About the need to be liked by other people

once i start analysing myself to get more clarity about my actions and world around me, one thing that bubbles up from my past experiences is
I do a lot of things ( e.g. small lies, show-off ) to impress other peoples.
maybe this could be the visible symptoms of bigger personality issues.

why I feel this need to be liked if not admired by other people ?
why am I even ready to try unethical approach to get attention of people ?why I feel bad when people don’t like me ?

Dr. Roger Covin in his book The Need To Be Liked explains it in great detail, our need to be liked by other people is one of our fundamental need designed for our survival. From evolution point of view it requires for human race to live in groups and in order to join a group you need to be likeable enough. Although we came so far that in reality it is not required any more yet our brains are designed that way.

So what happens if we are not likeable or rejected ?
Our bodies are designed with a feedback system to help us understand rejection. Just like physical injury cause pain which help us understand injury and it’s intensity. In social rejection we feel sadness, fear, anxiety, depression and other emotion to help us understand whats and how much problematic cause is.

Like physical safety mechanism when we saw a threat we fight, flee or freeze. In social encounter when we anticipate ( so many times wrongly ) threat of social rejection. We feel uncomfortable ( e.g. sad, depression ) to avoid these feeling we either fight back ( e.g. overcompensating, lying ), flee ( e.g. social isolation ) or freeze ( accepting one is unlikable ).

It could be clearly understand threat anticipation is beyond our control but we can defiantly work on our threat interpretation process. A lot of time wrong threat interpretation is cause of problem and all kind of sadness can be avoided by practicing consciousness in interpretation rather than completely automatic process.

Threat interpretation is influenced majorly by our core belief about ourself. If one thinks he is likeable is going to handle threat anticipation much differently than the one who believe is faulty and we can only change our core belief by dropping our guards and trying them.

But what if cause is correct and we did a social mistake, understanding the cause can help us ease the pain and going through it rather than avoiding it. Pain is there for a reason to help us make strong just like everytime you break muscle and let it recover it gets stronger and stronger.