Nastiness has a way of hanging around long after the person who was nasty has forgotten you even exist. So why do you end up carrying it, and what would it take to finally put it down? Episode 358 of Let’s Talk About Mental Health explores why other people’s nastiness lingers and how to stop it from ruining your day. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

How many hours of your life have you handed over to other people’s nastiness without realising it? From rude people in public to mean comments online, the moment itself is usually over fast… but the damage can follow you home, lingering into your evening and sometimes all the way to bedtime. Most people assume the only answer is growing a thicker skin or learning not to care. It isn’t, and what actually works is far more freeing. This week on the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m talking about why nastiness affects you the way it does and how to stop it from taking more than its share of your life so that you get your headspace and your peace of mind back without having to toughen up or pretend it didn’t hurt.

👉 Ready to discover how to stop other people’s nastiness ruining your day? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Someone’s nastiness can last a few seconds and still take over your whole day… and once you know why, you can stop handing it any more of your headspace. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

Why other people’s nastiness gets under your skin

Why does other people’s nastiness get under your skin?

When someone’s rude, or snide, or just plain nasty for a few seconds, they seem to just move on with their day… while you end up having to carry it for the rest of yours; feeling terrible, or maybe even rehearsing the perfect comeback that you’ll never get to deliver.

Look, that does not mean that you’re weak or too sensitive. There’s a very real reason why nastiness sticks like it does… and once you understand it, you can stop handing your peace of mind to someone who’s already moved on.

So, let’s talk about… why nastiness can ruin your day.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you understand and improve your mental wellbeing.

This season I’m talking about different aspects of protecting your peace, and last week I said that doing it is a lot more like a filter than a fortress. This episode is about what to do when something nasty slips through that filter. And let’s be honest… there’s a lot more nastiness around at the moment: comment sections, car parks, the way people speak to others behind the service counter. And then of course there’s politics, which has never exactly been a love in but now it’s turned into a bit of a free-for-all of vileness and toxicity… so much so that at times it can make the Real Housewives look like a children’s story.

Nastiness seems to be pretty hard to avoid these days, and so before we go any further there’s one thing I want you to know straight up: getting stung by someone’s nastiness isn’t a sign that their opinion matters to you.

Research has found that being snubbed stings even when it comes from people that you can’t stand; in other words, that first emotional hit happens before logic has a chance to even get its shoes on. The hurt is automatic, but the hours and hours that it hangs around for are not… because what happens after the emotional hit is a very different story, and there’s one specific moment where you get to take your day back and your power back. And I’m going to show you exactly where that moment is a little bit later in the episode.

But first, we need to talk about…

What everyday nastiness really looks like

Alright, so I mentioned before that things often feel nastier out there at the moment, and something happened recently that made me stop and think about this stuff.

So I was on a domestic flight not long ago, and I was a bit taken aback by the really detailed announcement about “please treat the crew and your fellow passengers respectfully.” As someone who spent 20-odd years working in customer service industries, I was kind of stunned that an airline felt the need to spell that out to grown adults… and on both legs of my flight, so it wasn’t a one-off. And look, no offence here, but we weren’t even on a budget carrier! It was a full service one. That really says something about where we’re at as a society, because when basic decency needs its own safety briefing something has definitely shifted.

But this is not an episode about fixing the world; I can’t do that, and neither can you… and anyone who says they can is probably trying to sell you something. We can certainly contribute towards fixing it, but we can’t do it on our own. This episode is about you, and what happens inside you when that kind of nastiness lands on your doorstep… or in your face.

So let’s get really clear about what we’re actually talking about here, because ‘rudeness’ and ‘nastiness’ aren’t the same thing. Rudeness is careless. Nastiness is aimed.

Rudeness is the person who lets the door swing shut in your face, or who stays on their phone the whole time that you’re serving them, or who can’t quite manage to say thank you. It’s irritating, but you can usually file it under, “Well, I guess someone’s having a bad morning,” and then just get on with your life. Nastiness, on the other hand, is intentional. It’s the cutting little remarks, the snide tone dripping with contempt, the comment that’s designed to put you in your place and make you feel small.

And it turns up everywhere. A colleague somehow makes “great idea” sound like an insult. A fellow driver leans on their horn and mouths something vile at you through the windscreen. A family member gets a dig in at you over dinner, and then maybe says, “Ooh, I’m only joking!” the second that you react. Sometimes it’s words; sometimes it’s an eye roll, or a loud sigh, or someone looking straight through you like you’re not even there.

