ROSEMARY: The following is an excerpt from Time.com's Helthland website.
Lab participants who watch as photos of them are rejected — even if they know the rejection is being done by a computer — experience not just emotional but physical distress. Your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, fluctuate when you think you're being rejected. It turns out that all of us are the nerdy kids on Glee: pathetic and weak when Sue Sylvester comes around, even if we know she's a robot dressed in a sweatsuit.
This week a new study shows that these physical effects go further: rejection actually stops your heart. Thus the clever title of the new Psychological Science paper: "The Heartbrake of Social Rejection." The authors of the study — a three-member group led by a University of Amsterdam psychologist named Bregtje Gunther Moor — measured beat-by-beat heart rate changes in 22 students as they received either rejection or acceptance of portrait photos they had submitted. When hooked up to electrocardiogram monitors, the students reliably showed a skip in their hearts when they thought they had been rejected by someone shown their photos.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/29/heartbrake-how-rejection-literally-stops-your-heart/?xid=aol-direct#ixzz10yUslWtm
ROSEMARY: I hope they didn't spend too much on this study.
I was fortunate and only got a few rejections before my current book deal, so I don't know how I'd have handled the 36 or so "no-thank-yous" James Patterson supposedly got before his first book was accepted for publication. But the reality is, as writers, most of us experience rejection on a regular basis - agents, editors and readers make their choices every day and frequently - gasp - they may reject us. There's not much I can do about it if an editor is looking for the next PEN or Booker Prize winner (I write genre fiction.) Or a reader is in the mood for a vampire book (I write traditional mysteries.)
There are plenty of best-selling books or enormously popular movies and television shows that I don't particularly love. And that's what I tell myself every time I'm on the receiving end of a rejection. Hey, not everyone is going to love you. Chaque a son gout. Jan, did I get that right?
What do you tell yourself?
