Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 342: The Science of Building Better Relationships | Marissa King

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

The idea of networking can be fraught. For some people, it might, at times, seem either icky or pathetic to deliberately try to make friends, either in a personal or professional context -- especially since so many of us may be feeling a bit socially awkward anyway, after months of Covid restrictions. However, my guest today will argue that there are profound health benefits to building positive relationships, and she has advice about how to actually do it, based on neuroscience and psychology. Marissa King is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, where she studies social networks, social influence, and team dynamics. She is also the author of a recently-released book, called Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection. In this conversation, we talk about: how your social networks impact your mental health; how, when it comes to social networks, quality and structure are more important than quantity; why you’re not as bad at being social as you may think; the importance of humor; how status and privilege play into networking; the benefits of calling up old friends you haven’t spoken to in a while; and she will ask you to consider whether you are a convener, a broker, or an expansionist. This is actually part two of a two-part series that we're running this week about the hard science and soft skills of social connection. If you missed it on Monday, we had an amazing interview with a researcher named Barbara Fredrickson from UNC Chapel Hill. She has a lot of fascinating things to say about what love actually is and takes a pretty broad view of the concept of love. You don't have to listen to that in order to understand this episode, but I think they work great in concert.  One more item of business, and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we’ll be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I’m sure we’re all too familiar with. In this series, you’ll learn the mechanics of anxiety: how and why it shows up and what you may be doing to feed it.  And this is where you come in. We’d love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our anxiety series on the podcast. So whether you’re struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about re-entering the world post-Covid, or have any other questions about anxiety - we want to hear from you. To submit a question or share a reflection call [phone] and leave us a voicemail. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us a voice memo file in mp3 format to [e-mail]. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, May 12th.  And if you don't already have the Ten Percent Happier app, you can download it for free wherever you get your apps or by clicking here: https://www.tenpercent.com/?_branch_match_id=888540266380716858. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/marissa-king-342 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all is your's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, my fellow sufferers. The idea of networking can be fraught. For some people in might at times seem either icky or pathetic to deliberately try to make friends either in a professional or personal context, especially since so many of us may be feeling a bit socially awkward anyway after months of COVID restrictions. However, my guest today is

going to argue that there are profound health benefits to building positive relationships, and she has advice about how to actually do it based on neuroscience and psychology. Her name is Marissa King. She's a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, where she studies social networks, social influence, and team dynamics. She is also the author of a recently released book

called Social Chemistry, decoding the patterns of human connection. In this conversation, we talk about how your social networks impact your mental health, how when it comes to social networks quality and structure are way more important than quantity, why you are not as bad at being social as you may think you are, the importance of humor, how status and privilege play into networking, the benefits of calling up old friends you haven't spoken to in a while, even if it's awkward,

and she will ask you, and you'll hear her ask me this too, she'll ask you to consider whether you are a convener, a broker, or an expansionist. This is actually part two of a two part series that we're running this week about the hard science and soft skills of social connection. If you missed it on Monday, we had an amazing interview with a researcher named Barbara Fredrickson from UNC Chapel Hill. She has a lot of fascinating things to say about what love actually is.

She takes a pretty broad view of the concept of love. You don't have to listen to that in order to understand this one, but I think they work great in concert. Before we dive into today's episode, though I do have one more order of business. If you are a long time listener, you have heard me talk about our companion app many, many times. You might even be a little sick of it. Why do we keep talking about it? If I want to meditate, can I just go to YouTube and search for a guided meditation for free or sit and silence on my own or use another app? First of all, yes, you can do all those things. There are many, many ways to learn how to meditate. And if you found one or more that worked for you, that's great. However, I do think there's something special about the relationship between

what we're doing here on the podcast interviewing world renowned experts getting their take on issues that impact our everyday lives. And then in the app where we share practices specifically chosen to help you apply those lessons and to kind of as I like to say pound them into your neurons. In a conversation right here on the podcast a few weeks ago the meditation teacher seven aassi, hit on something key about this relationship between the podcast and the app. Here she is talking about that. I'm a big proponent of integrating what I would call integrating study and practice. So, combined with our practice, or what we call insights, that's why this tradition is called insight, is these aha moments, and you're so great at articulating that and bringing people on to kind of discuss that. Like, what is it that we're

learning? And then how do we kind of re-incorporate that back into the practice? It's a little embarrassing, I'll admit, to play you a sound bite where Seb praises my interviewing skills. And so I do that a little sheepishly, but I think she really does articulate brilliantly why we're so gung ho about the symbiosis between the work we do on the podcast and the work we do in the app. Practice and study work best in concert

because you're working several parts of the mind at once. Now that's how I learned from my teachers, sort of engaging my prefrontal cortex through reading books or articles that Seb likes to send me or talking to my teachers directly, but also then doing the practices, which kind of speak to a deeper part of the mind. And that's really the experience we're trying to bring you at 10% happier writ large. The wisdom of experts explained in a relatable way alongside practices to help you apply what you've learned.

So I encourage you to give it a try by downloading the 10% happier app for free, wherever you get your apps. Okay, enough of you murmuring out of me. Let's bring in our great guest. Here we go now with Marissa King. Okay, Marissa King, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on.

It's my pleasure. How did you get interested in this subject, social networks, social chemistry? Yeah, like so many people, I feel like we study and we teach what we need, and that was certainly the case for me. I had spent decades of my career understanding social networks and particularly trying to understand how networks related to outcomes

like mental health and well-being. But what was interesting is when it came time for me to start my own career, I kept getting this advice saying, you know, you need to get out, you need to network, you need to meet people. But based on everything I knew from science that actually was really misguided advice. And for me, that actually created a big obstacle to authentically connecting with people and developing and relationships in ways that were both meaningful to me and also consistent with what we know is helpful for research. And so I really wanted to write the book to help other people who have had a similar experience to me and just been almost

debilitated by the idea of feeling like they need to get out and network, which simply isn't true. So, if you don't need to get out and network, but you do need to know people in order to get anything done, where's the sweet spot? Oftentimes when we're thinking about networking, we have this idea in our mind that we need to meet new people or we need a larger network, and that makes perfect sense. It's one of the easiest things to see and understand is simply how many people you know. But what we know is for almost every outcome that you would care about.

So if you think about what we know from what network research the networks are associated with our likelihood of pay, promotion, career success, our physical well-being even, being in an appavers network is associated with a heightened risk of premature mortality or even our happiness and simply just how satisfied we are with life. For every single one of those outcomes, networks matter, but it's not the size of your network or how many people you know.