And you know exactly how it feels to be on the receiving end of it: there’s that flash of heat in your face, and that sort of “Did that really just happen?!” moment. And then that moment’s over, but somehow it doesn’t actually go anywhere. Maybe you go back and reread a comment that someone made, as if it might potentially say something different the fourth time you read it. You know, you tell one person about it, then another, and then every time you get wound up all over again. You come up with the perfect reply while you’re relaxing and watching TV. I even have it happen to me sometimes; you know, someone leaves a particularly nasty comment on one of my episodes and it gets stuck in my head.

And then there’s also the second emotional hit that you get after the initial one, the thing that nobody really talks about: it’s the being annoyed at yourself for being annoyed. That sort of thought process of, “Well, why do I even care what some random person thinks?” It’s a bit like getting kicked and then telling yourself off for limping afterwards.

To make things even more confusing, the emotional reaction to nastiness doesn’t land the exact same way every single time. Some days a nasty comment is like water off a duck’s back; other days, the exact same thing will get right under your skin and it will stay there. A lot of that stuff comes down to how much else you’re already carrying at that particular moment… which is exactly why one bad moment is a terrible way to measure how sensitive you are or are not.

Because that’s the biggest misunderstanding of all of this: most people assume that if something this small rattles them or gets under their skin, then they must just be too sensitive, or too soft, or they’re just not coping. Honestly, if you were completely unaffected when people were nasty to you, I’d be more worried about you, not less! Being rattled by nastiness doesn’t make you fragile. It makes you human; I mean, this is poor behaviour we’re talking about!

And so if part of you is also wondering whether or not everyone has just gotten meaner lately… I mean, you’re not completely imagining it; let’s be real! And there’s a surprising reason why it can feel that way, which I am going to come back to in a moment.

But before that, there’s a bigger question that we need to answer: how does something that lasts for a few seconds manage to cost you hours and hours of your head space? That’s actually where things get really interesting.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about…

Why nastiness sticks around long after it’s over

Alright… brace yourself for my regular dose of, “Ooh, let’s nerd out about the way the brain works,” right?! Because not only is this stuff fun for me, since I love talking about this topic, it’s really helpful for you to understand the bigger picture of why your brain does the things that it does.

Your brain is constantly keeping track of where you stand with other people. It’s a really old piece of wiring; for most of our history, being looked down on or pushed out by the people around you wasn’t just a little bit unpleasant… it could genuinely put your life at serious risk. Rejection was potentially fatal. And so when someone is nasty to you, your brain does not file it as “a mildly irritating social moment.” It still reads it as a hit to your social standing, and it considers that a potential threat to your survival. And so your brain reacts the way that it’s built to react to any threat: fast and loud, and reacting before logic even remotely gets a look in at what’s happening. It’s all about emotion.

And then there’s the weight that your brain gives things. Research going back decades has found that bad experiences carry more weight than good ones, and bad impressions form much faster and are harder to shift. Now, I covered this back in Episode 192, about the negativity bias, and it explains a lot here: it’s why the brain reacts to negativity so strongly, because one nasty moment can outweigh 10 decent ones.

So the lovely barista who remembered your order, or the neighbour who waved hello, or the colleague who covered for you… none of them get a second thought. But the one who was nasty to you gets your mind’s attention for the whole evening. That is not you being weak or melodramatic. The scales were tipped towards the negative before you even walked out the door in the morning, because your mind tends to pay more attention to the negative than the positive by default.

And this is where those seconds of something happening begin to turn into hours of your brain going over it. Your brain has registered a threat to your standing, and so it wants to do something about it; it wants to answer back, to set the record straight, to win the argument or win the point. Except the moment’s gone, and so is the other person. So your brain does the next best thing, and it starts rehearsing your comeback. It rehearses the withering look you’re going to give them, the version where you come out on top. You’re basically preparing for a rematch that’s probably never going to happen… especially because the other person quite likely has no idea there even was a fight.

The catch is that every rehearsal sets off the same reaction in you: your jaw tightens, your heart races, you get that flash of heat all over again. It happened once, but you live it a dozen times. And on top of that every time you retell the story, either to yourself or to other people, you’re hitting replay on the whole thing… usually with a fresh round of outrage thrown in at no extra charge.

Now remember when I asked earlier whether or not everyone’s just become meaner lately? Here’s the surprising bit. Researchers studying rudeness found that experiencing it, or even just watching it happen to someone else, primes you to notice more of it. So people start reading neutral things as being rude, and then responded more rudely themselves. So… after one nasty encounter, the world genuinely does look nastier and you’re more likely to pass a bit of it on to the next person that you deal with. Things out there may well have gotten worse, but carrying nastiness around makes them look and feel even worse than they actually are.

