Why rejection physically hurts your brain

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Underneath the hood, there is something very different going on than you just lack confidence. In fact, let me start by sharing a fascinating research experiment that happened with a woman named Naomi Eisenberg at UCLA, where they put people in an fMRI machine, which is basically measures the blood flow in their brain and activity in their brain to see what parts of the brain quote light up. And they put them in this game. It's called Cyberball, where you're in a virtual reality and you're just throwing a ball back and forth. All of a sudden, after about a minute or so, those two other people stop throwing the ball to you. They just start passing it back and forth uh between each other. And what they found is that a part of the brain lights up called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the same part of the brain that lights up when you get physically injured.

[00:00:50]And so, in this little experiment, being excluded from this silly game can trigger something in your body that's akin to physical pain.