It's actually the quality of your network and the structure of your network, the configuration of your social relationships. And by starting to understand what we mean by quality and what we mean by structure, we can develop networks that are actually much more effective than simply just meeting new people. Okay, so what do we mean by quality and what do we mean by structure? Excellent idea. You're making my job easy.

So if we think about network structure, oftentimes that's the piece that's the most complicated for people. And I like to use an analogy that my calling Nicholas Krasnock is drawn on when she talks about carbon atoms. So if you think about your network as being composed of people, right? And you think about how carbon atoms are arranged. If you take the same set of carbon atoms

and you arrange them in one configuration, you put them in flat sheets. You get graphite. It's soft, it's cheap, you can find it in a kid's backpack. But you take the same set of carbon atoms and you range them in tetrahedrily. You end up with diamonds, they're hard, they're clear, they're arguably one of the most valuable items on earth. And the same is true of people. If we take the same group of people and we put them in one configuration, imagine all your

friends know one another and they talk to each other all the time. You're going to get one set of properties. It's really different than if you have two different groups that never talk to each other and you're the only connection between them. So when we think about network structure, what we're trying to do is think about our networks, our relationships, as a map. And that map really tells us where we've been in the past. That's how it came to be, but also where we're likely to be headed in the future. Translate that to practical reality. What might some variable structures look like in an individual life?

Over the past three decades or so, we've been able to create a typology that characterizes most people's networks. So I refer to these as one of three different types. So we can think of people as you there being what I call conveners, brokers, or expansionist. And a convening network, everyone's friends with one another. That's the first type of structure I described.

And you can ask yourself a vineyard convener by thinking about questions like if you had a barbecue or a birthday party with everyone who's already there, would they all know one another except beyond knowing you? If that's true, you likely have a convening network. Conveners tend to have lived in the same place for a long time. They often have worked at the same job for a long time,

which means that their relationships are really deep. They have a lot of depth to their relationships. They often build these types of networks because they don't like uncertainty. So for instance, one of the defining characteristics of this network type is if you don't like changing plans at the last minute, you may be a convener. So this type of network has a set of properties in which because everyone's deeply interconnected

and there's a lot of depth, there's a lot of trust in that network and there's a lot of reciprocity. And so that's been associated with a lot of positive outcomes such as mental health and well-being is much more likely to exist if you are in this type of convening structure. What are the other two? So the second type are brokers. And brokers differ from conveners and they tend to straddle different social worlds. So, for instance, a broker may spend a lot of time working in the engineering department. They may play soccer on the weekends and they may, I don't know, be gourmet cook. And because they tend to straddle different social circles, they normally wouldn't come together. That puts them in that position that allows for them to recombine ideas. And we know that innovation really comes through recombination.

So this type of network is really beneficial in terms of innovation and creativity. And it's often associated with the strongest personality characteristic that defines what type of network someone normally has. People often think extra version or introversion are really gonna matter. But what we actually know is that the biggest predictor from a personality perspective is something called high self-monitoring, which is really just how chameleon like you are. So for instance, if you are good at making in promptive speeches, topics you know little about, you are likely a high self-monitor, which makes it much more likely that you're a broker because you can talk to different groups

in ways that allow them to have different perspectives. So I'm a broker. Hopefully I'm talking about things I know a little about today, but in this network is really beneficial, as I mentioned, for innovation and creativity, but also it's associated with much stronger work-life balance. Can being a broker, is there overlap in the vent diagram

with sociopathology? You know, like I can just give a speech on something I know nothing about. I won't take offense. There is something to what you said. So there's not necessarily an overlap with sociopathology, but people who are brokers, the downside of this type of network or people are often greeted with suspicion.

Ron Burt, who's a sociologist at the University of Chicago, says that brokers are at risk of character assassination. And in part, this is because they're just greeted with suspicion. Are you really part of us? Are you not really part of us? And one of the ways that we know that brokers can overcome this suspicion is actually to really behave with empathy. And so brokers who are, score higher on empathy,

actually overcome this suspicion that you immediately recognize of being like, oh, are they sociopaths or what's going on with them? This may be a digression here, but you talked about creativity's really recombination, I think you said. It makes me think of the data I've seen around

how diversity can make teams function better. It doesn't mean it's always the easiest working dynamic, but it does apparently lead to the best outcomes. Am I making an appropriate connection here? Yes, you nailed it. This is one of the questions that often arises. Is people ask, is it diversity itself that gives rise to these properties of innovation and creativity, or is there something deeper underlying it? What we know from research is that if you actually dig into this, one of the ways that diversity is so important is the same principle,

that you're putting together ideas that normally wouldn't come together. There are lots of beautiful examples of this in thinking about where do we get new art forms from. Oftentimes it's actually putting together groups that normally wouldn't talk together. And so that is the heart, both of artistic creativity, but we also can think of it with respect to scientific innovation.

And there's lots of research that shows that this is true. If you, for instance, look at when scientific teams come together, that the teams that are most diverse tend to have higher output and more innovative or creative ideas, but it's actually because they're bringing together different perspectives and different ideas, not just simply that they look different on the outside. Is empathy important there too? empathy is really important because the heart of that is thinking about is the idea that you can engage in perspective taking. So if you present a new idea to me,

if I don't have the ability to imagine what it's like from your perspective, or to imagine what it's like in that domain, then it makes it really difficult to put the different pieces together. So empathy is certainly important. So we've gotten through conveners and brokers and then expansionist is the last one.

That sounds kind of colonial, but tell me more. At least you're equal and you're sort of harping on each of these times. Oh, yeah, I'll make fun of everybody. Yes, you're spot on. Laughter is important, so particularly for social connections. So I'm glad that we're laughing. Expansionist are what we think of when we think of as quintessential networkers. Expansionist are defined by having an extraordinarily large network.

Most of us know around 650 people or so, but expansionists will know orders of magnitude more, so thousands oftentimes of different individuals. And you can ask yourself whether or not you're an expansionist by thinking about how many people you know named Emily and how many people you know named Adam. And if you know two or more people named Emily and two or more people named Adam, you're likely an expansionist. So that's a way that we can figure out how large your network is since we know how many people named Emily there are and how many people named Adam there are in the United States.

Yeah, I think I know more than two. I'm not surprised. So the benefit of that is that you're in a position where you have the ability to reach a large audience, you have the ability to change minds and be influential. The downside is this is often associated with a feeling of loneliness. And part because if we think about all of our networks no matter which type you are, we're essentially making, have force to make a trade off between, do we know a lot of people, but not very well, or do we know a smaller set of people with much more depth?

