Feeling Like a Loser Affects You Physically

Adults know high schoolers don't know it all, but there's one thing teens are more acutely aware of than even the savviest grownups: popularity. Years after we leave school, even when we convince ourselves that we've transformed from awkward caterpillars to graceful butterflies, the effects of those years can linger. And sometimes the things we learned from those rough periods can even make us better.

Few people are better educated in the effect that popularity has on us than Mitch Prinstein, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prinstein is also the author of a new book, Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World.

First, he says, it's important to understand what being "popular" actually means. Prinstein makes the distinction between likability—how much other people like us—and status, which is tied to social power. (Think of the "in" crowd in every single teen movie ever made). What makes someone popular on the status side can vary a lot between communities—at an all boys' school it can come down to physical size, or in a small religious town it can depend on how often your parents go to church. "It's specific to unique cultural factors, though there are some universals," he says. Because of the order in which their brains mature, teens are sharply attuned to status, so it's often the thing kids remember most as they mature into adults. No matter how long ago you graduated, you could probably name some of the popular kids from your high school right now.

Being unpopular can look similar on both of these scales. Again, there are a few universals—disruptive and aggressive behavior is a surefire way to put yourself at the bottom of the rankings in both likability and status. Looking different in some way will also, unfortunately, put you down there, Prinstein says. If we return to the high school movie trope, the stereotypical nerd can be down here, but often his or her outcomes will be different—more on that later.

No matter the reason for their unpopularity, teens lacking in likability and status will start to fall behind pretty quickly on some skills their peers are rapidly honing. "Having crushes, going on dates, learning to engage in those behaviors—they miss that. They're lagging behind. They have missed the window for learning those preliminary relationship skills when everyone expects you have to acquired them," Prinstein says.

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Through no fault of their own, kids who lack those abilities can seem more delayed, making them more prone to rejection by their savvier peers. For many, a sensitivity to rejection can scar them for life, their negativity about others snowballing into more missed experiences and continued ostracism. "It can truly change the course of someone's life," Prinstein says. "That's just a horrible way to live life, to forever anticipate these kinds of negative social experiences."

The effects of unpopularity are clearly psychological, and can be long-lasting. But they're also physical. "When you experience unpopularity, your body responds in one of the most dramatic ways possible: The brain registers that social slight as pain," Prinstein says. It's not quite the same as physical pain, but studies have shown the two types are somewhat similar in the brain. When it registers pain, the brain sends signals throughout the body that trigger a fight or flight response, which has downstream effects on DNA, Prinstein says.

Our body responds to unpopularity as a serious threat, and prepares the body to heal from impending attack by activating an inflammatory response. If this continues over a long period of time, this inflammation can contribute to the development to a number of health conditions, from depression to cancer. These effects can be hard to shake, even years after high school.

But not every unpopular teen is doomed to a life of slighted feelings and chronic disease. Intelligent kids, those stereotypical high school nerds, often fare very differently, Prinstein says—their status drops in high school because they used to be the high-achieving teachers' pets, which becomes distinctly not cool basically overnight. High school can be rough for these kids, Prinstein found in a 2002 study (participants were asked if they identify with the "Populars, Jocks, Brains, Burnouts, Non-Conformists, and Average crowds").

But as they move to the next stage of their education, the nerds find others like them, and the likable ones gain popularity just as quickly as they lost it a few years before. Though some continue on with scars from their high school years, their skills tend to be those rewarded by society at large. And that's how you get that phenomenon that we all picture at our high school reunion—losers in high school who become wildly successful adults.

Prinstein has found that people who are likable, no matter how popular they were in high school, go on to be more successful (better jobs, more likely to be promoted, better salaries) than people who simply care about status. "High status people don't necessarily do as well. They have more volatility in their occupational path," he says.

Unpopularity, or even just thinking you're unpopular, can create a filter on how a person experiences and moves through the world, Prinstein says. But popularity does that, too—it can make people assume that things are better than they really are. The filter that popularity creates can be more detrimental later in life. "People who are less popular are more empathic and can respond quickly to possible danger. That can hurt someone who is popular and who doesn't pick up on that—there are some contexts in which you want to be sensitive," Prinstein says, such as noticing when a romantic partner is feeling upset, or tailoring a sales pitch based on a client's emotion. Being more sensitive can even help you be a better parent.

The difference between unpopular kids that don't end up faring well in life and those that do is how they choose to confront their past experiences, Prinstein says. "As simplistic as it sounds, it's important for people to recognize where these patterns of behavior are coming from," he says. "Some people will say, 'Oh [that unpopular kid] is not me anymore, I feel so different now.' And it's just not true—we have scientific evidence that says this is a part of you, it's affecting you today. It's not something you can say never happened."

That could mean spending some time on a therapist's couch, or simply acknowledging to yourself that these experiences have shaped you. "Just recognizing you have that filter on literally makes you see things that weren't there before, it allows you to entertain new possible interpretations for what's happening around you," Prinstein says. The same way that pessimism based on past experiences can snowball in a person's mind and color all experiences, so too can optimism.

Prinstein has more questions about how social media affects popularity and our feelings about it—it's not just providing a new platform for all our old types of interactions, he says, but he suspects that social media is changing our interactions—and how we view popularity—altogether.

His advice to adolescents who might be coping with questions of popularity right now? Prinstein, who as a teen was a "geeky nerd" himself, understands the limitations of simply telling high schoolers that things will get better. He wants to show them the evidence that this is the case. "Kids' brains are so designed to care about status that I think I would want to explain to them why the status that they so crave, and desperately feel they don't have, is actually bad in long run." Read This Next: Here's What We Know About What Weed Does to Teens