Dhru Purohit Show - If You Want to Live Longer (and Happier), You Need Better Friends ASAP with Dr. Marisa Franco

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and WHOOP. Our friendships and relationships are an integral part of who we are and how we evolve. Even though we don’t need each other to survive anymore, we do need each other to thrive. All of the best things in life come from connection, community, and relationships.  So how do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Dr. Marisa G. Franco about how friendships are the most influential thing on our health, success, and happiness. They also talk about how to make, maintain, and deepen friendships and why understanding your attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant—is the key to unlocking what’s working (and what’s failing) in your friendships. Dr. Franco is a psychologist and national speaker. She works as a professor at the University of Maryland and is the author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. She writes about friendship for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert for major publications like the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Vice. In this episode, we dive into:    -The connection between friendships, relationships, and longevity (2:49) -Why social connection affects our longevity (5:33) -Questions to ask yourself to figure out if you’re lonely (12:15) -How being a better friend helps you in every aspect of your life (16:33) -How to make friends as an adult (20:35) -How to break into an established friend group (24:22) -How our baggage affects how we show up as friends (29:57)  -How to assess if you are being a bad friend (48:56) -Firing a friend (1:02:38) -How our trauma impacts our relationships (1:07:26)  -How to navigate differing opinions in friendships (1:09:04)  For more on Dr. Franco, follow her on Instagram @drmarisagfranco, Twitter @drmarisagfranco, and through her website, drmarisagfranco.com. Get her book, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends, here. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and WHOOP. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. For me, it's been a game-changer to optimize my sleep and improve my fitness, performance, and overall health. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The number one thing that decreases your mortality rates over and above those things, exercise and diet that we focus on so much for wellness is your level of social connection. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Marissa G. Franco, and we're talking all things, loneliness, friendship, connection. Did you know that one of the. Most important predictors of longevity is connection, relationships. But so many people feel that they don't have the right relationships in their life.

They feel that they have shitty friends. They feel that they don't have a community or a group of friends that truly understands them or has their back. Well, if you want to create all those things, today's episode is for you. A little bit more about Dr. Marissa G. Franco. She works as a professor at the University of Maryland and is the author. author of the newly released book, Plotonic, How the Science of Attachment can help you make and keep friends. Dr. Franco writes about friendship for psychology today and has been a featured connection expert on major publications, including the New York Times, the telegraph, and vice.

And she speaks on belonging at corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and universities across the country. One personal anecdote that I want to share before we jump into today's interview, having better quality friends and making friendships a priority in my life has been a game changer for me. It's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about this topic. When I focused on up-leveling my friendships and also focused on looking at how I could be a better friend to those friendships in my life, every aspect of my life improved. My health and wellness got better. My finances and my income increased. My sense of joy. and contentment in life, my sense of fun and the amount of experiences that I got a chance,

all these things that improved in my life directly came back to having better quality relationships. This is why I want this for you. So even though a lot of people don't necessarily think that they have a friendship problem, or even though a lot of people don't necessarily think that they have a loneliness problem, I encourage you to listen to today's conversation because it might inspire you to take your relationships to the next level. Dr. Marissa G. Franco, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in.

And there's something super important that you talk about in your book. And it's not something that people would normally associate with a topic of friendship, which is, what is the connection between friendships and relationships and longevity? I'd love to start there. oof, this is a good question. It's funny. I'm teaching a class on loneliness and sharing all this data that's really blowing their minds. Like, for example, meta analyses that summarize all the existing research out there. Look at the impact of something like exercise, like running on your mortality over the long term or eating healthy, like eating vegetables over the long term. And they find that, you know, obviously these very important things do decrease our mortality rates somewhere in the like 20 to 30 percent mark. But actually, the number one thing that decreases your mortality rates over and above those things, exercise and diet that we focus on so much for wellness is your level of social connection. Social connection influences your mortality, also more than just our common public health priorities, like obesity, smoking, right? The things we tend to focus on and create policies about, they don't impact mortality as much as your level of social connection.

when you hear that what does it make you think what's so special because i feel like if you if you go back let's say even like 10 years ago and you would tell people look sleep is so important for your health i know it feels like a soft intervention but we cannot over emphasize how important sleep is in terms of how you function if you don't sleep well you crave more carbs and sugar the next day if you don't sleep more you know if you don't sleep well you're more irritable if you don't sleep well like all sorts of impacts. And people are like, yeah, yeah, I get it, sleep. Okay, okay, I'll sleep when I die. And I feel like friendship and social connection is kind of going through that right now. You talk about it. People are like, okay, I get it. It's important, but it's still a little

underrated. So what's so special about that topic that it's so connected to our longevity? This is a great question. And I feel like it's something that we battle with us connection researchers in that connection feels so invisible, right? It's not a, physical and tangible like I'm eating this salad or I feel the sweat come down my body when I exercise. And I think that's one of the reasons that we so undersell it. And it can get lost amongst all the other things that go on in our day in a way that I feel like happened less in the pandemic, right? Like we were alone and we really had to reconcile with the impact that this was having and we really saw it. Like feeling more depressed, feeling like your identity is shrinking,

which is something that happens when we're not around our community, who sort of triggers the different parts of our identity. And so I think that's part of the reason why it's really under soul. But you also ask me within that question, why social connection affects our longevity. And I think we're finding from the research that just like we need oxygen, food, water to function optimally, we also need social connection. The impact of loneliness is devastating,

as devastating as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's a common stat that's shared. And what happens is if you think from an evolutionary perspective about the impact of loneliness, right? Loneliness meant you were separated from your tribe and you were in danger, like historically for our species. So what that means is that it triggers all these stress processes. Like you're in fight or flight mode.

You're sort of hypervigilant for cues of rejection. You're more distrusting of others. I like to tell people that loneliness is not just a feeling. It actually alters your entire mind state. The research finds that when you're lonely, you think people are rejecting you when they're not. Or when you're lonely, you report liking humanity less or liking your roommate less or having less compassion for human beings overall.

It's sort of like this stress process. And again, loneliness is also linked to poor sleep because you're on hyper-alert. You're very hyper-vigilant for other people who are. going to reject me or other people are going to harm me. And so obviously being in that fight or flight space for so long creates such a large wear and tear on your body. What is the definition of loneliness? Yeah, that's a good question, right? Because for some of us, alone time feels good. For others of us, a lone time doesn't quite feel well. And one of the factors that predicts that is like your mental health and well-being, right? Like if your mental health is suffering,

you're more likely to experience alone time as loneliness. Because, loneliness is fundamentally not having as much social connection as you desire. So if you don't desire social connection in this moment and you're alone, it's a lone time. If in this moment you're alone and you do desire social connection, it's loneliness. And within that word social connection, I know a lot of people that have a lot of different people in their life and you would look at them and you'd say, well, they're surrounded by a lot of people. They have a lot of people at work or there are maybe a lot of people that work with them or they have a big family, but there's still this deep desire for depth and connection. So you could be, in my understanding, and I'll phrase it

to you, could you be somebody that still has a lot of people around you, but still you feel lonely inside? This episode is brought to you by bi-optimizer's magnesium breakthrough. If you struggle with chronic fatigue, muscle aches, brain fog, anxiety, hormone imbalances, headaches, constipation, Or as my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, likes to call it, FLC syndrome that's code for straight up feeling like crap, listen up because I'm about to blow your mind and tell you about a super mineral that's linked to all of above and more. The question is, are you getting enough of it? I'm talking about magnesium, one of the top nutrient deficiencies around the globe. Here's something that a lot of people don't know. There are a ton of different forms of magnesium

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That's M-A-G, B-R-E-A-K-T-R-E-A-K-T-R-U-G-H-R-U-G-H-R-U-G-R-U with the code Drew 10. You know what's been a game changer for me as far as my fitness goes, my daily performance and my overall health, sleep. But you know, sleep is not as simple as just closing your eyes and hoping for the best. The quality of your sleep is ultimately what matters the most, which is why I love wearing my WOOP device. Woop is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coach platform that monitors your physiology 24-7. Woop helps me figure out my ideal sleeping schedule and gives me a sleep score every morning that's based on how the sleep I get

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Just go to join.wop.com and use the code Drew 15 at checkout. That's join. Dot W-H-O-O-P.com and enter the code D-H-R-U-15 at checkout for 15% off any W-WP membership. When I got my first job as a professor, I was administering a loneliness questionnaire to my participants called the UCLA Loneliness Questioner, one of the most popular assessments of loneliness. And I took it and I was like, oh, I guess I'm lonely according to this questionnaire. Because the questionnaire asks things like, do you feel known by people? sort of like do you feel that sort of intimacy of really being seen by other people? Like do you feel like you're really your authentic self around people?

