The Art Of Conversation For Making Friends - David Robson

are we in a loneliness crisis what does the data say yeah I mean you see this like everywhere like I think every week There's a new like newspaper article saying that we're in this kind of loneliness epidemic and like there's no doubt that like the surveys showed that lots of people feel lonely like as many as 50% of people feel uh pretty lonely like a you know regular points in their lives um so yeah it is a kind of Crisis but whether this is like a new phenomenon that is really up for debate because if you look back at the historic data which is imperfect but you can go back like 60 70 years um and people were reporting high levels of loneliness back then too so even though I'm sure that like some elements of our society today are kind of driving people apart you know like people don't live in their family so much often we're kind of based in you know different continents even um people are living alone a lot more like I'm sure all of that is super relevant but I don't think it's the only reason that people are feeling lonely and I think like the research really shows that there must be some kind of psychological barriers you know like the problem lies within us as much as in our environment and that's why people have felt lonely for decades centuries potentially oh that's interesting so there's a like an ambient level of human loneliness that's just endemic to being us and then we have this sort of new world of technology and and atomization and isolation and and and digital communication and stuff and maybe a lot of people are laying what is a much more sort of ancestral archaic problem at the feet of the new technology is that kind of how you frame it yeah exactly you know like um every time a new technology comes along like we blame it for everything um so you know like back in like Jane Austin's time like people were saying that reading novels was like driving the youth into like Madness um you know so I think like technology you know like our cell phone are just tools um they can be used to enhance connection or they can be used to um kind of just engage in Social comparison and make us spill really [ __ ] about ourselves compared to other people but the tool itself isn't the problem it's the way we're using it um so that's where I'm coming from really is it's all about kind of mindfully knowing like how we handle our relationships that's important yeah I think to me I would say there is a step change in the power that these devices have over us compared with previous ones you know yes maybe the Wireless in 19112 or something was these kids they're just going to be listening to the news all day or whatever and then the know the television as well was a huge concern especially when it was in more households this is going to turn everybody into sort of adult totally useless citizens um I do think that there's a step change I do think that social media and smartphones are uh a difference of kind not just a difference of degree of what we're talking about here but at the same time how easy and convenient it is to now have a legitimate excuse a a a genuine enemy that you can say this this is why I don't connect with people the way that I want to this is why I don't have any social uh depth with the people that are around me this is why I don't seem to be able to find a deeper meaning in my relationships um it's the boogy it's like the smartphone of the gaps for all of your Social ills yeah it totally is I mean like you can blame it on the technology and you can just kind of take this attitude that is you're kind of helpless um to solve your loneliness or you can look at the kind of psychological literature and actually like what's come out in the last like five or 10 years is that actually there are lots of things that we can do to enhance the relationships that we do have or to build new relationships which is often a lot easier than we expect I mean that's something that comes out in the literature all the time that we're probably much better at being social and uh kind of having these authentic deep relationships than we believe we we we are we just have to know how to do it correctly just to set the scene how important is social connection I mean it's so important so I think like we all know you know it's nice to kind of have a group of friends who you can rely on and to have like meaningful relationships with your family like to live with a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend and um you know like we know I think everyone knows that that's super important for kind of mental health and happiness but what has become so apparent is that social connection is fundamental for your health I mean accumulating evidence from 50 years uh shows that it's actually one of the big predictors of mortality so you have things like smoking drinking your BMI um whether you do exercise uh you know whether you're kind of uh taking care of things like your blood pressure but social connection is right up there with all of these it's as important if not more important than all of these other core lifestyle factors um so you really can't actually overestimate how important social connection is it's you know it's just fundamental to living a good and healthy life yeah I was looking at some of the different uh correlations that you'd found immunity diabetes heart disease Alzheimer's neurod degeneration so like friendships are the Panacea they're the the ultimate cure to whatever it is that ails you right yeah exactly I see it as being like exercise you know like exercise basically reduces your risk of like all illness um social connection is pretty much the same and there are really strong evolutionary Arguments for why that is and essentially um when we were kind of you know in prehistory it was like we were living in nature that was really dangerous with the threat of predators or other groups who might have attacked our group like you really had to have a solid alliances with the people around you so if you were excluded or if your ties were quite weak um you were in danger so the body um first of all it evolved this kind of strong signal to kind of uh warn you that something was up and that you had to remedy that so in the same way that you feel physical pain to kind of warn you that you've got a wound that needs to be tendered you would feel social pain to warn you that your relationships really aren't um as secure as they need to be to keep you physically safe so that's why loneliness is so painful emotionally um and then we also that is accompanied by a physiological reaction as well so you see an increase in inflammation because if you're um isolated you're at more risk of injury so you have this kind of low-level inflammation that's going to um protect you from infection if you do get injured you have like a higher higher levels of blood clotting factors um which would stop you losing blood if you're attacked um inflammation and blood clotting like might be good in the short term if you do have a wound but actually in the long term they're going to increase your risk of things like Alzheimer's or a stroke or a heart attack and actually those stroke and heart attack are you know the two things that are most strongly linked to loneliness um and you can really see the mechanism is like so um so tightly bound into our kind of evil evolutionary history so I everyone that's listening has been redpilled about a lot of evolutionary psychology they understand that a human on its own 50,000 years ago is a human that doesn't survive for very long so I think everyone can understand the ultimate reason for why loneliness would hurt right from the ultimate proximate um U Paradigm the mechanism is something that I didn't know about and that is so cool what are some of the other mechanisms meet because this is you know big question that I had why do friends make such a difference like what our body's got some weird Facebook friend tick counter thing in the back of its mind like what what's it doing to detect this what's being mediated by the people that are around us that mechanism thing to me is is really important yeah I mean it's so fascinating and it's still being kind of researched and um kind of developed this Theory but you know you can see in other social animals like even rodents you know kind of do depend on living in groups um that they have these kind of loneliness neurons that are a little a little like the areas of the brain that deal with Hunger so it's like you feel um satiated after you've eaten so your hunger kind of decreases and then it increases when you're going to run out of energy well it seemed to be the same with um the loneliness neurons that it's like when you've been apart from people for a while or if you feel you know isolated from those who are around you but you just don't feel close to them um it seems those loneliness neurons become more active like they're kind of telling you they're giving you this warning like you need to tend your relationships and then when you've spent time with your friends or your family uh it kind of the loneliness neurons like stop firing so much um until you uh you know until you're kind of in that danger zone again so yeah we are keeping track of our social connection um very tightly automatically it's kind of a a lowlevel desire just like hunger thirst all of the other things that we need to survive lots of people will say I don't need anybody I'm A Lone Ranger maybe I've been in friendships before and I've been betrayed maybe I've tried to make friends and I've really struggled um I don't even care about the world I've absconded I've gone full Ted kazinski mode I'm out in the equivalent of the digital Woods you know in my apartment or whatever um how much are these effects of loneliness outside of our conscious awareness that we feel lonely do you know what I mean there's some people who will not be around many people and go God I I I just really do feel lonely the Solitude is hurting me and then there's other people who either uh genuinely or sort of um deceptively don't have that sensation is it your belief that pretty much everybody's brain is still playing the ticker sort of loneliness neuron thing is firing regardless of whether you think [ __ ] the world or actually I really want a lot of friends yeah I do think it's like that I mean I think like you know pretty much everyone is going to need need some kind of level of social contact I think it differs depending on whether you're like introverted or extroverted for what that kind of social connection will look like so you know some people I think are very happy with having like a hundred kind of weak ties that they see like semi-regularly um but they maybe don't have such a close bond with each one of those um for others it might be important just to have like their spouse or one close friend um who they really rely on but I think fundamentally some kind of social connection is this kind of basic human urge um I do kind of see looking at the literature and kind of reading between the lines that um there might be some people who like you say they're kind of neglecting this basic need in the same way that someone with an eating disorder might kind of start to neglect their need to eat so you can isolate yourself and it's almost like you you just stop listening to the kind of brain or the body signals for what you uh desire but then your mental health is going to suffer in other ways you just might you might not be linking it to that cause but I think there's no way that you're not going to suffer some consequences from that yeah I was uh I was trying to sort of correlate it to your last book the expectation effect which everybody needs to go and read by the way fantastic um I was wondering whether the story that you tell yourself about your degree of loneliness mediates this sort of loneliness neuron activation and the the platelets being closer to coagulate all that stuff I think it probably does a little