How to stop taking things personally: 5 Tips

There are people who feel emotionally attacked or hurt at the slightest touch. What to do about it?

If there is one thing the human mind specializes in, it is making everything that happens to us have meaning for us. For this reason, sometimes there are curious experiences. There are many situations that, if we were to analyze them coldly, we would see that they are neutral and have no transcendence, and yet they make us focus our attention on them and associate them with an emotional charge. On many occasions, we overreact to them, believing that practically everything that happens to us is important and happens because we are there.

Of course, this phenomenon also occurs in our personal relationships. Doubting about the intentions or emotions behind the actions of others, or what they say, can cause some people to see an attack in the most ambiguous signs: a gesture, a change in tone of voice, a constructive criticism... For them, this article will be of special interest: how to stop taking things personally? Let's look at it through a series of basic guidelines.

How to stop taking things personally

Every psychological change involves a transformation of our beliefs and our daily habits. Bearing this in mind, and that to get to improve in certain aspects of the personality it is necessary to make an effort and to work in a constant way, follow the following recommendations for stop taking things personally at the slightest hint of a possible attack or conflict.

1. Explain your personal evolution project

Not a legally valid contract, of course, but a verbal one. This is very simple: you must tell the people you trust the most that you are trying to stop taking things personally so as not to get angry or offended unnecessarily. Just by doing this, you are already modifying your social environment so that it will be less tempting to throw in the towel and let yourself fall back into your old ways.

By following this advice you will succeed in creating expectations in both yourself and others, so that you will be indirectly boosting your motivation to move forward and try to take personal relationships with a more constructive attitude. a more constructive attitude.

2. Analyze your type of hostility

When we say that someone takes things personally, we simply mean that he or she adopts a hostile or defensive attitude in situations of ambiguity in which his or her self-image or public image could be compromised by a comment or action of others. This encompasses a variety of behaviors that do not necessarily resemble each other.

So, it is good for you to stop and think about how hostility appears in you when you take something very personally. In this regard, you should distinguish between at least three tendencies: aggressive attitude, passive-aggressive attitude and resentful attitude.. In the first case we are talking about people who are clearly angry and express that feeling of anger, in the second case hostility is manifested in a more subtle way, without directly confronting the other person but treating them with contempt, and in the third case hostility is not expressed, but the fact that our feelings have been hurt is hidden.

Depending on which of these categories you place yourself in, you can decide whether your work should focus more or less on preventing hostile escalation against others, or on reinforcing your self-esteem so that you are not hurt by a wide variety of social experiences.

3. Detect which situations trigger that emotion.

Are there specific situations where you feel you take what happens personally? Name them. For example, for some people this occurs in relation to their career path, for others these experiences occur only in the family context.or even just with some people. Knowing these things will help you decide if you should manage only certain personal ties differently, or if the problem lies in a facet of your personality.

4. Work on your self-esteem

Yes, this task alone brings with it a whole series of exercises to do, but it is an indispensable step. The reason for this is that there is always a certain insecurity when someone takes things too personally. Ultimately, this is a tendency towards catastrophic thinking. a tendency towards catastrophic and somewhat paranoid thinking, fueling the beliefs that in the endIt feeds the belief that there are hostile forces around us that can hurt us through the most insignificant details.

For example, something relatively simple you can do in this regard is to lead a healthier life and take better care of yourself in general. This will positively affect how you feel, and will allow you to break old vices that made you feel bad and adopt a more pessimistic perspective about what is going on around you.

5. Start from zero in your relationships with others

Sometimes hostilities are still there out of sheer inertia. For example, because in the past someone misunderstood the other's intentions, a misunderstanding was created that was perceived as disrespectful, and reconciliation does not come because both parties refuse to admit their mistakes. Creating a symbolic end to this stage makes it much easier to rehabilitate those bridges of empathy. rehabilitate those bridges of empathy that will make it easier to break down this tendency toward paranoia.