“In the mind, the neural connections become stronger and cause us to dwell more on the negative aspects of that person,” says Marsden. Over time, this response puts stress on our bodies, conditioning us to be more skeptical of a person’s actions than we would be if we felt neutral about them. Stressors that trigger fight-or-flight need not be life or death, though, says Marsden: “Sadly, our body cannot tell the difference between an actual stressor (being chased by someone with a knife) and a perceived stressor (having work with someone you hate).” This is why seeing posts from your high school bully can make you feel the anxiety of being bullied all over again: your fearful associations with disliking the person trigger your own need to protect yourself. As AJ Marsden, assistant professor of Psychology at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, puts it, “our fight-or-flight response is our bodies way of dealing with a stressor.”
Our negative feelings toward someone get stronger as bad experiences with them pile up, and these negative thoughts trigger the fight-or-flight response in our bodies. This visceral, emotional reaction can spark a long-term pattern of dislike when it’s validated by action: if you perceive that someone has hurt you, your fear of them becomes rational. As Robert Sapolsky writes in “ Why Your Brain Hates Other People,” when we see someone who even looks different from us, “there is preferential activation of the amygdala,” which means the brain region associated with fear and aggression flares up. In order to understand what happens in your body when you dislike someone, you can start by trying to understand fear.
Here’s how the mind-body connection involved in disliking someone works. Indeed, dislike is a necessary survival mechanism that humans have been using to get by for centuries, way before the jungle of social media took over.
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