Their brains also showed less activity in those same pain regions when playing

cyberball. So it looked like there was really evidence that, yeah, this physical painkiller seems to be having an effect on social pain too. It is really important to include the warning label, which is that Tylenol is actually quite toxic. So when I talk about this with large audiences, I always tell them this because people are like, oh, cool, the next time I get rejected, I'll just take a bottle of Tylenol and that will kill you. People should not try to do this at home and self-administer because it's actually dangerous.

I just want to echo Matt here again. Do not take an aspirin or a Tylenol or any other painkiller to ease the hurt of rejection. It is dangerous. Do not do it. Never ever. Seriously, not a smart strategy. But Naomi and Matt's findings do provide an existence proof that there are ways to turn off the pain of rejection. When we get back from the break, we'll see that there are some safe ways to inoculate ourselves and the people we love from the pain of rejection. We'll learn that we don't need a drug to alleviate the hurt of being jilted,

but we do need to get the right strategies to make sure our rejection cuts don't get infected. In fact, we'll talk to a scientist who's come up with a host of simple strategies we can use to fight our heartaches and feel better. When I applied to graduate school for a PhD program, there were 10 programs that I wanted to apply to. Nine of them were good. One of them wasn't. I decided to apply all 10. The nine good ones said no. The 10th didn't even bother responding. This is psychologist Guy Winch. His first round of graduate school applications didn't go so well. And I felt very, very rejected. And then I realized they're not rejecting me. They're rejecting my application.

My application is something I can work on. And so it got my head together again. This might sound like a pretty enlightened reaction from an applicant who didn't even get a no thank you from the worst program in his entire field. But Guy has long been an expert on strategies we can use to bounce back. Guy is the co-host of Dear Therapists, a podcast that gives practical tips for how to recover when things don't work out in life. He's also the author of Emotional First Aid, Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts. Well, the idea is that we all have a medicine cabinet at home, and we're actually very good. If you get a cut, you can actually, most people can look at it and estimate whether that requires a Band-Aid, a stitch, or a Uber to the emergency room. But we get emotional wounds

on a daily basis, much more than we do physical ones these days, because we're not skateboarding as much as adults, or maybe we are, but we're not scraping our knees as much. We are experiencing failure. We are experiencing rejection. We are experiencing loneliness. And there's a lot of research that can tell us how we can soothe some of those pains and treat some of those wounds, except we're not aware of it and we don't use it. Now, that's not to say that we don't try to deal with our rejection pain. We often react very strongly to these emotions. The problem, according to Guy, is that we do so in some very unhelpful ways, like getting really angry. When we stub our toe, our instinct is to go and kick the desk of drawers that did it, or to punch something.

I mean, our instinct for pain is to lash out. And rejection is pain, and our instinct is to lash out. Studies have vividly shown that the anger of rejection makes us want to hurt other people. In one experiment, subjects first got rejected in a game of cyberball and then had a chance to lash out against a group of innocent bystanders. Subjects were told that they needed to decide how much hot sauce to make people drink in an upcoming taste test experiment. They were told that these taste testers didn't like spicy food,

but that they would have to drink whatever size shot of hot sauce the subject poured. What happened? Subjects who were rejected in the cyberball task poured more than four times as much hot sauce as people who didn't get dissed. Other studies of rejection have found that jilted subjects are more willing to punish strangers with a white noise blast that's longer and louder than non-rejected subjects choose. And that's mild, right? That's hot sauce and loud noise. But we

also know that there are a ton of crimes of passion, except they're actually consequences of rejection and they often involve very little passion, just the anger that comes from being rejected. And it's something that costs a lot of lives, especially for women, on an annual basis. Given the potential for such dire consequences, Guy argues that we need to learn how to treat rejection pain right away, the same way we'd grab a first aid kit to put a Band-Aid on a cut. If you leave it up to our mind to make the decision about what's the best way to heal an emotional wound, it will inadvertently send you down the wrong path. It will do the wrong thing because it's just trying to protect you from having that wound again. It's not trying to heal it in an adaptive way. When I think of rejection first aid, I'll be honest, I think of booze, frankly, and ice cream.

