The Psychology of your 20s - 384. How to stop taking things so personally

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

If you’ve ever felt like a delayed reply, a change of tone, or a bit of feedback ruined your whole day, you might have a tendency to take things personally. In this episode, we’re looking at why your brain is wired to do it in the first place, and why it doesn’t automatically mean we’re self-centred and egotistical. We explore:•        Why we interpret normal things as an attack•        The spotlight effect and personalisation•        The role of the id, ego and superego•        How to tell when the ego is being helpful or harmful•        5 tips to stop taking things personally Listen now! Watch on Netflix Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]  The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

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In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Ellen, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian. Michael Mancini.

My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what

he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spike, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. This episode feels very timely, very necessary for the moment that I'm in right now. since moving to London, I have found myself becoming very self-centered, a much angrier person.

And part of what this has done to me and my personality is that for the first time in a while, every slight thing feels like a personal insult. Every person who is pushing me on the tube, every cancelled plan, even though I know the city is busy, every slightly weirdly worded email, I have become very hypervigilant towards it and ready to really see the worst in people and in situations. And that scares me because that's not like me. That's not the person I am. I think part of being a self-conscious kid was that at some stage I just realized it cost too much to care what others thought about me. And I've operated from that mentality for so long, So to have had this resurgence of this like weird making everything about me, reading into

everything, taking it all personally attitude is it's not something I'm interested in. I don't think you guys are particularly interested in it as well. I think we could all use a bit of a psychological breakdown of how to release these feelings because they definitely create significant blockages for us when we start to make everything about ourselves. You know, for starters, it collapses your attention inward. It eats up all your mental resources that could have been devoted to things you actually care about. It makes you ignore valuable information such as feedback and healthy criticism because it all just feels like the same kind of threat. And quite frankly, I think it just makes you miserable. It makes

you self-conscious. It doesn't make you a nice person to be a real. and that is not something that I'm aspiring to be this year or any year. So today, let's answer the question. Why do we so often place ourselves at the center of things, especially things that have very little to do with us? And why that is the case, why our brains operate in this sometimes annoying fashion, and of course how to stop taking things so personally before,

I guess it goes too far. Stay with us. So the first thing you need to understand is that your consciousness is built through quite a narrow, subjective lens. You don't experience the world from a bird's eye view where you have equal visibility of everyone's experiences. You experience it from inside, one body behind, one pair of eyes with just one stream of thought and subjective feeling that is running through every single experience that you're having.

It is very reflective of that classic quote. You know, you don't see the world as it is. You see the world as you are. So what that means is that when you're feeling insecure, everything becomes evidence of that insecurity. When we see the worst in people, it's because we're not feeling our best. When we see criticism, it's because our inner critic is already so, allowed. You are your only reference point because that's the only perspective that you have direct

access to. Your needs, your feelings, your interpretation, that becomes urgent and it becomes central by design. And this isn't your brain malfunctioning. This is actually the explicit role of the ego at play. And it's exactly why you have an ego, ego, ego literally being the Latin for I, you have an ego to prioritize you. Now, when we hear the word ego, I think we typically associate it with obviously like egotism and bravado and the loud guy at the bar or like the obnoxious know-it-all person at work or like somebody who's very image obsessed. The ego is actually our sense of self and our sense of self-identity, personal awareness. You don't either have an ego or don't, we all have one. In line with psychodynamic theory, which built on

Freud's original ideas, basically the ego is what balances our unconscious primal desire to be important and to be known and to be seen and to indulge with our moral compass, which is called the super ego. And that, our super ego kind of, I guess, represents our calmer side, the side that acts based on what we are expected to act like. So our ego is actually the thing that's in the middle of those two things. It's the mediator that takes what we really want to do and what we know we should do and finds a nice middle ground. When you start taking something personally, what might be happening is that your ego

cannot manage the roar of the id, the roar of who we think. think we are and that we're at the center of the universe with the super ego, the part of us that says, you know, kind of tone it down and act in accordance with what others expect and how you should act. Now, again, ideally, the ego steps in and it does a really good job. It reality tests, it balances both perspectives, it sees a situation from a healthy standpoint. But when our emotions are high, the ego actually gets a lot less effective in those situations because it takes a lot of effort to fight against instinct and impulse and anger. And when the ego can't mediate well, this is where we often start to jump to conclusions and to feel a certain kind of like rage and resentment

because we take everything personally. Now the situations that are the ripest for assumptions and confusions, are those which are ambiguous and which present a threat. And this is why our reaction often spikes in moments where other people are involved and there is a perceived social threat, whether that is rejection, humiliation, exclusion, disapproval. This is always going to register to us as meaningfully dangerous because of evolution, because of our past. So because of that, it gets shifted up the priority poll because it's tied to something that's precious.