But how clean are these lines? Because yeah, I know more than two atoms and amylies, but a lot of that is just because I meet a lot of people through work, animal. I'm not sure it really says that I'm an expansionist per se in my personal life. That's interesting. So if we think about what this typology,

we can think about it with respect to a characterizing our set of social relationships. We can also think about it as a rising from behaviors. So as you describe, in part, this is defined by your work. That's certainly true for everybody. We often think about our networks as being defined by like, what we do, but oftentimes far more than what we do, it's where we spend our time. So your work is necessarily going to define, in part, what your network looks like. So if I think you mentioned age also, most people's networks are actually largest when they're 25 and then they fall off a cliff.

So if yours is getting bigger and bigger over time, you're an exception to the rule. But we just describe, right? Our networks imparted a fine by where we spend our time. It's also to characterize by our station and life where we are what we're doing in a given moment. And they change over time. So most people's networks, as I mentioned, are largest when they're 25, but then they shift over the course of our lives and our careers. And you can also be multiple types. So you can have a large network, be an expansionist and a broker. It's pretty rare. Almost it's extraordinarily rare, actually, to be both a broker and a convener. The few people who manage that actually have extraordinarily powerful networks, but it's rare. So their types are not mutually exclusive and they're also quite fluid.

I'm doing what I imagine everybody in the audience is doing is I'm just trying to figure out where I am in this typology. My wife and I were talking the other day about sort of now the things are opening up. We want to be pretty intentional about creating, you know, social opportunities going forward. And we're kind of making lists of who we want to see. And also, I have a 50th birthday coming up and we may want to do two events, one for sort of one group of friends and one for another group of friends.

But, what, so you're taking a deep breath, whoa, it's jumping good. Oh, well, I mean, you've revealed a lot, right? It's said, I mean, you said actually so much in what you're just describing. And when you said that you were thinking about having a birthday party for two separate groups of friends, that pretty much nailed it.

And I know which type you are. Well, actually, kind of being honest three because there are two separate groups of friends and then probably family. So you're almost certainly a broker. So getting back to that question, like, would you have a party with all the same group of friends if the answer is no? You're probably a broker. But behind just thinking about what type you are

and that's a really good diagnostic, what you're describing about this intentionality about our relationships that's happened post-pandemic is something that I think is extraordinarily powerful and a real distrungure from where we've been in the past. And I think it's incredibly important for people to start to think about this, because I would argue it's one of the few silver linings

of the pandemic. We know in general that people are really reluctant to be intentional about their relationships and reflect upon them. So outside of this conversation, the fact that you're having the same conversation with your life and thinking about your relationships, even making a list in this very purposeful manner

is an extraordinary shift from where most people were prior to the pandemic. And I think that the past year or so has made us all so much more conscious of how important our relationships are. And then my hope is actually that all of us will be more intentional about how we maintain our networks and help to cultivate our relationships moving forward. I wonder how optimistic I am. I often think about a comment from then-centered or Barack Obama who said that America goes from shock to trans faster than any other nation on Earth. So like,

will the intentionality that my wife and I are just spaying now? Will we be doing the same thing in a year and two years? Will this affect last? I think it's likely to be enduring. So I can tell you the positive way that I think it's likely to be enduring and the negative way that I think it's likely to be enduring. So I'll start with a negative way. Over the course of the pandemic, I've been studying actually what's happened to people's networks and what I found in my research is that the size of our networks is shrunk by close to 17%. And that shrinkage is actually almost entirely due to reduction in the size of men's networks, which is shrunk by close to 30% or more than 400 people. That's a big reduction in size. And getting to your

question about, are these effects likely to be enduring? What we know from other crises with respect to networks is the effects do tend to be enduring. So if you look at, for instance, what happened to networks post turkey and Katrina, the same thing happened. It's a very adaptive thing to do, but networks shrink and focus inward because it tends to be more protective

and that more convening like structure tends to give more social support. So this is a natural adaptation. And what's been found, for instance, in Katrina, but also if you look at over time, most people's networks take a huge hit when they have kids. And in both of these cases, they hardly ever recover. So our networks in general,

if they're left without attention and recultivated, they tend to get smaller and smaller and smaller over time and these shocks tend to endure. This is why loneliness is such an issue, particularly in the elderly, is because this is a contendual shrinkage over time. So the downside is, unless we're really intentional, I do think the negative effects are likely to be enduring. On the positive side, my hope, right, is that we've all been so profoundly affected

by missing a real longing for human connection that I think that it hit us at an emotional level, not just a cognitive level. And from that perspective, I think at least for the years to come, in the medium to long term, the positive effects will also persist. You said men's networks have shrunk by 30% why have men's networks been particularly hit hard by the pandemic? There are a couple of different reasons why men have been disproportionately affected and I think the first thing to get out of the way is what doesn't explain it because

they think it has important relevance for everybody. Women have spent more time networking than men. Every piece of data that we have suggested actually women have had been far more time crunch and have had far less time to devote to relationships. So it's not just simply spending more time. But what seems to be underlying it are a couple different things. The first piece is that women and men naturally maintain their networks quite differently. So research by Robin Dunn-Barr has found that men tend to maintain their social connection by doing things together. So they may go bowing together,

they may go with the bar together, they may play basketball together, they may do whatever men do together, but men in general, whether it's with men or between men and women, when men are in charge, they tend to maintain connection through shared activities. In that disruption, the inability to do things together

has made it so that they're simply just losing touch. In contrast, women tend to maintain relationships through conversation. And since conversation's been unimpeded during the past few months, they've been much more effective in maintaining the relationships because they can just continue to have that same social connection through conversation. The second piece which gets back a little bit to empathy is that women tend to be much more accurate and recalling or knowing what their network looks like.

So if I asked a woman and a man to guess how many people they know or if I asked them to kind of show me which map their network look like, women tend to be much more accurate at this. In part, it's not just women, this tends to be true of people lacking in power or resources in general. So minorities without access to resources, regardless of its gender or whatever other dimension, this tends to be

true because they have to connect to get things done. And that ability to accurately perceive one's network makes it so that they're not as likely to fall victim to this sort of out of sight out of mind, which has been one of the biggest effects that has helped accelerate the shrinkage of men's networks. Back to the typology. So if I heard you correctly, the healthiest for human psychology would be the convener. That's correct. Is the die cast permanently? Am I a broker irretrievably? Can I get better at being a convener, etc? Certainly, the die is not cast forever. Thank goodness. This conversation will be far less interesting if once a broker, forever, a broker, once a convener, forever a convener. Our networks, really, as we talked about, are defined by where we spend our time.