bit like um because say like we know that your kind of attitudes to stress in general um can have an influence on how you kind of physiologically respond to that stress so if you see stress as being this kind of that um makes you stronger and is important for growth you have a better physiological response than if you see stress as being super dangerous and like um bad for your health bad and a sign of failure um so I do think like when we experience these kind of uh transient periods of loneliness I think our like mindset is going to have a role there like you could see um like I think you know no matter how strong your social network like sometimes you're going to still feel a bit rejected by people like that your friends aren't always going to act in the way that you want and you can kind of catastrophize that and you can start to tell yourself that like blame it on yourself and see yourself as being totally unlikable and you know something inherent within you that's not going to be as healthy as if you just kind of take a more philosophical like stoical approach to that and and accept that sometimes loneliness is a part of the human condition and you can recognize the loneliness as this kind of core signal a bit like physical pain that's telling you that maybe maybe you have to nurture your relationships in other ways so if you've been let down by one friend like maybe it's time to reach out to another to kind of get that connection that you're missing what was the relationship between creativity and finances with loneliness yeah I mean so this is a whole other mechanism by which um uh social connection might be related to uh our health because actually when we're socially connected we become more creative um because if you're surrounded by loads of different people of different backgrounds who have different viewpoints um you have this kind of cross-pollination process where like their ideas feed into your ideas and vice versa and then that plays out in how Innovative uh you are as an individual and as a group um so you can see that in data from like the creators of Broadway musicals for example you sometimes had um groups of like the choreographer ERS uh composers lyricists who only work together in very small isolated groups um they tended to be less successful like as seen by like the critical success how long the plays ran um how like how much money they took in they were less successful compared to some of these groups who would like um they were a bit promiscuous in who they would work with so they would be work with like one group for one production and then go on to another but they were just carrying so many different ideas from all of the people they' worked with like they had this kind of broader Professional Network and then that seemed to help them to break the kind of norms of the genre so that they became um more creative in what they were producing and something like um Westside Story seemed to come out of that kind of uh very collaborative process where you actually had people who had already worked with a whole bunch of other professionals before they joined that particular group um and then you know if you have if you're more creative you have more um Financial Security often because you're doing better at your job um if you're well connected you know you just see more opportunities for business so that gives you better Financial Security if you're made redundant um you know like something like in the UK like 50% of um people found their job through like an acquaintance um so it's easier to then kind of get back into employment so that you know all of that is good in itself but it's also just relieving you of like some of the biggest stresses that you're going to have to face in your life um so independent independent of the kind of loneliness response and what that's doing to your levels of inflammation and the clotting agents you're also just better to uh better equipped to deal with all of the challenges that you you're going to have to face and that's a uh cycle of feedback loop as well presumably that poverty for instance is a reliable inducer of stress into a hum's life if you drop into poverty there's this great um study that I learned about to do with uh epigenetics uh for mothers and they did this study Robert spolski talks about it did this study where um women who entered poverty during pregnancy and you can see this uh like epigenetic Cascade into the child into the the fetus and if that child is a female that child has every that they are ever going to make a baby from while they're inside of what will be grandmother who has just gone into poverty so you end up with three generations of this epen it's so interesting so yeah this sort of interest it's like um it's kind of like stabilizes in a way it's just sort of robust increas in robustness yeah that's exactly how I see it it's just that you you know like if you fall ill and you've got someone to take you to the hospital um like that is something that could potentially increase your lifespan as well um we know you know when people are socially connected they're also just more likely to kind of take care of their health because uh they get that kind of feedback from other people who might be saying like [ __ ] hell David you've gained a bit of weight or whatever it might be exactly yeah no totally it's like that or like you know if you've got like a cough or whatever that won't go away like you really do need to get that scene right yeah the denial of your own medical issues is harder if there's someone watching you yeah that's exactly it um so you know it's just so fundamental but like you said it's like we have when you're connected you have these kinds of um like stabilizers that mean even if you hit a kind of rocky road like you're just better able to write yourself more quickly is it the number of friends what are some connections more important or higher value than others how should we think about connect our connection balance sheet or the the profit and loss account yeah I mean so it's going to vary from person to person and kind of what connections you really value like I I know some people who um you know just love like having a huge social network of people that they aren't so close to others are happier with just having like a very small but tight-knit group um but even within those connections like you can kind of differentiate so you have the people who are purely supportive so you know they're always there for you when you need them um and they're like anoyed good like they're just going to you know like you want as many people as you can of those then you have the purely aversive people who are kind of you know like consistently nasty um like you know we would tend to I've been saying I've been saying friends but you're talking social connections and social connections can be both good and bad right yeah well they can that's it so I mean like um you know those people I guess we would try to like shift out of our social network but then there's these people who are kind of in the middle um the kind of ambivalent relationships or Frenemies and what is weird about those is we might keep them in our relationship for our in our kind of relationship Network for our whole lives um but they're pretty bad for our help actually if you have too many Frenemies um so these are kind of you know Jacqueline Hyde figures who like might seem like your best friend one day then they're in a bad mood and they're like lash out of you the next but the good kind of Might outweigh the bad so you you don't want to just like fall out with them and like exclude them from your social network completely um but what the research shows is that they can actually be more stressful for you than the purely aversive like consistently nasty people like you know if your boss is just always like difficult with you you kind of can discount what they say if sometimes they're praising you and then and other time they're just unreliably really critical that's like um that raises your blood pressure a lot more basically so even just knowing that you have like an ambivalent Connection in the Next Room as you and that you're going to have to interact with them that is enough to raise your blood pressure so is it the uncertainty is that what's causing it to happen yeah it's the it's totally the uncertainty and it's because they're nice enough to us that we actually really care what they say we're not like um we we are not going to ignore them in the same way that we might ignore like your like horrible Uncle who's just going to be critical like whatever you do how can people recognize or learn to recognize Frenemies better so I think like there are I think it like actually the questionnaires are pretty easy actually to kind of so I put them in my book and it's basically like when you need help is this person on a scale of one to seven helpful or like not helpful at all very helpful and uh not hurtful at all or very hurtful but essentially if someone scores more than two on both of those scales they are aomy and then the research shows that they're actually like pretty bad for your health if they uh if you have too many of those Frenemies within your group um yeah so I think like we can I think we all know people like that and I'm not saying that we should just like um detoxify but I think like we can be mindful of the way that we interact with them so like if you're already feeling stressed like just avoid an ambivalent connection like don't go to them for help um if you have to see them like try to do something like to kind of chill out afterwards like try to exercise some self-compassion like maybe just even like just remind yourself of the fact that like you know of their nature that they are this ambivalent connection and that you don't have to take what they say so personally because that's you know that's on them that's not on you I think all of these things can help to mitigate their effects so it's kind of like a a lowering of expectations in some ways that your the unpredictability comes about because some days they convince you that they're potentially a good friend but then many days they come and they're a dick or they're aloof or they're not responsive or they're mean or they're not helpful or whatever it might be um so just bringing down the expectation of the good like and this is the reason why your boss that's just 24 seven a cantankerous person is well you know it's Jim you know Jim Jim he's just Jim he just that's the way he goes um but the guy that flip-flops between you know Jim and John is the more difficult one so by just okay everybody's Jim now everyone that's ambivalent is Jim and I lower my expectations and therefore I don't I don't get surprised when that happens yeah I mean that's how I see it that's kind of how I deal with my own kind of ambivalent connections is just to be to recognize that like I don't have to like they can react however going to but I don't have to actually engage with that in the same way that I did before like I can choose to kind of discount their kind of unpleasant side because it's you know that's their problem with the way that they're conducting their relationships is not a reflection on me what do you mean when you talk about the personality myth yeah so this is the idea that um I think a lot of us have that um you're like you you kind of think either you're like a super super social person or you're not and there's not much that you can do about that so you might just think it's like my shyness my introversion that just stops me from um talking to strangers or enjoying parties or um making new friends you know when I move house to like a different city um and the research shows that that's actually not true and so you a common idea is that introverts just aren't going to enjoy being gregarious but actually when you give introverts challenges to kind of go out and chat to someone in the park every week who um every day you know who has a cool dog or cool hair or