Feeling rejected or humiliated, it's tied to things like acceptance and belonging, things that we really care about. So the irony is we make quick judgments when we'd actually be better off having a more controlled, active thought process because of how important this situation is to us. when someone is short with you, when they're quiet, when they're distracted, your brain basically has to infer what that means for you. And it wants to do that quickly. So what information does it have access to quickly? Your interpretation. Your information. Not all the actual evidence or factors. This is, we know what this is. This is a speed over accuracy trade-off. What gets, I don't know, I don't want to say ignored, but maybe neglected, glazed over,

due to the operation of our own mental shortcuts, is empathy, is thinking about other people's mood, is thinking about the internal world they're living in and their past and their interpretation. Because in the moment, it takes a lot of extrapolation and thought process to think about their perspective. what you have to remember, and this is hard, but what you have to remember is that every situation actually has three layers. It has the objective reality of the event. It has the meaning that we assign to the event, and it has the meaning that someone else assigns to the event.

The meaning we assign is an appraisal, and our appraisals are rarely and I don't think they're never neutral. We know this from something called cognitive motivational relational theory. And this theory of emotion basically describes and explains how emotions arise through an interaction between our past and how we interpret a situation along with our goals and our values. And then what concerns others and what concerns our well-being. Very complicated way of saying, in other words, our appraisals dictate how we see something. and they are a great peak into what we really fear, what we really want, what we really care about.

You've got to remember, again, human behavior is highly complex, it's highly individualized. So we end up relying on shortcuts that have formed in our minds, in our brains over many, many years. So if you have any tender places or sore emotional spots, any old fears, if you encounter a situation that even looks slightly like that. Your brain will try to resolve the ambiguity by snapping that moment onto the nearest familiar story. And that is why normal events begin to feel like you're being attacked, because they match something you already believe could be true. There is another word in psychology for this, schema or schemas. This is the way we organize our current experience based on past experience. Schemotherapy, which was developed, I think only like in the 70s or 80s.

Basically what it says is that there are a few main schemers, a few main ways of seeing information that will skew neutral information into a dangerous interpretation based on our past experience. I'm going to describe a few, and you can kind of see what I mean. So, for example, a really common one is an abandonment schema. What that basically means is that the past has told you people are going to leave. People aren't to be trusted. They're unpredictable. They will abandon you.

So it essentially says any situation that looks like that is going to be that. And you should be wary of any signs that they're going to leave so that you can prepare to leave first. you have an abandonment schema. Then there is a mistrust schema, kind of similar. You know, this is when the past has really taught you that people will take your shortcomings and use them against you. So you shouldn't give people the ammo to kind of do so. Another well-known one is a shame schema. This is when in the past, you know, you've revealed certain things about yourself and people have blamed you,

made you feel bad, criticized you, so now you learn to keep. parts of your identity to yourself. One final one, the failure to achieve a schema. I actually think this one is very interesting. This is a situation where because you have failed in the past, you inevitably now believe that you will continue to fail again into the future. Therefore, this is an indication that you are untalented, you are not successful, and you should never try.

There are, I think, from Jeffrey Young's original work, there's about 18 schemers. So you can go and look these up and there is one for literally every single situation. Another one is the pessimism schema, like believing that life will always return to being bad, therefore anything good will soon be taken away. You shouldn't trust anything. I know one of my own schemas I have to be aware of is social isolation schema. You know, I've talked about this.

I had a really hard time when I was a kid. I was bullied really badly. Nowadays, I know that means my brain is always going to read too much. into small social slights or silence from friends. I know that because in these situations, I always feel like a kid again, and I always have this urge to panic, to withdraw, to get angry, and it means that I take neutral situations,

and I make them about me in a very unique way, a very individualized way based on my past hurt. We all do this. So if you want to stop taking things too seriously or personally, You firstly need to understand the schema. You need to understand, should I actually say, the scheme is plural, that you are bringing to the table. Being aware of that is so crucial so that you can interrupt that self-focused rationalization of neutral events and have a more healthy positive interpretation. That is my first step for taking things less personally.

