Rejection therapy is trending on TikTok. Here’s what experts have to say about it

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN

(CNN) — Out of the crowd, Michelle Panning picked her target, an unsuspecting man she didn’t know, and asked him an unusual question. Her hands shook as she pointed her phone camera on herself.

“Can I borrow $100, please?” she asked. “No,” he said. They both smiled and went their separate ways. Panning was not dejected. “I did it!” she told the camera as she walked away.

Panning was not really looking for $100, and it didn’t matter what the stranger’s response was. The feat was asking the question in the first place.

She did it in the name of rejection therapy, a popular trend on social media that encourages people to ask strangers odd requests that will most likely get a “no” in response. The point is to face the initial fear that may arise in anticipation of a likely rejection or another negative reaction.

It’s like a form of exposure therapy, in which you gradually expose yourself to a situation you fear, and it could be a good exercise for someone with lower levels of anxiety looking to feel a little more comfortable with rejection, said Dr. Taylor Wilmer, a board-certified licensed clinical psychologist based in Virginia who specializes in exposure therapy.

But there are also precautions to keep in mind to make sure the interactions are done safely, added Wilmer, who is the director of clinical product strategy at InStride Health and a board member for the National Social Anxiety Center.

Here’s what Wilmer and other experts have to say about this social media trend and how to ensure these challenges are beneficial and not harmful.

Asking to get rejected

Panning, who coaches women on love, sex and relationships and often posts her advice on social media, heard of the trend when she came across a TEDx talk featuring Jia Jiang. Jiang had blogged about himself performing rejection therapy for 100 days after being inspired by a card game Canadian entrepreneur Jason Comey originally developed.

After watching Jiang’s TEDx presentation from May 2015, Panning was inspired to show others, and herself, that rejection is not as scary as it can seem.

For 30 days this summer, Panning did a daily challenge on her pursuit of rejection and posted it to TikTok. She asked strangers for hugs, clothing stores if she could be a live mannequin, a mattress store if she could take a nap in a display bed and a sandwich shop if she could go behind the counter to make her own sandwich.

At the beginning of the challenge Panning felt she had to hype herself up and brace herself for the answer she thought would come. But by the end of the 30 days, she said she felt more comfortable with approaching and asking strangers questions.

And while many of her requests resulted in rejection, Panning said she was surprised to find that sometimes strangers would instead say yes. “I was like, ‘Wow, how much are we leaving on the table by simply not asking, because we’re afraid of being rejected?’” Panning said.

Jiang recently told CNN the art of the challenge is to ensure that both people are having fun and that the other person does not feel pressured into giving a specific answer to an odd request.

“I give myself some boundaries. … I wouldn’t ask people to do something that I wouldn’t want to do myself,” Jiang said. “I set up those guidelines for me to not get stressed out and to make the other person at ease. But I don’t care about if I get a yes or no. If I get a yes, great, I do it. If I get a no, awesome.”

The challenge could be a helpful way to get to know oneself a little better and understand how uncomfortable emotions, such as anxiety, can arise in certain situations, said Jourdan Travers, a psychotherapist based in New Jersey and founder of Awake Therapy.

But if someone experiences severe anxiety and has a hard time completing smaller asks, Travers suggests working with a mental health professional instead of forcing yourself to complete the social media challenge.

How to face the fear of getting rejected

Exposure therapy can help people practice managing uncomfortable feelings by exposing them to more scenarios where anxiety tends to show up, Travers said. When a person instead chooses to avoid situations that create anxiety, it can make those feelings stronger and can start to dictate how someone lives, she added.

“Feeling nervous about rejection, and feeling anxiety or feeling fear in general, are totally normal human experiences. … Those emotions in sort of small, manageable doses actually help to keep us safe,” Wilmer said. “It’s just when that fear or anxiety gets so big that it gets in the way of us living our lives and doing the things that we want to do, then it can be helpful to get some outside support.”

It is important to keep in mind that the rejection therapy challenges on social media will elicit a different type of feeling than the emotions that can naturally come up when experiencing rejection from a job application or someone you’re romantically interested in, Travers said.

“From not getting what you want, that rejection hurts, and it stings,” she said, “and I would say that it feels different than the rejection you’re going to feel when you can kind of anticipate the response is going to be a no.”

This self-help trend can be useful in showing people that they can handle rejection and “that things are not going to be as bad as our anxious brains tell us,” Wilmer said.

Sometimes, asking an odd request may surprise you with how many times people will say yes instead of no. And even in the TikTok videos in which someone faces rejection from a challenge, most of the time the stranger doing the rejection is fairly nice about it, she added.

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