How we're investing in our relationships. Are we focusing more on developing stronger relationships, focusing on reconnecting with people we may have lost touch with? They're also defined by behaviors in any given moment. So convening networks often times, or characterized by people who are quite good at being able to imagine what is like to walk in someone else's shoes. And they're very, very good listeners, which is, in many ways, a super power of human connection. But another piece of this is also just what happens in life. And one of the interesting things that's happened during COVID is actually we've all become a little bit more

convening like in our networks that we've all turned inward. And that's a natural adaptation. And so you can think about, in part, due to shocks, we naturally adapt in this way. And that can be really beneficial. And the short term, particularly for providing more emotional support in times when we may be struggling with mental health issues.

So we can certainly change our networks, thank goodness. I've been trying to become a more convening like for quite some time. And it seems to be working. You've been trying to become more convening like in that you're trying to have deeper relationships with the people you already know. Yeah, I'm naturally a broker. And in part, as you were describing your own network, it's in part due to just

the nature of my work. I spend a lot of time talking to people in business schools. I spend a lot of time talking to people in medical schools. And because of that, that has made me in many ways a broker, but in part just that has a lot of professional benefits, but from a personal perspective, it's become increasingly apparent to me that I could benefit from a more convening like network. It's also true over the course of one's career that that shift later sort of make career broker just quite beneficial and then over time becoming more convening like

has a lot of benefits and because it becomes really unwieldy to broker large networks. So I've been trying to make this shift both for professional reasons but also for personal reasons and just feeling like I could use a little bit more happiness I think. But just to go back to the hosts, prerogative to be totally salipsistic, just in terms of where I, which bucket I'm in here, like I, for example, when the pandemic hit, I have two sort of meditation buddies. You know, in meditation circles, if you have a community, it's called the Sangha.

We have like a mini-Sanga, these three guys. We set up at the beginning of the pandemic weekly calls and then over time it went to every other week. So those relationships I went deep on, but I'm also always open to meeting new people. So is it possible? I mean, you said it's pretty rare, but I don't think of myself as extraordinary and I feel like that is a straddling of those two. What you actually just described is something that's called network oscillation. And network oscillation is the idea, right, that if you want these benefits,

like you want the innovation and creativity of brokerage, but you want the mental health benefits or the social support benefits of a more convenient like structure, it's been suggested that over time, some people, various reasons will do this, that they'll go in deep for a fixed period of time, and then they'll expand their network out towards a more brokerage-like network. So this idea of network oscillation is one of the ways that you can get these benefits across both categories.

So what you just described is a really beautiful example of that, and before we were talking about me wanting to make this shift towards a more convening like network, what you just described as a perfect example of a really powerful way to do that, if you want a convening like network, convene, bring people together for an intense, purposeful period of time with focus. And that is an extraordinary way of cultivating that type of network. It's interesting about convening.

So these three guys, I did convene this group. I knew them individually and put us together and it turned out to be extraordinarily successful, not in a capitalistic, productive sense, but in a psychological sense. We've all gotten a lot out of these relationships. Now our wives or friends and our kids or friends, it's been really meaningful. However, when I think about throwing a 50th birthday party and inviting literally everybody, that's a little stressful.

And like, worlds colliding can be a bit of a, convening in that way can be a bit of a pain in the butt. And so like I kind of was thinking to have tighter, warmer, less awkward gatherings around my 50th birthday. One more thing I'll say about this is that I actually like going to parties where people are deliberately throwing together eclectic groups of people. I just don't necessarily know that I want to be

the one taking responsibility for it. That makes perfect sense. And as you were describing them, like, oh, back to like, then it's like, I think it feels like you're putting your broker hat back on, right? And they're not mutually exclusive. People don't shift between them as often as you would think.

But that notion of, like, I keep these different world separate is also one of these defining reasons, for instance, that brokers actually tend to have much more work-life balance. So that idea, like, I wouldn't want to mix, like, my personal social support, like, that tight-knit world with my work world. Like, those two things need to say separate. That's a very brokerage, like that tight net world with my work world. Like those two things need to stay separate.

That's a very brokerage like statement. And what we know is actually that actually promotes a lot of work life balance. And you said before that our social networks tend to fall off a cliff the longer we live, is that because of kids or are there is a multi-factorial? I never want to blame my kids for my own social lacking. If you think about what's the positive side, right? Our networks are so large when we're younger for two different reasons.

One is we simply just have more time so the ability to invest more in our relationships in terms of time is helpful in that respect. But the other piece of it is that our networks in often in many, many ways are really defined by the social institutions that we belong, whether that's your work organization or your voluntary organization.

And prior to like 25 or so, you're really handed a ready-built social network. So this is like, college is invested an extraordinary amount of thought and time and to think about how to help-built social network. So this is a college is invested in an extraordinary amount of thought and time and to think about how to help people develop their network. All the factors that lead people to social connection, so a shared identity, a common sense of place. All of that is sitting there waiting for you when you're younger.

But as you move into the work well, then then particularly when you have kids and you have far less time, and the kids also oftentimes necessitate a huge shift in social circles. And in many ways that you go from hanging out with whoever you choose and want to hang out with to hanging out with, whoever your kids choose and want to hang out with. So that creates this really abrupt transition. Yes, I have noticed. We have one in these six, and I have noticed. You said before that laughter

is important, that seems intuitive, but from a research perspective, why is laughter important? I mean, there's a lot of reason that it's important that there's chemical effects, right? Positive chemical effects to laughter. But even a short period of laughter during a conversation is much more predictive of how connected we feel in our overall sense of happiness than how long that conversation goes on. So I'm part of I think that there's the chemical aspect of it but also a sense that we are existing in the same shared reality like we're on the same side. Right, right. Now, I think I'm hilarious, but not a lot of people do. But what if you're not funny because I know people, you know,

I'm not going gonna name any names, but his initials are Ben Rubin and he's the CEO of 10% happier and he's totally not funny. And when he makes jokes, I often describe it as like interpersonal violence because I then have to, like everybody feels like they have to laugh,

but it's not funny. And so like, what do you do if you're not funny? I'm like told all the time I'm not funny. Which I think it's true. And it was my kids are honest like told all the time, I'm not funny, which I think is true. And it was my kids are honest like this, right? And my kids tell me, I just make jokes when I'm really, really uncomfortable. So it's like, I have no advice.

