You feel it when others are invited to a meeting you want to attend, but you’re not. When others get a chance to speak, but you don’t. Even when someone acknowledges others with a smile or “Good morning!”, but not you.
These everyday slings and arrows in the workplace, real or imagined, intentional or accidental, are a major source of office politics, gossip, and bad feelings.
What can you do?
The Cyberball paradigm
The pain is quite real, at least as measured by neuroimaging studies. In a series of experiments at Purdue University, for example, they had participants play a virtual ball-tossing game called “CyberBall” with what they believed to be two other players but which were in reality part of the software. The players tossed the ball to each other for several rounds, and gradually the human player was excluded and stopped having the ball tossed to them.
A pattern of activations very similar to those found in studies of physical pain emerged during social exclusion, providing evidence that the experience and regulation of social and physical pain share a common neuroanatomical basis.
Ouch. But why? Why would our brains subject us to pain for such a minor event?
Because of the importance of social bonds for the survival of most mammalian species, the social attachment system may have adopted the neural computations of the ACC, involved in pain and conflict detection processes, to promote the goal of social connectedness.
This painful feeling isn’t limited to the research lab and video games. “Social exclusion” is experienced by babies during playtime; by teens when their messages are left unread or not replied to; by adults at work and a wide range of other social situations when they feel “not seen.” We may well experience this pain hundreds of times each day.
A possible remedy
There is no real “cure.” The number of signals that humans exchange is extraordinary, and how we interpret any given signal can vary wildly depending on our past experiences and environment. Our reactions are wired too deep in our brains for most of us to control.
What can help, though, and what we do have control over, is the purposeful development of feelings of inclusion.
You don’t have to wait for a big corporate program or for a crisis to bring people together. You can start with a small group, as I’ve seen in WOL Circles when people post feedback about their experience. As much as they may join a Circle to accomplish a goal or build their network, what they tend to value most is the feeling of being connected with others, of feeling seen and included.
“We started as strangers and now we’re friends.”
“We inspired each other.”
“We supported, helped, and cared for each other.”
“I learned you will never walk alone.”
What this shows me is that, no matter what social environment you’re currently in, you can create your own “social connectedness” that the researchers wrote about and feel good as you do it.
If there is a prescription for feeling better at work, the ingredients are kindness, generosity, and the development of trusted relationships. Those are things that anyone, with practice, can cultivate and experience for themselves.