And that’s the real cost of all of this. It is not the comment itself, which was over in a matter of moments, but it’s the hours and hours of your mood, your energy, and your attention that follow it. It’s the person who then cops your snippy reply that afternoon because you’re still carrying it, and usually they did nothing to deserve it. And so all of that emotional energy goes towards someone who isn’t invested in you in the slightest, someone who probably couldn’t pick you out of a lineup by dinnertime; honestly… if they knew how much airtime they were getting in your head, they’d be asking for an executive producer credit.

Now I wanted to talk about this topic now because, as we’ve already covered, the nastiness out there isn’t going anywhere, and none of us can directly control that. But what you can control is how much of your life it gets… and by extension, how much of you you contribute to that.

So I want you to be honest with yourself for a moment, right? Think about the last time that someone was nasty to you. How long did the actual moment of nastiness last? And then how long did you carry it around for afterwards? Because the gap between those two answers is where you get your day back… not to mention your peace of mind.

And that is exactly what we’re going to get into right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! So now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of this episode, and let’s talk about…

How to deal with nastiness

Alright. So let’s talk through things you can do after a specific instance where someone’s just been nasty and you can feel it starting to take over, as well as some longer term stuff; the stuff that makes you less of a landing place for nastiness over time. Please don’t try to do all of these at once; just pick one, maybe two, and just start there. OK. So, first…

Notice when the replay starts.

Earlier I said that there’s one specific moment where you get to take your day back, and this is it. You can’t stop the sting; that bit happens automatically, and it happens whether or not the person deserves your attention. But the first time your mind goes back over it, that’s a totally different story… because that’s the moment that the seconds start turning into hours. So your job is simply to catch it. So maybe it’s an hour after a stranger just mouthed off at you in a car park; maybe it’s that evening, after a relative got a dig in at you at a birthday lunch. Whenever it happens and you notice yourself going back over it, say to yourself clearly: “I am doing it again.” That’s it. Clear and simple. You’re not trying to stop the feeling, or argue yourself out of it, and you’re not judging yourself for it; you are just noticing that you have picked it back up… because you can’t put down what you don’t notice you’re holding. Next…

Drop the comeback.

Once you’ve caught yourself replaying it, the next thing to watch for is the rehearsal: the perfect reply to the rude person at the checkout, or the cutting line that you’re going to deliver to the colleague who made a snide remark in front of your manager. And look, I get the instinct to do this; don’t get me wrong, some of those lines are genuinely brilliant… I have written some absolute crackers in my head over the years, and not one of them has ever been heard by another living soul, quite sadly! So… just ask yourself one simple question here: will this person ever actually hear this? If the answer is no, then the draft goes in the bin… because you’re rehearsing it for an audience of nobody, and every rehearsal costs you. Now… if the answer is yes, they will hear it, because you know you’ll see someone again, that’s a different situation and Episode 325 about dealing with difficult people will help you handle it properly. Either way, the imaginary version does not get any more of your headspace. Next…

Check for anything worth keeping, then close it.

This one might surprise you, but sometimes there’s a grain of truth tucked inside the nastiness. Someone yells, “Learn to drive!” and if you’re really honest with yourself, you did drift a bit into their lane. A family member makes a harsh comment that’s delivered horribly, but there is one fair point buried deep in there somewhere. Part of why it keeps niggling away at you is that little bit of truth sitting there unprocessed. So once you’ve calmed down, not in the heat of it but once you’ve calmed down, ask yourself, just once: Is there anything in this I’d actually want to act on? If there is, write it down in your own words minus their tone and attitude and decide what you’ll do about it. And if there isn’t, and most of the time there won’t be, then you’re done. Case closed. Nothing left to argue about. And by the way: if criticism in general is something you tend to struggle with, Episode 284 about dealing with criticism goes much deeper into that. Next…

Decide what their opinion is worth.

Earlier I mentioned research about how being snubbed by people that you can’t stand still stings you, and that is exactly why advice like “just don’t let it bother you” is completely useless. Of course it’s going to bother you! That part isn’t up for negotiation. But how long it gets to bother you? That absolutely is. Think about who this person actually is. Someone who chooses to be nasty to a stranger, or to tear down a family member for sport, is giving you a crystal clear example of exactly who you don’t want to be. So why would you hand that person a place in your mind? If they’re not going to show you respect, why would you respect their opinion? And honestly, who cares what their problem is? Now, I’m not suggesting that you should hate them. Contempt just keeps you completely tied to someone just as much as hurt does. This is about more of a shrug: “That’s not someone whose opinion I value. I’m moving on.” Right? Whether it’s an anonymous troll or a relative whose values you don’t share, their opinion only carries the weight that you give it. Next…

Retell the whole day, not just the worst bit.