And the truth was that even though I was surrounded by my colleagues every day, I did not feel like they actually knew who I was. So that meant that I was actually lonely. So I think of, for example, inauthenticity as a form of loneliness too, the feeling that, you know, I'm around people. but they don't actually see me, and I'm not actually able to reveal myself. What is a good question? We were chit-chatting a little bit before the interview got started,

and I was sharing that my anecdotal experience is that it's actually very tough sometimes to get people to open up and say that they're lonely. It takes, you know, kind of really getting a chance to know somebody. It's almost like feeling people don't want to admit it. You know, people will sometimes say, I'm struggling with my business, or I'm struggling with my health, loneliness is one of those things where it sort of makes you feel like you are a pariah if you openly admit it and say that you're lonely. So what are some questions? Maybe there's even some people that are listening today that aren't actually sure.

Am I lonely? Am I not lonely? What's an assessment or a way that people could ask themselves? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's like unfortunate that loneliness is so stigmatized because there is this 2000, I think it was 2018 report that found that the average American is lonely. So it's, it's so, I think, tragic, I think, that it still feels stigmatized to share that you're lonely, given that most of us are. And, you know, the pandemic, meta-analyses that assess the effects of the pandemic on our levels of connection found that it slightly increased our loneliness. So I would say, now more than ever, people are very lonely, right? And so in terms of like questions you might ask yourself to figure out if you're lonely, I think a big one is like

do you feel like the social connection you have matches the social connection that you want? And if the answer is no, you might be experiencing loneliness. I think the other thing is like do you feel like people really know who you are getting at that inauthenticity piece that contributes to loneliness? Well, I think that was a New York Times article that I read a few years ago. And one of the questions that they had inside of there, I think they called it like the 3 a.m. test. Like it was like if something, you know, you wake up and there's like an emergency and you need a friend, right? Not hopefully knock on wood 9-1-1. You don't have to like call the hospital, but you need a friend.

Do you feel that you have somebody that you can call? Yeah. What do you think about that question? So it's, I think it's really getting at the question of do you have not just a friend, but a confidence? in a way. And it's interesting because there's a study that looked at 106 factors that influence our levels of depressive symptoms. And the number one protector against depressive symptoms was having a confidant, someone to confide in and share what's really going on. And so, you know, when we think of friendship, I think your question really makes me want to fine tune our definition,

right? Because, you know, I battle against as someone who studies friendship really deeply, our collective definition of friendship being so flimsy, right? Like, I think often we just see friends as like, you know, this is someone I'm going to hang out with months a month and do this networking event, positive vibes only. We don't assume that friendship is its own responsibility. It's its own commitment. It's a relationship like any other relationship, one that you have to invest in one that you have to maintain. You know, people are so used to spending so much energy on dating, for example, or even maintaining a marriage, right? Couples therapy. We don't have a lot of friendship therapists, for example. And so I think because of that, it limits the potential that

friendship could contribute to our lives, right? I think a lot of the time we see friendship as this inferior relationship. Like, it's not as important as family. It's not as important as your spouse, right? But we're not recognizing the ways that we're actually acting to make this relationship inferior. We don't have ceremonies for our friends. We don't spend as much time on our friends. I'm less likely to travel across the country to see friends than I am to see family or that I am to see a spouse, right? And so fundamentally when you invest less in a relationship, it's going to be less important. And that's not because friendship is inherently less important or less meaningful. But I think we have to look at our behaviors and some of our scripts that we have for friendship. And we have for

friendship to understand why our ability to connect with a larger community might feel kind of limited. One thing that you were sharing again before we started recording was we often think of our relationships as isolated. So my friends are over here, my family's over here, my coworkers, et cetera, my volunteer group is over here. Help us understand the argument for like how becoming a better friend actually helps you in all aspects of your life.

That's such a good question. Helps you in all aspects of your life. Well, the research generally finds that whatever we do to be pro-social or sort of make other people feel loved and supported, right? Also benefits our mental and our physical health, for example, doing an act of kindness for others, like our mood improves after that. Or offering people support, right? That can both feel heavy for us.

we also feel very rewarded by it or expressing affection towards other people, right? That's positivity and that's warmth that you also experience in your body. And so one way to improve your mood and your mental health, and in fact, this is one of the more successful interventions against loneliness, is to be pro-social. Like start focusing on what can I do to make other people feel like they belong and start acting on it? Because the problem is, like what I said earlier, Drew, about loneliness being not just a feeling, but a state of mind, is that when we're lonely, we're also more self-absorbed, right? We are thinking, and also when we're insecure, like negative emotions make us more self-absorbed.

So we're thinking a lot more about how are people impacting me, you know, did that friend reach out to me? Did they say hi to me? Did they greet me? Did they slight me? In conversation, we're thinking about what we're sharing, how I'm coming off. And we're thinking a lot less about, have I made other people feel like they belong? Have I made them feel cherished? Have I made them feel valued?

And I think part of being really good at connection is to start flipping the script, right? If you want to be really good at making friends, you have to make other people feel like they belong. Because according to a theory called risk regulation theory, we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on our analysis of how likely we are to get rejected. So those Oprah's of the world who make other people feel like they belong, they're telling people, hey, you can invest in me. I am safe. And that's why they end up having people gravitate towards them more. You said the Oprah's of the world. Can extrapolate on that? Maybe our audience doesn't know. I actually, I don't know if I know the full reference. It's just that Oprah makes everybody feel welcome. Oprah's like a super connector, you know, and she makes people feel like they belong, right? She says, you say something interesting in an interview with her. I'm an Oprah fan and she'll say, tweetable moment, tweetable moment. She'll just make people feel really special. I mean, I guess you can think of, like, I don't know, other super connectors that might also do the same thing, but Oprah's the one that stands out in my mind. Yeah, well, I think that I had a little small, a little side note. I had a very interesting situation where I arrived to an event, and I didn't know anybody when I first arrived very early in the morning.

And I walked into the room, and the only other person that was standing there was Oprah Winfrew. What? That's so cool. Actual, true story. And we, I saw her and I was like, wow. Like, you know, I've watched Oprah and other things. I also really just appreciate how much she's introduced a lot of topics of mindset and different spiritual leaders and people like Reverend Michael Beckwith here from the Gap Center. And one of my favorite author is Eckart Tolle.

And I just went up to her and I just shared a story with her. And she listened. It was about Eckhart and just how a lot of my friends have heard about his work through her having him on his show. And she just asked a lot of great questions and was smiling and just like had this oar about her. So that's my little Oprah. Oh my gosh.

That would literally make my life if that happened to me. That's awesome. But coming back to what you were saying, really what I'm hearing is we're talking about the modern day, like how to, you know, make friends. and influence people, right? Like it's a modern day version of that, is that I hear so many people complain that they don't have the right friends, but are those same individuals putting in the effort and energy to actually be likable and create connection?

What are your thoughts on that? Oh, gosh, I wish that we learned. I'm sure there's many classes we wish we learned. We wish we took when we were younger, and I feel like making friends is one of them, that I wish we all got that education. You know, I'm teaching Gen Z now, and what we're seeing is, like, their biggest class on relationships is, like, social media.

And so I think, you know, the problem is that a lot of us just don't know how to make friends. We have no idea. And so we might rely on our childhood friends because it's easy, because we've known them, because we don't have to put in much effort, and they're already there. But then a lot of people feel disenchanted with their childhood friends. Like, I've evolved as a person.

And if I had met these people right now, I'm not sure they would have been my friends. So if we know how to make friends, we can really shake up our friendships world and begin to curate our social connections in our community to find people that really fit us. So that leads to the question, of course, Drew, how the heck do you make friends? What I think is really important first is that we stop assuming that friendship should happen organically. There's this sociologist, Rebecca Adams. She says friendship happens organically if you have repeated interactions that are unplanned and shared vulnerability.

Where do we get that? School, right? We had gym class. We had recess. We had these classes. We saw people every day. We didn't plan for it. We were able to let our guard down in school.

But as adults, we're in this working world. Many of us hybrid and virtual now. And we don't always let our guard down, right? People know one side of us, our work side. And there's a study that actually found that the more time we spend with people at work, the less close we feel. So what are the implications of that? That we can't assume that friendship is just going to fall into our lives like it did when we were younger, because we are fundamentally inhabiting a different infrastructure now as adults. So we're going to have to try.

We're going to have to make the effort. You know, if you find someone you like being able to say, it was so great to chat with you. I've really enjoyed it. Would you be open to exchanging contact information? Right. And we think this comes off as weird. This comes off as awkward. But first of all, remember when I told you that the average American is lonely, right?