So what to do when you're not funny, but I can tell you what not to do. And so it's like, don't try to like make an awkward moment more comfortable by making a not funny joke. And self-deprecating humor is really risky. It's a particularly risky for women. That's like a whole another conversation

because that's my other default. It's like, oh, I'll just make fun of myself. But it's a dangerous thing to do. Go there. Why is it particularly dangerous for women? Because self-deprecating humor tends to lead towards more social connection where new already have established confidence.

And so that inherent tradeoff, that particularly are faced with a double-buy between warmth and confidence, that if I'm using self-deprecating humor to try to create a sense of warmth, it makes it people perceive you as less competent. So you've got to sort of establish the confidence first and then you can go that route, but it's just so risky because you never really know when you fully establish confidence. It's interesting because so most of my humor is self-deprecating, but I may have the privilege to be that way because people assume competence because I'm a white male. That's right.

Huh. Huh. I'm, I'm saying because I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion based on some conversations with some colleagues that like the only safe humor for me really is self-deprecating humor because if, you know, people are pretty sensitive these days and for pretty good reasons. And so I don't want to be making fun of other people even though I in my head, I usually am. But if I then identify that even self-deprecation is another hideout of locker privilege or whatever you want to call it, so that does reduce the opportunities for humor.

Yeah, I mean, so now I'm starting to go a little bit outside my mouth about sort of tease, but we can go there because it does kind of relate to things I know things about. But if you think about it in a conversation, you can either make fun of yourself, you could make fun of the other person, which just does like just seems risky, right? Or what we actually oftentimes default to in conversation is talking about a third party who's not there. So that's another way of saying gossip. And what we know is that 60% of conversational time according to Robin Dunbar is actually spent gossiping. It makes perfect sense. We gossip for evolutionary reasons. And a lot of that might be making fun of someone who's not there because it makes us feel connected.

But it's also engaging in a type of discourse that allows us to feel like we're a part of a community that's safe. And so that tendency to either, or you probably don't want wanna make fun of someone else that just doesn't seem like a very kind thing to do. So you're basically either making fun of yourself or you're trying to find, and this would probably be the advice

that I should not be giving, you're trying to find something in your common situation. That's not another person that you can both laugh about. I wanna say you described yourself as not funny and I don't know you so I can't confirm or deny but but I I would say that you Seem very ready to laugh Which I think is really important Yeah, I hope so right like if we can't laugh like I feel like laughter and lover like the point of the day like if you don't do that

What are you doing? I Can really relate to having your kid see right through you. I was seeing him with my son right before the pandemic had a buddy over there watching a movie. And I made a, like a sort of age appropriate provocative comment to the little boy that he was watching the movie with and the kid turned around and looked at me quizzically and my son without even turning around and said, oh yeah, he's crazy. And so yeah, my son doesn't think I'm that funny, but I think I'm hilarious. And I feel like, you know, anyway, I think we've exhausted this topic. So I have a million other questions.

Do animals count as social connection? I have a million other questions. Do animals count as social connection? So I've been asked this before, and I think so. I wouldn't personally think of them in this way, but it's a shift because it's a really deep question. Then it's asking this question fundamentally, what is social connection? I would say that the heart of social connection,

or at least a high quality social connection, is the ability to be fully present with another being. And if that's an animal, why not? I mean, we have cats in our contemplating a dog. And I don't, it's not as meaningful to me, you know, as other human beings, but it's very meaningful. Our relationships with our animals. Certainly.

Right. And in many ways, I feel like animals can read our behavior better than other humans a lot of the time. So I think it's certainly important. We know that there are benefits to having animals around, like huge emotional benefits to having animals around you. So I think they count. It's a little complicated though, because if you ask me like, what is society

or like what is social connection, I often think of it beyond a group of two. Like I think it really starts when you have a group of three. So I'm just not sure about like how the third fits in. You have many animals. I agree about to find out I suppose. Based on all the research you've done, what is your advice to people about how to put this to use

in their own lives? The biggest piece of advice that I have is to realize that there's extraordinary untapped value in your existing set of relationships. And far too often, people are really focused on either like, I need to grow my relationships or people often also are really paralyzed by feeling inadequate about their social relationships. And so my first piece of advice is that there's extraordinary value in your existing network and the key really is to reach out and reconnect with people and to stay in touch. And by cultivating your existing relationships, the vast majority of benefits that we get from social connection are already there for you. They're just oftentimes not effectively cultivated enough.

But I can hear the stories running through the heads of the listeners saying, well, I haven't talked to these college friends in five, 10, 15 years. We want me to reach out to them. They don't want to hear from me. If they wanted to hear from me, they would have hit me up blah blah blah. Yep. So that's the most common barriers. So there's been research that asked people to do this to think of someone that you haven't seen in two to three years and to reach out to them and what that research has found is that those relationships are particularly powerful because the trust in doors for a long period of time in relationships are feelings of closest drop really, really quickly. After two to three months without being

in touch with someone, our feelings of closeness to non-family friends dropped by 80%. But our sense of trust endures for an extraordinary long period of time. So those relationships won the trust endures. But also, they're likely to have new ideas and new perspectives. So you get these benefits of brokerage. So reaching out has huge benefits. But in experiments when they ask people to do this, exactly what you said is the most common refrain. And I force people to do this in my MBA classes every time I get the chance.

And it's the same thing. Oh my God, what am I going to say? If I haven't talked to them in a while, I probably haven't talked to them for a long time for a reason. It's going to be so awkward. But the truth is that, one, COVID has a benefit in the sense that people have been doing this. So it's actually made it a little bit more normal than it was before.

But even setting that aside, if you just imagine being on the receiving end of that phone call or email, you would almost certainly be delighted to hear from the other person. And then people are like, well, okay, I imagine maybe that won't be so weird, but what am I going to do? And there's so many things we can do when trying to connect. We could give something to the other person, which could be as simple as, hey, I heard this podcast, I think you would, you may really like to hear it, it made me think of you. We all need social connections so much, in particularly in this moment, that even simply, I'm thinking of you, is a gift.

You can ask for help, asking for help allows the other person to be of service, to get outside of themselves. So again, asking for help is in many ways a gift. But just letting someone know, like, I was thinking, if you or you said this and it's actually had a huge impact on my life, who wouldn't want to hear that? Much more of my conversation with Marissa King right after this. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth?

And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others.

And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy

during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. I took you down the rabbit hole of my perceived objections to reaching out to all friends, but the first thing you said when I said in terms of advice to people, the first thing you said was there's value in your existing network. What else?

