Jillian Anthony | Vox

You should be setting rejection goals

2025-03-26T06:00:14-04:00

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

This past fall, I set out to get rejected as often as I could.

A healthy fear of rejection lives inside most people, and has some of us in a chokehold. Being rejected is seen as, at worst, an embarrassing personal failure, and, at best, an obstacle standing in the way of our hearts’ desires: a dream job, a thriving social circle, a first date with a gorgeous future partner. Last year, it dawned on me that I was actively avoiding rejection in my writing career in order to keep myself safe — and small. So I set my sights on denial.

I dreamed up a project called November of NO and gathered an online group of 15 people to join me in my quest. “We’ll build resilience by inviting no’s into our lives, all in the pursuit of getting to yes,” my pitch went. The point was to make rejection itself the goalpost to reduce the fear and stickiness around it, and simultaneously get closer to our objectives. We set goals to eagerly get rejected from job applications, film grants, pitches (my personal goal as a freelance journalist), and other targets of our yearnings. Each week, we logged our attempts, rejections, and finally, any yeses we received.

I aimed to get three pitch rejections a week, or 12 in total. When I shifted my attention to rejection rather than success, it felt so much easier to do the work — my perfectionism-forward world was topsy-turvy, and getting a no was suddenly worth celebrating. By the end of the month, I had racked up seven rejections and landed three new editorial assignments.

Sera Bonds, a November of No group member who has long worked in nonprofit development, says she sent out around 80 total asks that month. It was also her first time tracking the number of rejections she received, even though rampant rejection has been a part of her work for 30 years.

“I don’t take it personally when friends can’t hang out, or my teenagers say no,” she says. “A no is actually a yes to something else.”

“I feel like about five years in, I really learned that there’s a critical mass of nos you have to get to get to the number of yeses you need, and it really has nothing to do with me,” Bonds says. “When I ask somebody for money, or I’m looking for a contract or a collaboration, most of the time the reason they say no is something on their end. So now I just trust it, and I don’t take it personally.”

Bond says that attitude has seeped into other parts of her life, too. “I don’t take it personally when friends can’t hang out, or my teenagers say no,” she says. “A no is actually a yes to something else.”

Learning to see rejection as opportunity rather than failure can lead to more satisfaction in many aspects of life, from work and personal goals to dating and building strong relationships, experts say. And research has long shown that having high rejection sensitivity can mean developing low self-esteem; avoiding closeness in relationships, especially romantic ones; and is linked to a higher risk of other mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Plus, failing, regrouping, and getting back up again builds resilience. As the adage goes, you miss every shot you don’t take — and even missed shots can help you take better aim.

Ryan C. Warner, a psychologist and consultant, trains his leadership and business clients to adopt a “rejection mindset,” which means learning to approach rejection rather than avoid it. “It’s teaching individuals to deliberately seek out situations where they may fail and, ultimately, that helps build confidence that they will succeed.”

“That emotional pain that we experience from rejection gives our brains a signal: Hey, something’s wrong.”

Our aversion to rejection is deeply rooted in evolutionary psychology, Warner says. Fitting into social groups helps ensure our survival, so we instinctively learned to avoid any behavior that caused a negative social reaction. Rejection triggers a response in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions as well as our “fight or flight” instinct.

“That emotional pain that we experience from rejection gives our brains a signal: Hey, something’s wrong,” Warner says. “You need to react, or you need to avoid, so you don’t feel that pain anymore. … When this is constantly reinforced, it will ultimately recreate that fear of future rejection internally, [and lead to] avoidance.”

Some neurodivergent people might experience rejection aversion even more acutely. Some 6 percent of American adults have ADHD, and people with ADHD can experience rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), or intense emotional pain when faced with rejection.

Anushka Basu, a 29-year-old finance writer based in India, was diagnosed with ADHD after experiencing extreme social anxiety during college, and later RSD, which she says starts subtle but, eventually, “freezes my body and mind.” It was a long process for Basu to learn how to better handle rejection, she says.

