Elizabeth Rayne
– Dec 22, 2023 7:00 pm UTC
Enlarge / The invitation might be nice, but you can feel free to say no.
The month of December is packed with parties, dinners, and outings that are the source of both fun and introspection. When you receive an invitation, it’s difficult to determine whether you should attend, and declining can be daunting. An interesting psychological study suggests encouraging results for those who fear rejection this holiday season. Research finds that people might worry more than necessary about negative consequences when declining invitations. The findings may help anyone struggling with this decision to feel less overwhelmed and more empowered.
Psychologist and assistant professor Julian Givi from West Virginia University led a study on how hosts react when an invitation is declined. The results showed that hosts were not as upset as invitees feared when they couldn’t make it. Surprisingly, declining an invite did not negatively impact social lives as much as originally thought. With this realization, it becomes easier to manage social anxiety related to declining invitations and to focus on self-care during the holiday season.
So, when you receive that next invitation, consider it an act of kindness on the host’s part. It’s okay to put your well-being first and make decisions that align with your needs. After all, the spirit of the season is to enjoy time with family and friends, and that includes taking care of yourself, too. Take a deep breath, respond with honesty, and enjoy the holidays on your terms.
Why are we so nervous that declining invitations will annihilate our social lives? Appearing as if we don’t care about the host is one obvious reason. The research team also thinks there is an additional explanation behind this: we mentally exaggerate how much the inviter focuses on the rejection, and underestimate how much they consider what might be going on in our heads and in our lives. This makes us believe that there is no way the inviter will be understanding about any excuse.
All this anxiety means we often end up reluctantly dragging ourselves to a holiday movie or dinner or that infamous ugly sweater party, and saying yes to every single invite, even if it eventually leads to holiday burnout.
To determine if our fears are justified, the psychologists who ran the study focused on three things. The first was declining invitations for fun social activities, such as ice skating in the park. The second focus was how much invitees exaggerated the expected consequences of declining. Finally, the third focus was on how invitees also exaggerated how much hosts were affected by the rejection itself, as opposed to the reasons the invitee gave for turning down the invite.
There were five total experiments that assessed whether someone declining an invitation felt more anxious about it than they should have.
