How to Stop Taking Things Personally

Do you tend to take things personally?

• Maybe you get defensive when your spouse gives you feedback?
• Or you assume coworkers don’t like you when they criticize your work?
• Maybe you feel overly responsible for other people’s bad moods?

No matter what form it takes, taking things personally can wreak havoc on your emotional life and relationships. But the good news is it’s absolutely something you can change about yourself with a little practice and some patience.

Today, I’m going to share 5 of the best ways I’ve found to stop taking things personally and develop a more balanced and resilient sense of self.

1. Practice Criticizing Your Own Behavior

I know this one sounds counterintuitive but hear me out…

The core problem with taking things personally is overextending criticism of your behavior to criticism of your self.

For example:

• When your boss gives you some tough criticism about a recent report you filed, you assume she doesn’t respect you or thinks you’re incompetent. You’re assuming her critique of your performance is a critique of your character.
• Or when your spouse is visibly upset and not as cheerful as usual, you assume it’s because they’re mad at you. In this case, you’re assuming they’re thinking negatively about you as a person rather than upset with your behavior—not to mention the possibility that them being upset has nothing to do with you!

If you want to stop taking things personally, you need to get better at distinguishing behavioral criticism from character criticism.

And a good way to do this is to practice criticizing your own behavior without criticizing your character.

For example:

• Imagine you suddenly realize that you forgot to send an important email earlier in the day. Instead of criticizing yourself—God, I’m an idiot… how could I forget to send that email?!—replace that criticism with a more narrow and specific criticism of your behavior: That’s not great that I forgot to send the email. I need to work on a better system for responding to email.
• Or suppose your partner is giving you some tough feedback about your habit of leaving stuff laying around the house. Instead of personalizing their criticism—She thinks I’m a slob—try to replace that self-criticism with a criticism that’s focused on your behavior: She’s right… leaving stuff around is a bad habit and I need to work on not doing that anymore.

If you’ve struggled with taking things personally for a long time, it’s natural that you tend to see all criticism as bad. But it’s not. Given and received well, criticism is a wonderful thing because it promotes growth and positive change.

And if you want to get better at receiving it well (and not taking everything so personally) practice criticizing yourself well—keeping it narrow and specific and focused on your actions not your character. Do this regularly, and you’ll have a much easier time seeing other people’s criticisms as feedback on your behavior, not critiques of your character or self-worth.

2. Reframe Criticism As Feedback

A common push-back I get when I suggest not interpreting criticism of behavior as criticism of character goes like this:

But what if they really do think I’m dumb? What if they really just don’t like me?

First of all, not taking things personally doesn’t mean assuming everyone loves you. That’s just as irrational as assuming everyone hates you. Not taking things personally means not assuming people are thinking badly of you as a person when there’s no evidence for it.

Still, there probably are situations and relationships where people are thinking badly about you—your character, your personality, your very self. Even if that’s the case, you can still stop yourself from ruminating on how much they dislike you by reframing their criticism as feedback.

For example:

• Let’s say you’re in a performance review at work.
• You’re pretty sure your manager really doesn’t like you. And when he’s criticizing aspects of your job performance, the evidence actually seems to indicate that he’s also pretty critical of you as a person.
• That’s tough. And as a rule, you should probably try to avoid or get out of relationships where people actively think badly of you.
• Still, you’re in this situation and there’s not much you can do to change that right now. So what do you do?
• Well, you could dwell on and ruminate over the fact that your manager doesn’t like you. But that’s unlikely to generate anything helpful or positive and almost certainly will cause you a lot of excess emotional pain.
• Alternatively, you could reframe their criticism as feedback.
• You might say something to yourself like: I know he doesn’t like me. But his criticism of my work does have some validity to it—I really should be more prompt turning things in. I’ll work on that.

