143. Why do we replay conversations?

we break down the psychology of our twenties. 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've seen 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 am 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, watching 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 have 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 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 twenties 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 rarely 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. 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 work because of our anxiety, because of our the kind of spotlight that we put on them. And secondly is

stress reactive rumination. So this involves constantly thinking about situations that maybe cause 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 all 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 mulled 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. We're 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 like 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 always too focused

on themselves to be critically analyzing our behavior. But that inherent need to care, that needs 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 replayers 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 we're in conversation with you. In 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 hyper vigilant 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 out and that we're not prepared for. What if a small moment or infraction is a symptom to us of some greaterst social exodus. It's probably not, but this also really links You know, the relationship between rumination, replaying conversations, and social anxiety as well. You know that

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, all 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 be as a way to quote unquote identify our mistakes and correct them, or be 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 bring it to 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, conversation, 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 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 shortbreak. 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 out anxiety or if it is real is if the thought starts with what if. 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 ten and seed 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 irrational 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 catest 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 be 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 in 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 the replaying conversation option. I know that I'm only doing this because I'm overthinking and because of my social hypervigilance, 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 has 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 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 needs to rep 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 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 fined, I'm gonna lose my job, this person's never 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 coworker 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 were 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 human's 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 eca tessential. The world is so large, there are so many people living their own independent lives. There's like millions 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 natural really 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 Podcasts, Spotify, wherever 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 m