“It starts with friends and family pointing out your shortcomings,” she wrote in an email. “Then, we go on to internalize it, and before we know it, it paralyzes us. So, in essence, we reject our own selves before anyone else.”

How to have a better relationship to rejection

It is possible for each of us to build more tolerance to rejection, and even to grow our self-confidence and self-acceptance as we do it. The key is to learn to understand “no” as a hallway to the next room rather than a closed door in your face — and that it’s not usually personal.

Helping people with RSD conquer fear of rejection is a key part of the work that therapist Billy Roberts, founder of Focused Mind ADHD Counseling in Columbus, Ohio, does with his clients. “Ultimately, if someone tells you no, the default isn’t that they think you’re worthless or that they think you’re a bad person or not good enough,” Roberts says. “You’ve got to learn to manage your emotions so that you can put yourself out there again — and then eventually you win, because you’re putting yourself in situations where winning is a possibility.”

1) Create rejection goals

Warner recommends deciding on an aspect of your life you want to improve or change, then creating tangible goals. He finds the SMART framework helpful — that is, setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This means your goals are actually achievable and trackable over time, and you’ll know whether or not you hit them. For example, if you want to date more, you might set a SMART goal to go on five dates in the next three months, or meet five new people — which necessarily entails putting yourself out there more. Just make sure your goals are realistic.

“I think it’s definitely effective for people, having measurable [goals] that you feel like you’re making progress toward,” Roberts says. “But people set themselves up and they’re like, ‘I’m going to apply for 100 jobs this week,’ and then they have a hard time taking action on that.”

Carla Birnberg, an author who writes a newsletter about building habits for a successful life, first got more comfortable with rejection when she was shopping her book manuscript around 2000. “It definitely desensitized me to rejection,” she says. Now, she has a goal to get rejected as a podcast guest five times a week. “I would love to be on two podcasts a month, but I know five rejections a week is the only way to get there,” Birnberg says. “It brings me closer to that yes.”

She also uses people’s responses and feedback to refine her message, and hopefully get a higher response and approval rate as she goes along. “Rejections aren’t all the same,” she says.

2) Reflect on your rejection hangups

Both meditation and journaling are easy and inexpensive ways to get to know yourself better, and have proven mental health benefits. They can also help you interrogate your response to rejection. “Ask yourself, ‘What are some times I may be rejecting myself?’” Warner says. You can also get guided support from a professional with therapy or counseling.

When Basu realized she didn’t want to define herself through rejection, she began to analyze rejections in her journal, asking herself why each situation did not work out as she had hoped or expected. Then, she wrote down things she learned, what she could do differently next time, and how this rejection might change her future for good. She began to notice that some rejections weren’t personal, and took note of her own resilience.

“In hindsight, I noticed moments where I thought rejection spelled the end, yet I ended up with something better down the line,” Basu says. “I started telling myself, ‘I am good enough.’ … Over time, I started to view rejection as a part of the process towards finding the right prospects. And I began looking at job applications as a numbers game. I knew that at least one would land if I kept at it. I started to view rejections as a need for redirection instead of failure.”

3) Trust that rejection can get easier — and builds confidence

The catch-22 of rejection is that you have to experience it, recover, and try, try again to “get that positive feedback loop going,” Roberts says. The more rejections you sail through, the easier it will get, and, eventually, the more you’ll discover that risk, and even straight up rejection, does reap rewards.

Roberts wants to remind people that “action comes before healing,” meaning it’s only through repeatedly being rejected, processing your emotions, and moving forward that you will eventually have a reduction in anxiety around rejection.

“[People say], ‘I want to feel more confident, and then I’ll ask them to hang out, or then I’ll apply for the job,’ when I actually think it’s the opposite,” Roberts says. “We have to put ourselves out there and embrace the discomfort, knowing that that discomfort will reduce, and take action towards our goals.”