Reframing criticism as feedback is powerful for two main reasons:

1. It short-circuits unhelpful mental habits like rumination and worry. Just because something’s true doesn’t mean it’s helpful. A lot of people rationalize unhelpful mental habits like worry and rumination because they are (or might be) true. But so what? A meteor might come out of nowhere and destroy all life on earth. That’s technically possible, but is it helpful to obsess over it? Similarly, your manager might actually despise you, but dwelling on it doesn’t do you any good—and in fact, it actively hurts you.
2. It’s empowering and fosters agency. When you deliberately choose to focus on what’s helpful and constructive rather than getting lost in negativity, you’re teaching your brain a powerful lesson: Even in the face of negativity, I choose how I want to live my life. Do this repeatedly, and it starts to become a core belief—that you are the author and hero of your life, not a victim or side character. And that belief is incredibly empowering and confidence-promoting.

In the face of negativity, self-pity is easy and attractive because it’s a temporary ego boost—woe is me, everyone else is so mean, etc. But long term, choosing growth and agency is far healthier.

3. Call Out Your Mind Reading Habit

A lot of taking things personally is based on a subtle but powerful cognitive distortion called mind reading.

Mind reading means assuming you know what other people are thinking or feeling.

Now, in all fairness, it’s not surprising that we fall into this problem of mind reading because a lot of the time we can actually read people’s minds…

• Suppose you make a sarcastic comment to your husband. Immediately his brow furrows along with a slight eye squint, tensed shoulders, and clenched hands. So you think to yourself: Yikes, it looks like he’s really angry! Well, more than likely you have correctly inferred something about his mind—he’s angry!
• Or suppose you’re giving a talk to a small group of people. As you look around, many of the people listening have a vacant, far off look in their eyes, and none of them are looking at you; in fact, two of them seem to be nodding off. So you think to yourself: They look really bored. Probably not a terrible guess!

But here’s the thing…

Just because we’re often good at reading people’s minds doesn’t mean we always are.

In fact, precisely because we’re often quite good at mind reading, it’s especially easy to fall into the trap of assuming we always are. And this is a set up for taking things personally:

• Your coworker looks distracted, so you assume it’s because they’re bored by your presentation and think you’re dumb. But in reality they had a huge fight with their spouse this morning and are lost in worries about it.
• Or your wife looks irritated and upset. So you assume that she’s mad at you. Turns out, she is irritated, but it has nothing to do with you. So while your mind reading was half right (you accurately identified her emotional state), you completely missed the implication of that emotion.

Go ahead and mind read, just don’t assume you’re right.

When you notice yourself taking something personally, ask yourself if you were mind reading. And if so, ask yourself in what ways you might have misinterpreted what the other person was thinking or feeling:

• Maybe they’re mad at me. But maybe they’re mad at something else?
• It’s possible they think I’m an idiot. But maybe they just disagreed about the conclusion I came to.
• I suppose they could have canceled our coffee date because they secretly resent me and don’t want to be friends anymore. Or maybe they did in fact have an exhausting day and just need to rest.

4. Identify and Anticipate Your Triggers

One of the biggest but least well understood reasons people get stuck taking things too personally is surprise.

Surprise is an emotional amplifier:

• If you get surprised by feeling anxious, you’ll likely feel even more anxious.
• If you get surprised by feeling happy, you’ll likely feel even more happy.
• And if you get surprised by the emotions that go with taking things personally—guilt, shame, anger, for example—you’re likely to feel even more of those difficult emotions.

The implication is that if you can stop getting so surprised or caught off guard by taking things personally, you won’t get as upset and will be better able to manage it well.

Of course, sometimes surprise is just inevitable. We can’t predict or control everything. But your tendency to take things personally is probably more predictable than you realize.

Try this:

• For a few weeks, keep a little list (physical or digital) of times when you found yourself taking things too personally.
• Just jot down a sentence or two describing what happened and how you felt.
• For example: Got feedback from husband about how much I say “like” and felt angry and ashamed.
• Do this for a few weeks and you’ll quickly start to notice patterns: certain situations and people predictably are triggers for your taking things personally habit.
• Maybe it’s sales meetings at work, car rides with your spouse, or arguments with your kids.
• In any case, once you’ve identified two or three common triggers for taking things personally, you can start to anticipate them, which will actually make them easier to handle.

