When you’re listening to someone give you criticism, delving more deeply into feelings is often a really bad move. It can make the criticism last longer and feel worse.

Neurologists know why. The older part of our brain, the brain stem, rules our most basic human drives (e.g., fight, flight, food, and fornication). If this area is highly activated, other, more evolved areas of the brain will take a back seat. Simply put, feelings are stronger than thoughts. You aren’t going to conduct higher-level reasoning when you’re in fight-or-flight mode.

That’s why, when we receive criticism (or most bad news in general), focusing on our feelings is actually stimulating the exact wrong area of the brain. It’s reinforcing the older brain stem (sometimes called the lizard brain), and it prevents us from accessing the more mammalian areas of the brain, where we do all our best higher-level thinking.

So, when we’re listening to personal criticism, we need to slow our brain down, and rather than dwelling on our feelings, we need to focus on less emotional issues, like facts. In neurochemical terms, it’s about moving from adrenalin (tied to fight or flight) to oxytocin production, which triggers a more relaxed, supported, state—a “humanized” state.

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