How to take criticism without falling apart

“Got a minute? I have a few comments on your presentation.”

The message from your manager arrives on Friday at four in the afternoon. Nothing else. And although there isn’t a single harsh word in it, something happens in your stomach. Until Monday you replay everything that might have gone wrong. When you finally sit down together, it turns out to be two small notes about the formatting of the slides. Your manager is happy with the presentation. You, meanwhile, have had a weekend that felt like waiting for a verdict.

If you recognise yourself in this, you are not oversensitive and you are not alone. Criticism hurts almost everyone. For some people, though, it doesn’t just hit the work they did but something deeper — the sense of whether they are all right at all. In this piece I want to write about why that is, how to separate feedback about what you did from a verdict on who you are, and how to ask for feedback yourself without falling apart.

Why criticism hurts — literally

When we say a remark “hit us” or that a rejection was “like a slap”, it is not just a figure of speech. In 2003 the psychologist Naomi Eisenberger and two colleagues published a well-known study. Participants lay in a brain scanner and played a simple computer game of catch with two other “players”. At some point the other two — in reality a computer program — stopped passing them the ball. In the excluded participants, brain areas that are also involved in the unpleasantness of physical pain became active. The more excluded they felt, the stronger the activity.

Researchers call this social pain. The explanation is evolutionary: for a creature like the human being, being cast out of the group was for a long time life-threatening. An organism that experienced rejection as pain tried harder to avoid it. Criticism is not exclusion, but it is a signal that an old part of us can read as a warning: careful, they might not want you any more.

Mark Leary linked this to self-esteem in what is known as sociometer theory. In his view, self-esteem works like an inner gauge that constantly tracks how accepted we are among others. When criticism comes, the gauge drops — and with it our sense of worth. In some people the gauge is very sensitive: a small remark is enough to send the needle to the bottom.

Bad is stronger than good

If you have ever come home from an annual review in which you heard ten pieces of praise and one remark, and carried home only the remark, that is no accident either. In an extensive review titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Roy Baumeister and colleagues showed that in almost every area of life, negative events, information and reactions leave a stronger and more lasting trace than positive ones. Attention sticks to whatever might be dangerous.

Something else is interesting too: feedback itself is not always helpful. In 1996 Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi gathered several hundred studies in a meta-analysis of how feedback affects performance. On average it helped. But in more than a third of cases, performance after feedback was worse than before. It worked worst when it shifted attention from the task to the person — when people took from it a message about themselves rather than about what they had done.

That is one of the key ideas of this piece: feedback helps when it stays with behaviour. When it slips to the level of “what you are like”, it often does harm — regardless of whether the person giving it meant it that way, or the person receiving it simply heard it that way.

When your self-confidence is low, criticism hits the core

Someone with a more secure self-image hears the remark “this report is too long” roughly as it was said: the report is too long, I’ll shorten it. Someone who carries a quiet doubt about themselves often hears it differently: “I’ve got it wrong again. I’m not good enough. Now they’ll see what I’m really like.”

Between what was said and what was heard stands an inner voice that took shape much earlier. It often has the tone of someone from childhood — a parent, a teacher, an older sibling — who responded to mistakes with disappointment, mockery or withdrawal of love. I wrote about where that voice comes from in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from, and there is a short explanation in the knowledge base under the inner critic.

When criticism comes from outside, the inner critic joins in and amplifies it. The outside remark lasts half a minute. The inner critic repeats it all weekend.

Separating behaviour from yourself

The psychologist June Tangney spent decades researching the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt is unpleasant but useful — it leads to repair, apology, change. Shame leads to hiding, withdrawal or attack, because it seems there is nothing you can fix. If you didn’t make a mistake but are a mistake, there is no way out. I wrote about this in more detail in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters.

Criticism we hear as a verdict on ourselves triggers shame. Criticism we hear as information about behaviour triggers guilt at most — or simply curiosity. That is why one of the most useful skills you can learn is exactly this: translating what you heard back to the level of behaviour.

This doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t hurt. It means that, alongside the hurt, you ask yourself: what exactly was said? About which action, which task, which moment? It often turns out that the remark was much narrower than what the inner critic made of it. To practise this, the knowledge base has a short exercise, two columns for the inner critic.

Three reasons we reject criticism

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, who work on difficult conversations at Harvard, describe in their book Thanks for the Feedback three triggers that shut us off from feedback. I find it very useful to know them, because each one is recognisable by a different feeling.

• The truth trigger: “That’s simply not true.” The remark seems wrong, unfair or baseless to you. The response is to argue.
• The relationship trigger: “Who are you to tell me that?” What bothers you is not the content but the person saying it, or the way they say it. The response is to switch to another topic.
• The identity trigger: “I really am useless.” The remark shakes the picture you have of yourself. The response is to collapse — or, as a defence against collapsing, to reject it sharply.

For people with low self-confidence, the third is the strongest. And it is also the least visible, because it often disguises itself as the first two: it is easier to say “that’s not true” or “he hasn’t a clue” than to admit that the remark hit something that has been hurting for a long time. I describe the same mechanism, only at the other end, in Overconfidence: when trusting yourself is a defence.

The first ninety seconds

When criticism lands, the body reacts faster than thought. Your heart speeds up, heat rushes to your face, a lump forms in your throat. That is normal and you can’t prevent it. What you can prevent is doing something in that state that you’ll regret later.

