and how to stop it f*cking you up

Why it feels so personal

A lot of people come to me saying the same thing in slightly different ways. “I’m really bad at taking feedback.” “Everything feels like criticism.” “Even when it’s mild, it goes straight to my chest.”

And the first thing I want to say is this. If feedback hits you like an arrow to the heart, that does not mean you are bad at it. It means you care. You’re attentive, conscientious, and probably quite invested in doing things well. In other words, your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

The problem is not that you feel it. The problem is how much power we tend to give it once it lands.

Feedback is not neutral, even though we like to pretend it is

Feedback often gets treated as neutral data, as if it arrives clean and factual, untouched by the person delivering it. But feedback is never neutral. It is shaped by mood, context, capacity, and care. What people say belongs to them first, even when it is about you.

This is especially hard if you are someone who thinks carefully before offering feedback yourself. Someone who understands the stakes. Someone who would never fire off a half-thought comment without considering the impact. Many of the people who struggle most with feedback are the ones overthinking in a world where plenty of other people are clearly doign the opposite to the point of under-caring.

So when something blunt, rushed, or oddly personal lands, it can feel shocking as well as painful. Care meets convenience. Thoughtfulness meets admin. And your body reacts fast.

Why it lands in the body before the brain

That hit people describe is not imagined. It is your nervous system reading feedback as social threat. Belonging, safety, status. The body responds before the thinking brain has had a chance to get involved.

This is not fragility, but an over-efficient protection system doing its job extremely well. The trouble starts when we treat that reaction as proof that the feedback is true, urgent, or definitive. Feeling real does not make it accurate.

The problem with giving all feedback equal power

One of the reasons feedback ends up ruling us is that we rarely question how it was gathered in the first place. We treat it as information, as if it simply exists, rather than something that has been actively designed.

But feedback is shaped by the questions we ask, the format we use, the effort required, and the emotional tone of the request. Most feedback systems prioritise speed and convenience over care. They invite quick reactions rather than thoughtful responses. People treat it like admin. And then we absorb the results as if they were carefully considered truths about our work or our worth.

That is a design problem, not a personal one.

If we are going to invite feedback, it is worth asking not just what information we want, but how the request itself is likely to be received. Is it clear what we are actually asking for. Is it accessible. Is it proportionate. Is it easy to engage with. Does it invite thoughtfulness rather than irritation.

Sometimes that means simplifying, or being explicit about what kind of feedback is actually useful. Sometimes it means making it lighter, clearer, or even a bit more playful. Not because feedback has to be fun, but because humans respond better when things feel human.

When feedback systems are poorly designed, they produce skewed results. And skewed feedback has no business carrying equal emotional weight.

Becoming an equal partner in feedback

This is where you can bring a sense of agency back in, and stop feeling like an open target.

One of the reasons feedback can feel so destabilising is that it often flows in only one direction. Someone gets to assess us, and we just take it. They get a form or a box to fill in, and we get the arrow to the chest and the internal audit.

Becoming an equal partner in feedback means remembering that if someone is allowed to judge your work, you are also allowed to assess the experience you had with them and the place that work actually holds in your life.

This is not about turning the spotlight inward and criticising yourself harder. It is about context, balance, reality checking.

It might be helpful to create your own parallel feedback form. A set of criteria you use to ground yourself before deciding how much weight to give what’s been said.

That might include whether the work was set up well, whether expectations were clear and reasonable, whether communication was good, whether there was collaboration or you were expected to carry everything, whether you were treated fairly and with respect, and whether you were paid properly and on time.

And crucially, it also includes asking how much this piece of work actually mattered to you.

Was this something you cared deeply about, or something you took on pragmatically. Did you want it to develop into further work, or was it always a one-off. Was it closely aligned with your values, or further out on the edges.

You can make this very concrete if that helps your nervous system settle. Ten criteria, each scored out of ten. You add them up.

If the total comes out at 80 or 90, then yes, that feedback probably deserves more of your attention. It comes from work that mattered to you and from a relationship that broadly met you halfway.

If it comes out at 20 out of 100, that tells you something important. Not about your worth or competence, but about the conditions under which the work happened and the place it actually holds in your life.

In that context, the feedback does not get to run the show. You are no longer submitting to it. You are in conversation with it.

Where your energy actually belongs

When you bring all of this together, the relationship, the setup, the fairness, the design of the feedback, and the meaning of the work itself, something can shift. Feedback shrinks back down to size. It becomes information rather than a verdict.

Without this kind of anchoring, feedback tends to trigger endless rumination. Replaying conversations. Rewriting yourself. Trying to feel safe again by making sense of what went wrong. That takes an extraordinary amount of energy, often in service of people or situations that do not deserve it.

When you learn to place feedback where it belongs, that energy becomes available again. You can put it into work that excites you, clients who value you, creativity, rest, repair, and momentum. Things that actually nourish you rather than drain you.

Your nervous system was trying to protect you. This is you giving it better information. Feedback does not have to rule you. And it certainly does not have to keep fucking you up.

And if you want a practical, permission-giving companion to all of this, Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fck* is still one of the best guides I know to choosing where your fucks actually go. This pastiche to the Joy of Tidying by Marie Kondo has real depth, and asa people pleaser in recovery myself with a history of thin skinnedness, it was truly eye poppingly opening and so so useful. Choose where you put your fucks wisely. It doesn’t mean you care less, just that you learn to care better.