um you know just make conversation with the Barista in your coffee shop so things that they would normally find a little bit uncomfortable like to start with they have this strong prediction that they're really going to hate those interactions like everyone including extroverts tend to be a bit pessimistic about how much they're going to enjoy talking to a Ranger like we kind of assume it's going to be more Awkward than it really is but introverts kind of think that because of their personality like that's going to be especially true for them um and then you look at how they feel afterwards and they enjoy it just as much as the extroverts they actually really benefit from the social Connection in exactly the same way how much truth is there in the introversion extroversion introvert extrovert dichotomy I'm sure that you've dug into this and looked at the data and sort of debunked the Bro signs yeah I mean so I do think like um people do kind of fall along that Spectrum um I guess most people are ambiverts we're a little bit extrovert a little bit introvert you know like we I think most people enjoy socializing um and recognize that fact and then but also enjoy a bit of solitude as well like once those loneliness neurons have stopped firing and you've got your fill you can away like We you just don't have the same appetite as someone who is like a pure extrovert so I do think there are individual differences along that Dimension but um what the research shows is that like no matter where you lie on that Dimension you do benefit from just becoming a bit more social than you currently are or most people do so even extroverts can benefit from being a bit more social but especially introverts can um and that our personality like they're not necessarily hardwired in our genes like we do have genes that influence whether we're introvert or extrovert but it's not like they seal Our Fate like people can move along that Spectrum just by kind of practicing uh being more GRE gregarious being more um uh kind of dominant in certain situations like you know we're not it's not like our genes kind of determine our personalities like 100% what would you say to the person who feels that the the prototypical avatar for the I struggle to make new friends I find it hard to be gregarious I'm not the loudest person in the room or maybe I you know just got a little bit of anxiety I'm in my own head I'm very thoughtful um what what do you say to them to help them get out of their own skin a bit right so I totally think it depends like how they feel about that like how they kind of evaluate the effect that's having on their life like I think you know like I was saying earlier some people probably do just have less appetite for social connection and if you're actually pretty happy with the way you are and you don't feel frustrated then there's no need to change your behavior but I think lots of people do feel frustrated and would benefit from more um acting more socially and they believe that they can't because of their personality and so I would say to those people actually that is where the personal myth is really a barrier and that you need to overcome that by just kind of slowly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone um and you know like I think the best way to do this it's kind of proven in Psychology is to set these implementation intentions so it's all very well to be like oh yeah I'm going to be more sociable today like that's a really vague goal it's not going to help you achieve that goal very much so it's much better for you to kind of identify like when and how you're going to go about that so it could just be that you're telling yourself like when I'm at the supermarket and I see someone struggling to carry their groceries I'll just offer to give them a hand or you know I'll just instead of just asking like straight for my coffee like I will just try to ask the Barista like how they are you know how their day is going like just make some kind of small talk and what the research shows is that when you do that repeatedly even over quite a short time span of say five days even by the end of that 5 days people are already changing the way they perceived those interactions so they no longer expect those interactions to feel um awkward and they expect to enjoy them and then they do enjoy them so you know I think it's just something that we do have to practice kind of day after day and recognize that um you know it's a learnable skill it's like learning a musical instrument like you have the potential to be sociable you just have to put in a bit of work to practice those skills wow five days to make to start to reframe that I suppose so much of what people are worried about is some odd catastrophic outcome I'm going to ask the Barista at Starbucks how their day is going and and then the police are going to come in or they're going to laugh at me or it's going to be weird or whatever it might be so it's almost like I guess exposure uh training you know it's just yeah yeah it totally is yeah it's like overcoming any kind of phobia um so I mean you can't ever guarantee that there's never going to be someone who is unfriendly but like what I love about these experiments where they've got like you know hundreds sometimes thousands of people to enact these behaviors is that is so rare for people to have a really bad experience like in the first couple of studies like just no one reported having like hostility kind of Fram back at them when they tried to talk to strangers on like uh the Chicago buses and trains or on the London Underground like PE people even like the London Underground has like a really bad reputation for people being really unfriendly and isolated and not wanting to make conversation but like people responded much better than anyone had expected and I think like each person maybe on the train is kind of sitting there you know some are happy in their own faults others are kind of feeling a bit lonely and they're just waiting for someone to kind of strike up the conversation but they're not brave enough to do it so a lot of people are actually super grateful when you're the one who kind of takes the first step and kind of you know op your mouth to speak why is overcoming egocentric thinking so important uh yeah I mean so this is one of the kind of barriers where like we I guess the work on like the personality myth kind kind of shows that like we're all better at making connections than we think we are but that doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement and so entric thinking is one of the ways that sometimes we do needlessly create uh kind of misunderstanding between people um so essentially uh all neurotypical people have the uh they have the capacity to uh they have theory of mind which means that you can kind of put yourself in another person's uh shoes and take their perspective and recognize you know like um that they might have different opinions or Knowledge from what you yourself have um now the problem is that even though we have that capability uh it's quite hard cognitively to do so far more often than I think scientists had expected people don't apply their theory of mind they act super egocentrically and just assume that like the other person that they're talking to can see what they can see knows what they know thinks what they think has the same beliefs um can understand their intentions even when they're super ambiguous um in what they're saying um and you know I think we're quite robust in our interaction so there's a lot of correction that goes on in any conversation when you're kind of you know there's a bit of misunderstanding and then like uh it soon comes out with like by asking the right questions or just by by kind of elaborating that allows the two people to kind of fully get on board with with what they're saying um but just by being conscious of this fact that you might be thinking egocentrically and just kind of checking like does the other person actually understand what I'm saying like are they familiar with the terms I'm using do they have a completely different political opinion that I just haven't given them a chance to express um you know just doing those kind of little like safety checks in your conversation can just like Smooth over the conversation so you're not making those kind of fundamental errors yeah what else did you learn about the art of conversation presumably a lot of what we're talking about with regards to human connection is going to be mediated through it so it's a a pretty key skill to develop right yeah it is so I mean asking questions is fundamental something that is kind of well known is that you should ask more questions when you kind of meet someone for the first time like don't talk about yourself but I think what we often misunderstand is the importance of followup questions so you could go into a a conversation and you could just be like asking it could be like an interview almost you're like what do you do where did you come from do you have a wife like you know like what's your favorite sport like um fine like you're showing an interest in the other person but it does feel a bit formulated whereas if they tell you something like a bit quirky and then you like drill down on that and you just follow up by asking like what they meant or like why that thing is so important to them like you know what what Joy or pleasure they get out of this activity that they've just described like those are the ones that really matter and so you look at like um people on speed dates um and like the amount of follow-up questions that people asked like really predicted whether they would actually be selected for a second date I mean like if you asked enough followup questions it doubled your chances of getting a date basically so it's well worth bearing that in mind um the other thing that we should really uh bear in mind is like is good to ask questions but we also need to be quite generous with what we're telling the other person to um so self-disclosure like revealing your own kind of deeper thoughts and feelings is super important as well and we have this kind of bias in our um conversation where we we think it's always safer to just talk about like you know the superficial stuff you know like those kinds of questions I was talking about earlier like what profession do you do where did you grow up um what did you do at Halloween you know that kind of stuff but um but actually when scientists have forced people into these conversations where they like two strangers have to ask like super probing things like um do you have an intuition about how you're going to die or like what is your what is the most embarrassing thing that you've done in your life or what's your biggest mistake and why would you wish that you could correct it you know not the usual kind of stuff that we would talk about like within 20 minutes of me someone but um that is called the fast friendships procedure and like I mean the name says it all but I mean it really puts people on this fast track to intimacy like within about 45 minutes those people feel closer to each other than they do to some of their oldest friends which is kind of amazing just take us through high level what the Fast Friends procedure consists of yeah so I mean it's kind of asking those probing questions but I mean basically the it was developed by artha Aaron at um a psychologist in New York and essentially he just got these participants to kind of total strangers to sit down with 36 of these questions um that got progressively more kind of intimate um like there's nothing kind of dodgy or sexual there but I mean it's just you know asking people like to kind of uh to look inside themselves and reveal something that they might have felt to embarrassed or vulnerable to talk about um so fears dreams uh you know another one that I love is like if you had a crystal ball and it could tell you uh anything about your life or your future um what would you want it to tell you and