Nobody admires all the people they’ve ever met. Most people can probably think of a few persons they don’t like. Some people, on the other hand, reach a point where they are so angered, wounded, or upset by people or events that they believe they detest everyone.

Feeling like attitude might make it difficult to go about your daily activities and engage with others. It may generate a lot of tension in your relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and other people in your life. Hate is a powerful feeling that may be harmful to your health.

This article discusses some of the reasons why you may feel like you detest everyone, how this feeling might impair your physical and mental health and some coping tactics that may be beneficial.

Reasons Why You Might Hate Everyone

Here are some of the reasons you may feel like you detest everyone:

• Stress can cause you to feel overwhelmed, frightened, impatient, or even furious. Prolonged stress can result in furious outbursts, which can grow to the point where you feel you detest everyone.

• Social anxiety: may make it difficult to engage with others and cause feelings such as worry, dread, humiliation, and sadness. In certain circumstances, persons with social anxiety may even respond with hate and hostility to events that make them uncomfortable.

• Introverted personality: While some people are extroverted and social, others prefer to be alone. Socializing with individuals beyond your personal group might be emotionally exhausting if you’re an introvert. This can often rise to anger and dislike of individuals and situations outside of your comfort zone.

• Ideological differences: Having different political, religious, cultural, or social beliefs and values as others can cause you to feel angry with, and perhaps hateful toward, others whom you feel are “against” you, says Kristen Farrell Turner, PhD, a psychologist and educator at Pritikin Longevity Center. Turner says an “us versus them” mentality can induce angry, hateful feelings.

Consequences of Hating Everyone

Many individuals feel that suppressing their emotions would make them go away, but this is not the case. Unaddressed emotions accumulate and increase over time, rather than fade.

The more powerful an emotion develops, the more physically hard it is to keep it under control. Emotions are energy in action (E-motion).

We clench our jaws, grind our teeth, strain our muscles, and ball up our fists to try to stop the motion. It’s draining.

Extreme emotions can cause our brain to release stress chemicals. When we bottle up emotions like anger, the release of stress hormones is continual, which leads to increased inflammation throughout the body and can have serious health effects over time.

Impact on Mental Health

Hatred is an intense emotion that, when contrasted to other often associated undesirable sensations such as anger or irritation, leaves little, if any, the opportunity for connectivity or empathy.

Furthermore, holding ill will toward people will deprive you of pleasurable life experiences. Hatred not only consumes a lot of cognitive and emotional energy, but it also prevents you from interacting with people and enhancing your life. — PHD KRISTEN FARRELL TURNER

Hatred may also include disgust, and if you’re disgusted with everyone, you don’t want anything to do with them. When you remove connectivity and empathy from the equation, your cognitive and emotional coping options are severely limited.

Impact on Physical Health

Hatred is an unpleasant emotion that demands a significant amount of emotional energy. People who are distressed frequently pursue harmful self-soothing habits, such as consuming comfort foods or abusing alcohol or other substances, in order to suppress and escape their misery.

These sentiments may be accompanied by a withdrawal from healthy activities such as exercising and spending time with supportive friends and family.

Assume you frequently experience the sense of hatred, which is accompanied by the sympathetic nervous system’s fight or flight reaction. In that instance, the individual may ultimately experience some of the long-term effects of chronic stress, such as systemic inflammation.

So, whether via maladaptive self-soothing to cope with the emotion of long-term sympathetic nervous system activation or through continuously experiencing hatred toward others, chronically feeling hatred toward others may be harmful to your health.

Who can you talk to about these feelings of hatred?

If you find yourself distracted with thoughts of hatred, a therapist or counselor can assist you in processing your emotions and charting a course to serenity.

Treatment often begins with an examination to better understand the nature and origin of your hate, followed by counseling to help with emotion processing and coping skills, medication to treat any biological aspects that may be contributing to the strength of sentiments, or both.

Coping Strategies

Turner proposes the following ways for dealing with feelings of hatred for everyone:

• Avoid all-or-nothing thinking: If your hatred for people stems from a disagreement with them on a particular subject, try to remember that you may disagree with others without hating them. Just because you strongly disagree with someone else’s opinions or conduct does not imply that person is inherently evil. This is known as “all or nothing thinking,” and it is unreasonable. Remind yourself that your hatred is directed at the problem, not the person.

• Avoid generalizing: If your hatred for others is directed towards a specific group of people, such as individuals of a certain race, area, or religion, your reasoning is unreasonable because you are generalizing. You are categorizing an entire group of individuals as “evil” and making conclusions about them based on a demographic feature.

• Practice empathy: Empathy and nuance are effective antidotes to illogical thinking. It’s critical to remember that no one is entirely good or entirely evil. While it is not always simple, putting oneself in someone else’s shoes may go a long way toward fostering empathy and decreasing hostility. Others, like you, have reasons for their views and conduct.

• Prioritize self-care: It is critical to prioritize your needs and care for yourself. For example, if you are stressed, you may need to make adjustments in your life to deal better. Alternatively, if you are an introvert, you may need to establish boundaries to help you feel more at ease.

• Seek therapy: Therapy might assist you in exploring your feelings and understanding why you dislike everyone. It can also help you become more sympathetic, form healthier relationships, and learn new coping strategies.