The transformative power of journaling

2025-02-06T06:03:14-05:00

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

In February of 2021, I picked up a new copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a 12-week “spiritual path to higher creativity” first published in 1992. I’d long heard this book’s praises sung on the internet, especially one of its main tenets: morning pages, which are supposed to be three pages of spontaneous writing you complete upon waking about whatever comes to mind. I only finished nine weeks; a common joke around the book is that almost no one finishes it the first time they try. Three years later, morning pages remain one of my life’s most fulfilling habits.

I’m just one of tens of thousands of people around the world who’ve picked up journaling as a mainstay of my mental health hygiene over the past few years (the search term “journaling” surged on Google Trends in April 2024). And although people have journaled about their lives for centuries, journaling is having a modern moment in the spotlight.

The Artist’s Way holds a ubiquitous presence not only in writing-centric hubs like Substack (a quick scroll of my recent feed brings up dozens of mentions of the book) but also in plenty of celebrities’ social media feeds. Singer Olivia Rodrigo says the book helped her make her sophomore album in 2023; entrepreneur and investor Tim Ferriss says it’s “the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found”; and Adriene of Yoga With Adriene YouTube fame invited her followers to join her to write morning pages in September. Thirty-three years after its publication, it’s sold 5 million copies and been translated into 40 languages, and as of this writing it’s currently No. 2 on Amazon’s “creativity” bestseller list and No. 48 on Barnes & Noble’s self-help list.

Then there’s The Shadow Work Journal, a wildly popular 2021 self-published book by author Keila Shaheen, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and marketing. She was only 24 when the book outsold Oprah’s latest book club release. The guide to confront the “shadow,” or unconscious, parts of yourself, based on concepts by psychiatrist Carl Jung, blew up on TikTok, where more than 29,000 videos can be found under the hashtag #shadowworkjournal. While Shaheen isn’t a therapist or trauma expert, many sing the praises of the journal’s tools such as “wound mapping,” an exercise in which you self-identify core wounds under categories like trust, neglect, and guilt. Shaheen’s second book, The Book of Shadow Work, comes out January 14, through a Simon & Schuster imprint as part of a multi-book deal.

Shaheen — a lifelong journaler who keeps different notebooks for topics like productivity, focus, and dreaming and envisioning — was going through a “profound crisis” when her diaries led her to self-help and spirituality, and exploring shadow work.

“Diving back into those diary pages and transforming the questions I would ask myself and exercises I would do into a guided journal made so much sense for me, so it was almost a way of alchemizing my own pain and process into a resource for other people to experience,” Shaheen says.

Guided journals can be useful to kick off your writing habit, but you don’t need anything specific to get started other than a pen and a notebook. Everyone from George Washington to Maya Angelou has done it. If you’d prefer to use tech like your laptop or tablet, you can use a word processor like Google Docs. But aside from record-keeping for your own life, journaling can offer many genuine health benefits for little effort and zero dollars.

The proven benefits of journaling

In addition to the many people who can attest to the transformative power of journaling, there’s also solid scientific proof that the simple act of writing about our feelings is good for our brains. Author and psychotherapist Kathleen Adams opened the Center for Journal Therapy in 1988 and has dedicated her career to “the intersection of writing and healing in a mental health setting.”

“When I first started doing this work, there were six books published on journal writing,” Adams says, “and now there’s, like, 25,000.”

The first scientific study that helped popularize journaling as a mainstream form of mental health care was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999, Adams says. Two groups of rheumatoid arthritis and asthma patients were asked to do the Pennebaker method, a writing exercise in which they would write down their thoughts and feelings daily for three days. The control group wrote about neutral topics, while the other group wrote about their most stressful life events.

“In 47 percent of the cases, the doctors reported that symptoms [in the patients writing about their stress] had decreased dramatically,” Adams says. Earlier in her career, Adams also worked with patients dealing with mental health issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and other issues in a psychiatric hospital when “journaling wasn’t a thing yet.”

“What I found there was that even though journal writing was pretty new to most of them, when they wrote for even a few minutes at a time, they felt better,” she says. “They learned some coping strategies that stayed with them after they were discharged. And it was very much a revelation to me.”

