Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here back for another episode, another topic as we break down the psychology of our 20s.
Before we get into it, I just want to say that this topic was a suggestion from one of our wonderful listeners and I saw her message and I could not believe that we hadn't spoken about it before because it is just that universal.
So thank you to Abby in California for your incredible suggestion and inspiration.
If you have a topic that you want me to cover, something going on in your life or that you see in the world that you wish you had a psychological explanation for, please feel free to DM me on Instagram at that psychology podcast.
I would love to hear from you and whatever is on your mind, but let's get back into it and talk about our topic today, which is why do we replay conversations?
This happens to me all of the time, almost at I would say an unimaginable level and not just in the moments after the conversation or interaction, but for days afterwards and most of the time, the conversations I'm replaying are not necessarily negative or awkward or uncomfortable in the moment.
I just can't shake this like need to give myself a continuous play by play, searching for things I may have said that were weird or embarrassing.
What the other person may have thought of me examining every very small, minute detail.
Maybe you're in the same boat, you relate to this description.
You are also repeatedly thinking over everything, you know, your boss may have said at that last meeting or that conversation you had with a stranger at a house party, late night chats with your partner, every small interaction with an acquaintance on the street where you barely said a few words.
It can be so small, insignificant even, but you're left thinking, was that strange?
Was that awkward? What is their perception of me after that?
Perhaps you're thinking back to that one thing you said that maybe was a little bit weird and you're magnifying it as if it was the only thing said rather than in the context of a lot of other things and you're just wishing that you could take it back.
Or sometimes we wish that we'd pushed deeper, we'd said more.
I think that is especially the case when we're having conversations about things that are inherently vulnerable like mental health, where in the moment, we're not quite sure what to say, but afterwards, we think of everything we wished we had said.
If you are someone in your 20s and you haven't experienced that, I think you may be the anomaly, because it's a feeling that emerges from so many secondary emotional experiences that we're having in this decade.
Feeling awkward, feeling strange in our own skin, feeling insecure and inadequate, trying to figure out how to manage nuanced and complicated emotions, not just other people's emotions as well, but our own.
And it's not all about the conversation.
In fact, I think it really is about the contents of the conversation that we're worried about.
It is the personal weight that we place on other people's perceptions and opinions of us.
It stems from our very deep desire to be accepted.
So we scan our memories for anything that indicates that this person maybe didn't like us or thinks of us in a way that is not aligned with the version of us that we want people to see who we want people to think that we are.
I think this occurs for a few reasons.
Number one is because our brains are not relegating those unimportant conversations and forgetting about them as we probably should.
Our brains are holding them at the same level of priority as more important situations or interactions.
So it causes this confusion between what is actually worth us remembering and what is not.
When we replay conversations, what we're really experiencing is rumination.
Rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on past experiences and events, particularly the negative aspects, sometimes like we said, for weeks, even months afterwards.
How I describe it is that our brains are stuck in this loop or mental maze that we can't break out of, even when we want to.
This preoccupation with some small, probably negligible social interaction takes up so much space in our mind when we are replaying conversations, we are experiencing two distinct types of this rumination pattern.
Firstly, we have post event processing, which is the pervasive detailed reviewing of socially failed or embarrassing activities or situations that are perceived even more negatively in hindsight than they actually were because of our anxiety, because of the kind of spotlight that we put on them.
And secondly is stress reactive rumination.
So this involves constantly thinking about situations that maybe caused stress or will cause stress in the future as a way to dull their importance and look for a solution to prepare for things that might arise, might not, it's almost like, you know, catastrophizing the future by looking at the past.
So when I say that rumination can dull the importance of conversations, or the things we may have said wrong, this may seem counterintuitive, but really, rumination exists as a way to self soothe or emotionally regulate, even if it's maladaptive, by turning over a memory or a conversation in our head
over and over again.
It's like pushing on a fresh bruise, right?
It hurts, but it also feels less painful the more we do it because we're desensitizing ourselves.
The metaphor I always give is that rumination does to our memories, as the ocean kind of does to a pebble, with every moment we spend thinking about it, we slowly smooth it out.
We slowly feel more comfortable with our thoughts or reflections of what we said.
We make ourselves more comfortable with our discomfort the same way that the ocean kind of smooths out or the crevices on a rock.
Some studies also suggest that rumination provides us with an illusion of control.
So if we think about that interaction more and more, we feel like we have more control over the event, because we've spent so much time thinking about it, right?
It's kind of the same with overthinking.
So when you worry about something, you mull it over, you're kind of trying to prepare for if this person comes back and says to you, hey, that was really weird, why did you say that?