why so it's kind of getting people to really tell some something that might have been secret beforehand or you know something that they're scared about potentially you know it just kind of it's a kind of uh ambiguous prompt in that it's not forcing someone to go in any particular direction but what you choose is super revealing about what's going on in your uh kind of inner life um and yeah so then he kind of tested like how people how close these participants felt at the end of this 45 minute conversation and compared that to people who just went through kind of normal small talk on you know like what your favorite film or you know could be I mean what talking about your favorite film could be super revealing but most people just aren't going to go into enough detail or depth to really make it um sufficiently uh profound to kind of build that connection um you know so the people who did who went through the fast friendship procedure yeah they at the end like he tried to get them to estimate how close they were to each other with this um uh psychological test of like um of the relationship strength and then he compared that to how uh people normally feel about like their old friends from their childhood or from University and he found that already the kind of average friendship between these two strangers was roughly at the same level how funny it's um you know when you see those Netflix documentaries and it's some person that was part of a famous historic event they caught a ball at the sports game or that daughter went missing on holiday or they did whatever and they're always in some dusty Warehouse somewhere and I always thought when these people were being interviewed I was just presumed that they told this story a million times that so many people were interested in their story and that had asked them these questions but then you see on these Netflix documentaries people get very emotional and tear up and and and struggle to complete their sentences and stuff like that and that made me think well actually they probably haven't had that many people to tell this life story to how many people in your normal day-to-day existence actually decide to go to that place and give you a a canvas to talk about deeper things that maybe you don't usually think about or talk maybe you've never talked about it before not because it's like shameful but just it's a bit odd or no one's ever seemed to be patient or giv you the space to be able to do it and uh yeah that kind of made me think you know this is evidently one of the biggest things that's happened in someone's life and it's still so emotionally charged I I have to assume that that's because they haven't got that this isn't the hundredth time they've said it yeah exactly I mean so like when you kind of question people about stuff like the fast friendship procedure um most people when you ask them like why are you nervous about talking about these topics like what you you've like the psychologist would be like you've told me that you think it's going to be awkward but why do you think it's going to be awkward and then like people just assume that it's um that no one cares like no one wants to hear about their inner life or this kind of event that was so profound for them and I guess it's almost because that event was so important for their life that it's like the rejection would hurt so much more if they told it the other person was just like oh yeah anyway you know you'll never guess what happened to me yesterday like you know like and maybe that will happen in some cases like with all of these things there's no like hard and fast guarantee that it's going to go in the way you want but the numbers are really in your favor like you these conversations are uh on average going to be so much more rewarding for you than you expect like that's what the research shows that if we were just a bit braver we would find like so much more reward from all of our social connections the other thing to consider is who says that a person's negative response to you opening up is a you problem like you want to be around people to whom you can have deep conversations and talk about important things and play with new ideas and open up parts of yourself that you don't do typically and it's so strange this ability to make ourselves the bad guy in in scenarios especially social not oh that's because of me I'm so awkward I'm so stupid you know I'm so clumsy um that you hang a second like if someone had said to you this thing would you have been interested actually yeah probably that'd be pretty cool it'd be pretty cool to find out about you know that the this thing that they've held with them from childhood that's very powerful to them I would have been interested I would have asked questions okay and why did that other person not well I don't know they just don't they socially ungly okay so it's not you that's done the social faart it's actually them in their response to you this is a them problem not a you problem yeah that's exciting clear I think like um also it could be and I think this comes back to the uh egocentric thinking that we were talking about like it could be that the other person really was interested in what you were saying and they assumed that you knew how interested and how much they cared like how interested they were and how much they cared and they just weren't communicating that correctly because of this egocentric assumption that must have been written all over their face and so that's what comes out of that research on egocentric thinking is that we we're really bad at judging how strongly our emotions are being communicated because we fill them quite strongly we assume that other people will also be able to read them and that's true in all kinds of situations like if you're lying you assume that the other person can tell when you're lying but you're not really giving away so many tells that they can like if you find if you're at a dinner party and you uh find the food pretty disgusting and you feel like super self-conscious because you're worried the host is going to kind of see that disgust all over your face like what scientists have actually set people up to have that exact experience and like it's completely undetectable like you can't no one can guess better than chance whether someone's eating something disgusting or whe they're eating something um you know really delicious um and so I think that's happening here in these conversations that um sometimes like people just aren't like letting you know what you really need to hear but they might still be feeling it so there's no point in us like beating ourselves up over not getting quite the response that we expected because we just don't really know what that person was feeling often how can people Express appreciation more effectively yeah I mean that's so yeah that is something that we can all do to strengthen our connections is to just avoid this uh ambiguity that people have like we are generally um not very good at uh saying compliments because we just don't do it enough like I think there was some I can't remember the exact statistic but like we bite back the majority of the like nice things that we think about other people because we assume that they know it already or we think we're going to be so clumsy we're going to sound like really ingratiating and sick of fun foring it's yeah you think it's going to be awful so so we just think like okay I'm just not going to say anything at all that will be better and again it's like you're protecting yourself like because by expressing a compliment or appreciation or gratitude you're kind of making yourself a little bit vulnerable um but like those fears are totally unfounded like people they just really love to hear good things about themselves as you would and like as it's again it's like like you said like if you just turn it around and think well like would I want to hear that like um I look great today or that I said something really smart like of course you would so why you assume the other person wouldn't um so yeah just we can do it more often expressing gratitude and appreciation um and what the research shows is like it benefits the other person a lot but it also benefits the person expressing those good feelings so actually once we've said something kind um we feel better ourselves and it even like um it's good for us physiologically like it actually reduces our stress response uh so there was this uh study that was inspired by shock tank the TV program where students had to kind of come up with a product um give a presentation like impairs and the researchers told like just one person in each pair like just you know Express gratitude to the person who uh is helping you with this and then they measured like how they responded to the to giving the presentation itself like how the kind of blood pressure the cardiovascular system responded and what they found that both the person expressing and receiving the Gratitude uh tended to show like a more muted uh stress response so they just um they were still like kind of charged and excited but they weren't going into fight or flight essentially wow how cool yeah that's something that I've noticed since moving to America uh you may say that Americans have too much enthusiasm and that may be true uh but I think that Brits have the equivalent scarcity As Americans have abundance and there's this when I first moved out here two and a half years ago um I got invited on a really big uh podcast it was the it was Tim P's show on the day that the Kyle writtenhouse verdict came down so it was going to be I think there was 300,000 concurrent live viewers at one point it was [ __ ] insane and I got invited to go and and be on the show and it just happened to be the day that I was there I'm like all right well I guess I'm commenting on the Kyle writtenhouse thing now and um I'd only been in the city for two weeks maybe three weeks and I'd made some friends before but largely these were just friends that I'd got and in between me leaving the apartment the Airbnb I was staying in and going down to get picked up by the car that was coming to get me two different guys rang me that I'd met over the last sort of three weeks and both separately both basically said the same thing hey man just just wanted to let you know I know you might be a bit nervous about tonight but you're going to smash it like I've got pizza and me and the MS are going to sit on the couch and we're going to watch it it's going to be so cool how are you feeling I'm really happy for you and I was like this is such a a a lovely gesture from someone that didn't need to do it from someone that you kind of barely know um and it it felt really alien and that was one of the big oh wow you know that you can say that you can behave in that way the sort of zero some Puritan tall pop Brit in me sort of bristled a little bit and didn't really know how to take it but yeah it's um it's a it's a really big deal I suppose the other side of expressing appreciation is self-compassion and you looked at self-compassion too yeah so I think self-compassion is like super important in kind of all the things I'm talking about um because it's like you were saying that we often like if there's any awkwardness in a conversation like we just tend to put the blame on ourselves like if you have met a stranger and there are like you know you say a few clumsy words or there's that kind of weird silence where neither of you knows what to say or like you don't quite know when to finish the conversation like you think like that was wholly my fault like I should have been more socially fluent and able to just like seamlessly kind of you know exit that conversation and go on to the next one um you know the other person's feeling exactly the same way so that is a phenomenon called the liking gap which means that when we both um have a conversation with a stranger like each person tends to go away thinking that they liked the other person more than the other