Most of us move through life with an invisible antenna tuned to one frequency: "What does this mean about me?" A sideways comment from a colleague, a friend who doesn't text back, a stranger's impatient sigh — our minds immediately route these signals through the self. This is the personalisation trap: the habitual, often unconscious assumption that other people's words and actions are fundamentally about us, our worth, our standing, our identity.

The trap isn't a character flaw — it's a deeply wired survival reflex. Social rejection once meant real danger, so the brain learned to monitor every interaction for threat. The problem is that in modern life this reflex fires constantly and almost always inaccurately. When we take things personally, we're not reading reality more carefully; we're projecting our own fears and self-judgements onto whatever happens to be in front of us. The first step out of the trap is simply recognising that it exists and that it distorts far more than it reveals.