And it's strangely satisfying to us because it allows us to feel like we can kind of predict that this might happen, where in some way in control, prepared for what's coming by forcing ourselves to replay it again and again and again.
And of course, that's not true.
Unfortunately, you know, the conversation is in the past.
There's nothing we can do to change it.
Thinking about it more is not going to change what someone else's perception of us is in the moment.
But rehashing future conversations based on past experiences is another way that we keep ourselves stuck in these memories.
And I think it evolves as a way for us to obviously prepare for how we want to change our behavior, what we want to say in the future.
If we can identify what went wrong in that interaction that's causing us embarrassment, we can prevent it from occurring again.
So we protect ourselves from the potential future opportunities to feel cringe or to feel bad about ourselves.
But that can also morph into anticipatory anxiety, where when we are constantly trying to prepare what we might say in a conversation, how we're going to guide the conversation, we're making a mental checklist of topics, we actually become really fearful of these imagined scenarios where we might not be
as socially adept as we would like to be.
And these scenarios, they only exist in our heads.
But they are causing us really quite tangible and real fear.
I think in those moments, we have to remind ourselves why we care.
Why does this person's opinion matter so much that we are taking, allowing it to take up so much of our limited cognitive capacity, right?
Is their opinion going to do us physical harm?
Is it going to stop the real people in our life from loving us?
Is it going to make you any less happy?
That is a big question.
Is it going to reduce your enjoyment of life?
Probably not, unless you put emphasis on it, unless you decide to think about it.
Their thoughts are neither our problem or our business.
Honestly, who cares if you came off weird.
I say that is so much more authentic than the people who are preoccupied with impressing other people at their own expense.
And it really doesn't matter all that much.
We talk to thousands of people across a year.
Not all of those conversations are going to be like incredible.
We're not always going to say the perfect thing.
We're always going to have regrets.
We cannot hold on to those because there's just so many of them that we would have to keep locked up in our brain.
Also as an important reminder, people's memories are a lot shorter than we think.
And they are normally way too focused on themselves to be critically analyzing our behavior.
But that inherent need to care, that need to overthink small moments, comes from that social, very intuitive social side of us that craves closeness and fears alienation or social exclusion.
To explain this, let's talk about this idea of rejection sensitivity.
For those of us who are chronic overthinkers and repliers, when it comes to our social interactions, sometimes it can come down to actually something deeper that's going on in our brain.
Rejection sensitivity, dysphoria, and our old favorite, social anxiety.
So rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria, this relates to our inability to regulate our emotional responses to perceived rejection.
Not actual rejection, but our own interpretation of a situation.
For example, if someone kind of slightly turns away from you or leaves to go to the bathroom at a party whilst they're in conversation with you and five minutes later you see them talking to someone else, you're going to pick up on that.
Maybe there is an explanation for why they behave this way, but that is not obvious to you because you are more hypervigilant to the social cues that someone gives off that they are going to reject you.
And it also causes us to replay those interactions again and again because what if we missed one of those cues?
What if we are blindsided in the future by some memory that we cringe at and that we're not prepared for?
What if a small moment or infraction is a symptom to us of some greater social exodus?
It's probably not, but this also really links the relationship between rumination, replaying conversations, and social anxiety as well.
This is the important thing, you would not be worried about these people if you are not socially in tune with yourself.
And I saw this quote from a therapist that I think captures this perfectly.
She said, my most anxious patients are often my smartest patients because that anxiety you are feeling comes from a feeling that you can solve a problem by thinking about it more because you are quite intelligent.
And so we spend a lot more time in our own heads and it's also what makes anxious people such perfectionists because we're used to being able to solve a problem by thinking about it more.
Anxiety, as we know, it comes in a lot of forms.
Anything that our brain can find scary or intimidating will cause anxiety, especially for some people, certain or even all social situations.
When we are socially anxious, that makes us more alert to our potential flaws or quirks or the weird things that we say, and it causes us to linger on them for a lot longer because we are terrified of a perceived cost or consequence of being perceived negatively.
We see that as a threat.
Not only does that lead to a lot of excessive rumination, but potentially even future avoidance of certain situations where we might not know anybody or we've had a weird experience with someone else who is going or there'll be big groups of people because we are so hypervigilant towards those situations
as potentially being threatening to our sense of security and our sense of social acceptance, we just don't go.
We avoid them. It's that disproportionate fear of social situations whereby our brain has unintentionally elevated the importance of other people's opinions and judgments such that they become a really deep catalyst for worry, stress, even panic at times.
So we replay conversations, I think as a conclusion because A, it is a way for us to feel secure and to soothe ourselves and B, as a way to quote unquote identify our mistakes and correct them or B, vigilant and aware of situations where we may have socially sabotaged ourselves or where people might think
that we're weird because we appreciate that the opinions of others matter to us.
