How to cope with the effects of gossip on your mental health
What are gossip and rumors?
Gossip and rumors always start with either misheard information or with someone that purposefully started it. They generally are about the personal lives of people. It tends to hinder them in their social life or their personal relationships with people. When they are purposefully started it is because of jealousy or because they want people to stop talking about them so they divert the attention to someone else.
Why do people tend to spread them?
Rumors are something that people tend to spread when there is uncertainty in a situation. People tend to always want to know what is going in on in other people’s lives sometimes to escape their problems and sometimes to put another person down.
Sometimes rumors are spread naturally and unintentionally, maybe you heard something about someone and another person asks you so you tell them what you have heard but without the intention of hurting someone. Talking about gossip and other people’s lives can make some people feel more included in a group. Gossip can also work as a form of entertainment to your brain.
How do they affect your mental health?
Gossip always has a form of being negative but it is worse when the rumor is about you and especially when it is incorrect. It can bring your social life down and even your mental health. Making people look differently at you and even change in their mind their idea of who you are. It can be embarrassing and degrading especially because bad rumors normally have something to do with your love life or career.
It has happened to me that someone made up a rumor about my relationship because they were drunk. I was seriously concerned because at the time my partner was out of town. I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. People assumed stuff and judged me and even blamed me on the rumor.
Some people even came to say that “rumors start because of something” and that it was probably true. This affected my relationship with my friends and my partner but it made me learn who to trust. It also taught me how to deal with these types of situations and why keeping stuff more private is important because if not the information can be altered.
What can you do to cope?
To cope with the feeling of helplessness you can meditate on what this experience is going to bring to you. You can process your feeling in a journal and try to express your truth. Ask yourself why is it important to you what people think about you or your life. If you keep asking this question after each time you answer it you will come to the deepest meaning of why you really care.
From there you will be able to see that it is truly not that important. You should be able to live your life free of care or judgment. This will not only bring you peace but also confidence. Talking about confidence another way to cope and to get through those feelings is knowing who you are. When you know who you are and you know your truth you are less likely to doubt yourself and feel bad about something happening. It is also important to know who to trust.
If you go around telling people that you don’t trust something about your life you can not make sure that they are not going to go tell someone else. They might change the information for their benefit or by accident. So knowing your people is a preventive measure to avoid certain rumors of modified information.