Talking about things can absolutely help. It’s one of the things I say in this show all the time; it’s why it’s called ‘Let’s Talk About Mental Health’! Telling someone you trust once so that you feel heard, that’s great. But telling it five times to five different people until it’s the main event of your week? That’s just hitting replay with an audience… and every retelling is going to wind you up all over again. So tell it once for support, not over and over for agreement. And when you do tell it, tell the whole day. Think about the barista who remembered your order, the neighbour who waved, the colleague who covered for you. They were part of that day too. If you only ever tell the story of the person who was nasty, you’re giving them top billing in a day they barely showed up for. Next…

Cut down the nastiness you consume.

And this is a longer term recommendation. That rudeness research I mentioned earlier found something else as well: it wasn’t only experiencing rudeness that had an effect; just watching it happen to someone else did as well. And that means that if you spend your downtime scrolling through comment sections, reading pile-ons online, or watching people tear strips off each other, you’re basically marinating in nastiness; you’re walking into your day already primed to spot nastiness, and already a bit more likely to dish some of it out. I’m not saying that you have to switch off from the world completely, but notice which feeds and shows and sites leave you feeling a little bit grubby in your soul afterwards, and cut back on those. You know, I keep mentioning the Housewives… I love watching the Real Housewives of Dubai, but I haven’t even finished season two because it just makes my soul feel dirty. Protect your peace from the nastiness you choose, not just the nastiness that finds its way to you. Next…

Learn which jabs stick and why.

Not all nastiness makes you feel the same way. Some comments slide straight off you, and others hang around for days or weeks. So over the next two or three weeks, keep a quick note of any that stuck around for the longest time and what they were actually about. Was it your looks? Your competence? Being ignored or dismissed? Usually you’ll start to see a theme for you over time, and that theme is pointing straight at a sore spot. A dig about your appearance stings for days because part of you already worries about it. A jab at your competence lingers because it’s poking at something you’re unsure of. Now, none of that is bad news; it just tells you exactly where you need to put your energy, whether that’s working on it yourself or with a counsellor or coach. Because the stronger that spot gets, the less any passing stranger’s nastiness can affect it. Next…

Don’t pass it on.

And this one matters for everyone else in your life. When you’re carrying around your emotions about someone’s nastiness, it often tends to leak; you know, your partner or your kids get the ‘short fuse’ version of you that night because a stranger was vile to you in the afternoon. Or maybe a shop assistant gets a much sharper tone from you than they deserved, because you’re still pissed off about an email that you received earlier. Rudeness spreads, and anyone can be a carrier. So after you take a hit, notice when your fuse is shorter than usual. And if it slips out, which it will sometimes because you’re only human, just repair it quickly: “Sorry, that wasn’t about you.” Five words, and the chain of nastiness stops with you. Because nothing changes if nothing changes. If you keep carrying nastiness around and handing it on deliberately or just subconsciously, you become one more link in the same chain that made you feel like rubbish in the first place… and you don’t have to be. Let the nastiness stop with you.

So those are the tips, and these aren’t just for the bad days; practicing them when nobody’s being nasty to you is exactly what makes the next time easier to deal with. You don’t need to do all of them all at once either; pick one, and start there. You’ll find all of them in the episode’s transcript at ltamh.com/episodes or it’s linked in the description.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Someone else’s nastiness usually lasts a few seconds, and being stung by it is completely natural. But the hours that follow are yours to decide on… and that’s exactly where you get your peace of mind back.

So, who’s had more of your headspace lately than they ever deserved?

Because when you boil it all down, nastiness may get the moment… but you decide whether it gets your whole day.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by Marcus Aurelius, and it is:

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.

Marcus Aurelius

Let me repeat that.

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.

Alright. That’s nearly it for this week.

Registrations are now open for my Protecting Your Peace on Purpose coaching program until January 17, 2027, unless filled earlier. Find out more at the link in the description or head to: ltamh.com/programs. Spots are strictly limited, so keep an eye out for details of future groups if you miss out.

My Patreon supporters get a discount on the program, as well as weekly early access to my podcast, so consider becoming a supporter. You can also check out my book Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck for more practical advice for better mental health. They’re all linked in the description.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Next week I’ll be talking about avoiding the things that need to be addressed. In the meantime, check out my episode about why protecting your peace isn’t optional; it’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.