It's like what I think of, you know, so like, is this kind of common? You didn't invent booze and ice cream, you know, like in other words, that is the go-to. But yeah, we tend to numb the pain. That's our basic response. Let's numb it with sugar. Let's numb it with alcohol. All very well. Doesn't actually solve anything. You'll wake up feeling both hungover or nauseous and still in emotional pain the next day. So it's not necessarily the most useful. What would be useful is to counter some of the impacts by, first of all, exhibiting self-compassion. You know, like we literally go and find ways to beat ourselves up when our self-esteem is at its lowest point.

And so instead of reviving our self-esteem and our confidence, we're actually doing the opposite. It's one of the most unfortunate tendencies we have post-rejection. So that's the first step of rejection first aid. Stop making all those rejection wounds worse. Don't kick yourself when you're already down with all that negative self-talk. But a second step is to fight the urge to lick your wounds in solitude. Healing from rejection requires a dose of social connection. We're tribal animals and part of the rejection is about our need to belong, our need to feel affiliated with certain groups. It can be a

church group, it can be our amateur softball league. It can be our clique of friends, our college roommates. But that group membership gives us literally this layer of protection, this shield, because we feel part of a group. We feel more protected. In the moment of rejection, you won't. But then go and reach out to your group and reconnect and have a few chats with people in the group to remind yourself of your fact that you belong, that people appreciate you. And it's an amazing tonic. But what if you can't get that social support in person? What if you're like Tim Colseri, stuck in a foreign country, away from your friends and family when you get fired or jilted? For situations like these,

Guy recommends a practice he calls social snacking. Just as we grab a snack when we're hungry but can't eat a full meal, so too can we ease our social hunger with small reminders that we're connected to others. Studies show that merely surrounding yourself with pictures and mementos of people you love can make the hurt of rejection subside a bit. But the most important rejection first aid treatment, according to Guy, is a practice that actively helps you remember your own value. You need to recall that you're still a good person, but not in the way that self-help books suggest.

You don't need to launch into a bunch of cheesy positive affirmations. Like, I'm beautiful and I'm going to find great love kind of things, and they often don't work because in the moment of rejection you actually don't feel beautiful or very optimistic about finding great love. That will actually make you feel worse. Guy's work has found that a better value-boosting technique is to get really specific. Let's say it's the romantic domain. Your head is going to take you to all your shortcomings and deficiencies. What you need to do is balance that out. So make a list of every quality that you know you have.

It's got to be stuff you know you have, not stuff you would like to have, but things you know you have. It's got to be real. That make you a good dating prospect. You're emotionally available. You're good with in-laws. You bake stupendous muffins. You give a back rub, whatever it is.

Make the list long and exhaustive and varied. And then choose one of those things that's actually meaningful and write a couple of paragraphs about why that's a meaningful thing in relationships, how you've exhibited it in the past and how it's been appreciated or how it might be appreciated in the future. Do one of those a day when you're feeling rejected romantically. If it's about you got rejected from a job, do one about what makes you a good employee, you're loyal, you're reliable, you're responsible, you're timely, whatever it is. But do the things, you know, write out what you're bringing to the table, what makes you valuable to directly counter that tendency to do the opposite in your head.

Guy has found that leaving our emotional wounds untreated, without any rejection first aid, can have long-term negative impacts on our psychological health. We do think differently. We become very, very risk-averse. We withdraw. Our instinct isn't to then go out and reconnect with the people who we can reconnect with. It's to withdraw because we become risk-averse. We withdraw. Our instinct isn't to then go out and reconnect with the people who we can reconnect with. It's to withdraw because we become risk-averse.

