Why cringing feels terrible (and what it says about you)

Why do you cringe at things you said years ago?
Why do other people’s awkward moments make you physically recoil?

Cringing is a self-conscious emotion tied to shame, belonging, and internalised social rules. It’s your nervous system trying to protect you from rejection.

In Episode 21 I talk about:

• What cringing actually is from a psychological perspective
• Why you judge yourself so harshly for past behaviour
• Why you cringe at other people for being “too much” or "embarrassing"
• How conditional approval shapes your internal rulebook
• The shame loop: rumination, replaying, and self-punishment
• Why highly empathetic or hyper-vigilant people cringe more
• How to respond with curiosity instead of self-abandonment and judgement

Cringing doesn’t mean you’re cruel.
 It means something inside you learned that being visible wasn’t safe.

This is honest, uncomfortable self-reflection. Sit with it. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] The things that make you cringe about yourself or other people are usually the parts of you that are begging to be understood.

Hello everyone. Welcome to your regularly scheduled self-reflection. I am Tash, and this is things we say in therapy. A place to feel seen, to learn some psychology, and to self-reflect on some hard truths to improve your mental health. Before I get started, I'd just like to remind you to subscribe or follow the channel. If you enjoy the topics that I talk about. I know that they can be really uncomfortable, but that is the point. I think discomfort is so necessary for growth, and I would love for you to come along on this journey with me.

You're safe here. Everyone knows what cringing is. You remember that thing you said years ago

where everyone looked at you like you were a freak or a weirdo, [00:01:00] or you told a joke and no one laughed.

You reread that text message that you sent to an ex that you wish you could legally erase from the world.

You replay a conversation in your head and you think, why did I say it like that? Why did I make that weird noise when I laughed at what that person said?

But you also feel that horrible cringey feeling when someone else does something embarrassing, when someone else overshares,

when someone else is too loud or too awkward.

Or when you watch a video online and you physically have to turn it off because you can't even stand to watch it.

This is uncomfortable on purpose, so let's call it like it is.

So let's define cringing more psychologically. Cringing is a self-conscious emotion.

It lives in the same sort of emotional family as embarrassment, shame, and guilt.

But here is the [00:02:00] key cringing at something you did versus cringing at something someone else did. It comes from the same place inside of you,

and it is a psychological reaction to things that are subconscious.

Your brain is constantly comparing

who you believe this other person is versus

who you believe other people are allowed to be,

and you're evaluating them on the mold of what you are allowing yourself to be or how you see yourself.

Whether that other person is the past you or a totally different human being. Cringing is also a social threat scan. You are scanning the environment consistently because your nervous system is asking whether your environment is safe on a social level, would doing something get you rejected

or would this cost my belonging to this group?

It all ties back to that innate [00:03:00] biological need to belong to a group for survival, and so you're drastically trying avoid abandonment by fitting a certain mold that you think would be socially acceptable. And when something falls outside of that mold, that is what's making you cringe, and it is an internal judgment.

Cringing doesn't come from making mistakes alone.

It comes from believing that those mistakes or being visible in certain ways to other people defines your worth.

I have said so many cringey things in my time, so many, um, I'm gonna share one that still sticks with me. This happened back in high school when I was in probably year 11.

I had a friend who would go to Catholic Mass. They were telling me that they have to go every Thursday to their Catholic mass, and I. I had [00:04:00] never, I hadn't been brought up Catholic and I knew next to nothing about Christianity because my family are not very religious people. I thought that they said Catholic maths, and I was responding to the things that he was saying, thinking that Catholics had their own maths lessons.

And he looked at me like I was such an idiot. He was so confused, and looking back on that makes me cringe so hard. I still think about it.

Anyway, I hope that me sharing that story sort of helps you feel a bit more comfortable thinking about your own stories, but when I think about things that other people have done that have made me cringe. I actually struggled to think of any. I don't remember many of those moments yet. I [00:05:00] remember so many of my own, and I feel like that's quite comforting and

nice to think that people probably don't remember. Hopefully that person doesn't remember me talking about bloody Catholic maths. Oh my gosh.