person no way so that's that shows up in the data yeah yeah it's really consistent the liking Gap yeah so that in itself I think uh should leaders just you know once we know those statistics like we can just stop like beating ourselves up so much like uh because actually so what's happening there is that it's like we so again it's like egocentric we're so conscious of how we've behaved um that's like kind of burning in our minds if we think we've said like a fuxa so we assume that it was equally important for the other person but they really aren't taking much notice of that like they don't really care if you're like the perfect conversationalist who's always got something like super witty and appetite to say like what they are more likely to do is just think about the overall uh kind of emotional tenor of the conversation just Vibes it's just Vibes man it's always been just Vibes exactly like was I laughing a lot like did they kind of validate what I was feeling like were they curious about me um you know that's what really matters like your warmth not your confidence um so we can all be just a bit more forgiving of ourselves and like sometimes we will say a f but most often we won't and it's just not worth the kind of mental energy to become too fixated on that because even if you did the other person like so that's the other thing that even when you make a definite faar like you turn up to a dinner party and you're the only person who hasn't brought like wine or cake or anything um you ask people to judge how they would uh to rate how they would judge another person for doing that like how Negative they would be and then you get them to rate how they think the other person is would judge them but the same thing and consistently people assume that the other person is going to be twice as negative as they would be for the same thing so even if you make a faux part it like really isn't such a big deal like it's just it's so forgettable isn't it interesting you know the fundamental attribution error bias so um somebody cuts you off in traffic it's because they're a dangerous wanker you cut someone else in traffic it's because you need to really get to work because you're late and there's an important meeting like we have this sort of um we often attribute other people's actions to their personal motives whereas ours are more to do with external events and we not you know we we're able to not be as culpable and it's like a reverse fundamental attribution error in social situations whereby we will always be the awkward clumsy social faux par Vic uh and everybody else is a competent smooth James Bond talking person that that you know won't forgive us but that we would forgive them is a very odd way that we sort of turn the bar stool upside down yeah it's I mean it's crazy actually because like if you ask people like how smart are you compared to the average person like most people overestimate how intelligent they are or like how good a driver are you or 70% of people say that they're better than right exactly and yeah if you ask people how smart do you think other people think you are so you're kind of Shifting that to like to a question of social judgment then people are really underc confident so it's like we we're constantly kind of thinking the best about ourselves but also assuming that other people are thinking the worst about us wow how interesting yeah I am I learned a lot about this comfort with Vibes and imprecision even though I I'm quite obsessive about Precision when it comes to speech when I started the show I thought that my goal was to be kind of like a ruthless indexer of information kind of the ultimate blinkist app for whoever I was speaking to and it was just to break down all of the different things in this new book or whatever and then that would be it and it had to be said in the most precise and accurate way possible and then as you go on when I think about the sort of conversations that I enjoy listening to or the ones that I enjoy having it's more just about Vibes it's was it fun did it flow well was it Charming did we have a laugh did everybody feel comfortable and casual and and that's really what it is and in an equivalent way I did a a live tour toward the back end of last year so standing up on stage in front of between 500 and a, people and I'd seen a few friends do performances much bigger ones Comedians and stuff and their mics would break or the lights would go out or someone from the audience would yell something and you might think oh that's going to ruin the flow of the show or that might get them off their game or oh my God how awkward that the the mics died and it made me so much more warmly disposed to them to see how they dealt with something that went wrong and they did it in a Charming way or maybe they said something wrong they forgot the line or they tripped over or they spilled water on them elves and all of those there was no such thing as a social FAA there was simply dealing with An Occurrence in a Charming or an uncharming Manner and if you dealt with it in a Charming manner even if you did it to yourself it made me like it's the it's called what's it called the pratfall effect um which when someone messes up if the you end up liking them more as long as they can kind of style it out in a not totally socially ungainly way so yeah oddly social faas can be a breeding ground for perhaps social excellence in a way yeah totally I mean I totally think it's like you said it's like how you respond to the era um that like the perceived era is more important than like the era itself um uh and you know like even stuff like uh you know like people really overestimate like how important like showing a few nerves are going to be like in an interview um or on stage um but when you question like observers like you know what did you think of this performer and you know like some of them might have been like touching their face a lot because they were nervous or like you know biting their nails whatever um those people were actually considered to be much more likable than the people who gave like a super smooth performance and I think it's just so relatable like you see someone who is feeling probably like how you you would be feeling and even if you don't show it on the outside like you're going to have those nerves so like your empathy is just kind of kicking in and you kind of rooting for them to do well um and we see that more generally like there's this phenomenon called The Beautiful Mess effect which is a bit like the pratfall effect but this is like we try to hide like our kind of failures and errors and vulnerabilities like you know you don't want to tell people if you're feeling like um like you look a bit [ __ ] today or you've got some kind of complex about part of your body the athletes foots come back or something right exactly or you're like uh you know you like made a real [ __ ] up with your job and it's like you know it's really embarrassing was like a school boy error that you have to own up to and people assume that like um confessing those vulnerabilities is going to make them look weak people are going to feel a bit repelled by that um but actually people often like far often far more often than um you think they're going to like appreciate your kind of marriage and honesty and authenticity for just like owning up to these things and like we much prefer someone who's honest than someone who we think is kind of hiding something and so there was this study looking at um like giving people kind of profiles of like potential dates um like weird profiles I don't know like how they set this up exactly to look like natural but like the potential dates had to like say whether they'd ever done like some pretty immoral acts like um had they ever um hidden an STD from previous lovers um and like had sex with them anyway um people who said they had done that were considered to be a a better potential date than people than people who refused to answer the question so obviously someone who had never done it was preferable but at least admitting to your immoral Behavior was much better than just trying to avoid the question completely what about the novelty penalty what's that yeah so that is um I mean it's like so familiar for most people I think like you know when you've been on like um you've had an amazing experience like you've you know been on a great holiday and you get home and you want to tell like all of your friends about it um and then like you're 10 minutes in and you can see their eyes glazing over like you're just not getting the interaction that you want um that's the novelty penalty because um essentially people often prefer to hear stuff that is already a bit familiar to them um rather than something that is totally new and like the researchers found this in this kind of uh kind of quite complex uh setup where they gave people like YouTube videos to watch and then they got one person from the group to describe the video and found that people much preferred hearing about a video they'd already seen compared to hearing about a video that they hadn't seen and it's totally bizarre because it's like you'd think it would be boring to you to hear repeated back to what you just observed um but the problem is we're just like maybe our story our storytelling skills just aren't up to scratch so we're leaving a lot of gaps in the uh kind of narrative and so it just isn't that obvious like why do I like why should I care about this like you forget to say kind of what really attracted you to that experience and why it was so personally important to you like you give the kind of maybe some of the irrelevant details while skipping like the emotional content um and so that's what we need to do I think to be better conversationalist to avoid the novelty penalties to again like lean into that self-disclosure and not be afraid to say kind of why something matters to you to get a bit of personal investment I had a guy called Mr ballan on the show a couple of week weeks ago he's probably one of the best storytellers on the internet he does strange dark mysterious sort of True Crime adjacent stuff and it was really cool he explained he do does this story uh he does a number of stories does one of them and then he explains his approach to storytelling using the story that he just told and breaking down why he said things in this way and a really cool Insight that I learned from him was the power of omission so when you're telling a story there's one about a a a lamp this guy who is in a marriage for years and years and years and then this lamp in his living room starts to behave very strangely and it turns out after he protracted story of all of this stuff that he was hit in the head during a high school football game and was knocked out for 5 seconds but lived an entire different life and then came back around and was no longer married to this person for two decades didn't have his kids didn't have his dog didn't have his house didn't have anything and had imagin this entire of life that he felt he'd lived for you know decades and decades and um but he doesn't say that bit until the very end so you know there's this sort of ever escalating anticipation he's getting sort of stranger and stranger and stranger but if he' opened up the story by saying something like I'm going to tell you a story about a guy who was hit in the head in high school like you know that completely punks the game and takes you to the end before it started um so just thinking about how consciously and and dexterously he looks at his The Art of Storytelling not just conversation but of Storytelling and yeah what are you including and what are you excluding and maybe saying you know and this is how it made me feel and this is why it was really important to me like create some [ __ ] Stakes in whatever it is that you're talking about why should someone care yeah exactly and I think so what we kind of maybe underestimate is that what people will care about is like um the emotions