So that means the average American would probably be really happy to have someone try to connect with them. Also, Drew, related to mindset, I think we can probably get into this more later. But one thing that I've learned from the research on friendship is that our predictions of how our social behavior comes off are not only inaccurate but negative. It's our natural inborn brain's negativity bias. right? Brain's helping us survive. We learn more from negative experiences than positive experiences, which means our predictions tend to be more cynical than the truths. So there's this study where these researchers had strangers interact. Afterwards, they asked the strangers, hey, how much did you like them? How much do you think they liked you? What they found was that in general, people

underestimated how liked they were. It's a phenomenon called the liking gap. So I try to remind people when it comes to friends, people are less likely to reject you than you think. Like, if you only ask them, you'll find that out. But the truth is that we're also stuck in this negativity bias, that we never actually test that assumption. We continue to assume that if I put myself out there, it's going to be weird and I'm going to get rejected. I think another challenge with friendship is that we often model behavior. And if our generation before us is a little bit more disconnected and the generation before that, just with people moving, like how many people, times have you moved what town did you grow up in like where were you where were you born

new york city new york city and you're still based in new york city oh you're yeah right yeah because you went to university of maryland so i think a lot more people are like moving around they're like going to a different city and like a lot of my friends have moved twice in their adult life for jobs and other things like that so you have to start over yeah again each time and that can feel quite daunting for a lot of individuals One hack that I've seen, because I moved to Los Angeles about 10 years ago, is also finding people who, if you can find people who also moved around the same time as you did, it's nice because they're equally as motivated in investing in new relationships. And I was sharing with you that I'm part of this men's group. It's called man morning. We get together on Thursdays and go for like a hike in the morning.

And all those same guys, we were looking back and we've benefited so greatly from our friendship and all sorts of. of incredible things have happened. When one person does really well and gets a book deal, then somebody else sees that it's possible and something happens for them. When one person's income goes up and they talk about the group and what they're doing in their business, everybody else's income kind of goes up. We all kind of lift each other up in the positive direction. And when we were looking back about like, what was it that allowed this group to really get connected? I think, number one, everybody is growth minded, right? Which is nice to have friends that are kind of open-minded. Number two was everybody kind of plus or minus a couple years moved to Los Angeles at the same time.

So they were motivated to try to find their group. Do you ever hear that that is kind of, it's hard for people to break into an existing group that's there? This is such a great question, Drew. I think you really hit the nail on the head. In the research world, it's called transitioners. Finding transitioners helps you find friends. So that's new people that just moved to the new city, people that just might have come of a relationship, people that might be retiring, right? Those are the people that tend to be

particularly open to friendship. And something that I really suggest to people is, if someone doesn't want to be your friend, walk away, don't work harder, right? Like sometimes we're like, oh, they're pulling away. Now it's time for me to ask more and cling more, right? But no, I think when you end up trying to cling to those people that don't seem as invested as you are, Maybe it's just time, right? They're less available. They have other life obligations. It's not that they don't, they necessarily don't like you.

But you end up pursuing relationships where you're not going to get your needs met, right? And welcoming those relationships into your life. And so I think when it comes to friendship, it's really important to try to build friends with people that are similarly invested in the relationship that can give you the level of reciprocity that really makes you happy. But Drew, I am actually really interested. I love this more. What is it called again? Man morning. Man morning.

It's such a great idea, right? Because what you did is you brought continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. Like by creating that every Thursday we meet up. We actually talk about celebrations and navigations, I think you mentioned, right? What's going on our life? What do we feel stuck on? Yeah, exactly. Like you created infrastructure for friendship and the ways that you set up that group.

I think one question I would be interested in is what do you say to people who are new to a city and want to find transitioners. How do they find them? Well, my friend Louis Howells, a really smart dude, when I asked him this question one day, we were just chatting, he said, I have the perfect answer. I always tell people, go to where people grow. Go to where people grow. Where are people going to grow? Because those individuals, if they're going to that yoga class, if they're going to that photography class, if they're going to take some continuing learning education, if they're just going to a meetup for entrepreneurship, whatever it is, any kind of community where people are going to grow, to learn to be a better person, those individuals tend to be

in a place where they're transitioning and they're getting into a new subject. Even if they haven't moved just recently to a place, they're kind of in a new life stage. So if they want to be better, if they want to make themselves better, they're also more open to finding community that's going to help them. And they want to invest in other people that are in that same space too. So it's hard to find people like it's not easy. I know like Bumble has like a whole friendship category and other stuff. I think that's kind of awkward for a lot of especially men to, you know, do something like that, like to seek out and use an app to find friends versus like going to like an entrepreneurship meetup or going to like a soccer meetup or whatever it is. you know, whatever social club.

I think women are naturally a little bit more better. I'd love to hear about that. Are there any gender differences between friendships and stuff? But yeah, go to where people grow. Where are people growing? What is a subject you're interested? That's a way better place in your area to find somebody in you who's willing to invest in you and be open to you investing in them.

Thoughts on that from a professor's standpoint. I love that. Like that is just such an awesome idea. I've usually just said like what's something you like to do, do it in community, right? because people that are doing it in community are open to community. But go where people grow, I think it's probably more catchy. So I might have to use that in the future. I'll credit Lewis House, right?

Louis House. Yeah, School of Greatness. That's awesome. How important is it inside of, well, let me take a step back a little further because you mentioned something and you were talking about people have this fear of, is somebody going to like me? And people have this fear of, I just met some. knew, they're not replying to me, are they kind of pulling back? How is important is it to be

aware of our baggage that we're bringing into new relationships? And I guess the second part of that would be, how does our baggage affect our relationships? I love this question. So when I wrote Platonic, right, I'm a psychologist. And I knew a lot of the times friendship advice, it's a little surfacy. It's like, join a meetup, right? It feels super surfacy. It feels super surfacy, but it's like that doesn't address that I'm really afraid of rejection and that feels very exposing, right? And so how do we address sort of like the deeper psychology? And so for my book, the thesis of it is really the idea that how we've connected has fundamentally shaped who we are. Our experiences of connection or disconnection are deterministic for whether we are trusting, vulnerable,

friendly, warm, cold, withdrawn, cynical. Like all of these personality traits are predicted by our previous experiences of connection. But then who we are affects how we connect. It's not random. It's not just like some people happen to fall into friendship and others don't, right? There's certain qualities that we have that make us more. likely to be very good at connecting with other people. We tend to see that those people that have histories of healthy connection embody these qualities that make them really good at connecting

with other people. So it's sort of like this positively reinforcing cycle. Another term for what I'm sharing with you is called attachment theory. Attachment theory is basically the idea that in our parenting relationships, we at that time, that critical period, we really start to internalize a larger template for what it means to be loved and get close to people from our parents. So if I'm vulnerable, will people judge me? Will they not judge me? Right? Or, you know, if I have a need, will someone try to meet it or not? You know, if I share a feeling, will someone minimize it or will they be open to it, right? In our parental relationships, we form this template and then, according to attachment theory, we start to bring it to all of our other relationships. So your

your relationship with your parents kind of sets the tone and shapes your brain in terms of what to expect with other relationships. Exactly. That's exactly it, Drew. The problem is, right, that all of these attachment styles suffer from confirmation bias. If you have this template, you are looking for information that matches your template. You are disregarding the information that does not match your template, right? So people, for example, that think everyone is going to abandon me, right? This is anxiously attached, it's called. They might go into a new friendship. A friend didn't respond to them in like, you know, four hours. They're busy doing other things. This person is abandoning me. That trigger is going off. All of a sudden, they start

either pulling away from this friend or, you know, anxious, actually attached people. They'll suddenly make a lot of demands or start, like flooding you with like requests, right? Because they need you to prove to them that you're not abandoning them. And then that actually ends up pushing people away. So it's sort of like your mindset affects your behaviors so that and then your behaviors affect reality in ways that confirm your initial fears. And you don't really what I love about attachment theory, right? Because some people are like, well, this is depressing. Good for people with healthy relationships. And I'm like, that's not the implications here.

The implications here. And this is coming from me who's previously anxiously attached, now a lot more secure, is that you're not powerless over your social world. Right? Like before you understand how this works, you can just be like, people can't be trusted. Everybody's going to leave you at the end of the day. And it's, and you have this understanding that the problem is out in the world and then you have no control over it. But if you can understand how I behave, how I show up in my relationships affects how people treat me, then you have an opening. If I change my behaviors, now I can get something different out of my relationships. I don't know if you've seen any of the content of like Caesar Milan, the dog whisper, right?

But in a way, when you look at like the behavior of dogs and as social groups, you see that, you know, dogs have a lot of these same type of attachment type relationships and dogs that are raised in isolation. And owners are really afraid and they don't let them play with other dogs and other stuff, especially when they're like the small dogs. They don't know how to be around other dogs that are there. And in a way, of course, humans are different than dogs, but like, we're still like pack creatures. And we have not sort of learned how to properly, you know, connect. And of course, our relationship with our parents and how we, you know, we're brought up. What do you think we're, you know, without, you can go into as much detail or as little detail as you want? But you mentioned that you had previously identified yourself as like having more of an anxious attachment.