The other piece of this, right? We've talked quite a bit about the structure of our relationships, but if we think about the quality of our social connections, The quality of our social connections are really defined in the moment, like in a micro second. And it comes to us oftentimes through our senses. So a lot of particularly the health effects and mental health effects have biological origins. It come in these very momentary interactions through our senses, whether that's making enduring eye contact

or this our sense of touch. But too often we're actually shut off from this by simply being distracted. The parable of the Goods Meridan was a study that was done in the seminary at Princeton, many, many decades ago. And they were really curious about when someone actually stops to ask for help.

So to figure out how to what made someone inclined, these are seminarians who would think they were one to help to figure out how to, what made someone inclined, these are seminarians, you would think they would want to help to figure out which one of them would actually be willing to help someone else. They ask people to think of the parable as a good Samaritan. So to revisit the biblical story and deliver a sermon on it. And then they also ask to random assignment, another group to write a sermon on something else,

totally unrelated. And what they found is that what predicted who stopped or who didn't stop was not whether or not they were asked to think about this parable of the Good Samaritan, what predicted who stopped and who didn't stop was whether or not they were told to hurry. And that piece is so critical.

Even if we want to help, if we want to connect, that notion of being told to hurry really inhibits our ability to truly connect with others. The same is true, one of my another study that I love to revisit is a study in attentional distraction, which was really curious about, for instance, if you would notice a clown going by on a unicycle. They found that people who had their cell phone out

two thirds of them missed a unicycling clown. So if you imagine that you can miss a unicycling clown and walk over, right? Someone who's like clearly in distress on the ground and needing help, all of this suggests that simply being in a hurry and being distracted impairs our ability to connect. And so being present with the people that you're with

is arguably the best way to strengthen the quality of your social relationships. But this seems like a tall order because I mean, I know intimately what it's like to be in a state of, you know, insensate, self-concerned. I've embodied that many times. Potentially you're asking people to sort of re-prioritize their whole lives and maybe cut back on the amount of commitments they have, et cetera, et cetera. Oh no. I think if you could do this for five minutes in day, you could change your life. I mean, that sounds... Now, I feel like I'm selling something. That was maybe an overstatement. But let me give an example. I'll give a more concrete example.

So I mentioned before that I feel like listening is a superpower. Listening is incredibly important for our ability to connect. If you think about listening, if you ask people how good they are at listening, 95% of people will tell you that they're a good listener. If you've ever had a conversation, you know that most people aren't good listeners. Part of this is simply this distraction piece

that we were talking about, but part of it is also the self-focused you mentioned, and also that we don't actually know how to listen well. So people who were even trained in listening or tend to be trained in active listening, so mm-hmm, asking follow-up questions. So just to think about how you can improve your ability to listen, this core skill. What I often ask people to do is to ask about how you can improve your ability to listen this core skill.

What I often ask people to do is to ask someone how they're doing, just simply how are you today? And don't say anything at all for 90 seconds. Give them full 90 seconds if they want to take it, right? Just to say how they really are doing. And when you give someone else this opportunity, if you like, they're being truly seen and truly heard, the benefits to the other person are extraordinary. Like I've literally seen people cry in a classroom, just by giving, being given 90 seconds of space. And at the same time, like noticing your own tendencies, right?

Like oftentimes people will either want to jump in with like a me too story, like, oh, yeah, I had that too, which you think you're helping, but oftentimes you're helping, but oftentimes you're derailing or to like, do I want to ask follow-up questions, which again, doesn't give the person this full space that they need. So that practice, like a 90-second practice, really can have cathartic benefits for the other person, but it can improve your ability to connect in a way that doesn't take a huge investment in time,

but it really is instructive, I think, both to you and helpful to the other person. So we don't need to go out and take whole courses on how to be better listeners. We can just try this and build from there. Yeah, I think fundamentally people just want to be seen and heard. Like, we want to connect in our humaneness. And so giving people that space oftentimes, that's what they really need. So, they has been helpful for me. Also, I've made fun of my CEO earlier, Ben Rubin, but he's a very close person in my life.

We've done a lot of work on our relationship because our relationship then bleeds out to the rest of our organization. It's really important, plus we just like each other. And we have an executive coach that we work with. His name is Jerry Kologna. He's been on the show before. And Jerry once pointed out that I have a habit that when Ben expresses anxiety, I rush in to try to fix it. Instead of just telling him to say more about the anxiety so that he can just get it off his chest. Yeah. Does that strike you with in line of what with that seems like a to me, I make the connection between the 90 second thing and this.

Yeah, it's a huge piece of that. So like that's an important self realization. They so you've in these conversations realize like, Oh, I attended what to be a fixer. And what happens oftentimes, like you think you're trying to help. Part of it is giving the other person this space to let whatever they need out out. So that helps reduce their anxiety. The second piece is oftentimes people already know the solution to their own problems, right? They know the solution. And so in many ways, by jumping into trying to fix it, you're taking away the opportunity for them to solve their own problems. So in conversations that are like, of that ilk, one of the easiest phrases I find to use is,

like, do you want me to simply listen? Are you looking for advice? And I've asked this a lot of times, like many, many times, and I don't think anyone has actually ever wanted my advice. They just want me to listen. I see. If you had asked me that question, if I was unloading to you, I would say both, but first, listen. You know, it's interesting. I'm thinking of a conversation I had the other day with it. It was private, so I won't name the person, but it was a couple of people. It was a group conversation. And the where we were landing was that these, what you might call people skills, we are generally not taught these.

I mean, it just seems like a huge problem. you might call people skills, we are generally not taught these. I mean, it just seems like a huge problem. We are not taught how to be effective human beings with other human beings. In fact, the culture is pushing us in the other direction all the time, nose into your phone. No, that's exactly right.