that we're feeling and like you know if they're connected to us they kind of want the best for us so if something was super important they kind of really want to understand that bit what they don't care about is like your kind of Journey to or from the airport or like um you know like um maybe they don't even care much much about the details of the location itself that you've been to if you're on this amazing holiday what they really care about is like like you know did that fundamentally change your perspective on your life way yeah exactly yeah what is important about truth and lies and secrets um so this really surprised me um and it's the fact that like honesty just is almost always uh valued even if you're delivering bad news to people even if it's not necessarily like reflecting well on yourself um even if it's the kind of situation where you would normally tell a white lie to save someone's feelings um like kind of sugar coating some negative feedback um there are very few situations where telling a lie is ever going to pay off um which seems kind of like amazing and that I kind of heard assumed that like things like white lies are kind of um a social lubricant like you just need them to kind of get along each day but these researchers in the US kind of they set people out on a mission to kind of either be as honest as they could be in every single interaction for a few days or to be as kind as they could be in an interaction in every interaction for a few days or to just carry on as normal and what they found was that the people the well-being of the people who were kind or honest were pretty much the same actually but what was especially noticeable was that the people who were being like sometimes brutally honest with people um tended to report that their interactions were far more meaningful like they felt that they leared a lot more about those people and that those people learned a lot more about them when they were you know like saying some uncomfortable truths compared to people who are going around like with these specific intention of like trying to be as kind as possible and to make people feel as good as possible um so that yeah I mean that's changed the way I deal with like a lot of my interactions now like it's not a pass to like be kind of just like rude and nasty like because there's I think in almost every case there's going to be uh a kind way of telling the truth or like a like pretty blunt and nasty way of telling the truth so it's always better to kind of try to frame what you're saying in a way that can be constructive that will help the other person to learn from what you're saying rather than um just being like too overgeneralizing in a way that is not helpful for their growth um so yeah be specific try to be constructive try to offer advice or your own time and resources to help them to deal with the kind of negative feedback you're giving but overall people will uh will appreciate far more the negative feedback that can be useful over a white lie that isn't going to help them to learn and to grow how can people overcome the discomfort of telling people the truth even if it's going to be painful for the truth teller so I think that is just practice actually I think like with a bit like with the kind of overcoming the awkwardness of talking to strangers I think it's about recalibrating our expectations and you can only do that by kind of repeatedly performing this action and recognizing that the outcomes are you know on average far better than you expected and over time you just naturally start to recognize that the kind of little bit of awkwardness that you're going to face is worth it for the kind of rewards at the end yeah I suppose it's the same sort of exposure training thing that I can tell the truth and the whole world doesn't blow up right okay or maybe I can do it again um yeah yeah yeah it's exactly that and I guess I start out with like small kind of like the low hanging fruit I guess is one way that I would deal with all of these social dilemmas is that you know you you build up maybe to something that's going to be much harder but I wonder if there's a I I spoke about this a couple of months ago there's a website still up called 100 days of rejection and it's a a kind of exposure therapy social exposure therapy and each day you do something um you ask the bar at the coffee shop if you can have this for free you see if a stranger will give you £100 you do it's just sort of everchanging group of different things and some of them are so toe curling like so awful and painful to do and I think so much of what you're trying to do there is just teach yourself this thing that you are adamant is going to be socially explosive is probably totally fine and you know with the truth as well I suppose the other side is that if you're holding on to secrets for too long ultimately you're the one that's going to pay the price yeah sure the other person you know might be upset about it but it's you that's got to vacillate about this complex house of cards that you've built up trying to keep said Secrets away from someone and you can relinquish that by just saying it yeah exactly I mean I think you hadd written about this in one of your newsletters actually it's like it is better to have like an authentic meaningful connection with someone who likes you for who you are then to kind of no matter how good the relationship seems to be if you know that you're hiding something really important and you're always scared that they're going to reject you for that thing that you're hiding like that in itself is something that is going to lead you to feel that kind of existential isolation so you don't actually you're like surrounded by people but you don't really feel like emotionally connected to them um so yeah I totally agree with that and actually then there's lots of good research and anyway showing that when you keep secrets and your mind like keeps on kind of going to these kind of awful things that you're hiding um you actually experience it almost like a physical burden so when people are ProMed to think about a secret that they haven't told uh the people they love um they actually like physically overestimate like how steep a hill is going to be to climb or like if they're like throwing a ball into a Target like they'll overthrow because they kind of assume that they're strength isn't as great as it would no way as it really is yeah so it has it's like embodied cognition that changes the way you navigate the world like everything feels more tiring than it should be hang on so someone that is holding on to a secret when given a ball that they need to throw at a Target on average they overthrow the ball compensating for a perceived weakness Yeah by and and that is a what was the term it's like embodied cognition embodied cognition dude you find the best studies it's so much fun uh yeah how crazy to think about that that yeah this sort of inner fragility that they have manifested in themselves the shame that they probably have about not being able to say this thing oh well my my real world strength must be equivalently uh like feeble therefore I must throw the the ball harder and they end up overthrowing it yeah and so what happens then is if you get them to like reveal the secret to someone even just to one of the researchers then like that embodied cognition kind of vanishes so they suddenly start to be more accurate in their movements or in perceiving the kind of physical challenges ahead of them so you're saying baseball players and cricketers should be as honest as possible because it's a performance enhancer right yeah exactly yeah who you I learn I learned a new word from you which was confelicity ah yeah yeah yeah I love that yeah or Mitch freuder is the kind of German equivalent so it's the we have shardan freuder which is our kind of uh Joy at someone else's Misfortune but MIT freuder or conicity is our kind of Joy at seeing someone else is happiness and success and achievements and this is so relevant when we think about celebrating our own successes like we tend to hide a lot of our achievements because we don't want to seem like we're bragging and we assume that the other person is going to judge us harshly for kind of talking about our promotion or like that kind of professional award we won or even just like a a personal best at the gym like we hide these kinds of things much more than we should because we assume the other person is going to feel envious of us but what what the research shows is that like when people find out that you've kind of had these good events in your life and you decided not to share them it's actually super insulting because you're treating them a bit like a spoiled kind of kid who has to kind of win up Monopoly like every time you play it or they'll have a tantrum like it feels incredibly paternalistic to find out that like your best friend or your colleague or your brother didn't tell you about something good in their life just because they thought you might react badly um so it drives um it drives a wedge in our connection in that way because it's just fundamentally like offensive to to be treated in that way um but then yeah we're also missing the fact that most of these people would feel confelicity like rather than being envious they're just going to be happy for you and sharing in that happiness is just another way for you to be able to uh to bond and to kind of share an emotional experience that uh kind of confirms that you you share the same values in life well the other thing as well is if you share something which is genuinely meaningful to you and that you're proud of in a Charming way obviously you can shove it down people's throats and in which case the negative response is probably you deserved it but if you do it in a Charming way and someone doesn't take a thing that's meaningful to you positively and doesn't positively reinforce it hey guess what that person shouldn't be in your life like they suck as a friend they suck and the same as the you open up to somebody you try and tell them something that's really meaningful or something that's shameful or something that you're scared of and they don't respond in the right way that's not a you problem that's a them problem yeah I mean to me all of these things it's like a classic case of someone being a friend of me like an ambivalent connection like if they're not responding to you when you're like opening up to them whether it's about a failure or a success um or just like a really meaningful experience then yeah like there's something kind of there's something going on in their life that is wrong um but you don't have to feel embarrassed about the fact that their response was inadequate it is I I need to do a little bit more thinking about this sort of reverse fundamental attribution eror which is what you're kind of developing is a a kind of self-confidence in Social self-confidence that I will make errors but I know that I'm coming into this playing the rules of the game remotely appropriately and trying to put my best foot forward and it takes basically all of the pressure off you socially you go look I I didn't mess up like I just you know I did the thing it's this person that's incapable of of receiving or returning in a an apt manner yeah I mean that's I think that's ultimately it like we should be able to expect from the people in our social networks that they are going going to respond positively to you sharing your life with them and yeah so it's like it's having that confidence to realize that if they're not going to do that then maybe your social network is better off without them or at the very least you just don't have to like value their opinions so much um but I mean the good news is that like we overestimate How likely it is that people are going to react in all of these negative ways like most people who have your best interests at heart they're going to be like they're going to respond in the way that you would want them to what