What were some of the factors in your life growing up or just experiences that would have led to? that. It might be helpful for our audience to sort of understand like how does somebody kind of develop that a little bit more. Yeah, that's a great question. In general, when it comes to anxious attachment, you might experience parents that are more intrusive or just not aligned with what your needs are. They may be sort of like invalidating, for example. Like if you share a need, they're sort of like, you know, no, like get over this or that's not how you should feel, right? They bulldoze you. Yeah, they'll bulldoze you a little bit.

They're doing the best they know how. Exactly. But still, they bulldoze you a little bit. And usually if you're anxious, if your parent is anxiously attached, you'll become anxiously attached because they're like this baby isn't loving me, right? So they're not attuned to you in the same way, right? And so I think it's, for me, it was probably just the sort of validation piece, needing to feel like I was more validated and my feelings. And so what happens is if you don't receive that invalidation early in life, you start being what's called avoidantly attached to yourself. Avoidantly attached people uncomfortable with vulnerability, uncomfortable with intimacy.

They come from parents who gave them shelter, gave them food, did not give them any emotional warmth. It was take care of this over your own. Why are you crying? Don't cry. Be strong. There just wasn't much emotional support in that relationship. And so anxiously attached people tend to relate to their own feelings like, I'm too much. This is, you know, this is my feelings are invalid or, you know, it's my fault that this thing,

this went wrong. Like they just, they don't see that, they don't see, I guess, the larger mosaic of the relationship playing out. They always think they're the person that's doing something wrong. So they tend to pair up, be part of relationships with people that don't treat them well because they think it's always their fault. Are they also tend to be like hypercritical on themselves? Hypercritical, there's actually like brain science research that finds that their amygdala lights up more when they experience rejection.

So they actually experience slights. And that's the lizard brain, the fear part of the brain. The fear part. Thank you. Thank you for describing that. Yeah. Yeah. So fundamentally slights in relationships are more painful for them.

So I like to think of it like, let's say someone took your lunch, Drew. if you had a refrigerator stocked with food at home, you'd be like, man, someone took my lunch. But I guess, you know, I'll go take out all this food from my refrigerator that's at home and I still have food. But for anxiously attached people, it's like, someone took my lunch, there is no food. And now I have nothing. And so anxiously attached people, they'll wallow in relationship issues. They'll obsess over them because they don't have the same level of resilience. And what that resilience is, I think, is like security in yourself.

So you can use yourself as a resource to regulate events that are going on outside of you, right? So if you hurt me, I'm able to say, like, you know what? I know that I'm a good person. Even if you reject me, I still am confident that, like, I have something to offer people. But anxiously attached people, they really outsource their sense of self. They say, basically, my feelings about whether I'm a worthy person are completely dependent on how you treat me. How does somebody go from anxious or avoidant to secure? Yeah, this is a great question.

You need to understand your template as an anxiously attached person, right? Your template is that people are going to abandon you or hurt you. You also have the tendency to engage in a behavior called fawning, which basically it's like you have fight, flight, freeze, and then fawn. It's a threat response where if people don't like you, you try to get them to like you. But the secure thing to do is if people don't like you, let them not like you, find other people, right? Because that's how anxiously attach people find themselves in these negative relationships. So it's about noticing your own template and how that affects your behaviors and trying to practice different behaviors, which I really go into the book. I know that this is sort of generalist.

But it's also about noticing moments of safety, right, that aren't aligned. with your template that people are abandoning you. So Rick Hansen, he's a psychologist. He really talks about how our brain learns from negative experiences really strongly. But we can get them to learn from positive experiences if we actually stop and savor moments of safety, like take them in, like think about them and focus on them until they stir something in our bodies. Because when our bodies stir emotion, we start releasing these hormones that contribute to

like changing our brain structures, right? So if you're an anxiously attached person, when someone is responsive to you, take that in and feel that. Like, meditate on it a little bit, right? And also start building relationships with people that actually like you that are secure because that's going to start healing your template over time too. I love your thoughts on this. But when I was before I met my wife and I was in the dating world, as somebody who, you know, everybody grows up and has their, own, you know, little tea traumas and other things that they, you know, that they experience. But I would say overall, like my, my dad always had great friends. My mom always had great friends.

And they really modeled and they started first with my sisters on the middle child. And they really emphasize like, you guys are like a team. Like your best, like your first best friend was like my sisters, right, at a young age. So I grew up with a lot of secure attachment in that side. And later on in the dating world, you know, everybody has relationships that work out, don't work out for different reasons. And I realized that the women in my case that I would have the most alignment with sort of like the future and our vision and other stuff.

And I come from a big family, which can be a lot for a lot of different people. And I have a lot of friends in my life was I would ask people when I was dating early on, like, just to get to know them a little bit, like, do you have friendships that you've maintained over the years? And not that if they didn't, they were a bad person, but that it just maybe wasn't a fit for me. I had been in some relationships previously where I was dating some, some women who had kind of, every year, it was like a cycle through of new friendships. No judgment on that. It was more of a sense of, I looked at it as like, if you can maintain friendships, sure, you may be not in alignment with the same people that you grew up with when you were a kid.

But if you have long-term friends and you're like in your 30s, it takes a lot of effort and energy to have long-term friends. You end up fighting. You end up making up. You end up having to keep in touch. But if you don't have those friendships, again, no judgment is just that will sort of my world of a lot of friends and a big family and as somebody who also, I don't want to be everything to you.

I actually don't want to be your best friend. I want to be your partner, your romantic partner, maybe one day. day in the future, your husband. I want you to have your own friends so that you don't demand on me every single thing. I don't want to go shopping if that's something that you want to do or if you want to do this very specific thing that I'm not into. Sure, there might be some areas we overlap, but you should have friends that you get a chance to do that with. And there's other things that we get a chance to do that with. So I know that's my little soapbox moment, but I'd love to get to your thoughts on that. First of all, I love this soapbox because I feel like a lot of

us have just been taught the opposite, where we're just like, find your, you know, your one and only, they complete you. And then we become very insular with that, you know, primary spouse. And we start shedding our friendships. This is sort of a common trajectory that we see. Like, once you get into a romantic relationship, research finds that on average, we lose two friends, right? And I think that we are losing out on such an opportunity. Because fundamentally, what the research tells us is that friends are resource for a romantic partnership, right? So, for example, there was this study that looked at spouses that were in conflict, and that led to maladaptive cortisol release, like their cortisol release patterns, stress hormone release patterns were off and wacky. But if they had strong support

outside of their partnership, that didn't happen. Their cortisol release was still normal. Other research that finds that when we're going through trials and tribulations with our romantic partnership. We're more resilient to those problems when we have friends outside of the relationship. And so it's such a resource when we have friends. And then fundamentally, if you look at loneliness, right, John Caciopio, he's past now, but he was a loneliness researcher. He sort of argued that there's actually three different dimensions of loneliness. One is intimate loneliness. That is, I'm lonely for someone who's a very close connection, a spouse, a best friend. Two, relational loneliness.

I'm lonely for someone who's as close to me as, like, a typical friend. Three, collective loneliness. I'm lonely for a larger community working towards a common goal. And so what does this research mean that even if we found the best spouse ever, we can still be lonely because as human beings throughout our entire history, we've needed an entire community to feel whole, right? And then I think, you know, we're just going to miss out. and we're going to harm our friendships and we're going to harm our spousal relationship.

If we decide, oh, once I get into this relationship, I just have to focus on this one person. And I no longer prioritize these people that I've prioritized for decades before I found this one person. It's so true. You know, there's a friend of mine, author, speaker, podcaster, Astaire Perel. Oh, Esther. And she has this great quote. She says, what we used to get from an entire village, now we expect from one person. and that's kind of like the Disneyification, the Disneyfication of romance.