But we are going to take a short break here and then dive into a few others. stay with us. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.

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Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm sure we are all kind of sick of hearing this, but when you start taking things too personally, sometimes you need a reminder of the facts. And the facts say very little of other people's time is concerned with anything but themselves. Simply put, nobody's thinking about you. They're thinking about them. And when they are thinking about you or they are thinking about an interaction they've had with you,

often they're thinking about their own side of the story. Here are two studies that provide literal evidence for this being the case. The first is from possibly the most famous social psychologist in the world. You will have heard his name on this podcast probably more than my own. Robin Dunbar, my dream guest. He conducted this study in the 90s where he analyzed the conversations of thousands of individuals and he coded the conversations to be like, how often are people talking about themselves versus others?

And he found that 78% of all of our conversations involved people talking about themselves and their own perceptions. That leaves only what, quick math? 22% of conversations where we are talking about other people. A similar study from 2021, ran eight experiments actually with over 2,000 people and found that even if we sometimes underestimate

how much people are thinking about us, when people are thinking about us, again, they still remain the centre of their own thoughts. They replay what they said, what they did, how they felt. They probably couldn't tell what outfit you were wearing if it wasn't something that was personally related to them. But evidence to evidence here, there was a study on literally that exact idea.

In the early 2000s, researchers at Cornell University asked participants to wear a t-shirt with like an embarrassing, crude, funny image in front of the entire class. And before they went in, researchers asked the participants, like, how many people do you think are going to notice that you're wearing this terrible, terrible, embarrassing shirt?

The participants were like, I think around 50% of people are going to notice my t-shirt. But actually, it was only around 25%, only about 25% of their fellow classmates actually noticed the t-shirts. And even then they didn't necessarily have negative opinions of it. A great way to stop taking things personally is to remember, people don't care about you that much. They care very little about you. That can be one of the most terrifying thoughts.

and I also think one of the most empowering. Part of why we obsess over people's opinions and their perceptions of us is because we believe in this so-called spotlight effect, which says that the thing you dislike deeply about yourself, that you are insecure about, that you see the first thing, it's the first thing you see when you look in the mirror.

Everybody else there is a spotlight on it, they can see it too. The thing is, other people are experiencing you as just one stimulus amongst many other stimuli, alongside things that are much more pressing to them, such as their own worries and their own stress and their own spotlight on what they think you're seeing in them. The spotlight effect is basically your brain making an error in logic. It's saying, because I notice it, it must be noticeable to everybody else as well. The psychology says probably not. And even if they do notice it, and it is the center of their attention, isn't it more indicative of them that they're able to pinpoint somebody else's insecurities with

that much accuracy? I just feel like that's a, if somebody's able to do that for a group of people in front of them and is able to be like, you're insecure about that feature, you're insecure about that feature. That says so much more about them. So that's my tip here. to stop taking things personally, identify, yes, how you may be reading into things, but then also identify how often you're probably incorrect about what other people are noticing about you and how little a problem that you have with yourself is to everybody else. Next, because this is definitely sometimes advice people find it hard to practice. I definitely find it hard to practice this.

We are socially attuned. it's not like we're going to hear these facts and be like, great, I'm cured. Instead, if you're finding it hard to stop taking things personally, I don't think you have to stop caring about everyone's opinions. Instead, I want to ask that you pick only four people whose opinions matter to you. Four people whose comments you allow yourself to take personally. Four people whose opinions you take on board. Only four.

You can only choose four, so you have to choose wisely. And these people cannot be subbed out. They cannot be subbed in. They are on the team until they are permanently off the team. And your second rule is that they have to be somebody whose opinion you truly trust and who you know has your back. You can't choose your mom if your mom always criticizes your choices. You can't choose your boss if your boss always disrespects you and makes you cry.