is there to say about Envy then if if confelicity and feeling joy in other people's successes is something that's good what did you learn about Envy so I mean I think it's perfectly possible for someone to feel like a bit of envy and conicity at the same time and like that's how I feel sometimes like you know my friends who are offers and if they have like a huge success like I am like genuinely really delighted for them I would never want to take that away from them um but I would also like it for me yeah that's it and actually though there's nothing wrong with feeling Envy so um scientists kind of say there's like uh malign Envy where like you want to take that tear that person down well that is obviously an unhealthy reaction um but benign Envy when you're like when someone else's success is just making you realize is reaffirming what your goals are going to be for yourself and it's like a source of inspiration like that is totally something that's a totally natural reaction and it's something that you should be listening to and then you know putting into action I think it's you know Envy can be a really strong form of motivation you don't have to put yourself in competition with that particular person but it's good for you to just identify like yeah I still want to achieve that goal and the fact that this other person has achieved that goal has just proven that to me that is probably going to be as good as I expect it to be isn't it cool I I really like this idea of being able to balance being happy for your friend's success with wishing that you could have it as well I don't think that that's something that's negative uh I had Neil Neil Strauss guy that wrote the game on the show a couple of weeks ago and he told me the title of his new book and I I think a a good rubric for whether or not a title is great is does the person that you tell it to think [ __ ] why didn't I think of that and like that's the kind of Envy energy I think and the the title of this book is the power of low self-esteem and I thought God that's so cool that's so it's like this oxymoron it's intriguing it's short I love it I was [ __ ] God damn it like why didn't I think of that and it you know that's I don't think that I would judge myself for that kind of of envy um and you can even with this you know going back to the transparency the openness the the honesty thing I think I said it to him at the time and you know that almost calling out the emotion and going bro I mean God damn it I wish that I'd said that that's that's so smart that's really really cool I'm really happy for you that's going to smash it like you know that's all of the things that we've just spoken about in a single sentence right exactly and I think that's a totally healthy reaction that I think sometimes like in the past we would feel a bit embarrassed about saying that we feel like Envy for someone but it's like you know that's also kind of a mark of that person's success it's a lowkey compliment feel yeah I think it is a compliment yeah like and I would take that as a compliment myself if someone said they were like a little bit envious of me like um as long as I knew that they were also feeling happiness for me as well like I would totally take that as a yeah Envy Envy with happiness good Envy with negativity dangerous need to be careful right yeah exactly why is asking for help important um so a lot of us kind of and it's again because we're scared of seeming like vulnerable and weak we're just scared of asking for help we assume that we're going to you know be perceived badly for that but also we think we're going to be a burden on the other person that they're not really going to want to help us anyway so we're kind of struggling Alone um it makes our life a lot harder but a little bit like when I was talking about when you don't share success um because it's um because you kind of assume the other person's going to R badly and they feel insulted by that well actually people feel a bit the same if you don't ask for help when it would be totally natural for you to do so like if you've got a really good friend who would be able to like take you to the hospital when you're ill and you pay loads of money for a taxi like they actually feel a lot worse for the fact that you didn't ask that like it's an insult to them so we by asking for help it can actually be a really good way of cementing a relationship and making that person know how valued they are and um that can even be true like not in those kind of emergency situations but even just with the kind of the uh kind of little things in life that you could maybe do for yourself but like it just feels good when someone else is going to help you out um so like asking someone to cook your favorite meal for you um just because you know it's going to feel like super comforting to have it from that person rather than doing it yourself um there's a Japanese concept called am I that describes that kind of um uh favor request um where you could you're perfectly capable of doing it it's a little bit inappropriate to ask for help but you ask anyway um the idea in um the Japanese jaese concept is that actually that can enhance lots of relationships and make people feel kind of especially good about themselves and like you know they enjoy caring for you and that's what the research shows and it's not just in Japanese culture it's also in American culture by um by asking for favors you're underlining the close nature of your relationship and people actually like you more for it and amazingly that even happens with strangers um so if you the kind of scientists set up this experiment where like they gave people these difficult math questions and like at the end of um the kind of test like one person had finished before the other one if one of the participants asked asked the other to just kind of help them with the remaining questions that actually increased the bond between the two participants and you didn't see that increase in the bond if the teacher was the one who kind of told the participant to kind of to offer that assistance you actually had to ask for it yourself to underline how almost like how much you respected that other person for how smart they were and how much you appreciated their help and then that yeah it's a lowkey comment on their competence would you mind helping me carry these bags out you look like the sort of person that is sufficiently physically robust that you can carry some bags with me uh hey man would you mind taking me to the hospital I consider you to be the sort of person who is sufficiently thoughtful and cares about me enough you are a sufficiently good helpful person that you will do this thing for me and I suppose as well I I'd seen some I'd heard about some studies around this topic but not as precisely if you just explained them but I seem to remember something to do with doing a favor for someone is see not seen as favorably as asking for someone to do a favor for you and I think that part of that if that's true part of that is implicit in the I ask David to do me a favor is that well in future you know the the the debt cycle has begun between the two of us so yeah implicit in me asking you to do me a favor is that I will do you a favor as opposed to just coming out and then doing something for you that you maybe didn't ask which then places the debt in your hand he like hang on a second I know you just you know unnecessarily brought around some food for my bird feeder but what are you going to ask me to do next week and I didn't you know I didn't kick this off in that way whereas by requesting the other person to do it they have the option to not enter into this uh NeverEnding vicious regifting Loop of of favors yeah exactly like I think like um yeah like just you're I I just think you're showing to the other person that um you kind of fundamentally think they're a decent decent person and like you said like um there is an element I think of this kind of feeling we don't want to feel in debt um but we don't mind giving generously and not expecting anything in return to another person so I guess that again it's this kind of asymmetry we might do a favor totally altruistically not expecting anything in return but we're worried about um the fact that we might need to um to have that um kind of yeah to cash in at some point the debt will be called yeah yeah exactly yeah what role does the Gratitude Gap play yeah I mean that's really important in that just we so basically like when anyone does um something kind of altruistic like they can benefit psychologically and even physiologically from having performed that act of kindness like is I call it in the book it's fit easy but it's like the gift of giving so actually people who are generally altruistic in their lives they might be volunteers or just they are super helpful with like running errands for their family all of that kind of thing they live a lot longer than people who are a bit more selfish in their lives if you're always looking after yourself rather than other people you might expect that those people would be prioritizing their own health and so would be healthier but no actually prioritizing the people around you actually has these kind of knock on benefits for your own health and well-being um so like being a generous person is really good but you have to be able to see some benefit from what you're doing like if you if someone does an altruistic act and they don't see that they've actually helped the other person they experience none of those uh benefits of having of having done the deed in fact it just makes them feel kind of used and stressed and kind of stressed out and frustrated and the problem with the Gratitude Gap is that um we maybe just don't like express our gratitude as much as we should do because we assume that the other person kind of knows how self-evident of course I'm so grateful for the thing why wouldn't I be think I would say it's exactly that and so we're not giving them the full benefits of what they've you know done to help us even even though we probably do secretly appreciate it what is a tactic for overcoming the Gratitude Gap so just expressing gratitude more explicitly I think is like always important um but also we should be careful about how we Express gratitude um like any any kind of sign of gratitude is probably going to be perceived pretty well but you can make it a lot more powerful if you change the way you frame it and what a lot of us do mistakenly when we talk about gratitude is we do tend to make it kind of emphasized too much the benefits for us which as I've just said it's fine to say you know to show that the ACT has had a a good effect on us that it's been been useful but what's makes it even more beneficial to the other person and makes them feel especially good about themselves is when you kind of turn that reflection back onto them and talk about the specific qualities that you appreciate about what they've just done so like you were saying with that friend who's like given you that um uh kind of lift to the hospital or the airport um it's really good for you to tell them that like they've saved you a lot of time and money and they've made your journey a lot more comfortable um but it's even better then to say to make it explicit the fact that you appreciate the the fact that they are the person they are the kind of person who would do that that you you recognize that they are generous and you know giving and um uh yeah like uh that they have your best interests at heart like you really appreciate those qualities um so it's the combination I think that's powerful often we kind of focus just on one or the other but it's much better to kind of to say both like the effect on you what you value in that other person what about healing bad feelings yeah there's uh we uh like are not very good at dealing with like disagreements like I think we all know that fact that um kind of Rifts can easily happen between people who are super close um and often