But one example I do have of something that makes me cringe is I've mentioned her before in one of my episodes, but there's this girl called Sophie Jones who does rejection therapy videos on TikTok, and she'll do things like Get up in a train carriage that's absolutely packed and just tell them a joke.

Um, a lot of the times it's so awkward and she does it with the purpose of being rejected in order to desensitize herself to rejection, and she's a great, amazing woman. I commend her to the highest point because I genuinely could not do what she does.

But I do think it is very valuable, but I physically have to turn her videos off sometimes because I cannot watch them. [00:06:00] They make me physically hurt from how much they make me cringe. I, ugh. Ooh. When something makes you cringe so hard.

What I'm getting at here is that the feeling of cringing at things that I've done and cringing at what other people do comes from the same place. When I think about cringey things I have done. I get worried about what other people thought of me at the time, whether they would still like me or whether they would think that I was weirdo and reject me.

But when I think about cringey things that other people do, it also makes me worry about what people think of them because they are operating outside of that mold of rules that I have for myself that I stay within in order to not feel abandoned or rejected.

And so that makes me cringe when other people, do those things, because I worry about what people are gonna think of them. And [00:07:00] it's a reflection of what I think other people would think of me if I were to do what they were doing.

Some people cringe more than others and it's because they have a slightly different mental framework than other people.

It's often the more judgmental people who are bigger cringes than others.

Because obviously the more judgmental people have more rules for themselves, stricter rules for themselves, right? That's why they judge other people, because those are the people live outside of the rules they have for themselves.

But high cringes can also exhibit high empathy. They can also exhibit higher

sensitivity to rejection. And most likely a history of being criticized or ridiculed or controlled or emotionally monitored when they were a kid or growing up.

They're are often people who develop behaviors like replaying their own behavior in their heads and ruminating on [00:08:00] things. Overthinking and over scrutinizing themselves and other people,

and as a result of that, they stay hypervigilant of their surroundings and therefore, because they notice more, they cringe more at things

or cringe at more things.

You are more likely to cringe a lot when you were taught that love is conditional.

When you felt that you were only approved of when you played by the rules

and being liked,

meant being regulated and fitting a mold of what other people expected you to be.

So therefore you hold yourself to a certain standard and struggle to process when other people don't hold themselves to that same standard,

and the cringe is born.

When you were taught those things, your nervous system learnt that if you misstep, if you make a mistake, deviate from that mold, you'll lose connection with people. You'll be abandoned. You won't be approved of, you [00:09:00] won't be liked.

And so when you cringe at others, you are thinking

if they mistepped, they're wrong, they're embarrassing, they're

not a good person to be around. I need to distance myself.

Makes you sort of not want to be around those people, right?

But the truth is that if you cringe a lot at yourself, if you hold yourself to a really high standard and struggled to process it when you've been perceived as doing something embarrassing or whatever.

It is because you were trained to police yourself and to police others, as a result.

I've actually learned a lot about myself whilst researching this topic.

This relates so highly to the behavioral habit of silently judging other people for the things that you secretly fear happening to you or doing. I.

There's such a huge fear of violating social norms. We developed this society, especially with social [00:10:00] media and everyone filming everything, that constant hyper vigilance of worrying that you're gonna deviate from social norms and be seen doing so because there's eyes everywhere.

But when I am cringing at other people,

I notice that I do that when they reflect something that I think I lack or that I wouldn't be able to do or handle. and therefore it can make you feel embarrassed for them and cringe

because what they're doing involves vulnerability or putting yourself out there. And that is something that you're afraid to do.

A question to reflect on here is

who taught you that being visible or imperfect, making a mistake was wrong?

So let's move on to more specifically why cringing is a mirror is a reflection of how you feel about yourself.

We cringe the hardest at others

for the things that we were [00:11:00] told were wrong. Things that we were told were too much.

For the behaviors that we learned to suppress in order to be accepted.

This applies to past you and to other people. So when someone makes you cringe for being loud, for being really emotional, for being unfiltered, for trying too hard. That was such a huge thing in school. Everyone made it so uncool to try really hard and it made everyone cringe and you had to look like you didn't really care in order to

feel socially accepted. Like I remember those people who would lie about doing their homework and stuff like that, and then they'd get to class and they'd end up getting like a hundred percent, those sorts of things. That's what it caused.

