Social Rejection is Hazardous to Your Health

Psychologist Naomi Eisenberger’s interest in the emotional life of the brain, revealed a greater connection between physical and emotional pain than commonly supposed. Her landmark experiment studied how being excluded as a player in CyberBall, a computer-controlled virtual-reality game, created “social pain” as a result of rejection.

They found that being socially rejected activated the same nerve cells that process physical injury and generate what we know as pain. Even trivial slights become a source of irritation.

In other words, rejection actually hurts.

Dr. Eisenberger’s study confirmed it, but it is not news to me or many of my readers, that a broken heart hurts as much as a broken arm.

The logical follow-up study was to determine if a painkiller like Tylenol relieved a heartache. The experiment showed the Tylenol group reported less distress and less brain activity in the pain regions after being rejected than the placebo group.

But don’t get your hopes up. It isn’t that easy. For one, you would need to pop a pill every time the world rebukes you. That’s a lot of Tylenol!

It is remarkable how readily rejection leaks from our emotional lives into our physical lives.  So much so, that inquiring scientists have begun to reevaluate the cause between sickness and health, living a long life or dying early.

In essence, what is the impact of social inequalities on our bodies and brains?

It would not be unexpected to target the current societal unrest as a prime offender. But most likely, social pain triggers an evolved ancient pain response calculated to keep you alive.

Historically, we depended on social relationships for survival. Food gathering, nurturing, hunting, protection against predators and enemies demanded close and trusted social interaction.

Scientists postulate that the pain of rejection evolved from the need to signal a threat to our lives. Astute and wily nature plagiarized the existing mechanism for physical pain rather than start from scratch. The upshot is that broken bones and broken hearts became intimately interconnected in our brains.

Despite an intuitive expectation that the more significant the rejection, the stronger the ensuing pain, something else occurs when we get rejected that sheds light not only our struggle for acceptance but the longing desperation that accompanies it.

Rejected people may become emotionally numb, a phenomenon called ego-shock, that is equivalent to the physical numbness that can follow injury. For example, if you cut your finger slicing carrots, you feel nothing at first, as your body seems to shut down to protect you against the pain. Similarly, your consciousness can freeze up to guard against the assault of emotional pain.

Rejection then sometimes goes beyond hurt, leaving us unable to feel anything at all. These moments of shock are usually short-lived, but point out a mostly concealed fact.

People are not merely social animals. We not only live with others but we also live through them and in them. Our identity exists because others see us. What we see is what they see, or what we suppose they see.

When they turn away, we become unseen and for all intents and purposes, cease to be.

Rejection is often overt but in its insidious forms, it skulks inside the very makeup of society.

In an interview for Radio Boston in 2012, Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard University, and a pioneer in child development and personality studies, said: ‘The best predictor today in Europe or North America of who will be depressed is not a gene and it’s not a measure of your brain; it’s whether you’re poor.’

But incapacitating as poverty is, there is more to the story. Mounting evidence over the past decades indicatethat the lower your status at work, the shorter your life. (The Role of Psychosocial Processes in Explaining the Gradient Between Socioeconomic Status and Health; Nancy E. Adler Alana Conner Snibbe)

The counter claim is that socioeconomic status is not the cause of poor health, but that unhealthy people, drift to the bottom of the social ladder. However, this drift does not clarify the well-documented pattern that more unequal societies, with steeper social hierarchies and bigger status differences, exhibit worse health outcomes.

The culprit appears to be something about our social position.

The inequality researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (The Spirit Level; 2009) call it status anxiety, because social status carries an implicit judgment of one’s value to society. The farther up the ladder you climb, the more respect and admiration you command from those around you.

It follows that being lower in the hierarchy implies a failure to live up to society’s standards of success. Judged as lacking and inferior, you are subtly rejected.

Thus, if you find yourself near the bottom, you may feel worthless, hopeless and helpless.

More alarming, threats to our social identity go beyond emotions, tampering with critical neurobiological systems such as the immune system that is linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, depression and others.

The social rejection that pervades low status helps explain that elusive link between poor health and social inequalities.

The troubling truth about social status is that it’s relative, having less to do with your actual circumstances than your relative position to everyone else on the social ladder. Predictably, this ranking produces more losers than winners, not unlike sports, where second best is never good enough.

Social climbing doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It often raises the bar. Gazing down haughtily from the top rung, it occurs to you that you are now a member of a new social group.

Regardless of what you achieve, there is always someone above you. Status, then is not a winnable game because the target keeps moving and each success is also a failure.

Every winner is a loser.

Are we doomed?

While it seems like eradicating hierarchies is contrary to human nature, they can be flattened by creating more equality. Greater equality dissolves the boundaries between groups, promotes social mixing and assimilation. It lessens the probability of social isolation, a leading cause of death and disabilities worldwide.

Social isolation acutely affects the elderly as they retire, suffer loss of family members, hand over the car keys, become ill or too frail to take part in social activities. A number of studies shows that as many as 50% of over-80s report social isolation.

Belonging to a social network is crucial to motivating and incentivizing them to take better care of themselves. However, be aware that being alone is not the same as feeling alone.

People can be rejected and become social outcasts in their own mind even if they live among others. The quality of their connections is important.

We must face the truth that it is often in our minds that rejection is most treacherous. It is not in the stabs of pain it sends through our heads, nor in the turmoil it inflicts on our bodies. Rejection can live on in the mind, nurtured by our own distorted imaginations.

To identify yourself as isolated preordains you to be rejected over and over, even if no one is snubbing you.

You are both the one who rejects and the one rejected. Rejection hurts us most by making us complicit in its brutality.

Here is my quick fix suggestion when you see or know someone that is feeling rejected or isolated today or any day:

 Give them your best hug. It will help.

Nobody gets through life without experiencing some form of rejection, which is why everybody knows how awful it feels. ~ Adena Friedman