over the craziest things that become kind of Amplified um in importance and it's only when you know months or years have gone by that you look back and you're like why did I let that small disagreement um you know come to dominate what was actually a great relationship um there are a few different ways that we can overcome um that kind of uh overly uh kind of microscopic attitude to our um and kind of a forensic attitude to kind of the rights and the wrongs of a situation um and one of those is just to kind of take a distanced perspective that helps you to kind of zoom out from the situation and to recognize what is really important and so you know often then you'll realize that you know you're arguing over something that fundament Mally like might need to be uh discussed resolved but it's not so important that it's worth actually destroying what could be you know a very fruitful authentic genuine relationship for months or years to come um and so psychological distancing can work in many ways but you know it could just be imagining what an objective Observer would think about the situation at hand um so maybe imagining that you were actually talking about this with like a marriage counselor or or whatever um or just like some friend or relative who isn't directly uh kind of biased towards one person in the disagreement toward the other um it could just be imagining that you're looking back on this situation in 10 years time and you know what what do you think would really stand out as being important you know when years have passed and this situation has long since you know been finished and over um there's a study looking at married couples um so newly newly words uh for the first year like the researchers did nothing they just questioned them like how often they were about how often they were disagreeing and you know how much they liked each other and like they had quite a few disagreements these married couples and they're kind of liking for each other over that first year like kind of went downhill qu like not dramatically but you know at the end of the first year they did not like each other as much as when they first got married um which I think is quite you know relatable um but then at the end of this first year they got people to do this self-distancing exercise and what they found was that those participants they their relationship satisfaction was stable like they still had these kind of disagreements but they resolved them a lot more easily whereas people who hadn't been taught their intervention um they just continued on that downward trajectory so actually that one small psycholog iCal intervention I think could save like a lot of marriages just take people through the self-distancing thing again just so that they've got it as uh easy takeaway so essentially it's like you know like even In the Heat of the argument but definitely like afterwards when you you know you're both kind of thinking about what's just been said it's to try to look at at the situation from some uh some New Perspective so rather than just thinking about how you feel like in the present moment it could be imagining that you're looking back on that situation in 10 years time when like you know enough time has passed that you can be a bit more objective about what's just occurred so just you know literally just thinking like how will I feel about this in like 2034 um or just imagining that you're like an objective Observer so just like thinking you know what would this kind of neutral party think about this disagreement my arguments like his or her arguments like what would they how would they appraise this and you know what importance would they lend to all of this and you know it really works like people really do just like take that kind of step back or step you know into the future and recognize that actually you know it helps them to just recognize what's important and what isn't essentially so doesn't mean that like you're just instantly going to forgive the other person but it means you can be more constructive in what you say you're not going to be so petty to kind of you're not going to resort to kind of those knee-jerk insults that you might do if you're still really immersed purely immersed in the the feelings of the fight itself yeah your 13th law in the book is something that I landed on after we probably did maybe between 300 and 500 life hacks on this podcast over the space of 6 and a half years and it was a huge series and it was how to make a good toasted sandwich or this new protein powder we'd found or a great meditation app or some new time blocking technique or whatever you everything that we wanted and um the number one hack that I had is basically the same as your 13th law which is text your friends when you're thinking about them so you know a lot of the time you'll just be going about your day and some memory will pop up or you'll wonder I wonder what such and such a person is doing and you know this person that has no idea that you're in their thoughts arises you think something nice about them and it goes away and maybe in some karmic way they do end up benefiting from it uh but I've just taken to using that as a trigger to immediately text that person and honestly one of the most like simpy texts ever if you can't think of something cool but hey man just thinking of you hope everything's well uh like like that's a or singing your praises you know talking about the over dinner say I really love that he's got this new song out or did you see that thing that he did or he just got married or he's got a kid I'm really happy for him or whatever it might be and um it's so good it makes me feel so good to do that and uh yeah text your friends when you think about them is just out of 500 life hacks it's my favorite one yeah me too I mean and I think it's like again it's like this kind of liking Gap phenomena and it's like all of these um different psychological barriers that we've spoken about is that people tend to be quite resistant from doing that because they are kind of worried that it's going to be really awkward and the other person like especially you know you haven't seen someone for a while it's difficult to know exactly what to say so you just avoid saying anything at all and you let the kind of friendship like fizzle out even further um but the research shows you know when you send those messages like people genuinely really appreciate it like they're going to enjoy receiving that message a lot more than you assume they're going to and you're going to feel a lot better like you said than you might have assumed that you do like you know friendships change all the time but actually just keeping people in your thoughts and in your life like that's one of the best things we can do to craft that um social connection that We crave is there a favorite study from the book that we haven't spoken about yet that you found yeah we've covered uh such a lot um yes I guess one thing that I do kind of love and it's just such a like bizarre but amazing study um so basically like what the research shows is that like for any the foundation of social connection is um this thing called shared reality and so like we know that like there's um this phenomenon called uh homophilia or homophily and we're kind of like people who are similar to ourselves the similar music taste similar you know same religion um same like kind of worldview on politics um you know people who speak the same language or dialect came from the same place like that those things are important but what really connects people and makes you like actually want to be best friends with someone rather than just kind of vaguely know them as an acquaintance is knowing that they have the same um inner kind of experience of the world so you know do they find the same things funny do they laugh at the same time do they get kind of the same chills at the same time in the same song lot all of these are intense um visceral reactions to the world um and so there are psychological studies that kind of just try to Prime that and they're really dumb kind of imagine if questions like um if Jennifer Aniston was like a household object would she be like a screwdriver a cocktail shaker or or like a pencil case and like the the answers are like pretty much meaningless but if you tell someone that they both chose like um toothpick for Jennifer Aniston like they sense that they have this kind of shared inner world and that makes them like that other person a lot more and I just love that that actually there are these tiny little Clues um that we're experiencing all the time that are just helping us to bond it's bizarre really works like I mean um and obviously that is such an artificial kind of experiment like I'm not saying that we should all play these kind of imagine if questions to like connect to strangers but I think it shows how actually how much of our kind of connection and and like clicking with someone can really depend not just on like those kind of um big similarities in your like background education all of that but like you know it's just those kind of uh immediate um impulsive uh responses to the world around us and there's actually then like a bunch of um neuroscientific research that shows that there's a literal truth in the kind of feeling that someone is on the same wavelength as you and you know like these researchers in the US got like a bunch of like a class of students to watch like a series of YouTube videos some of which were like you know music video comedy documentary whatever and scan their brains as they were doing so and they found that just from the similarities in the brain activity as people responded to those videos they could predict who was friends with who and it was really because they had this uh very similar streams of Consciousness like their interpretation framework is similar to someone else this isn't necessarily happening between the people it's that they are similar kinds of people so when they get a shared stimulus person a C and F all move in the same way well why well it's because they've conditioned themselves and quite likely if you're going to observe the YouTube video in that way from all of the kids in the schoolyard you're probably going to get on with the ones that think like you and talk like you and have the same sort of views as you yeah yeah you click exactly and so you know it's like uh I think like you know sometimes again because we're so reserved we can avoid allowing people to kind of see inside our stream of Consciousness so if you're like too uh cautious about revealing like what you think or feel like there's just no way of constructing that shared reality like no the other person just doesn't know if you're thinking in the same way as them or not and so I think that's why things like self-disclosure are so powerful because you're just you're offering many more opportunities for you to recognize like in what way do your kind of views of reality coincide hell yeah David Robson ladies and gentlemen David I love your work I love the fact that you're digging into all of these fascinating psychological studies uh James Smith shamelessly repurposed a bunch in his book and then I've been using them on my live tour so I very much appreciate that I've been subscribed to psych.org psych.org for ever since we last spoke uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing get the new book Etc yeah so there's my website um www. davidson. um you can kind of pre-order my book or order it um uh anywhere where you'd get your normal books like Amazon you know Bookshop or whatever wherever you go um but I do have like links on my uh web page as well um I'm on Twitter or X at Dore aore Robson uh my Instagram which I'm just kind of trying to build up is David a Robson so yeah you know I love hearing feedback I love having questions so get in touch I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next mate thanks if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give him a watch