Stop apologising for things nobody said were wrong

Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling completely fine, then later started wondering whether something you said came across badly?

Maybe you made a comment that seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now you’re thinking, “Did that sound rude?” or “What if they thought I meant something else?” Then you replay it. You remember exactly how you said it and you think about their expression. You start wondering whether they seemed slightly quieter afterwards. And suddenly you’re considering sending a message to explain yourself or apologise, just in case. The problem is that feeling worried about how you came across doesn’t necessarily mean you actually came across badly.

There’s something psychologists call post-event processing, where we go back over a social interaction afterwards and analyse what happened. It’s been studied in people with social anxiety, and research has found that repeatedly reviewing an interaction may contribute to remembering more negative information about how we behaved. So going over the conversation again and again doesn’t necessarily make our interpretation more accurate. Sometimes it can make us feel even less sure of ourselves.

So if you're wishing you could go back in time and change a situation, try and look at it another way. Ask yourself why you think what you said was rude. Did the other person actually react badly? Did they say something was wrong? Or have you started trying to work out what they might be thinking? You can also imagine somebody else saying exactly what you said. Would you honestly think they were being insensitive? Or would you hardly give it a second thought?

If you really think you may have said something that could be interpreted badly, you don’t have to ignore that. You could ask someone you trust for a second opinion, or clear it up with the person if you feel there’s a real reason to.

But it’s also worth trying to understand why you want to apologise. Sometimes it’s because we’ve realised we could have hurt someone and we want to put that right. Sometimes it’s because we feel uncomfortable not knowing what someone thinks of us, and apologising feels like a way of making sure they don’t dislike us. That’s particularly easy if you’re someone who cares a lot about getting along with people. You probably don’t want to be insensitive, and the idea that someone might think badly of you can feel uncomfortable.

But as much as we'd like to be able to read other people's minds, you can’t know what someone is thinking unless they tell you. And in many cases, they may not be thinking about what you said at all. They might have moved on with their day while you’re still replaying a conversation they barely remember.

So before you create a problem you then feel responsible for fixing, come back to what you actually know. You can’t control exactly how everybody sees you, and you probably don’t need to.