And I think that people have to actively work against that. I guess the modern version of that would be the Instagram version of the ideal relationship. And typically I think a lot of people think of like women falling into that, but I think men can, everybody can fall into that because you have this ideal version that this one person is going to come in and complete you. And you put so much emphasis. there and you pull back. I think another area that's tough just because kids are tough and raising kids are tough is when people have children. And people are going through another major life

stage. We have less kind of community support. Child care in the U.S. plays a role into it. Anything about kids that you see inside of the research and friendship. Because anecdotally, that's just one area where I see a lot of, a lot of the, you know, people on my team are are women. Many of them are young mothers. And I hear that there's just listening and, you know, talking and different things like that in our sort of virtual water cooler moments, loneliness is a challenge for many of them in a way that they had never experienced in life. Yeah. Yeah. This is a good question. And certainly it's a reality that when you have a newborn kid completely dependent on you for everything, that it's hard to spend that time.

with your friends in the same way. You just have less time. You have more obligations. But when it comes to like the transition to motherhood, it tends to be easier to keep up your well-being if you're continuously investing in your social support network, right? Like social support network, social support, it just protects us from pretty much everything, everything, especially difficult life transitions, like the transition to motherhood, right? They can often bring up a lot of things. And I think it's hard because I feel like when I'm going through this now, like friends that are having kids, there's often the assumption, oh, they have no time because they have to spend all this time with their kids. So I'm just going to kind of shrink away as a friend if I don't

have kids, right? And so I think that can contribute to even more isolation for new parents, right? It's that same thing where like when you assume people are going to reject you or are disinterested, then you sort of pull away from the friendship. And so I think that, That's a misconception that can help people that don't have kids and people that do have kids maintain their connections that, hey, just because someone has a kid doesn't mean that there's no interest in maintaining a connection. It might just have to look different, right? So I, you know, showing up to my friend's place at 7 o'clock for a 20-minute walk,

like you might just have to be more accommodating, right? So in the book, I talk about generosity and friendship and what should it look like? And I think when it comes to friendship, we often emphasize reciprocity. you are reaching out as much as I'm reaching out and you're making concessions as much as I'm making concessions, but I actually prefer the term mutuality. Mutuality means I'm looking at your capacity and my capacity, and we're choosing the best decision based on an acknowledgement of our shared capacities. So at the times when you have less capacity, I'm going to show up more, maybe when you just had a kid, right? I'm going to be the one that's more flexible.

At the time when you have more capacity, you're going to show up more. It's more fluid, it's more dynamic, and it's more based off of the realities of the situation right now. Like, we're not going to expect the same things from our friends when they're going through something really difficult than they would. Then we would when they're feeling their best. How do you know if you're being a shitty friend? This is a great question. I think shitty friends, oh, man, I feel like I can go in so many different directions with this. Because I think my hypothesis, and this isn't even based on research.

is that we don't often know when we're being shitty friends. That's why I'm asking the question because I'm sure there's some people that are listening. Everybody, I'm sure at times, you're going through a lot. But I think it's a very important question because we often feel that the other, just in society, not just even with friendship. It's often the other that's the problem. And not ourselves. And I think it's important to have an honest look at ourselves, especially if we want to improve our life. And I think sometimes we have to ask yourself, like, are we being a shitty friend?

So yeah, most people don't know, but what are some things that they could be thinking about? Yeah. Behaviors, patterns, actions. Do you follow through with what you say with your friends? So when you, I remember my brother was telling me, he asked a friend to pick up a package because he was traveling. That friend just didn't show up, right? That's one of the number one things we look for in friends. Are you going to support me in those times of needs?

So those are like what I like to call diagnostic moments for friendship is the, these moments that matter disproportionately for how we view the friendship. One is like big celebrations in my life. Like did you show up when I got married, for example? But also moments when we're at our lowest, like any of these extremes in mood, like do you show up in those times? And so when someone doesn't show up when we need support, it's just going to disproportionately impact our desire to stay in that friendship.

Like for me, I had a friend. He went through divorce and I just made sure I was always checking in on him and seeing how he was doing and trying to be very present with him. But when I went through a breakup, I texted him and he didn't even respond. And I, my body wouldn't let me engage in this friendship anymore. Like it was, I just literally could not muster interest. As much as he's a great person, and I know it wasn't intentional, and he was probably just being oblivious. And that's the thing. I feel like obliviousness just tends to be behind a lot of the ways that we don't show up as friends, you know, like especially because we don't prioritize friendship in the same way, right?

It's just the thing, if we let things slip, the first thing we let slip is often friendship, right, with all the other things that we have going on. And that, I think that letting slip process, we're not always conscious of it, but it has a real impact on whether our friendships are continuing to be maintained. Can I ask you a little bit more about that? Did you tell this friend that didn't respond to you that you were hurt? by his behavior. I think you said it was a he.

Yeah, it was he. So Drew, this was my growth edge writing this book because I was like really scared of bringing up conflict with friends. I was like, I should get over it. This is my anxiously attached side. I should be getting over it. You know, like why do I make this big deal out of something?

It's not a big deal. This is anxiously attached chatter you might recognize yourself in, right? Just devaluing your needs before anyone else can. But once I started writing the book, gosh, I read this study on conflict, and it found that open empathic conflict is actually linked to deeper intimacy in our relationships. And I was like, so I'm sabotaging my relationships by not bringing up conflict? And now, of course, it totally makes sense because in these relationships, when I didn't bring up conflict, I just withdrew. It wasn't like if I didn't bring up the problem, it went away.

It was I was afraid to bring up the problem because I thought it would hurt the relationship. But by not bring up the problem, I inevitably hurt the relationship because I didn't want to be apart in it anymore because I wasn't expressing my needs. And then other studies that find that, like, people that communicate passive aggressively, they actually raise other people's blood pressure, right? And so you think you're like trying to be a coming by being like, this isn't a big deal or trying to get it indirectly or not addressing it up front. But actually you're like kind of dooming the relationship. And for me, it was like, I ended up bringing it up an issue with my best friend. And she actually didn't do anything wrong. I thought she didn't respond to her.

an important email. She did. I didn't see it. And I realized that when we don't have conflict, we are holding someone guilty before giving them a trial, right? Like, that's what we're doing. And this was one of the things, Drew, that I learned in my process in the ways that friendship is like our other relationships, is like our spousal relationship. We have to work through conflict with our spouse. We're going to have to work through conflict with our friends. That conflict arises, it's a sign of intimacy. It's not a sign that a relationship necessarily. needs to end. There's the psychoanalyst, Virginia Goldner. She talks about the difference between flaccid safety. Flacid safety is this relationship feels safe because we never bring up any problems

versus dynamic safety. This relationship feels safe because we can rupture and repair and rupture and repair. And she says, like, dynamic safety is how we find deeper intimacy. So anyway, this is a very long-winded answer to say, I had to bring it up. And I realize it's important for me to bring it up for the health of this friendship and that it's actually a negative thing for me to try to get over it on my own when I'm not. So I ended up bringing it up with him and just saying like, hey, like, and that's the thing, open empathic conflict benefits relationship. So it's not me attacking him saying, you're an awful friend. I shut up for you. Where were you when I needed you? No, I said something like, you know, good conflict. You're engaged in perspective taking. You're giving

people the benefit of the doubt. You're expressing your needs with eye statements. Like I feel this way, not you did this. So I just said like, hey, you know, I know that this probably wasn't intentional and I'm aware that you probably have a lot going on. But I just wanted to share because I want us to be able to still have a close relationship. And I feel like bringing this up will help us continue our relationship that I did feel really hurt when I tried to reach out to you about my breakup and I didn't hear back from you. And so he ended up responding this beautiful text message. It was very nice. It was like absolutely, you know, what would you feel most supported by? I know this must be extra hurtful,

considering all the ways that you showed up for me. And so that was like a really, really nice text message. But, man, Drew, I guess it was just like maybe our friendship. He probably was a friend. He wasn't like a closer best friend. He was just like a friend. Yeah, there was a lot of dynamics involved. Yeah.

So the initial betrayal, I will, I think in that case, it was sort of was too much. It was just too much. And I also, like this was a friend that had a history of like, I don't know, just not showing a similar level of investment. So it was hard for me to be able to come back from it. But I will say more likely to come back from it because we had that rupture and repair than I would be if I never addressed it. Then I would have really been done. And I see friendships too.

And I think this is a really good way to look at friendships in research on long distance friendships. As flexible, not fragile. So over time, there might be periods where either of us are just less invested in this. And that doesn't mean that that won't change eventually. And we might like come back together and become close again over the long, you know, the long lives that we all live. Yeah, I think what's important about that story and thanks for sharing it is that I actually think that one of the number one things that we do that's shitty behavior in friendships is the well-intention. idea, but again, it goes back to this avoidance sort of aspect, which is not letting people know when we're hurt.