Can't choose a friend who always puts you down. I want you to choose your team of four, a friends, family, a partner whose opinions you are allowed to take personally and then nobody else outside of that. I really like this method because you've most likely spent 15, 20 plus years absorbing everybody's thoughts or potential thoughts about you. So you aren't going to be able to reverse that overnight. You're not going to be able to go cold turkey on caring what they think. This is like the replacement therapy you may need.

you know, instead of going sober from taking things personally, we just go down a little bit. We just decrease the dosage. I think another way to stop taking things so personally, if you find it hard to not insert yourself into a story, is actually to insert yourself even further. It's going to be so, this is such simple advice, but it's important. you need to interrupt your interpretation of what you think they're thinking with what you know you would be thinking. Again, we only have access to our own thoughts. Use that to your advantage. If this was you in this situation, in their situation, how would you actually be thinking about this?

You know, why would you have made that judgment? Why would you have spoken in that tone? You know, if you had three deadlines, if you had a headache, and had a bad night's sleep and, you know, you were worried about tax time, I don't know, how would you come off as sounding in a message? If you were really socially drained, would you be warm and chatty, or would you be brief and quiet? If you were really anxious, overwhelmed, would you show up perfectly, or would you be a little bit distracted?

How would you be behaving and reacting? Asking yourself this, putting yourself even further into the narrative, can help pull you out of the trap of what this means for you by thinking why has somebody else been kind of forced or has had this reaction? What else could be true here? It's actually kind of a classic anxiety tip. And of course, a lot of why we take things personally is anxiety and is filling the gaps with our own knowledge and the worst case scenario.

But this technique, this chain reaction interruption, asks you to question what else before you ask what if. What else could be going on here? A good rule, when you find your brain running away with assumptions, for every negative assumption, you have to give yourself a positive one. You have to achieve a one-to-one ratio of what if and what else. Tip number four. I think we're up to number four now.

I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong. label the things that are assumptions and the things that you know are facts. This is a great one to stop those spiraling thoughts. When you start to take things personally, your brain is mixing facts and interpretations. It's mixing them together so seamlessly. They feel like they're the same thing. How you feel about the situation must be the only accurate interpretation.

Try and pull these two things apart. Maybe, let's use the example. of like your friend cancels a dinner that you had planned. An assumption here would be that, oh, this is totally evidence they don't like me anymore. They don't care about me. They think I'm annoying. They're going to ditch me. The fact here is simply that they canceled. Another fact might be that they genuinely just don't have the mental capacity or that they really are sick. Or maybe someone doesn't reply. The assumption here might be that they're avoiding you or that they don't want to talk to you or that they're annoyed at you. But the facts, the facts are, if we remove all

the emotion and fear-driven thoughts from this situation, it's just that they haven't replied. There are so many other possible explanations here. Acknowledging the assumptions versus the facts helped you to acknowledge the story you're telling yourself versus the reality of the story that's much more complex and has multiple perspectives to it. Next tip, tip number five, remember that this feeling you're having is temporary, but your reaction to the feeling can make the moment permanent. I just think it's wise to always try and give people the benefit of the doubt because that alone will reduce your emotional suffering. If for nothing else, it just means that you don't have to go through the annoyance

and the frustration of taking something personally multiple times. This one is pretty huge because often we will have this overwhelming response or this overwhelming urge to respond immediately, to fix something, to correct something, to defend yourself, to pull away. And I get it. Again, it's this threat detection system, which is trying to close the gap of uncertainty so that we know that we're going to survive and we know what to do next. But the thing is, feelings and emotions pass. They are uncomfortable. They will leave eventually.

But if you act on these emotions and you send a really reactive text or you, somebody pushes you and you push them back or something like that, you make a passive aggressive comment or you shrink yourself or you escalate the situation into something that is bigger, that's going to create lasting tension, lasting stress. and it's going to make the assumption you had the fact. It's going to turn the assumption into reality when it wasn't that way to begin with. Just give the emotion, give that initial reaction,

some space to just like move through you before you turn it, before you create collateral damage. Acknowledge that you might actually be wrong about the situation. Acknowledge that you might not have all the information yet and give people the benefit of the doubt before making the situation more intense. Something that goes hand in hand with this, and this is some of my best advice, the best advice I've ever received from somebody was

when you truly believe that someone's perception of you is negative, honestly, regardless of that, the best thing you can do, whether they're a stranger, a random person, is to be sickeningly nice and kind to them. That is actually the best response you can have, because then they have no choice, but to look at your behavior and see your positive reaction and see how nice you're being to them and only see a mirror of what they should be acting like and how ridiculous their behavior actually is. A study published last summer, I believe, at the University of Oregon, found really sizable evidence for this working.