A few things that help in the first moments:

• Don’t reply straight away. “Thanks, I’ll think about that” is not running away. It is permission to answer when you are yourself again.
• Breathe slowly and deeply into your belly. Making the out-breath longer than the in-breath helps calm the nervous system.
• Ask for a detail. “Could you tell me which part you mean?” A question moves you out of defence and into curiosity — and at the same time narrows the remark down to what was actually meant.
• Name what is happening. Even if only to yourself: “I feel ashamed right now.” A named feeling is less overwhelming than an unnamed one.

Once a person learns to ask for a detail, conversations about criticism often change. It might sound like this (a composite, not a real person):

“Your report was a bit confusing.”
“Hm. Could you tell me which part?”
“Mainly the ending. I wasn’t sure what you were proposing.”
“So it would help if I stated a clear recommendation at the end?”
“Yes, exactly that. Everything else was fine.”

The inner critic could easily have stretched “a bit confusing” into “I can’t write”. Two questions later it turned out to be one paragraph. The question didn’t just protect the person’s self-image; it also produced more useful information than the original remark.

How to ask for feedback yourself

Paradoxically, one of the best routes to taking criticism more easily is to ask for it yourself. When you ask, you are the one who sets the topic, the timing and the scope. Criticism no longer ambushes you.

A few suggestions on how to ask:

• Ask specifically. People answer “What do you think?” with “it’s fine”. Ask “What would you change first in this proposal?” and you’ll get a useful answer.
• Ask for one thing. “What’s one thing I could do differently next time?” One thing is manageable. A list of ten is not.
• Ask forwards, not backwards. “What should I do next time” sounds different from “what did I do wrong”, even though you are asking the same thing.
• Choose whom you ask. Not every opinion is worth the same. Ask people who care about you and who know the field.
• Say thank you before deciding whether you agree. Thanks is not consent. It only means that someone made the effort to tell you.

Exercise: from a remark to one step

Next time criticism stings, take ten minutes — ideally not straight away, but a few hours later, once your body has settled. You’ll need a sheet of paper.

1. Write down the remark word for word, as far as you remember it. Not what you read into it, but the exact words.
2. Below it, write what the inner critic told you about yourself. “I’m not good enough.” “I always mess up.” Let it be written down so you can see it.
3. Compare the two lines. How much of the second is actually in the first? You will often notice that the first line is about one action and the second is about the whole person.
4. Ask yourself what you would say to a friend who received the same remark. Write that answer next to it. This is the voice that Kristin Neff’s research calls self-compassion.
5. Choose one small step you can take on the basis of the remark — or consciously decide not to take it on board, and write down why.

Research by Mark Leary and colleagues shows that people who treat themselves more compassionately take unpleasant feedback with less defensiveness and more willingness to take responsibility. Self-compassion is not making excuses; it is the space in which you dare to look at a mistake. More on this in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows.

A view from relational family therapy

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we are interested in where a person learned what it means to be criticised. For one person, criticism in childhood was always tied to the withdrawal of closeness: when they made a mistake, their mother didn’t speak to them for two days. For another, it was tied to being mocked in front of others. For a third, there was never any criticism at all — and so they never had the chance to experience that criticism can be survived.

Christian Gostečnik describes how such early experiences remain inscribed in the body and are repeated in adult relationships. When an adult hears a remark from a manager or a partner, they are not only responding to that moment but to all the moments that resemble it. That is why the reaction sometimes seems out of proportion — and at the same time is entirely understandable. I wrote more about how low self-confidence takes shape in Where low self-confidence comes from: early experience and internal working models.

The good news is that what was learned in a relationship can also be changed in a relationship. Every time you hear criticism, survive it and stay connected to the other person, that is a new experience that is slowly written over the old one.

When criticism is not feedback

Everything written so far applies to criticism that is meant to help — even when it is clumsily put. But not all criticism is like that, and here it is important to be clear.

Humiliation is not feedback. If someone delivers criticism with contempt, mockery or in front of others in order to shame you, the problem is not your sensitivity. In his research on couples, John Gottman showed that contempt is one of the strongest predictors of a relationship breaking down. Behaviour like that is not something you should learn to take better.

Constant criticism can be a form of control. If someone in a relationship or at work criticises you relentlessly, so that you start doubting your own judgement, it may be emotional abuse. In Slovenia you can get help on the SOS helpline for women and children experiencing violence, 080 11 55, and if you are in distress, on the Samaritans helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) 116 123, available around the clock.

You don’t have to accept all of it. Taking criticism doesn’t mean agreeing with it. It means hearing it, thinking it over, and then freely deciding what to take from it.

Research has its limits too. The comparison between social and physical pain is still debated among researchers — later analyses showed that the two kinds of pain do not overlap in the brain as completely as was first thought. For everyday understanding, though, this holds: rejection really does hurt, and you don’t need to dress it up.

And if criticism often pushes you into days of low mood, sleeplessness or thoughts of not wanting to be here any more, it is worth talking to your doctor or calling the Slovenian crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am). If criticism has taken the wind out of your sails after a bigger setback, you may also find help in Confidence after failure: how to get back up when things don’t work out.

What to remember

• Criticism hurts because an old part of us reads it as a threat to belonging. This is social pain, not oversensitivity.
• Feedback helps when it stays with behaviour. When it slips to the level of “what you are like”, it often does harm.
• When self-confidence is low, the outside remark is amplified by the inner critic — which is why it is worth separating what was said from what was heard.
• In the first moments: don’t reply straight away, ask for a detail and name the feeling.
• Ask for feedback yourself — specifically, for one thing and from the right people. Accepting it doesn’t mean agreeing with it.