And the crazy thing is, is that, as you mentioned before, it doesn't just show up in friendships, it will show up in your relationship too. We run with these narratives in our head and these stories, and we have no idea the battle that people are facing. And we have no idea about the tough time that they're going through. We have no idea that the thing that we didn't realize that we didn't realize that we're we did before was their version of like getting back at us, you know, and they have something that they want to bring up. And I think that honest communication of like, hey, listen, you know,

I always like there's this approach to marital therapy that I got really into with my, my wife and everything. It's called the Gottman Institute. You familiar with it? So they have this term inside of there. And a lot of their, a lot of their advice on relationships is actually, just as your advice that for friendships makes you better in relationship, a lot of their relationship advice makes you a better friend. So this term called a soft starter. Don't come in ready to start a war with somebody because defense, when people are defensive, they're less likely to hear you. So soft starter is, hey, I know you didn't do this on purpose or, hey, I know you didn't intend this, right? Because most people don't intend to actively hurt you or,

or whatever. Hey, I know you didn't intend this, but when you didn't respond, like, I felt a little hurt by that. And I just want to, you know, reach out and share that with you because I care about you. And also, I want to check in because is anything going on with you? And when I've asked that and sent that to people, which also takes courage, it takes courage to say that because your fear is that people are going to reject you. They're going to say, F off. I don't care about your problems anywhere, you know, or in other instances, I see that people who haven't always shown up, and we all go through phases where we don't have the chance to show up. Somebody becomes a dad or a mom or something or the business is really intense right now.

You get more busy. You haven't been as attuned to everybody's needs. So people usually have in the back of their head maybe some areas that they weren't the best at. So is it going to lead to this whole conversation of what I did wrong? But I just think that open dialogue and sharing that hurt creates that depth, that vulnerability that you mentioned. It's so tough, but it's one of the most important things you could do to maintain and deepen friendships that are there. Absolutely. And, you know, Drew, I love that,

you know, you have such a healthy approach to it and your security. It exudes as you talk about this. Because I think, you know, a lot of, again, our prediction mechanisms of our brain, right? A lot of people, myself included, just have this prediction that it's going to escalate, right? I'm going to make them more angry. It's going to be like when you play a game of monopoly that doesn't go well, like sort of like tables topped over. So like, you know, while I was doing research for my book, the father of attachment theory, John Bolby, he talks about how insecure and secure people approach their anger very differently. So if you're insecure, you experience what's called anger of despair, which means your goal is kind of to blow it up and get revenge because you're in so much

pain, right? And sharing a sort of script like you shared, it requires the ability to regulate your emotions. It requires you to say, hey, I'm hurt, but I'm also still engaged in perspective taking. When we're in pain, our ability to perspective take, it gets so low. And so, you know, insecurely attached people, when they approach conflict, it's like an attack. It's like, I'm here to attack you and put you down so that I don't feel this much pain anymore. It's very focused on the self, which is, you know, like I said, when we're in pain, we just tend to focus a lot more on ourselves because it takes resources to consider other people. Whereas securely attach people, they tend to engage in something called anger of hope, which means their anger doesn't, their anger,

angry feelings aren't what drives the conversation. Instead, they use that anger as a signal that something needs to change. And then they're strategic about figuring out, how can I get this issue to change. So part of that is me giving that soft startup. Part of it is me sharing my feelings. Part of it is me being able to share your feelings too. Like securely attached people, I think they're just thinking a lot more about the impacts of their actions on others and a lot less about this is my own pain and I have to do whatever it takes, whether that's withdrawing or attacking to try to modulate my own experience of pain. And often so much of what people are going through it's not about you.

It's so true. And I think that's an important reminder just in life as a whole. You know, there's that term, it's kind of like a phrase that I've heard people share, is that, well, before I shared a little background, it's like we worry that things are going to escalate. We worry that somebody's going to blow up, even in work and people have that relationship with their, you know, boss or whatever.

I think it's important to remember that if people are hysterical in any relationships, if they're hysterical, it's historic. If somebody is going to freak out on you about a genuine request, that's actually good information. I actually look for that in relationships, even in business. If I'm doing business with somebody and all of a sudden this person freaks out, okay, great. I'm getting information. So first, in a calm way, I'm going to engage with them and say, okay, what's really behind this? Because it's not just about this situation that's here often.

It's about something else. So what is the behind the scenes? And if we can't go on that journey together to go into the behind the scenes and then for them to say, you know what, listen, I've had a tough week. My parent was just diagnosed with cancer or this is going on. And that's why I freaked out and I apologize and I want to repair. It's an indication that this person is going through so much hurt. They actually can't show up for you right now. So that's good information to know because then in a beautiful way you can move on and you can love somebody from a distance.

Have you ever had to fire a friend? And what do you want to say about that topic? I wanted to first piggyback off. Please. I think, yeah, what you're saying is just so brilliant. Has me thinking about, like, I sort of reached the conclusion that, like, triggers are the opposite of love. Because when we love someone, we are seeing all of them. We are giving them the benefit of the doubt.

We are invested in their well-being and in them feeling great. When we're triggered, we are focused, we narrow someone. We narrow them into this one thing they did to harm us. We're not thinking about their well-being. We're only thinking about our well-being because we're just like, I need to protect myself, right? And in the research, risk regulation theory argues that often we are either in a place of self-protection or we're pro-relationship, right? A lot of the things we do to protect ourselves, I'm not going to initiate, I'm going to get

aggressive. I'm going to withdraw. I'm going to blame this on you, right? That might make me feel a little bit better, but the cost is my relationships. And the things that I do to benefit my relationships, like I'm going to be more vulnerable, right? I'm going to share what you did that hurt me in a vulnerable, honest way where I'm not blaming you. I'm going to share affection towards you. I'm going to be generous towards you. All of that makes the self more vulnerable, right? And so insecurely attach people, it's not that they don't want to love. It's just that they have this drive for self protection that's so strong and they don't always realize that that comes at a cost, right? Often like, well, I mean, like I said, one of the biggest protectors that we have in life is our

relationship. So if you're always stuck in self-protection mode, in the long run, that's actually self-harm mode, right? Because the cost is your relationships. And it's so taxing on your nervous system. Exactly. It's also taxing at your nervous system. You constantly feel like you have to protect yourself and defend. Yeah, you're bracing yourself. You're in that fight or flight mode. Yeah. I had a friend who recently has been working with a therapist to sort of unpack a little bit.

And then with that therapist also embarked on ketamine therapy, ketamine assisted therapy with a therapist. And, you know, I don't know too much about that topic. We've covered a little bit. You know, we've interviewed Dr. Roland Griffiths from Johns Hopkins on. psilocybin and the emerging research that's in that category. It's very fascinating. And I'm, I hope that it, you know, it seems like it has a really beautiful place to play in the right context and setting when it comes to helping us unwind some of this old baggage that, that we have

and sort of see ourselves for who we really are. And see the part of us that's not actually, you know, us. But this friend was sharing that, um, going through this process. And I've heard similar things with, with, uh, couples who've done, you know, MDMA assisted therapy, you know, that's there with a practitioner is they got for a second to see how much they carry their body throughout the day with a sense of they're just waiting to be punched like a bracing and how that affected all their relationships, their friendships, how even going into a coffee with a friend, they're part of a group that we all have, even going into a coffee with a friend, they were sort of getting ready for something to go wrong.

And so just that little perspective shift of easing the nervous system, not holding their breath as much, coming in and just sort of seeing each situation for what it is. Sure, there might be a situation where you do have to brace yourself, often not, and how that changed their nervous system and they started interacting with people in a different manner. It was just a little anecdote from one individual, but it made me feel really excited about the idea of your friendships in a way are a little bit of that canary in the coal mine. How you are with other people is often a reflection of how you are interacting with yourself and your nervous

system on a daily basis. I mean, let's talk about it. First of all, I want to say, like, wow, that was a very powerful story. I think, you know, coming to the realization that you're always bracing for impact, right? You're always ready to, I think that can manifest is always assuming people have negative intent or out to get you, right, if you think things like people can't be trusted, right? And I think a lot of people can relate to that. And I'm just so happy to hear that your friend figured out that that was happening. I also liked in your response, Drew, you kind of touched on like, it's about connecting with who you really are, right? Like, letting go of this trauma, trauma replaces who we are. If we've gone through trauma, we, it's hard to realize to recognize what's real.

it's hard to recognize what our true needs are because we're coming from this place of always being triggered and triggering puts us in such a different place, right? And so it's hard to have a clear lens on life when we've experienced all this trauma. And one of my chapters in my book is on authenticity because I think our authentic self is who we are when we feel safe. Because when we feel safe, we're not hijacked by defense mechanisms that are again crushing who we are most authentically. And that's why I think authenticity is important for friendship. Because I think as social creatures, at our most authentic self, when we feel safe, when we're not in fight or flight mode, we're naturally good at friendship. We naturally love to give.

We are naturally loving towards other people, right? We're naturally considerate of others. We naturally want and crave connection and we don't minimize that. And so part of it is like connecting with the core that's like in all of us. You know, you never lose that just because you've gone through some trauma. it's just that it might be a little bit buried. You might be a little bit out of touch with it. But like it's still absolutely there.