And I think, if you look at one of the reasons that people are really reluctant to think intentionally about their relationships, what you'll hear again and again is people saying, like, I didn't get the playbook or like, I don't know how to do that. And human interaction is one of the most curious domains of, in my opinion, of life, right? Like, if you ask people how good they are driving, they will tell you that they think that they're better than average. If you ask them how smart they are, they'll tell you that they think that

they're smarter than average. But you ask them how smart they are, they'll tell you that they think that they're smarter than average. But it went in a constant human interaction or social interaction. People routinely report that they feel like that they're worse than average. And there's a great example of this that was a study that was done by Erica Boothby, which she calls this at the liking gap. And you know you've ever experienced the liking gap. If you've been in a conversation and then you've like, walked away, and you start thinking like, oh my God, I don't know if I like, I came across the right way, or like I probably shouldn't have said that. And what she found is that she was curious

how common this was. And so she asked the person in the conversation, how much they enjoyed it, and then how much their conversational partner enjoyed it. And she consistently finds that we underestimate how much we perceive the other person and enjoy conversation. So there are so many examples of this,

and this is all to say that what this does is it feeds the sling society. And we feel like in a lot of the heart of that social anxiety is simply like, I don't know how to do this. Like I didn't get the playbook. And what I try to do in some of my work is like, like here are the basic things we know

about human connection and human interaction. So in a conversation, a follow-up question, it's like one of the best things that you can do because in part it shows your listening and by giving people these little pieces of like, this is a piece of social science that we know works. In part that helps because it actually works, but more than that, it helps because it helps reduce

social anxiety. And in reducing that social anxiety, we're supposed to be seeing less on ourselves. And then we can actually be there more for the other person. And there's a real sense of human connection. But it's true. It's like extraordinary that we don't learn this, right? And it's back to the listening piece. It turns out there was a study by Ralph Nichols, who's known as the father of listening. And many, many years ago, he found that five year olds were the best listeners of all, which I find hard to believe with, I have a five year old. But it goes back to like, we're not getting better at this over time, or we're not being taught how to do this well. Do you have any thoughts on how we could address the fact that people aren't being taught people skills.

I think that and this is like a little bit outside of my domain, but I think increasingly because we're recognizing how important it is, the kids now are starting to be taught more. So I feel like there's more focus on social and emotional learning in schools than there was at least when I was in school. And I think by taking that perspective is that social intelligence, like any form of intelligence is a learned skill and we can all improve, that that kind of takes this stigma away.

Like, if things are too often people will be like, oh, you're either like good at this or you're not good at this, but by really reinforcing that this is a learning cultivated skill, that I think can help open the door for people being more receptive anyway to begin learning some of these skills. And you're starting to see it too.

Like I was starting to roll through my head. Like this is like a lot of what I teach. And so it's in business schools now. I spend a lot of time working with physicians. And increasingly there's attention devoted to how do you teach physicians to listen? So I think we're starting to see more of it. At least it's my hope. So we've talked a lot about social anxiety.

Obviously social anxiety's got to be, I don't, I haven't seen the data on this, but it's got to be pretty high right now as we emerge from this pandemic. As you think about the vice in which people find themselves now, they may have had pre-existing social anxiety. Now they've got this historic trauma on top of it. What else would you say to people who are trying to figure out how to navigate this current situation? I mean, I think, first off at a societal level, some of the leading indicators suggest

that the consequences of this long period of social anxiety or social isolation, right, plus anxiety on top of it for both health reasons and also social reasons, that it's likely to happen during consequences. So, for instance, we know that opioid overdose deaths are up, we're up many months ago, already by 20%. We're seeing like really significant indicators of significant long-term mental health consequences from this period. And those are just the most extreme pieces. And so I think the first piece is a society we have to realize that the consequences of what we've been through are likely to be enduring and to be sensitive to that. So it's not that once that everyone has a shot in their

arm, if everyone does have a shot in their arm, but once we're back to normal, that things are going to be normal. But there's people who are really, really struggling as a result of what we've been through. It's been in many ways a perfect storm, right, of stress and isolation and not having access to help that many people rely on. And so as a society, I think we have to be aware of that moving forward and to put in place some more support and to be more understanding it. And one of the positive developments is in many places, I've seen conversations that never would have happened

around these issues that are happening now. So questions about like how are you doing and having people be willing to say something like, oh, I'm struggling with loneliness or, you know, I'm feeling really anxious. That happens now far more than it did. So I think if we can keep those conversations going and help realize that this isn't going to just go away and get people to support they need, that's a big piece of it. And then at the individual level, it's just reach out to people, right? And say like, hey, I'm thinking of you. How are you doing?

And being willing to help when you can. So even if you are feeling nervous about re-engaging with other human beings as their lockdowns lift, counterintuitively reaching out to other people and seeing if you can help, might help you. It's the easiest way to get out of yourself. Yeah, I love this theme. I come back to it a lot in my work of the enlightened self-interest of if you really want to do the best thing for yourself,

it's like taking yourself out of the center of the picture is, or doing something for somebody else is actually often the move. It's the easiest solution, right? Like if I'm trying to help someone else, I thought I can't be thinking about myself. And like particularly with respect to fear, so much of fear arises from self-centered, right? Like, and if we think about social, like, reenery, so the social world, like, what are they going to think of me? How am I going to look? All of that really isn't focused on yourself. So if you think instead of like, how can I give? How can I be of service? How can I help someone else? You can't really be thinking about yourself.

you have service, how can I help someone else? You can't really be thinking about yourself. I do know people though who might feel fear at the notion of asking somebody how you're doing and then having that person say, you know, unload a bunch of deep stuff. Like how do I even handle that? That's a really important point. And like, you don't ever ask a question

if you're not able to hold the answer. And sometimes we can't, right? Like, we just are in a space where we can truly hold the answer. And it's so common, right? It worked. Like, oh, how are you doing or how are things going? And that can be really dangerous territory if you're not really willing to hear the answer.

Because like, if you don't want to hear, like, I've gone to the point where I'm like, I'll just tell you really how I am. And so asking people to sort of put on those facades is actually can make people, there's lots of research that actually makes people feel less of a sensual social connection, a less of a sense of belonging. So it's like, do what you can to reach out, but make sure that it's within your emotional BMI with you may just not have

to be on with to do that in the given moment. How do you read when somebody asks you how you're doing whether they're sincere and want a real answer as opposed to a prefrontary one? So this gets back to the question. When you're talking about self-deprecating humor, I've gotten to the point where I just really tell everybody really how I'm doing, but that's a position of privilege and power. And I do that because I'm trying to create space and open up space for those conversations to happen. And so I mean, obviously if there's someone that I feel like

really is going to feel super uncomfortable, like, and I don't feel like they need that growth, I'm not going to do it. But I've taken someone of a position that I'm like just really going to tell because it creates the space for other people to say how they're really doing. So you want to model openness. And it almost always works. We're just as human beings wired to engage in reciprocity. So people usually meet you where they'll meet you where you're at in terms of emotional cadence. So your view is that by being open in this way, you can have a healthy ripple effect on the world

around you. That's the goal. being open in this way, you can have a healthy ripple effect on the world around you. That's a goal. You have talked a lot about being intentional when it comes to building and maintaining our social networks. I think you have already in this conversation pointed out that sometimes people worry about intentionality, perhaps because it might seem, I don't know, like overly, what's the word I'm searching for? You're just being too calculated about, you're maybe you're a social climber. Yeah, there's great research that's showing this, it is exactly true.

