How to get over the embarrassment
We’ve all been there. Made a total fool of ourselves in front of loads of people. It sucks.
You’ve done something foolish, and now you feel completely self-conscious and anxious. You think everyone is laughing at you; you feel about yourself blushing and want to run away from it all.
But don’t!
Embarrassment doesn’t have to ruin everything. You can learn to overcome it and get back to being the party’s life.
Unfortunately, you’re never going to be able to stop embarrassing moments from happening. But you can manage how you deal with it when one occurs. It doesn’t need to be the end of the world. You don’t need to run home and hide under your duvet. Embarrassing moments don’t have to be that bad.
Physiology
Everyone experiences an embarrassing moment from time to time, but we all have our ways of dealing with it. Some responses to embarrassment are common; blushing, sweating, and feeling your pulse racing. These are the body’s physical responses to a sudden rush of adrenaline.
This is the Fight or Flight reaction. Your body gets pumped with adrenaline, ready to run away or stand up to a perceived danger. This can happen when something embarrassing happens, but there are ways to help you manage these symptoms, which we’ll look at later in the article.
Steps to help you get over an embarrassing moment
Response
It might feel like everyone will be talking about this moment for weeks to come. But how you respond to it will make all the difference and affect how you remember the incident.
At this moment in time, you’re feeling incredibly self-conscious and like everyone is staring at you. So you have to do something, and what you do can make the situation a lot better. Or a whole lot worse!
Laugh it off.
Laughter is the best medicine in this case!
If you can laugh at the situation and yourself, others will soon forget it. It will minimize the problem and help you manage any feelings of anxiety.
Plus, thinking of it as a funny memory will make it seem more minor than a big deal. Everyone has felt embarrassed, so accept that it was super awkward and use it to start a conversation with someone. They’ve probably felt the same themselves!
Apologize.
Once or twice, then stop! It’s good to acknowledge the situation and apologize for your mistakes. Just be sure not to overdo it, as repeatedly apologizing can make people feel uncomfortable.
Apologising can make it easier to ask for help if you have made a mess or need assistance with something.
Please don’t make a scene or try to pretend it didn’t happen.
Over or underplaying the situation can negatively affect others and won’t make you feel any better about it later on.
Crying, screaming, or running off will make the situation seem worse than it is and will make it stick in people’s minds. The calmer your response is, the quicker people will forget about it and move on.
Pretending nothing happened could make you seem arrogant or don’t care about the people around you. It is better to acknowledge the situation and move past it.
Manage
Sometimes feelings of embarrassment can feel incredibly overwhelming and uncomfortable. They could exacerbate pre-existing social anxieties and be difficult to recover from. If you need some help managing feelings of shame, try these tips.
Distract
Try to distract yourself by listening to music or reading your book. Overthinking about the situation will make it seem worse, so try and take your mind off it.
Talk to someone
Talking to friends or family can help with any problematic situation. Sometimes it is good to share your story and have someone listen. They also might be able to offer a fresh perspective and help you see the situation in a more positive light.
Accept your imperfections
Everyone makes mistakes, and you are no different. It would help if you didn’t beat yourself up over the little things, so try to forgive yourself when you get something wrong or look silly in front of many people. It is what makes you human.
Plus, the people around you probably aren’t even as aware of the embarrassing thing you just did, so tell yourself no one saw!
Physical symptoms
You’re feeling super awkward, everyone’s staring at you, and you want the ground to swallow you up. And now your body is doing some crazy things too! Sweating and blushing does not help in embarrassing moments like these. Start by getting these physical symptoms under control, and then you will soon start to feel the embarrassment subsiding.
Deep breathing. Often you will find that breathing becomes fast and shallow in an embarrassing moment. Take some slow deep breaths to help slow your breathing and calm you down.
Taking deep breaths will help with the other physical responses too. For example, it will help slow down your heart rate and help reduce redness in your cheeks.
Taking a moment to breathe will also allow you to reassess the situation and figure out a calm response.