And I think if we can we can just like, I don't know, connect with like our genuine feelings. Like figure out who we are underneath, I guess, our trauma and our baggage. Like that just really helps our relationships and our sense of connection. But I realize I went off a total tangent and I didn't actually answer the question that you had. I love your tangents. Thank you, Drew. Do you mind repeating it? Honestly, I totally forgot.

because I was so into what you were sharing there. But I do have another topic that I want to talk to you about. Okay. And it's a really important topic that has become one of the most challenging aspects of friendship, I would say, in the last few years. For me personally, fighting to and putting intention on maintaining friendships with people, even if they have different views, let's say politically, globally, whatever, they vote different, has made my life so much richer.

And I want to chat about that because I've seen so many people over the last few years write somebody off because they feel that through one belief, maybe how they've voted or maybe even a you know an opinion that they have which often these days like opinions are they're like how serious are they like some people have opinions about all sorts of different stuff but let's say that person that friend has an opinion and now these two people who genuinely have things that they bond over have some shared experiences in the past are not just no longer friends, but actually in instances like enemies. Nemesis, yes.

And I want to chat about that because I am very worried about that component. And there's so many layers that are at play, including the fact that, you know, the media makes a lot of money, keeping things, you know, divisive. And advertising is down when things are not as divisive. It's just a natural state of the situation. But I'd love to hear your opinion on this, you know, because there's a lot of layers to it. There is a lot of layers to it. I feel like whenever I get this question, this is the question I brace myself on because I know it's a very tricky question to answer.

I always know like whatever direction I go with this answer, I'm going to get people that are really upset, which is why I try to approach this question with a lot of complexity, right? So I'll just give you an example, Drew. I, you know, when I was a professor in Atlanta, I was experiencing a lot of racism. I had another friend, also a professor at a different institution. He was experiencing a lot of racism. This sounds tendential, but I'll bring it back, right? I grew up in New York City, so I was not used to blatant racism, you know, people, you know, yelling things out at me on the street. He grew up in Germany.

He had experienced a lot of blatant racism growing up. And so fundamentally our ability to tolerate this was very, very different based off of our histories, right? And I ended up leaving that institution and finding a new job. And he did it. He stayed in his institution. He's happy. I think it was the right choice for him because I feel like our ability to engage in these conversations, have these friends across differences really depends on our own capacities,

our own values. It really depends on knowing yourself. Like, how triggering are these conversations for you? Are you able to still engage in that perspective-taking process? And for some of us, we're not able to do that, right? And I think we also need to recognize, like Bruce Perry, he's a trauma specialist. He talks about how regulation is privilege, right? Regulation is a sign that you've had the privilege of really healthy relationships

that have made you stronger and able to maybe get into these relationships that feel more controversial. And so for those of us who have that regulation ability, I think it's great, you know, connect across these differences, talk about these conversations. I think it's really great because, first of all, that's how we create change. Like friendship, according to the research, is how people change their opinion on things. They see a friend that goes through something. And it fundamentally changes people's view of a whole entire policy because they have a friend that has gone through an issue related to that policy.

Right. So I think, you know, if we want to create social change, it's going to happen on the backbone of connection. Social change will not happen without connection, right? But for those other people, right, who feel like this to me is deeply hurtful and it takes me out of being in a place where I am able to relate to my friend in a loving and positive way, right? Because this cuts somewhere really deep in me. If they're engaged in these relationships on these differences, it's just not going to go well

and it's not going to be the sort of healing that we want, right? Because negative quality relationships harm us, right? It's not that all relationships are good. It's like we need to be able to engage in these relationships and also keep the sense of love and the sense of connection. And just some of us have the capacity for that. Drew, sounds like you do. I mean, healthy childhood. Just the way you talk about it.

But some of us don't, right? And I think it just has to be okay for us to understand ourselves, for us to understand our own histories, for us to understand our own triggers, to figure out what we need to discern how we can navigate these relationships instead of putting, a one-size-fits-all approach to these types of friendships. I think one thing that has helped me in doing that is to see the person that, let's say, I'm having some difference of opinions on or other things. And often people will see that through like social media or whatever, is to make sure that I fight, regardless of what I decide, make sure I fight to see them as an individual and not a group.

Yes. The second that I make them a group, the more likely, and we've seen this historically, I make them into the other. Yep. And as soon as they're the other, it's easier to write them off, discount them, and even fundamentally, not even listen. I'm all about people firing friends. I don't want people to have mean-spirited people in their life.

I think there are toxic relationships. And the counterweight to that is that I do believe that most people in this world are good people. They want to be good people. They want to be good citizens. And if you have some in your life that you want to distance yourself from or love from a distance, I think that's beautiful. I think the first part that actually you get the benefit from, which is tough for people to do, is make sure you actually really listen to them first. Even if you completely disagree and you've decided that like, you know what, having this person in my life is too much stress, too much negativity, too close to a trigger that I have, or I don't want to constantly have every conversation be about

this thing or whatever else it is. The first part is just making sure, like, do you actually understand what they believe? And are you choosing, you know, to go in a different direction that way? I find that it's easier, just like there's a lot of ghosting in relationships. There's a lot of ghosting in friendships as well. And I think that I would argue, again, I want people to be friends with whoever they want to. I want them to be not friends with whoever they want to is that you don't develop that muscle. And if you consider yourself an intellectual on the areas that you're most passionate about, it's also a beautiful way to if your friend is also a listener and if you, you know, if they're not a listener and you challenge them and say, listen, I need you to listen to me

for a moment now because I listen to you. It's a beautiful way to stress test your ideas. Some of my, you know, I've evolved and changed my mind on a lot of different topics and things that are there because somebody who looked at the world, even if it was business and how to do business differently, they took the time to hear me out, reflect back upon me what, you know, they heard, and also share where I might have a blind spot, what I might be missing. And I was better off for it. So it's almost like my pitch to the people that are listening is that it takes effort. It takes work. Could it, not always, but could it in certain situations make you a better person? And that's the only question that I want people to ask themselves. Yeah. I

I think what you're touching on is an idea, you know, in the research on interracial friendships, how do you make them successful? It's this term called habitual open-mindedness, which basically I meet you, I look at you, I know basic things about you, and I don't assume I know anything more, right? Like, it's letting you tell me the story of who you are, starting with a blank slate, right? So I think, you know, sometimes we can go wrong when I think we can try to like over-identify with people, assume what we know that something about people and that almost can lead to like stereotyping people right like like you know as black woman people talking to me in a certain way like hey girl and i'm just like you don't even

know if i if i talk like that yet right so actually coming into the conversation with this other person is like honestly a blank slate to me and i'm not going to assume that because i know x y and z about them i know anything else beyond those things right so i think that's really what you're touching on i think another thing that we see, because again, I'm a college professor. So sometimes students will disagree about things in ways that you get contentious. Yeah. When you start sharing stories, right? Like, it's easy to disagree on beliefs, but we all have experiences that inform our beliefs. Like, how do we decide our beliefs on these major political issues? It's like oftentimes, what have we gone through personally, right? And I think it's a lot easier to connect and come together when instead of

trying to convince people, you're willing to like story share and be like, you know, this is like what I've gone through or like this has been a little bit of my experience that I've had. Like, what's your story around this? Like, how did you come to know this? Right. It reminds me of something of a mentor of mindset a long time ago. He said, you know, take somebody that you really like rubs you the wrong way like that you know just whoever it might be right some somebody in the media whatever this this is that and if in an hour long movie let's say i could condense their entire life from the time that they were born and all the experiences they went through how they were raised the times that they were bullied the times that they didn't fit in the times that they fit in with another

group that accepted them and that led to you know particular belief system all through where they are as a human being, know that if I could fit that all into an hour and a half, a 90-minute movie, that at the end of that movie, you seeing everything they went through, you may still completely disagree with them in terms of their beliefs and other things like that.

That's totally cool. But you wouldn't have any sense of not understanding them. And I think that there's a difference between understanding and agreeing with somebody. And I think that if we shoot for just a little bit more understanding and still stay firm in our beliefs and whatever categories those might be and all the topics that we care about, where I see sometimes the challenge and it makes people, I feel like it eats away a little bit at the friendship and the opportunity of really us setting an example inside of this, you know, inside of what it looks like to have friends across different, you know, places. As long again, they're not mean-spirited. They're, you know, they're good citizens. they want to contribute, which is most people that are there.

It's a good example. And if you care about a particular topic, you're going to be a positive influence in that person's life, and they're going to be a better person in the long term for it. So shooting for understanding to the degree that you can. Again, it's not going to be easy for all the different reasons that you mentioned. But I do feel if I didn't mention that, I wouldn't be true to something that I feel very important about on this topic,

which is that I really feel like we just need more friendships in this world to heal from a lot of the energy that's trying to pull people apart. Yeah. I think friendship will be part of what heals us. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it wasn't looking for any specific thing.