Let’s say you realize that a major trigger for taking things personally is monthly work meetings where you have to report out on your team’s progress…

• Because you find this meeting (including your tendency to take things personally) to be stressful, your natural inclination is to avoid thinking too much about it beforehand.
• Unfortunately, this avoidance strategy actually makes it more likely that you get caught off guard by criticisms or feedback, and as a result, you’re more likely to take things personally.

Alternatively, what if you tried this:

• Set a reminder in your phone for the day before each of your monthly meetings.
• When this reminder goes off, you set aside 5 minutes and reflect on a few questions:
• What criticism am I likely to get in tomorrow’s meeting?
• If I do, how am I likely to feel in response? What stories will I start telling myself?
• Ideally, how would I like to handle those criticisms?

Even if you don’t generate any amazing answers to these questions, the simple act of asking them will reduce the element of surprise in the meeting, which will mean you are less likely to feel upset in response to criticism or feedback and are better able to handle that criticism well instead of taking it personally.

However you choose to do it, just making a little time to reflect on common triggers for taking things personally and being willing to anticipate them ahead of time is one of the simplest and most powerful ways I’ve found to stop taking things personally.

5. Validate the Emotions Behind Taking Things Personally

As with so many things in life, taking things personally isn’t a struggle because it’s intellectually difficult—it’s not rocket science, as they say.

No, it’s difficult because it involves difficult emotions. And most of us never learned how to manage difficult emotions well.

For example:

• When a friend stands you up and you start taking it personally, it’s not that you don’t intellectually understand that maybe they have a really good reason for it that has nothing to do with you. No, it’s that you feel really upset—angry, sad, disappointed.
• And those emotions push you to ruminate and dwell on all sorts of worst-case scenarios:They don’t really like me; our friendship isn’t important to them; they’re such a jerk; etc.
• Then, these unhelpful stories and bits of self-talk lead to even more difficult emotions and the vicious cycle continues.

But, if you could manage that initial emotional reaction better, you could very likely avoid the entire taking things personally cycle. And a simple but powerful way to manage any difficult emotion much better is to validate it.

Emotional validation just means taking a moment to remind yourself that it’s okay to feel bad even if it’s uncomfortable:

• It’s normal to feel upset when a meeting gets cancelled.
• It makes sense that I’d feel a little angry after getting such tough feedback.
• Most people in my shoes would feel disappointed after a conversation like that.

This simple act of emotional validation works because it serves the same function as taking things personally but in a healthier way.

See, often the real reason we engage in unhelpful mental habits like taking things personally is that it’s a way to temporarily cope with or distract ourselves from a difficult emotion.

For example:

• If you feel anxiety about the status of your relationship after your partner criticizes something you did, taking it personally and getting “lost” in thought patterns like worry and rumination is actually a way to briefly avoid the raw feeling of the emotion.
• Of course, long-term it only makes things worse. But in the moment it’s serving a function or doing a job.
• But, if your first reaction to that difficult emotion is to acknowledge and validate it, this signals to your brain that it’s safe which down regulates your whole nervous system.
• Consequently, you don’t need the habit of taking things personally anymore and it’s much easier to let go of.

So, the next time you find yourself taking things personally, try to hit the pause button. Then, instead of getting lost in lots of storytelling and self-talk about the other person or what their comments/behavior mean about you, just take a moment to acknowledge how you’re feeling and validate those feelings as perfectly normal and understandable, even if uncomfortable.

Next Steps

If this article was helpful and you want to go deeper, you might be interested in a course I teach called Assertiveness Unlocked, which is full of tools and exercises for communicating clearly and confidently in your most important relationships.

Learn More: Assertiveness Unlocked →