How to Deal with Embarrassment

It's lunchtime, and the cafeteria is jam-packed. You balance your books and your corn dog as you make your way through the crowd when someone bumps into you! Whew! Okay. You manage to hold on to everything but one of the books. As you bend down to pick up your dog-eared copy of "Hunger Games," oh no, your pants tear right in the back in front of everybody! Welcome to Wellcast. We've gotten a lot of suggestions for this one from viewers like CreamSodapop8990 and CoolBirch. Today, we're exploring embarrassment. We'll explain exactly what your brain is doing the moment after you trip in front of everyone and give you our three-step method for brushing it off and moving on. Are you ready? Embarrassment is one of the many emotions you experience daily. It's a biological reaction drilled into our brains by generation after generation of embarrassed ancestors. Embarrassment occurs in a boomerang-shaped region right behind the eyes called, get ready for this, the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Okay, that's a mouthful, but you can just remember it as PAC. You know, like, "PAC my belongings! I am moving to Canada and never returning! I am so embarrassed!" Researchers at UC Berkeley discovered that the PAC lights up whenever someone's embarrassed. They did this in an experiment where they forced subjects to, get this, sing the Temptations song "My Girl" a cappella and then watch a video of their performances. Cruel, right? Activity in the PAC shot up and corresponded with sweaty hands, racing heartbeats, and general expressions of, "Oh my god, this is horrible." That's where we come in. It's time for our three tips to getting over embarrassment. **Step One:** Force yourself not to be the center of the universe. You need to convince yourself that whatever just happened isn't as big a deal as your mind is rapidly making it. Odds are it isn't. In fact, there's a tested scientific principle called the spotlight effect that states that other people don't notice nearly as many of your guffaws as you think they do. One experiment that tested this had a bunch of college students wear bright yellow Barry Manilow and Blazin' t-shirts to an introductory psych course. Afterwards, the students were asked how many of their classmates they thought noticed the ugly t-shirt. Invariably, the guessed number was much, much higher than the actual number. So first things first, take a deep breath and repeat the mantra: "Science says it's not as big a deal as my brain thinks it is." **Step Two:** Don't apologize. Deal with it. Guys, the worst thing you can do after calling a lot of attention to yourself is drawing even more attention by apologizing a lot. Instead, downplay the moment. If you incessantly apologize after an embarrassing incident, you're only telling others that this is a big deal and they should treat it as such. **Step Three:** Don't dwell. Change the channel. There's a big difference between embarrassment and shame. Embarrassment is often a natural and unavoidable reaction to an awkward circumstance. But if you continue to fixate on what happened, replaying the moment over and over again in your brain, the embarrassment can turn into shame and anxiety. You don't want to carry that around with you. Instead, imagine your mind as a TV and the embarrassing situation as an obnoxious sitcom that's forever in syndication. Change the channel and replace that awful sitcom with something positive—a good memory, a joke, or a book that you read that you really liked. Anything to get rid of that junk. Let's recap. Embarrassment is a completely healthy reaction to an awkward situation. Force yourself to remember that this is a big deal in nobody else's eyes but yours.