Anyway,

when you are cringing, you are putting other people down in your mind in order to bring yourself up.

The things I'm talking about aren't morally bankrupt [00:12:00] things, not morally wrong things, not objectively bad things, just

the forbidden things due to the unwritten social norms or the unwritten rules you have for yourself,

that ha that you have set out for past you and others.

Cringing is rarely about morality. It's usually about internalized rules.

I also just wanna clarify that cringing a lot or finding lots of things embarrassing or cringing. A lot of the things that you've done in the past, it doesn't make you cruel or judgmental necessarily.

It is just proof of something that you haven't acknowledged yet about yourself. A trauma.

And it's a self-protection technique.

So let's briefly walk through the shame loop. So, as I said, cringing is heavily tied to deep shame,

whether it's about you or someone else. A memory or behavior appears, your body reacts to it. You judge,

and then you [00:13:00] replay and you ruminate. And the shame tightens, its grip.

Your judgment comes from that feeling of shame. It is a deflection of the shame you feel about your past behaviors or of the shame you would feel if you did something that someone else has done that you find embarrassing. Your nervous system is essentially trying to avoid future rejection and maintain belonging.

So in order to maintain that belonging, we get the shame loop, which is a self punishment to make sure that you don't deviate outside of your internalized rules.

 So on the contrary, cringing can actually be useful sometimes.

Sometimes you can cringe and it can signal that your values are changing or evolving. That you've got increased emotional awareness

or that there's a mismatch between old you and your [00:14:00] current self and your coping mechanisms and the things you do.

Like I cringe a lot at how I used to cope and deal with my uncomfortable emotions. Now I'm a lot better at dealing with it, and so it makes me cringe and judge my past self because I would never do those things now,

and it deviates outta my current. Set of rules and behaviors that I operate on within my current value set and morals.

Cringing can signal you thinking that you don't wanna act a certain way anymore. You are thinking that the way that you used to deal with things is cringey because

you are now seeing things on a different light and you're able to view that it was destructive or whatever it may be.

We notice things when they matter to us.

Like if you had brunette hair and someone said, uh, I hate your yellow [00:15:00] hair,

you'd be like, ah, okay. I don't have yellow hair. So it wouldn't really affect you.

But if someone said, I hate your brunette hair, you'd probably take it personally because it is relevant to you.

When, when someone says something or does something and you notice it. And it makes you feel a certain type of way, whether that's good or bad,

it matters to you

and it reflects your current values. If it didn't matter, you wouldn't notice it. It's a selective bias we have.

Notice what feelings come up when you cringe and when you judge and reflect on it.

So let's briefly talk about how to sit with cringing and to deal with it. The first step is to name it on the body. Are you feeling heat? Are you feeling a lump in your throat, a pain in your stomach? Do you physically recoil? I

just name the physical sensation.

Then you need to interrupt that immediate reaction. The punishment [00:16:00] thinking, why am I like that? Or why are they like this? Can they just stop? What the hell are they doing?

Replace it with or respond to that with, there is something here that matters to me

that I am not aware of yet. I

Thirdly, you need to come at it with curiosity instead of judgment.

Respond to that question calmly. Ask yourself where that judgment is coming from. What rules

do you hold for yourself that are keeping you in that box, in that judgmental state?

What is it that you're feeling towards yourself that's making you cringe so hard and hate yourself because of something that you did in the past?

Avoidance keeps patterns alive.

When you cringe and when you judge, that is your problem. There is something going on in you. Accept people the way that they are.

Compassion is what allows for change.

Growth isn't about never cringing. It's about not abandoning yourself. It's about [00:17:00] learning why these things happen within us.

Thank you so much for listening to episode 21 of Things we Say in Therapy. I'm so happy that you are here.

Please go and find me on my socials. I'll have them tagged in the description below I have different playlists with all of my episodes on YouTube, and I'm also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and various other podcast platforms, so please go and find me on there as well. Give me a rating

and a follow so that other people can find the podcast. If this felt uncomfortable, that means something clicked. Sit with it. I'll see you again. Bye.