How to Stop Thinking About Embarrassing Moments

You’re brushing your teeth, perfectly calm, and out of nowhere it arrives: the time you waved back at someone who was waving at the person behind you. The wedding speech where you forgot the bride’s name. The email you sent to the wrong person in 2011. Your whole body flinches. You might even say something out loud, a groan or an “ugh”, to make it go away.

Almost everyone has these moments. Some people call them cringe attacks. They can be surprisingly intense for memories of things that, objectively, didn’t matter much at all. Why does the brain keep serving them up, and how do you make it stop?

Why embarrassing memories keep coming back

Emotional memories are stored more vividly

Memories with strong feelings attached are encoded more deeply than neutral ones. That’s why you can remember an embarrassing moment from school in sharp detail but can’t recall what you had for lunch last Tuesday. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, helps tag emotional experiences as important, and important things get remembered.

The brain is trying to protect you

For our ancestors, social mistakes carried real risks. Being rejected by the group could be dangerous. So the brain may replay social slips to make sure we learn from them and don’t repeat them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always notice that the lesson was learned long ago.

Each replay makes the memory stronger

Every time you recall a memory, you strengthen it. The more you go over an embarrassing moment, wincing at it, imagining what people thought, rehearsing what you should have said, the more easily it comes back. Replaying it is like walking the same path through a field: eventually it becomes a clear track.

They often arrive when your mind is idle

These memories tend to pop up in quiet moments: in the shower, lying in bed, waiting in line. When the mind isn’t busy, it wanders, and it often wanders to unfinished business, including unresolved social discomfort.

Mood makes it worse

When you’re tired, anxious or low, the brain is more likely to pull up negative memories. If cringe attacks are coming more often than usual, it may be a sign you’re stressed or run down.

Why the moment probably wasn’t as bad as you think

The spotlight effect

In a well-known 2000 study, Thomas Gilovich and colleagues asked college students to put on a T-shirt with a large picture of the singer Barry Manilow, which they considered embarrassing, and walk into a room full of other students. The T-shirt wearers estimated that about half the people in the room noticed it. In reality, only about a quarter did.

Psychologists call this the spotlight effect: we overestimate how much other people notice and remember our appearance and actions. Everyone else is busy thinking about themselves.

People judge us less harshly than we judge ourselves

Research by Kenneth Savitsky and colleagues found that after an embarrassing mistake, people expected others to judge them much more harshly than those others actually did. Observers tend to be more understanding, partly because they can easily imagine making the same mistake.

Embarrassment can make people like you more

Showing embarrassment after a slip, blushing, looking down, laughing awkwardly, actually tends to work in your favor. In studies by Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer and Dacher Keltner, people who showed embarrassment were seen as more trustworthy and generous than people who didn’t. Embarrassment signals that you care about what others think, which makes people more willing to forgive.

How to stop thinking about embarrassing moments

1. Name it when it arrives

When a cringe memory pops up, label it: “Ah, there’s the wedding speech again.” Naming it creates a little distance and turns it from an ambush into something familiar.

2. Don’t fight it

Trying hard not to think about something usually makes it come back more. Research by Daniel Wegner on thought suppression found that people told not to think about a white bear thought about it more often than people who weren’t given that instruction. Let the memory be there for a moment, without engaging with it.

3. Don’t replay it either

The aim is to let the memory pass through without rehearsing it. Notice it, then gently turn your attention to something else: what you’re doing, the sounds around you, the water on your skin. Every time you don’t replay it, the path through the field grows over a little.

4. Look at it from a distance

Instead of reliving the moment from inside your own eyes, picture it as if you were watching a stranger in a film. Research by Ethan Kross and colleagues has found that this kind of self-distancing reduces the emotional sting of painful memories. From the outside, it often looks much more ordinary, and sometimes quite funny.

5. Ask what you’d say to a friend

If a friend told you she still cringed about calling her teacher “Mom” in class twenty years ago, you’d laugh with her and tell her nobody remembers. Offer yourself the same response.

6. Laugh about it

Telling an embarrassing story to friends, with a sense of humor, can take its power away. Once a memory has been shared and laughed at, it often stops being a private wound and becomes just a story.

7. Look for what’s underneath

If one particular memory keeps coming back, it may be connected to a deeper worry: about not being good enough, not fitting in or being judged. If so, the memory is a messenger, and the real work is on the underlying feeling. Toxic Shame: How to Stop Feeling Ashamed of Yourself may help.

8. Look after your stress levels

Since cringe attacks come more often when you’re tired, anxious or low, taking care of sleep, stress and mood often reduces them.

When it’s more than embarrassment

If you replay social situations constantly, dread being judged and avoid social events because of it, you may be dealing with social anxiety, which is common and very treatable. Intrusive memories linked to frightening or traumatic events are different again and can be a sign of post-traumatic stress. In either case, please talk to a doctor or a therapist.

A small practice

Choose one embarrassing memory that still makes you cringe. Write it down as a short story in the third person, as if it happened to someone else: “A young woman stood up at her friend’s wedding and…” Make it as funny as you can. Then read it out to someone you trust, or just to yourself. Notice whether it still has the same grip afterwards.

For more on these feelings, see How to Deal With Guilt and Shame.