However, when Adams went on to work with patients with severe trauma, she discovered that unstructured journaling could “cause patients to write themselves into traumatization.”

“They used their journals as a friend, as a companion, as confessional, as an attempt to work through the traumatic memories that they had,” Adams says. “But they reported to me in our intake interviews that they would fall off the cliff or have some sort of a deep dive into a dark space in the context of writing about their trauma. Sometimes that could be about the lack of structure, pacing, and containment.”

Adams created the Journal Ladder, a structure for therapeutic writing programs, to counteract the possible negative effects of journaling. The lowest, or beginning, rung is the most structured, giving the patient specific prompts to write on for only a few minutes at a time. As you get more comfortable with journaling, you can work your way to the top rung, which is free, unstructured writing.

There are no “rules.” You can change up your journaling routine at any time: When you write, how often, for how long is up to you.

Over the years, numerous other studies have affirmed the benefits of journaling. A 2006 paper found that journaling reduced depressive symptoms in young adults struggling with their mental health, while a 2018 study concluded that journaling about a traumatic experience for just 15 minutes for three days per week over the course of a month was associated with reduced mental distress and improved overall well-being among patients with medical conditions.

Journaling can create an almost magical alchemy for some diarists that keeps them grounded. In 2023, 37-year-old writer and performer Hunter Gardner was laid off from his tech job in New York City and unemployed for almost a year, an experience that had him feeling emotionally low. That summer, a friend invited him to join a group of comedians like himself to work through The Artist’s Way together.

“I was really surprised about how if you just sit down first thing in the morning with a blank page and a pen and just let whatever’s on your mind spill out, how comforting that can be,” Gardner says. “It really taught me a lot about how to check in with myself and some of my negative self-thinking. … It taught me how to spend time with myself.”

As part of the book’s exercises, Gardner wrote personal affirmations that included “I’m allowed to be happy as an artist” and “I know what is best for myself and my happiness.” Soon, Gardner found himself being creative in new ways and more willing to experiment.

“Even now when I journal,” he says, “and this started when I was doing The Artist’s Way, I sign every entry with, ‘I love you, Hunter.’”

How to get started journaling — and how to keep at it

As we head further into the new year, there are simple, stress-free ways you can kick-start a journaling habit. My personal tips include selecting a notebook that holds a spark for you; choose a design or color that you’re attracted to — my current journal has purple flowers with gold embossing on the cover, and I keep it on my desk at all times. Try journaling at the same time each day (or week, whatever feels attainable for you) so it becomes a habit. If free journaling feels intimidating, look up simple prompts online, buy something like the Five Minute Journal that already has prompts inside, or simply write about what you’re grateful for.

Here are some of Adams’s best journaling tips:

There are no “rules.” You can change up your journaling routine at any time: When you write, how often, for how long is up to you and dependent on what’s working for you. The only “rule” to really pay attention to is whether “you’re getting outcomes that you value,” Adams says.
There’s no significant difference in writing by hand or on a device. Whether you’re tapping away on your Notes app or writing by hand, both digital and analog journaling can help you reap the benefits. If you prefer digital journaling, you can use a stylus, a journaling app, or dictate into a transcription app.
Incorporate relaxing or satisfying rituals. Pair your writing with something you find relaxing, like a cup of coffee or tea, or meditation. “Small pleasures applied consistently help deepen and extend your writes,” Adams says.
Set some goals and use your journal to track progress. Once a month, you can use a journal to check in with your goals. You can see the progress you’ve already made, if and how you’ve stalled, and reflect on how you’re feeling. At the same time, you can make a plan for advancing your goals in the next month.

Adams herself met Julia Cameron back when The Artist’s Way first came out, and she once wrote morning pages for 17 months straight. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anything particularly complex about any of this,” Adams says, “other than the recognition that a little bit of writing done consistently can have a big impact. … The journal is so clearly the self, so the capacity for a healthy relationship with the journal is predictive of the capacity for a healthier relationship with the self.”