We just don't want to suffer any more rejections. Guy's description of these long-term wounds made me think back to my conversation with actor Tim Colceri. Tim's experience of rejection cast a lifelong shadow over what should have been a moment of triumph to savor and enjoy.

Because in the end, Tim did get to be in Kubrick's full metal jacket. His consolation prize role as that violent door gunner got reinstated, and he found out that it was a more prestigious part than he initially realized. I found out later that they were thinking about Bruce Willis and Val Kilmer also for the role. Shooting the door gunner role also meant spending an entire day with the director who had hurt him so badly. I'm sitting back in Stanley's backyard in a helicopter right behind him, sipping wine.

And he looked at me and went, Tim, you have more energy than Kirk Douglas. Nobody will ever believe this. Connecting with Kubrick was Tim's first step to improving his sense of belonging and self-worth. But Tim got an even bigger sense of his own value when he attended the film's gala movie premiere. Two people over is Clint Eastwood and his wife, you know, and Cisco and even Nicolas Cage. Everybody's there and I'm going, this is weird, you know.

When the film began, Tim was still distracted by his feelings of rejection. He watched his replacement Lee Ermey's drill sergeant scenes with a jealous eye. I remember saying, oh, I could have done that line better. That's a new one. Oh, that's good. That's a good one. He didn't give that enough of that. You know, I knew I could do that a little better. Ooh, ooh, that's a good one too. And then when I came on, which is an hour into the movie, right in the very middle of the film I come on, I heard laughter throughout the audience, chuckling kind of. And I thought to myself,

was I good? I didn't know if I was good or bad. Really, didn't know. Was Tim good? I watched the film again recently, and Tim's performance is great. He's only on screen for a minute or two, but his dark and disturbing scene is one of the most memorable of the film. But as the years went by, the recognition he received still wasn't enough to blot out

all the hurt he experienced. You know what I said for 35 years? Every single person said, you're wearing a full metal jacket. The very first what I said for 35 years? Every single person said you were in Full Metal Jacket. The very first thing I said was, yeah, I originally was the drill instructor before the door gunner. I always wanted to tell them I had that role, which is terrible. I should have been proud to just say I was the door gunner and talk about that. But I always wanted to refer back to poor me getting screwed by having the best role in the movie.

I don't know why I was like that, but it took me a long time to get over that. Only now, decades later, has Tim finally taken steps to treat his emotional pain. In fact, he's started to follow a lot of the advice Guy described. Tim recently developed an entire one-man show about his life. Guy described. Tim recently developed an entire one-man show about his life. The show does address the Kubrick debacle, but it spends even more time on the other parts of Tim's life, ones that he's proud of, like his own time in boot camp and funny stories from his life as a flight attendant. In the end, Tim has successfully applied the first aid needed to heal his feelings of hurt.

He's even been able to look back more philosophically on his relationship with Stanley Kubrick. He wanted me in his movie, you know, and I appreciate that. I mean, somehow Stanley and me made it work, and it really worked. It worked

more than probably Stanley ever thought or me. People to this day still recite almost all my dialogue. It just blows me away. When someone lets you know that they don't want you in their life, in their workplace, in their school, or even in their Hollywood movie, it can be a crushing

blow. But in making this episode, I've learned that we don't need to suffer the pain of rejection. By understanding how rejection works, we can learn how to heal life's emotional wounds. But the science shows that we do need to take that pain seriously. We need to react to life's rejections quickly, just like we would a cut or a burn. When we're in emotional pain, we need quick emotional first aid. So the next time you're rebuffed, don't just do what comes naturally

and turn to the ice cream and booze. Ease your hurt by making sure you connect with people who love and value you. And be sure to prevent that long-term emotional scarring by reminding yourself of the many qualities and blessings you still enjoy, ones that losing a job or a romantic partner just don't change. And of course, it never hurts to learn more about other strategies you can

use to feel happier, even in tough times. That's a dose of medicine you're sure to get in the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibben edited our scripts. Marilyn Rust offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle,

Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Royston Reserve,

Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.