Why do I keep replaying conversations in my head?
The joke at work drinks, the text you sent too fast. People made to wear an embarrassing T-shirt guessed half the room had noticed. Far fewer had.
The short answer
One line from the evening keeps playing because, in that moment, you felt seen at your worst, and your mind wants to know how it landed. Each gloomy replay tends to make you judge yourself more harshly. Yet after a five-minute chat, strangers liked each other more than either of them guessed.
Why the moment keeps coming back
The drinks went well, better than you’d expected. Then the taxi pulls away and you hear yourself again. Your colleague had just told the table about her new job, and you said: “So you finally found a way out. Was it us or the coffee?”
Everyone laughed, her too, or at least you think she did, and before the next traffic light you’ve played it back three times. Psychologists describe this as going over your own part in a social moment again and again. Each replay can make the line seem worse than it was.1 It’s common after a social moment that felt embarrassing or nerve-racking. The scene tends to return by itself, uninvited, and makes it hard to think about anything else.2
Each replay makes the line sound worse
You’re home, lights off, phone face down, and the sentence is on its fortieth play. Here it is as it sounds by now.
“So you finally found a way out. Was it us or the coffee?”
- “finally”: at the table it was a filler word. In the replay it’s grown a sneer.
- “a way out”: now it sounds as if you called the team a prison, to the team’s face.
- “us”: somehow you spoke for everyone, and spoke badly.
- the pause after it: in your head it lasts three long seconds by now, and it grows a little with every play.
- her laugh: warm on the first play, then polite, then forced, then a little hurt, though the sound itself never changed.
In one study, people had a short chat with a stranger and then kept track of how much they went back over it during the next week. Those whose replays were gloomier judged their own part in the chat more harshly. People who were very nervous around others replayed more, and they judged themselves more harshly too.3
Would anyone notice a terrible T-shirt?
In a study published in 2000, psychologists at Cornell University in the US had students pull on a T-shirt with a big picture of Barry Manilow on the front. He’s an old-fashioned crooner, and other students had rated his face as truly embarrassing to wear on your chest. Each wearer walked into a room where a few students sat filling in forms, and was led out again almost at once. Then the wearer guessed how many of them could say whose face was on the shirt.4
Your guess first. For every 4 people in the room, how many noticed whose face was on the shirt?
Take a guess first.
The shirt felt so loud to the wearers that they guessed twice as many people had noticed whose face was on it as really had. When a moment feels that vivid from the inside, it’s easy to assume it looked just as vivid to everyone else. With 15 wearers and a few seconds in a lab, it’s a small study, and it used a shirt in a quiet room, not a joke in a loud bar. But if a whole shirt slipped past about 3 in 4 people,4 one line squeezed between other jokes may well have slipped past a few people at your table too.
Onlookers also tend to go easier on a slip than the person who made it expects. When people failed at a quiz in front of others, they expected a harsher verdict than they got, because the people watching took the whole situation into account while the person who failed saw only the failure.5
Strangers liked each other more than they guessed
After a five-minute chat, pairs of strangers privately answered two questions: how much do you like the other person, and how much do you think they like you? On a score out of 7, people gave their partner almost a 6, and guessed they’d got only about a 5 back. The researchers called this the liking gap. It turned up after chats of a few minutes and after chats of about 45. It showed in students and in adults at a self-improvement workshop. People also thought the other person had enjoyed the talk less than they had.6
In a second study, people’s strongest thoughts about how they’d come across were gloomier than their thoughts about the other person, much like the replay in the taxi, and that gloom helped explain the gap. The gap was bigger in shyer people, and even people of average shyness showed it. Most of these were people who had only just met. Students sharing a flat at university showed the gap too. They underrated how much their flatmates liked them for months, and the gap only closed near the end of the year. None of this tells you what your colleague thought on the way home. It does mean that, on average, people guess they were liked less than they really were.6
If she was short with you the next day
The shirt study suggests most of the table never registered the line,4 and the liking gap suggests anyone who did probably thought better of you than you guess.6 So the likeliest next day is an ordinary one. She posts a group photo, someone asks about the weekend, and one afternoon you notice you haven’t thought about the line in days.
Sometimes a remark really does land badly, and then it shows outside your head: she answers in one word at the coffee machine, or a friend tells you it stung. That calls for a short, plain message, something like: “That joke about your new job came out wrong. I’m really happy for you.” Send that one, then leave it there, so it doesn’t turn into her job to reassure you.
Asking what you said works better than asking why
Going over the same thing again and again is something everyone does. A 2008 review of the research found it can help you plan, prepare and get past an upsetting moment. It tends to go sour when the thoughts are big “why” questions, like why am I like this or what does this say about me. It helps more when they’re small and concrete: what exactly did I say, and what can I do next?7 So when the replay starts, ask what exactly you said and whether anything needs doing about it, such as that one message, and leave the why questions for another day.
People who go over social events more are also more likely to avoid similar situations later, a questionnaire study found.2 And if most of your replays are about whether you kept everyone happy, have a look at why you keep saying yes when you mean no.
If it starts again tonight
A 2013 trial split 53 students who worried a lot into two groups for two weeks. One group saved their worries for a set half hour each day, at the same time and in the same place, while the other was simply told not to push worries away when they came. The half hour group worried less, felt less anxious and less low in mood, and slept better than the others, though it made no difference to depression.8 It was one small trial over two weeks, so treat it as an early sign.
It costs nothing to try. Write the line down in a few words and pick a set time for tomorrow, say just after dinner. The worry time tool can keep that list for you on your own device. If the line comes back in bed, check it’s on the list and leave it there until then.
Sources (8)
- Brozovich, F., and Heimberg, R. G. (2008). An analysis of post-event processing in social anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology Review, 28(6), 891-903. Read the study Back to the text
- Rachman, S., Gruter-Andrew, J., and Shafran, R. (2000). Post-event processing in social anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(6), 611-617. Read the study Back to the text
- Dannahy, L., and Stopa, L. (2007). Post-event processing in social anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45(6), 1207-1219. Read the study Back to the text
- Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., and Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211-222. Read the study Back to the text
- Savitsky, K., Epley, N., and Gilovich, T. (2001). Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 44-56. Read the study Back to the text
- Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., and Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756. Read the study Back to the text
- Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163-206. Read the study Back to the text
- McGowan, S. K., and Behar, E. (2013). A preliminary investigation of stimulus control training for worry: effects on anxiety and insomnia. Behavior Modification, 37(1), 90-112. Read the study Back to the text
About these sources. Most of the studies were small and used students.