Research by Tisiana Cattaro, who's at Rotman in Francesca, Gino at Harvard, and they're calling Miriam Cattacki, they were interested in this question. Like, what is it the heart of like, why is there this discomfort with being of his at Rotman and Francesca Gino at Harvard and they're calling Miriam Kichaki. They were interested in this question, like, what is it the heart of like, why is there this discomfort with being really intentional about our relationships? And to explore this, they engaged in experiment

where they asked people to either recall like a spontaneous interaction, for instance, and I ran into you, Dan, at a cocktail party and we really hit it off and you gave me an idea that I really ran with and it turned out to be beneficial to me versus a much more what you're talking about. It is calculating your instrumental type of interaction. So an example of that would be oftentimes what we think of as like really intentional professional networking. So I go to a job fair and I'm looking for a job lead and that's why I'm there. And when they ask people to

recall these different types of scenarios and write about them, and then they ask them to get engaged in a word completion touch, so they for instance showed them letters W blank SH. What they found is that when people were engaged and think you just recalling this very type of instrumental, like I'm gonna like calculate a type of interaction that they were twice as likely to think of a word like wash rather than a neutral word like wish. The same, they also prefer cleaning products

over more neutral products. And what this is topping into is something in moral psychology that really captures this moral aversion. Like I literally want to wash away my sense. Like it makes us feel dirty. And it makes perfect sense that if you think about your relationships with your family, your friends, and many ways they're the thing that we hold most sacred or one of the things we hold most sacred. So being intentional or calculating is just simply morally off-putting. So this is true for a lot of people. If it's not true for you, it's important to realize other people may see it this way. But interestingly, they found that there's one group that didn't seem to have this aversion, and it turned out that it was people in power.

And you might be like, well, that makes perfect sense. People are becoming powerful because they're a good networker, right? This explains the whole thing. But it turns out that if you made people feel powerful, that you got the same effect. And it turned out when they dug into it, that it rises because people in power approach a situation and by thinking about like, what can I give in this social interaction instead of what can I get? And not reframing about thinking about what can I give instead of what can I get can really help overcome this moral aversion. And there are so many things that we all have to give right now, particularly just simply being with one other in a sense of

social connection. It seems like you're saying, as Iki as some of the cultural connotations may be, or if we're going in with the motivation to create connections rather than be instrumental, then it's kosher to be. It's actually recommended to be intentional. Yeah, we have to be. In part, if we're not intentional, right?

We lose connection, right? our networks are just getting smaller and smaller. And it's that intentionality is really important because no matter who you are, you have a fixed amount of time in your day, and you also have cognitive limits on how much you can actually maintain a set of social relationships, and you also have just constraints on your emotional bandwidth. And because all of those constraints are in play for all of this, if we're not intentional about our relationships,

we're simply losing touch with people who are important to us or can bring us more joy entire day. So we have to be intentional just because of the constraints that we face. I feel like, you know, just back to this question of like, how can we teach people skills? I think in some ways that connects in my mind to the fact that we don't prior you know, just back to this question of like, how can we teach people skills? I think in some ways that connected my mind to the fact that we don't prioritize,

even though all of the literature is from what I can tell around human flourishing, points to social connection and relationships being the most important variable. We don't really prioritize it the way we prioritize our stock portfolios or our bodies or like car shopping or whatever. Yeah, it's interesting.

In part, I think it's because relationships are a long-term investment. So you don't get an immediate payoff. I mean, you do sort of, right, that we get benefits from being in a high-quality connection in a moment. But a lot of the investments have really long-term horizons. And so if you're in any given moment, if you're faced with like you've got work to do

and there's a deadline to do it, or like, oh, you really should reconnect because you don't wanna be 75 and all alone, we're always gonna shift towards whatever is more immediate. And it makes that the continual focus on a relationship is much more difficult. I know that my making this more of a priority

of my own life has paid off in gigantic ways. Yeah, for me, I feel the same way. But I'm obviously biased. And I don't want to see morbid, but I do feel like the thing that always brings it back to me is to ask like at the end of the day, right? Like when like my time is like clearly on the horizon, like am I going to be like, oh, I wish I worked more or like I definitely won't be like I wish I exercised more, but I will wish that I would have spent as resume values versus eulogy values. That's brilliant. I'm not surprised. That's a brilliant articulation. You've done so much brilliant articulation in the course of this conversation. Are there areas where I should have steered us but failed to? No, I mean, I think the biggest thing is just

remember like the joy and connecting and so it's fengry having the chance to talk with you. is just remember the joy and connecting. And so it's been great having the chance to talk with you. Remember the joy in connecting. If you can keep that top of mind, you might be more intentional. Absolutely. Can you plug the book in any other things you're doing that people might find interesting?

Sure, you can learn more in my book, Social Chemistry, decoding, the patterns of human connection. And you can connect with me through my website, socialchemistry.com. Great job. This was a pleasure. I feel the same way. It was really nice having a chance to chat. I enjoyed it. So thank you. Thank you, Marissa. It was great to talk to her, especially at this time, as we're all emerging from our COVID cocoons. Also some exciting news before I let you go. This podcast has been nominated for two webby awards for the uninitiated. The webbies have been celebrating the best of the internet for the last 25 years.

And this year the 10% happier podcast has been nominated in two categories. Best interview show and best individual episode. The latter is for our conversation with the Dalai Lama earlier in the pandemic in 2020. If you are so inclined, you can help us out by casting your vote for us to win. It only takes a couple of minutes. Just go to vote.webbyawards.com right now through May 6th to vote for 10% happier in those two categories. We've put direct links within the show notes of today's episode.

Thank you for your support. One more item of business, and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we're going to be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I'm sure many of us are way too familiar with. In this series, you'll become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety, how and why it shows up, and what you may be doing to feed it unconsciously. We're going to teach you how to have a realistic view of your anxiety and to increase your ability to cope with challenging situations. You're going to learn tools for examining and

overcoming your own particular anxiety feedback loops while building the skills of mindfulness compassion and bravery along the way. And this is where you come in. We'd love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our series on the podcast. So whether you're struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about sort of re-entering the world post-COVID or you have any other questions about anxiety, we about sort of re-entering the world post COVID or you have any other questions about anxiety. We want to hear from you to

submit a question or share a reflection. Just dial 646-883-836. That's 646-883-836. The deadline for submission is Wednesday, May 12th. If you're outside the United States, we've put details in the show notes on how to submit a question via an alternate method. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you. In advance. This show, by the way, is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel,

and Jen Point, with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. As always, a big shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.