Reflect
It can always be very beneficial to reflect on specific moments and try to learn from them. Self-reflection and increased self-awareness can help you feel better about an embarrassing situation later.
For instance, consider why you felt embarrassed in the first place? What might you do differently in a similar situation? Was it as embarrassing as I thought it was? It can help reduce the shame around an incident if you think about what happened and the feelings you experienced at the time.
Reflecting on a situation can help improve your self-awareness and why you act or feel in specific ways. These can be valuable skills for all interactions in your life and can help you have more positive relationships with loved ones.
Rationalize embarrassing moments
Thinking about an embarrassing moment and trying to rationalize it can help you learn about yourself and areas for growth. There might be a specific reason you became embarrassed, and it can be helpful to try and discover this.
For instance, you felt embarrassed because you made a mistake during a presentation.
You feel ashamed because you wanted it to be perfect, and you set yourself very high expectations that you think you have failed to achieve. Of course, the other people in that meeting might not have heard your mistake or did and just accepted it and moved on, so the situation isn’t that embarrassing. But you have convinced yourself that it was.
This type of situation can help you recognize that your expectations of yourself are too high and that they must be more manageable. The chances are, no one in that room thought it was as embarrassing as you did!
Other people feel it too!
Similarly, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in our thoughts and anxieties that we forget that other people often feel the same way we do about things. So, for example, the other people in that meeting have probably also made mistakes and felt embarrassed about the situation mentioned. But they moved past it and continued with their career just as you can do.
What would you say if this had happened to someone else in the meeting and they told you afterward that they were embarrassed? You’d probably tell them it’s no big deal and it happens to you all the time, so don’t worry.
It can be helpful to consider the situation as if it happened to someone else. This way, our reactions to the situation can be unclouded by emotional responses.
Why am I so self-conscious?
Sometimes a person may feel that others are constantly judging them and that there is a lot of pressure to behave a certain way. This could make you feel very self-conscious. It can be widespread to worry about what other people think of you and how you are perceived in social situations.
But if you feel that your life has changed because you are worried about feeling embarrassed, you might have an anxiety disorder that needs addressing. Many people experience anxiety of different sorts. For example, social anxiety is a fear of large groups of people and social situations and can make normal conditions very challenging, often leading to feelings of embarrassment. Therefore, it is good to seek support for these issues and learn new ways to manage difficult situations.
Why embarrassment can be a good thing
While we are little kids we go through different stages of development. Around the age of 7, we begin to learn embarrassment and empathy. All of a sudden, we start to experience embarrassment at our actions, and it can help us understand what is and isn’t appropriate behavior.
Because we start to learn how it is to feel embarrassed, we then also begin to wonder how other people might feel. We learn about empathy. We understand now that it is important to consider how other people might be feeling following certain situations.
Often people with the highest levels of empathy also have a great deal of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. For example, experiencing embarrassment and other negative emotions can help improve a person’s ability to self-reflect and understand their own emotions. And along with that, they enhance their understanding of others’ emotions.
Empathy is an important skill that can help lead to the strongest and most trusting relationships with others.
Improving mental health
It is important to ask for help if you are struggling with your mental health. There are multiple ways you can receive support from professionals.
Therapy can be beneficial to help discuss any difficulties you have and help you manage your emotions. However, finding a therapist can be a daunting idea and you don’t always click with the first one you meet. But stick with it and you will hopefully find that you make progress with improving your mental health and can learn some useful coping strategies for challenging situations.
Mindfulness is a beneficial technique for everyone but especially for people with anxiety. It can help manage anxiety’s physical and emotional responses and lead to a much greater appreciation for the present moment. It could be useful during an embarrassing moment to help alleviate anxieties about that moment and remind you to focus on the present.
Get over it!
Dealing with an embarrassing moment can be horrifying. But learning how to manage your emotional and physical responses can help you move past these situations much quicker. Hopefully, it can reduce persistent feelings of embarrassment and improve your confidence in social situations.