What I always hear is “grow thick skin”. I guess there should be a process to do that or a mental training. But how?
I don’t talk about insensitivity or sociopath behaviour, but more like being toughy when it comes to little problem.
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I am no mental health doctor or any kind of stuff, but I do think at a certain age your mental doesnt “grow thick skin” anymore. At that point it is all about dealing with certain situations.
So yea, basically childhood would be my guess, but who knows?
With me, it’s just been sorta automatic as I grow older. With each year that passes, I care less and less what other people think about me. I guess it’s sorta growing to know who I am, so that criticisms that are untrue or exaggerated just roll off of me without effect.
Perhaps think about your own thoughts and look at why you believe someone else’s opinion matters so much to you.
Then you can remind yourself of the truth each time you begin to feel an emotional reaction you want to control.. their opinion doesn’t matter, don’t let them live rent free in your head and do what makes you happy.
I don’t have the answer, but I believe this “weakness” is mostly socially taught. When you are a little kid, you don’t care about other’s opinions, or potential avenues of failure. You do what you want to do and succeed/fail.
You have to keep this outlook on what you do. Having thick skin is accepting that things might not go the way you want them to, but still doing them.
“How does a brain not care about someone’s opinion?” Your brain don’t naturally think about that, you do. Why should care about someone’s opinion? Answering this question might lead you to what helps “growing thick skin”.
One thing that helps is experience, the first time someone expresses a negative opinion of someone, they have no idea what’s going to result, and they’re bound to wonder about all the potential results. When it’s happened many times before with either nothing occurring or something positive happening (like bonding with anyone else who had the negative opinion expressed about them), the event isn’t going to be as stressful.
Another thing that helps is feeling secure in your position. If someone knows that they are highly valued by others, they’re not going to risk losing that relationship over a external complaints or opinions.
Finally, making the realization that when you do something embarrassing, many of the people you think noticed probably didn’t actually notice, or only care for a short period of time.
You grow to accept the fact that it’s human nature to judge others and to gossip. When people express their negative feelings toward me I just assume they’ve had a tough go of it. At the end of the day, we are all humans with bottled up emotions, whether they be negative or postive, and it’s okay to express them.
You have to be confident and comfortable with yourself before you can take criticism from others. I say this as someone who was basically raised broken, and had to fix myself in adult life by learning how to admit mistakes, etc. Figure out your fears, figure out your strengths, and conquer the fear, and play to your strengths.
Personal growth. That might mean diet, exercise, abstinence (not limited to sexual), reading, learning, achieving. When you see the results of this it gives you mental fortitude. You’ll start to feel sorry for the people who feel the need to belittle others.
One of the important bits for me was to learn to like myself. I’m happy with who I am (although it took a loooong time to get to that point) so I have the resilience to be mentally tough when faced with problems or criticism.
I think of it as an internal filter. Rather than taking everything internally, I learn when I can discard, change with context, or redirect
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