Learning to live with rejection

Want to stop feeling hurt when someone says no? You might like to consider the rejection therapy challenge, writes

In 2012, 30yearold Jia Jiang walked up to a stranger and asked if he could borrow $100. ‘‘No’’ was the response from the baffled man sitting in a hotel lobby. He wanted to know why he was being asked, but Jiang didn’t explain; he just said ‘‘thanks’’ then walked away. This was Jiang’s first day of rejection therapy, a concept created by Canadian entrepreneur Jason Comely that challenged people to approach strangers with weird requests to build their resilience against rejection.

Jiang’s fear of rejection centred on a memory of being shunned in school as a young boy. A teacher had invited classmates to come up with compliments for one another, but they all went silent when it was Jiang’s turn. It dented his confidence for decades. By his 30s, he was working as a marketing manager, but his dream of developing mobile apps was stalled by fear of his pitches being rejected.

When Jiang searched online for help all he could find was fauxinspirational advice. Then he discovered Comely’s website, rejectiontherapy.com. On the site Comely explained that he wanted to ‘‘break the tyranny of social anxiety’’ by designing a ‘‘reallife game’’ with just one rule: ‘‘You must be rejected by another person at least once, every single day.’’ He created 30 daily challenges where getting rejected was the goal. Players had to ask a stranger for a free ride, or ask for a discount when buying something. They would succeed by being denied — and hopefully overcome the pain of failure by facing it head on.

Jiang liked the idea so much he took it 70 steps further, creating 100 challenges for himself.

‘‘When I started, my goal was to say, ‘All right, I’ll get rejected and learn from the rejection to become tougher’,’’ he says. The questions he asked were straightforward but awkward, such as requesting a free night’s stay at a hotel or asking for a selfie with a stranger.

Jiang now works fulltime helping others overcome the same trepidation he faced. When I speak with him on Zoom, he’s sitting in front of a green screen in his California home that he uses as a backdrop when coaching clients around the world.

‘‘The fear of rejection actually holds a lot of us back,’’ he says. ‘‘Even in our DNA it’s just something that we want to avoid.’’

Jiang is calm, confident and charismatic — a transformation from the awkward presence in the first YouTube video he posted a decade ago.

But why is it that we fear social rejection to such an extent? Social psychologist Naomi Eisenberger designed a study with her UCLA colleague Matthew Lieberman.

‘‘We started really simply with the question: what goes on in the brain when people feel socially excluded?’’ she says. ‘‘We brought people into the fMRI scanner and had them go through a game in which they were excluded.’’

The virtual game, Cyberball, involved subjects tossing a ball back and forth with two other participants. Except the other players didn’t really exist — they were avatars programmed to stop throwing the ball to the subject at a certain point in the game.

This allowed Eisenberger to track what happened in the brain when subjects were included and then excluded from a social activity, and she made an interesting discovery. The regions of the brain that were activated when a person felt left out were the same regions that were activated during physical pain.

‘‘From this early study we sort of thought, ‘OK, maybe there’s a reason people talk about feeling rejected as feeling hurt. Maybe there’s a good reason we use physicalpain words to describe these experiences of social pain.’’

Eisenberger says this borrowing of the pain system is probably a result of our reliance on caregivers during our infancy stage.

‘‘As a mammalian species, we’re born immature. We need to make sure we stay close to a caregiver to get the appropriate food, protection and warmth,’’ she explains. ‘‘If it’s so important to stay close to a caregiver, then it might be really adaptive to feel bothered, pained and distressed if we’re separated.’’

Over time this protective system may have expanded its duties and now kicks in whenever we feel our connections with friends, family or social groups are under threat.

‘‘There was something kind of beautiful about it,’’ Eisenberger says, reflecting on the discovery. ‘‘It shows just how important our social connections are; that we’re using what I think of as a really primitive system, this pain system, to ensure that we stay connected to others.’’

When I describe this rejectiontherapy challenge to clinical psychologist Stein, he says he loves the idea: ‘‘It’s fantastic. It’s exactly what I would recommend for people with social anxiety.’’