All of this can explain the reasons why some of us find it hard to let go of embarrassing conversations, situations, even years after they happened.
It's like a permanent time capsule.
I remember one time talking to this person who I had like a massive crush on at university and I had a few glasses of wine and I mispronounced this like one word and then kind of like stumbled over my words and he laughed and like kind of looked around me to see if anyone else had noticed and still
to this day I look at that memory and I want to roll into a ball and hide.
It is so small, it is such a small moment but sometimes I even intentionally like bring it to my mind to see if it still has that same impact and it always does.
It's like the feeling of embarrassment has not gone away, it's like a permanent little scar in my mind of that one time five years ago I said one thing weird to this one person.
So how do we let go of this need to hold on to these memories, this instinct to keep going over things in the past, conversations, social interactions, whatever they may be.
That is what I really want to talk about next.
How to stop overthinking your actions, how to stop replaying conversations and letting yourself fall into the matter you know the mental trap that these people, their opinion of you matters more than your own and that somehow their judgments of you carry a bigger weight than they actually do.
So we're going to talk about all of that and more after this short break.
Spending so much time in our brains and in thought patterns and spirals that we don't want to be having can be really exhausting to say the very least especially when we feel like we have no control over the contents of these memories.
Such is always the case with things that happened in the past.
So let's break down what we can do to change this by kind of stripping back the rumination process.
Firstly put things into perspective by leaning into the what if.
The easiest way to identify whether a thought is a product of our anxiety or if it is real is if the thought starts with what if and when we replay conversations the what if is often what if this person doesn't like me, what if they thought I was awkward, what if I said something weird.
Instead of trying to work through that thought spiral by getting stuck in the worst case scenario, follow that scenario through to its end with me.
What if they don't like me?
Well then they may not want to be my friend or spend time with me.
Okay so what if they don't want to spend time with me?
Well then I'll feel isolated and alone.
What if I feel isolated and alone?
Well then I'll feel bad.
What if I feel bad?
What next? Well when you challenge that thought you find the baseline feeling that you actually are worried about.
In this situation it's not that you're worried about this person's opinion, it's that you're worried about what their opinion might cause for you which is loneliness, which is rejection, which is feeling isolated.
So instead of working towards fixing your kind of tendency to replay conversations, work towards increasing your confidence around your value and your enjoyment of your own company and you know really strengthening the friendships and your appreciation of the friendships and relationships that will be
there regardless of what you said in this one conversation one time.
Talking about our what -ifs and taking them to what I call their natural conclusion also just shows us how rational so many of our fears are.
Is it really the case that one thing you've said in a conversation or one weird social interaction is going to ruin you, is going to bring down your entire life?
Have you ever seen that happen to someone before and I'm not talking about people who choose to be really racist or sexist or homophobic but people who maybe just laughed at the wrong time or revealed maybe a little bit too much, these people their lives are not ruined because they said one weird thing
one time but our brains do like to catastrophize and overthink you know what if we're the first one who that happens to.
Like I said it is a way of problem solving so it's looking for the worst case scenario to prepare yourself despite the chances of that happening being very low so it's important to realize that your appraisal of a situation what you think this person might think about you is a probably incorrect and b
very irrational. We also need to shift our attention our behavioral intention from valuing what other people may think of us to valuing our own authenticity and peace.
Behavioral intentions are so powerful for changing a number of behaviors from things like diet to exercise habits how we treat others and also how we treat ourselves.
Before going into a situation that you know might cause you to ruminate after the fact or could be stressful set a behavioral intention there.
I am going to let myself behave as I would like.
I'm not going to worry about other people I'm going to say what's on my mind without feeling embarrassed by it.
I think it's important to set a behavioral intention with yourself because it reinforces this kind of your authenticity firstly but this positive belief that you are actually in control of a situation and you are in control of whether you choose to behave in a way that is true to yourself or in a way
that is attempting to make others like you.
Literally you can talk to yourself and say I can choose to think about this I can choose to replay this conversation or I can spend my time on something more valuable which do I choose and then rationalize the urge to choose you know the replying conversation option.
I know that I'm only doing this because I'm overthinking and because of my social hyper vigilance not because of anything that actually happened.
I know that if I choose to replay this conversation it won't actually change anything about what was said it won't change a single thing and even at the end of the day if it could it doesn't really matter if this person chooses to think of me some way that is not my business that is nothing to do with me
unless they choose to bring it up.
Allow yourself to be emotionally detached from what other people think about you you're not invested in that.
