Why does rejection hurt so much? That was the question posed by scientists, recalls psychologist and "first aid" lawyer Guy Winch.

There are many ways we can feel rejected:

a. Parents do not approve of your life choices.

b. You were rejected by someone in a meeting.

c. Children at school do not want to be associated with you.

But regardless of the type of rejection, one thing is common: it really hurts.

The problem for scientists is that rejection needs to be studied in action to get an accurate idea of what really happens in the body and mind when we experience rejection.

To study the effects of rejection, the researchers decided to put a ball on a table inside a waiting room, in which three participants would sit.

First, one of the participants would take the ball and pass it to the other at the opposite end of the room. The person would then shake the third person and offer to throw the ball at them. The third participant would then follow the ball to the first person.

Then the cycle would continue, right? Wrong. And this is the moment when the real experiment begins.

The first person would pass it on to the second person as in the previous rotation. However, the second person would pass it back to the first and bypass the third.

As it turns out, the first and second person were secretly search assistants and the third was the only real participant. The researchers then began to study the responses of the rejected participants.

" Now, a lot of people think, 'Two strangers in a waiting room didn't hit me with a cannon.' This is a paradigm used dozens and dozens of times. "Anyone who has experienced this has reported exciting pain ."

After the initial ball training was over, the researchers came back and told the participants that the first and second person to throw the ball at each other were actually search assistants, instructed to act that way.

However, participants' responses did not change. They reported still feeling emotionally hurt, even though they now knew he was staged.

What exactly happens in our minds when we are rejected? And that it is so powerful that it affects us even when we learn that the event is staged?

To find out, the researchers placed participants in a functional MRI machine to find out what happened to their brains after trying the rejection.

"The downside was that the same pathway in the brain turns on when we refuse, just as we do when we have physical pain, " Winch said.

The researchers then performed the experiment again, but gave the participants Tylenol (sedative). Remarkably, they found that those who took Tylenol reported having less emotional pain from the experiment.

" We grew up in tribes and we couldn't survive outside of them. Being isolated from the tribe literally meant death, so we responded forcefully to rejection, as if it were a threat to our lives. We are talking about severity. Nowadays, we do not live in small tribes, but in a large population, where the chance of being rejected is much greater than it was in the past. This can make life as a human being of the 21st century unique, difficult. He said.

How do we respond to rejection? What do most people do when they are rejected?

According to Winch, the average person usually turns to alcohol or abuses food. However, these answers do nothing but provide temporary distraction. So what do you do instead?

Winch says there are some "wounds" we need to deal with, which are directly related to how we react to rejection. The most important of which is the lack of our assessment. �

For this, you can try positive assertions. However, at least according to Winch, they actually seem to make things worse because they strengthen beliefs about themselves, which they know are not true.

For example, if you say to yourself, "I'm a world-class performer," but it feels like half the people around you are better, you're just strengthening the belief that you're not very good, instead of being more confident. , which means the intended result.

Instead, Winch says practice a simple self-affirmation exercise. Self-affirmations are about qualities or attributes that you have yourself, compared to qualities or attributes that you do not want to get.

The idea is that by staying within your belief system, empower yourself based on pre-determined notions of yourself, rather than trying to extend beyond the current belief system.

Exercise has only two steps:

1. Mark five qualities or attributes that you have and that you really believe are valuable.

2. Choose one of those five things and write a short passage about one of them (1-2 paragraphs is even good). Consider why it is an important and valuable quality.

This simple self-affirmation exercise, Winch says, â??It will remind you of the self-esteem you actually haveâ? and can make you feel better.