why do I overreact to small criticisms?
When a small criticism lands like a verdict on your worth as a person, the problem is almost never the criticism itself.
The Brain Keeps Score
Your nervous system does not measure criticism by the size of the comment. It measures it against a running ledger of every similar moment you have survived. So when someone says your email was too long or your parking was off, the reaction you feel is not to those seven words. It is to every time a correction came with shame attached. The body responds to the pattern, not the incident. That is why the intensity feels embarrassing and out of proportion, but it is actually quite logical once you know what it is responding to.
Worth Was Made Conditional
Somewhere, probably early, you learned that approval could be withdrawn. Maybe praise at home was rationed, or love was warm when you performed well and cool when you did not. That teaches a specific lesson: you are only as good as your last result. When that lesson gets wired in young enough, a casual critique from a coworker in adulthood gets routed through the same circuitry. Your prefrontal cortex knows it is a minor comment. The older, faster part of your brain has already decided it is a referendum. The two parts argue, and the older part usually wins first.
What You Are Actually Protecting
The overreaction is almost always a guard response. You move fast, go cold, get defensive, or feel that sudden sick drop in your stomach, because some version of you is trying to keep something intact. Often it is a self-concept you have worked hard to build: competent, thoughtful, reliable. Criticism feels like evidence against that case. The sharpest reactions tend to happen in areas where you have the most invested, which is worth noticing. If criticism of your driving rolls off you but criticism of your writing does not, your writing is probably where your sense of self is living right now.
Something Concrete That Helps
Before you respond or withdraw, try naming the specific fear underneath the comment rather than reacting to the comment itself. Not internally defending against it, but actually asking: what would it mean if this were true? Usually the honest answer is something like 'it would mean I am not as capable as I need to be,' and that is a belief you can examine rather than a fact you have to flee. Over time, the reactions do soften. They soften fastest not through willpower but through accumulating evidence that a criticism can be true and partial and not the whole story about you at once.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Storm rhythm, the thing under the behavior.