You can also channel that that urge because I know it is quite a powerful urge and sometimes it's not easy to counteract but instead of suppressing it you can also channel it into more positive outlets like discussing it with your friend or your boyfriend whoever is removed from the situation might be
able to provide you with a rational voice when you can't.
Finally we can process our need to replay conversations by taking ourselves out of our minds and into our bodies channeling that nervous contemplative energy into a different source.
Our anxiety is just as physical as it is mental it manifests in restlessness fast breathing headaches being stick to your stomach and that all exacerbates our sense of emotional stress so it's kind of like this ongoing circle or cycle.
How we can interrupt that is provide these anxious thoughts with an outlet by activating what is known as our skeletal muscle brain axis through tensing or contracting and then releasing our muscles so start from your calves all the way to your neck tense your muscles release them by doing that you're
releasing a lot of that mental anguish as well and there are so many studies that demonstrate the effect this has on relieving our spiraling or persistent thoughts or just anxiety in general.
We can also participate in obviously sports go to the gym exercise particularly activities that give you a sense of moving forward not in a symbolic or a spiritual way but literally just physically moving forward.
When we engage in these kinds of exercise what we're actually engaging in is this thing called lateral eye movement basically to break this down anxiety and when we replay our conversations that is anxiety it is a fear response that has evolved to help us confront danger and the way that we did this in the past
and still to this day is either by fighting back or fleeing by running away and when we did this all of that adrenaline that was initially pumped into our body has a place to go we begin to feel calmer we begin to feel more focused we feel like we're doing something about the problem by either fighting
back or fleeing you can replicate that feeling of being active in the face of danger when you go for a run or a walk or a cycle that forward movement makes you feel like you're escaping a threat so in this case that might be someone's potential negative judgments you can take that anxiety and feel like
you are progressing past it by physically moving forward and the exercise in itself also allows a lot of that adrenaline that cortisol just that stress to be kind of expelled from your body i know it sounds really strange but it really does work next time you're sitting there being like oh my gosh what does
this person think of me i'm gonna be fired i'm gonna lose my job this person's gonna speak to me again i know it sounds so silly but go for a run and you'll feel that a lot of the anxiety in that moment will definitely dissipate for you here is your final reminder to give yourself a little bit of a reality
check here i say it all the time but no one is looking at you as closely as you are looking at yourself can you remember the last time you thought about something someone had said and judged them for it permanently and can you remember exactly what they said how did that change the relationship what did
it really mean for you you probably can't remember that level of detail just as someone else can't remember that level of detail about the conversation that you just had with them try and replay your last conversation that you had with i don't know your co -worker or your friend replay every single moment
in your head right now and i know that sounds counterintuitive but when you start to do that you realize that there is a lot of things that you can't really recall and the same goes for the other person our brain wants to pay really great attention to our own actions and feelings rather than others
and the same goes for the person that you are talking to most of the time we are quite inward focused and when it comes to replaying conversations recognizing that fact is something that can actually help put things into perspective no one is ever really that focused on you and that is quite liberating
it's freeing and it takes time to really embrace that but the outcome of recognizing that you really are just a lot more critical than you need to be is that you release yourself from that spiral and from that social examination furthermore even if you did something weird or you did something off so what humans
memory our memory is so fallible it doesn't last as long as we think it does and like most things that embarrassment is temporary it's like a small scab that may take a while to heal but it will eventually and to get really existential the world is so large there are so many people living their own
independent lives there's like billions of other people on this planet and we're really only here for a short time that conversation you had that weird thing you said is such a small moment in comparison to not just like the length of your life and how much you will do but just in terms of the world
and everything else that's going on you don't need to worry everything is temporary this feeling of embarrassment of cringe of awkwardness is temporary you will move past it and i promise you that most people probably don't even remember the thing that you spend hours worrying about so for all of my
fellow people who love the conversational replay i really hope that this episode has helped you out i know i gave a lot of advice here but i will say i still do struggle with this i think if you're naturally like also an empath you're naturally very like socially aware or socially conscious self -conscious
more like it it's really hard to break that habit because you have spent so many years of your life learning to prioritize other people's opinions so i hope that this is just one small step to kind of greater mental freedom when it comes to this rumination pattern i hope it gave you some practical tips
to help you out i'm going to say it again thank you to abby who provided this episode suggestion if you have an episode suggestion please feel free to message me at that psychology podcast we love getting some feedback we love getting some suggestions some inspiration some motivation and if you enjoyed
this episode please feel free to leave a five star review on apple podcast spotify whatever you are listening right now and follow along there are some really good episodes coming out i don't want to give it away but december is going to be a killer month for the podcast so make sure that you're here
for it and we will be back next week with another episode this year i've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so i decided to commit to dry january to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry january because you feel like you're still
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