On her first day of rejection therapy, it took Halle an hour to work up the courage to ask a stranger to borrow $100. After the interaction, she was shaking and sweating. But by day 59 of doing small challenges like these, she’s happily walking into a restaurant and asking to keep the plastic buzzer as a souvenir, laughing all the way to her table when she gets the inevitable “sorry, no”.

21-year-old Halle from Virginia Beach is documenting her journey to millions of viewers on TikTok. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve been extremely sensitive to rejection,” she tells Stylist. “Whether it was for school, my career or personal life, I avoided putting myself in vulnerable or uncomfortable situations because the thought of being rejected was unbearable. It was impacting my life.”

She came across rejection therapy, a concept coined by Canadian entrepreneur Jason Comely and further popularised by Jia Jiang in a TED talk from 2016. The idea is to go out and seek potential knock-backs, and Jiang put together a day-by-day programme of 100 ways to put yourself in uncomfortable positions, from asking for a ‘burger refill’ at a fast food chain to making an announcement on a busy plane. Each task is meant to help to desensitise the feeling of rejection, making it easier to ask for what you want when you’re not afraid of getting a big hell no.