They called it the perceiver elicited similarity effect. Basically, our behavior elicits similar behavior in others by setting a social standard that they then self-police on. You take people out of their world, you bring them into your world, and you make your world a pleasant place to be, one that has the kindness you wish to treat others by and you wish they treated you with. I think this has a bleed-on effect in that it allows us to detach from others' opinions because our internal world feels so stable and sound. If you make your internal world a positive one and you try and bring people in, when they still decide that they're going to

ruin the moment for you or they are going to personally project opinions on you, frankly, you don't, it's not a problem for you. It's not your business because your life and your internal state of being and your mindset is so strong and so positive that what are they trying to achieve? Sometimes when I'm really getting pulled into thinking about what others may think, do say how they perceive me, I try and think of myself as just another part of nature. I try and think of myself like a tree or a mountain or a bird. The job of nature and of these things is just to exist without narration. They don't audition.

They don't care. They don't imagine what story people are telling about them. They are just there to exist. And visualizing myself as just another part of nature, which I am, which we all are, whose goal is just to experience and to exist is very uniquely grounding because it gives you that cognitive distance between the situation and your interpretation, and it lets you just, it lets you just exist and not take it all on board. My final advice, if all else fails, remember the rule of five. Will it matter in five days? Will it matter in five months? Will it

matter in five years. I think modern day society and the kind of systems we exist in make everything feel very urgent and enormous and significant and life ending. So it's important to ask yourself this question to give you a good perspective. If it's not going to matter in five years, you don't need to burn your sense of self to the ground over it. If it's not going to matter in five years, you shouldn't spend more than five minutes worrying about it. have that short amount of time, that five minutes to worry and to stress if you really need to, and then just commit to writing the wave and letting it go. If you actually think, yeah, it's going to matter in five months, it's going to matter in five years,

then it deserves a calm conversation between you and the other person. Then it deserves more of a time investment. You know, it might be pointing to something bigger. There might be a pattern at play here. there might be a boundary you've been avoiding. Having that litmus test of like which of these three categories, five days, five months, five years is this going to fall into, lets you appropriately scale your response.

This just gives you an opportunity to, I think, put things into perspective, assign your response based on an honest assessment rather than treating everything like life or death. And I think if you strip it all down, all these skills, what we're really asking ourselves to do is to firstly recognize that this may be an interpretation and that your interpretation may be different to theirs. And then to secondly put it into perspective, how much does this really matter? And what is going to cost me more here?

Taking this personally, taking it on board, having a reaction. to it or just letting it go and choosing to stay curious, choosing to be like nature, choosing to remove myself from the narrative. If that person's opinion is still going to be the same, and you're not going to be able to change it, if their opinion is really that, isn't this going to be the best case choice regardless? Isn't that level of dignity over panic going to lead you to a better place? anyway, it's just such a rational choice and maybe that's what we're really aiming for here,

a rational choice in the face of irrationality that's going to leave you better off. So I hope these tips have helped you. I hope this psychological explanation for why we insert ourselves into narratives we don't belong in. It's clarifying for you. And that it just gives you pause, right? when you're in a situation like this next, you're able to really be like, work your way through the choices. It's like a build your own adventure. You're able to work your way through the adventure and be like, okay, even if this person is thinking this, is it in my best interest to take it on board? Or is it in my

best interest to discard this? Or to bring them into a nicer world, the one that I choose to inhabit. If you have made it this far, thank you for being a loyal listener. You now get access to our little secret, our secret club where you can drop a little nature emoji down below. So I know that you have made it this far and that you have listened to the end. Nature emoji because I think that's the ultimate goal of this episode, be more like nature. I also want to thank, of course, our researcher Libby Colbert for her assistance on this episode. Make sure that if you are listening and you are in the US, you check us out on Netflix because video episodes are now screening over there.

and we'd love for you to watch and to see what the vibe is like and what it's like being in the studio with me, rather than just listening, but of course, it is up to you. Make sure as well that you are following us on Instagram and also on Substack if you want access to more studies. All those links will be down below. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very, very soon.

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