How to Deal with Cringe Attacks

You know, when your brain decides to sucker-punch you with *that* embarrassing memory.

*Note: I’ve been under the weather this week, so this is an updated post from a few years back that I hope you enjoy!

Oh man, the cringe attack. It strikes when we least expect it—in the shower, folding laundry, or doing something equally mindless. Out of the blue, our brains decide to sucker-punch us with a flashbulb memory of an embarrassing moment. 

My brain remembering that mortifying thing I said two decades ago.

It’s a physical experience—for me, I have to close my eyes. Clients say the same mortifying *zap* makes them swear under their breath, shake their heads like a wet dog, or yell “What was I thinking?” at the universe.

Turns out cringe attacks are super common, especially if we tend to be hard on ourselves. Our brain doesn’t let us forget when we’ve transgressed the black-and-white Inner Rulebook— “I should always be dignified,” “I should always do the right thing,” “I should always have good judgement,” “I should never make a fool out of myself”—the list goes on.

How to stop cringe attacks? (Or at least cope with them more effectively once we’ve picked ourselves off the floor?) Here are three very different approaches: front, back, and side doors:

Method #1: Give yourself a break.

Cringe attacks are a memory of doing something we consider wrong, dumb, or ridiculous. But we can’t go through life expecting to make zero mistakes, have zero lapses in judgment, or make zero stupid decisions. Forgive yourself. Have compassion for your younger self who tried to tried to dance provocatively at a party and ended up getting whispered and giggled about. Take good care of the version of you who was accidentally insensitive when your friend disclosed an illness. Forgive yourself for scoring a goal for the other team all those years ago. In short, let go of the expectation that you never do anything cringey. Give yourself permission to have a full range of human experiences, including dumb mistakes.

Method #2: Play out the whole memory.

Cringe attacks play a very short movie clip: a split second of you sneezing snot on your boss, the hush that fell over the room when you called your colleague the wrong name, your personal version of the Swingers answering machine meltdown scene. Whatever your movie clip, expand it to include before and after to give your cringeworthy moment some context.

That feeling of “what have I done?”

This comes from a technique used to treat panic disorder. Panic disorder comes with intense fear and avoidance of having another panic attack, which on one level, makes total sense—panic attacks are uncomfortable, scary, and, in public, potentially humiliating. But that means folks with panic disorder will often play out a worst-care scenario in the movie theater of their mind. Take, for example, a client of mine who couldn’t travel due to her fear of panicking. Her brain would play out a memory where she panicked and collapsed on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport.

Her brain would hit “pause” on her memory at the very worst moment of the panic attack. So we played it out. What happened next? Someone asked, “Are you ok?” Someone else sat with her until she felt better. An airport security guard asked if she needed EMS. We played out the movie until she was safe.

Use the same approach with cringe attacks. Give your scene some context. When I cringe over innocently re-introducing myself to a woman I had met before (multiple times! To the point we had exchanged phone numbers!), I try also to picture our subsequent interactions and play out the movie until I’m socially safer, which buffers the cringe.

Method #3: Tell someone who will support you.

Cringe attacks hurt because they feel mortifying, humiliating, or otherwise shameful. Shame tells you to keep it a secret. It says: never speak of this to anyone. To counter this, do the opposite of what the shame is telling you to do and tell someone non-judgmental. Telling your embarrassing story to someone who will support you, listen with empathy, or otherwise pop the shame bubble will take away its power.

I thought this was AI but my kids informed me it’s a fennec fox.

All in all, re-think cringe attacks as something that happens to everyone--you, me, and every single person reading this newsletter. Rather than setting us apart as cringey weirdos, our cringey behavior connects us to every other human on the planet, who at one time or another, have all also been cringey weirdos.

If you found this post useful, there’s a lot more in How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, coming January 2025. Pre-order today and I’ll send you a video where we walk through three of my favorite exercises from the book together. Hey, there’s a preorder button right there!

Be kind to others and yourself,