Just another little soapbox moment on that. Let's come back to the book. It's out there right now. People can order it. Super exciting. Any couple of tips on being more likable. being the person that like, you know, there's some people that walk into the room and just people feel like, I want to be friends with them, right? Any other like quick little tips? Any things that we

didn't get a chance to cover that you want to share with people that you go deeper into inside of the book? Yeah. So it's funny when I was in college, I felt like to be friends with people, I had to be smart, impressive, entertaining, right? Charismatic kind of thing. And really, I guess it was. was misguided because it was almost like I try to make friends by elevating myself above people, whereas I think true connection doesn't happen on a hierarchy because it makes people like not really share all of themselves. And I think to replace that misconception, instead, I really think that, and this is according to the research, there's a theory called the theory of inferred attraction, which basically finds that people like people that they think like them. And so if you want to be likable,

It's really about liking people, showing that you value them. There was a study that looked at for 12 weeks. It predicted who would stay close friends over time for these budding friendships and colleges. One of the biggest predictors was how much affection did they show towards each other? How much affirmation did they show towards one another? So I think being, you know, an attractive friend towards other people is just about making other people feel like they belong at the end of the day. Like I talked about earlier, right? Can you greet people warmly?

Can you compliment them? And it's not about being people pleasing because I think people have told me that. And I'm like, because I think we naturally experience love towards each other and warmth towards each other. And we don't always give ourselves permission to express it. We also have the psychological bias where we think our affection comes off as more awkward than it actually does. And we assume that people don't like it as much as they actually do, right? But just freeing yourself up, I think based on this research, based on the science, to when you do feel positively about someone, when you do, feel warmly about someone, just letting yourself express it because that is going to benefit the

friendship. And like I said earlier, what we do to benefit our friendships also benefits our self and our well-being. It's also going to benefit you physiologically. I think a thing that I think about with that is that my friends that are like the real kind of like connectors, they're like hubs. They often are the initiators. They're the initiators with the compliment. They're initiators with gratitude. They're initiators with even prompts and invites texting the group and saying, hey, let's all go on a walk together. Let's all, you know, grab dinner together. And from the outside, for a lot of people, that seems like a lot of work, but they benefit so greatly. You know, your strength of your network has a huge impact and the depth of it on your income.

Yep. It has a huge impact on just the amount of total. people that you can rely on. It's also so much more fun. You get invited to more things. People think about you more often. And so just being a little bit of initiator, being that person who's a takes that extra step to say, hey, let's all go do something. Yes. It feels like work, but the dividends and the payoff, and it is work, are just so incredible. As somebody who considers himself in that category, I've gotten so much more back from the world and from my friends from just tiny little things. And sometimes that's just randomly scrolling through my phone. And I'll do this when I've like spent too much time on social media.

I'm like, oh, I caught myself. I'll go to my context book. I'll just literally scroll, see where I kind of end up. Make sure it's not, I'm not clicking on like an ex-girlfriend or something awkward. And then pick somebody. and I'll think about a memory. And I'll text them and I'll say, I literally was just thinking about you

and I just want to say hi, how are you? I remember that time in college and we all grabbed food and you told me about X, Y, and Z. That was really beautiful. It takes two seconds to do that and yet you just made that person's day. That is so beautiful, Drew.

And I think I'm like translating all the east. Some people are naturals at connection, right? You seem like one of them. Other people have to learn through the science. That's me. Because what I hear in your answer is one thing that I think is really fundamental towards both healing your attachment style and making friends is to assume people like you. This is based on research.

Who are the people that are most likely to reject you? It's the people that fear rejection. People that are high in something called rejection sensitivity, which basically means they project that they're being rejected onto ambiguous circumstances. So Drew, someone could have easily scrolled through their phone, gotten on a contact and been like, that person doesn't want to hear from me, right? What we find in the research is that when things happen that are ambiguous as most social interaction is, right, you don't know if that person wants to hear from you, doesn't want to hear from you, they tend to get cold and withdrawn and try to reject people in response to their perceived or projected

rejection. So they're very rejecting towards other people, ironically, even though they fear rejection. because they're not thinking about how they come off to others, like I said. Whereas when we assume the opposite, so this is according to some research when professors basically told people, based on your personality profile, you're going to go into this group and people are going to like you, right? That's our prediction based on our own research. It was a total lie, true. But what they found was that when people were told that they were warmer, they were friendlier,

they were more positive, they were more open. and the outcome was that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that people assumed that they were liked, the more that they actually were liked. In a way, it almost was like an affirmation. You're telling yourself that people like you, you go in, you're priming your body that that's the case. And I probably just add to that is like, go into the interactions that people like you and that the world is good. I love it. This is a secure attachment at the end of the day.

Something that I was going to mention earlier that I realized I didn't get to to get to is like you said, you made that really great point, Drew, about how you perceive yourself and that your relationships are fundamentally a reflection of that, right? Like if you think you are worthy of rejection, then you tend to build relationships with people that are more rejecting towards you or not build relationships at all, right? And so just to get into the science behind that, there's this theory called self-verification theory, which means that we look for relationships that verify our sense of who we are. So, we what these researchers found is that when people with low self-esteem could interact with someone

who really valued them and might praise them versus someone who didn't value them, they chose to interact with people that didn't value them. It's not that they don't want to feel loved and accepted. It's that when people loved them, accepted them, praised them, they thought they were being manipulated. They couldn't trust it because it didn't match their sense of who they are. And so that's how these things become so self-reinforcing. Again, if I have a negative sense of myself, I prefer to be around people who reflect that because the people that don't, I don't even register it. I think that they're lying to me. I think that they're trying to get something out of me, right? I assume that they have negative intent. And that's why I say it's like it's so important

to actually let yourself trust and take in signals of safety. Like as small as someone smiled at me or someone seem interested in this conversation with me or someone responded to my text message, right? Someone liked me on social media. Like pause and actually take that in and receive that to try to become more secure, to try to feel more worthy because likely there's so many instances in the world

of people showing you that they're interested in you and that you're worthy, right? But it's our job to be able to take them in. And it doesn't matter how many signals there are if you're not willing to take any of them in. What a beautiful reminder to conclude things on that idea that you're worthy, like you're good, you're a good human being. You deserve, you know, for the person who's listening here, there's a lot of people who

might have even felt like, do I even deserve good friends? And what I'm hearing and what you just shared is that you're worthy, your love, like you deserve it. Absolutely. Which means that you also get to be it for other people and they get to be it for you. And believe it when people tell you that they love you. Just like believe it. Well, this is a fascinating conversation because I've shared with you.

I care immensely about this topic. I've seen that when people have better friends in their life, every aspect of their life improves. Their career often does better. They feel just more of a sense of security in the world that you know that no matter what you're going through, like you're going to end up on the other side okay because there's other people that are there along with you. because we've done so many episodes on the brain and the nervous system. And our body needs other people and it looks to other people. And our nervous system looks to other people to know, like, are things okay? Am I okay in this world?

And we're losing a little bit of that community sort of setup that we had. Oftentimes for good reasons, people are working remotely and they're doing this. They have more individuality, more freedoms, more other stuff. But I think in a way where friendship was something. that was more automatic. It was baked into everyday life. You could not survive if you didn't have friends. And reciprocity was an insurance policy.

I'm going to do good around other people because one day, winter's going to come and I'm not going to have enough food or I'm going to need help to chop wood or fetch water or whatever else it is or to hunt. If you didn't have friendships, you wouldn't survive. Now in a way, and I feel like your book, again, link in the show notes, please. everybody go out and get it. Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends. Link in the show notes. Please everybody go out and get it. The reminder inside the book is that, yes, we don't need friendships to survive, right? Like, your lights are going to stay on. You're going to

have food at the grocery store. There's people that are involved, but they're not necessarily your friends. But if you want to thrive in this world, you got to know how to make and keep friendships. That's the message that I've taken away from your work. And I'm just ecstatic that it's out there. Thank you so much. I think you put it so well. Like friendship connection is just the key to flourishing. If people want to keep in touch with you and, you know, continue the journey, how do they follow along with your work? So I am on Instagram where I share more tips on friendship, even beyond what you'll learn in the book. And that's at Dr. Marissa G. Franco, D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-R-A-N-C. And on my website, Dr. Marissa Gfranco.com, you can hire me to speak on connection or belonging,

or you can take a quiz that assesses your strengths and weaknesses as a friend and gives you tips on what you can do. Is the quiz called Are You a Shetty Friend? Well, maybe after this conversation, I need to revise the title. Oh, man. Everybody is going to link to it and send it off to the other friends. Thank you. This has been fantastic, and I appreciate you, you know, coming in person and us getting a chance to talk. Super excited. It was so great to meet you, Drew. Thank you. Thank you.