Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 561: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends | Dr. Marisa G. Franco

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Did you know that having friends can make you less depressed? One survey found that the average American had not made a new friend in the last five years but 45% of people said they would go out of their way to make a new friend if they only knew how.   Our guest today, Dr. Marisa G. Franco, has written a bestselling book about how understanding your own psychological makeup and attachment style can help you make and keep friends. Franco is a psychologist and a professor at the University of Maryland. Her book is called Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make–and Keep–Friends.This is episode three of a four part series in which we are doing some counter programming against the typical Valentine's Day fair. In this episode we talk about:Why friendship is undervalued in our society (while romantic love is overvalued) and why this is damaging on both a societal and individual levelThe impact of technology on our relationships as explained by something called “displacement theory”The biological necessity of social connection and the devastating physiological and psychological impacts of loneliness Attachment style and its relationship to our friendshipsWhat you can do to make friends, including being open or vulnerable (without oversharing)How to reframe social rejectionThe importance of generosityHow to handle conflict with your friendsThe difference between flaccid safety and dynamic safety in your friendshipsWhen to walk away from a relationship How to make friends across racial, gender, and socioeconomic linesHow to deal with social anxietyAnd how our evolutionarily wired negativity bias can impact the process of making friendsFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/marisa-g-franco-561See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, did you know that having a large social network can decrease your risk of death by 45% that's more than the benefits conferred by exercise and diet? Did you know that having friends can make you less depressed and that it can improve your marriage if you're in one? As Aristotle once said, without friendship, no one would choose to live. And yet we are in what some have called a friendship famine.

One survey found that the average American had not made a new friend in the last five years. And slash but 45% of people said they would go out of their way to make a new friend if they only knew how. My guest today has written a best-selling book about how understanding your own psychological makeup, what's called your attachment style, can help you make and keep friends. Dr. Marissa G. Franco is a psychologist and a professor at the University of Maryland. Her book is called Platonic.

In this conversation, we talk about why friendship is undervalued in her view in our society, while romantic love is overvalued and why this is damaging both on a societal level and an individual level. The impact of technology on our relationships, as explained by something called displacement theory, the biological necessity of social connection and the devastating physiological and psychological impacts of loneliness. We also talk about a variant called collective loneliness. We spend quite a bit of time on attachment style and how it relates to our friendships

and how even just knowing a little bit about attachment theory can be extremely helpful in this regard. Then we move on to what you can do to make friends, including being open or vulnerable without, and this is important without oversharing. How to reframe social rejection, the importance of generosity, how to handle conflict with your friends, the difference between dynamic safety and flaccid safety in your friendships,

went to walk away from a relationship, how to make friends across racial gender and socioeconomic lines, how to deal with social anxiety, and how our evolutionarily wired negativity bias can impact the process of making and keeping friends. In other words, we often make paranoid assumptions that are not necessarily true. I should say this is episode three of a four-part series in which we are doing some counter-programming against the typical Valentine's Day fair. We've done romance and family drama. Those episodes will last week if you missed them. Go check them out. This week it's about friendships today and then coming up on Wednesday. A whole fascinating episode about the science of heartbreak.

Also a heads up before we dive in here. There are a few little moments here where you might hear some background traffic sounds during the course of thebreak. Also heads up before we dive in here. There are a few little moments here where you might hear some background traffic sounds during the course of the interview, just the nature of remote recording. Hopefully it isn't too annoying. 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%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show.

Hey y'all, it'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, 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. Dr. Marissa G. Franco, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. I love when I have a scientist on the show and somebody who's dedicated, you know, a big chunk of their life to a specific subject matter.

I love asking why. And in your case, I believe it begins with a bad breakup. Am I right about that? Yeah. Yeah. It was me not really valuing friendship and having that kind of whiplash from that. So I went through this breakup.

I was grieving and I decided to start this wellness group with my friends where we would meet up and practice wellness and we would cook, meditate, do yoga, read books. And it was really life-changing, Dan. And it wasn't like because we were cooking. I mean, maybe you would argue, maybe it's because we were meditating. But what really felt life-changing for me was just like

being around these people that I love that love me so regularly. And it led me to question some of the beliefs that I had about friendship and about romantic love, which were that romantic love is the only love that counts. It's the only love that makes me worthy. If I don't have romantic love in my life, then I have no forms of love in my life. And I looked around and I was like, well, why doesn't this count? Every week I get proof of how loved I am.

Why do we devalue friendships so much that it's kind of like gold under our feet, but we just see it as concrete? And so I just felt like my beliefs were informed by a larger cultural problem than how we view relationships. cultural problem, then how we view relationships, and wanted to write platonic because I felt like it was vital for people within an outside of romantic relationships to level this hierarchy that we place on love. Same more about the hierarchy. Why do you think that, as you've argued, platonic love lies on the lowest wrong?

Yeah. So the hierarchy, I think, was conveyed to me and just all the messages and the media that I received growing up. And I think this could be particularly strong for women that, you know, you need this one person to complete you. You have the soulmate suggesting that you don't need anyone else to complete you, that romantic love is all you need, you're going to get into this very nuclear family and just rely on this one person for everything, and that there's just so much more energy that we put towards our romantic relationships and permission that we get, right? We have this formal ceremony marriage to to show that we're committed to our romantic partner. We have Valentine's Day as a popular holiday.

We celebrate our anniversaries, all of the home art cards, movies, we have a whole rom-com, which is mostly about your ability to find a romantic partner. Songs are all about love, love, lust, it's usually romantic love. So we are just so bombarded with all of these messages on the importance of romantic love and far less bombarded by messages on the importance of friendship, like, you know, going to a wedding, people might ask you, are you next or do you have a spouse or

partner? And they barely ask you, do you have a community? Do you have friends? And even when we when we think about the language we use, like, oh, if we're not going to be in a romantic relationship, we're going to be just friends. And if we're going to enter a romantic relationship, we're going to be more than friends, suggesting that friendship is at the bottom. And, you know, I do think I'm speculating here. I think historians could probably answer why we devalue friendship to a greater degree, but I have read a little bit of historians thinking on this topic and honestly,

woman were kind of entering into these marriages because they had to, you know, you couldn't really own property. You couldn't really get jobs as a woman and as women got more rights and now didn't need to literally enter into a marriage to become a full person or to have rights to things, what is going to keep us in these marriages, per se? When we have these other ways for us to sign up for a credit card or to start around business, one one's women have rights, how are we going to keep them entering into these marriages? And I think part of that way was that we really taught women that, well, you need romantic love to be worthy as a person. And if you don't have it, you're not worthy as a person.

And if we valued friendship too much, it might make people question, could I choose a life partner in a friend? Could I just center this around friends? And it might threaten this sacred institution of marriage that we have. And so I think there is this energy around, well, if we can't keep people in this institution through their rights, we can keep them in this institution like psychologically speaking through making them feel like they're nothing if they don't find this form of love. You also argue that if you want to have a healthy, romantic relationship, you need to have friends.

You can't just rely on one person. Absolutely. And this is a research-backed argument that I make. There are studies that find that women are more resilient to tribulations in their marriage when they have close friendship outside of it, that when you get into conflict with a spouse, it impacts your release of the stress hormone cortisol in problematic ways, unless you have quality connection

outside the marriage, that if you have friends, not only do you become less depressed, but your spouse also becomes less depressed because the mental health of people that are in these romantic partnerships is highly correlated to one another. So anything that you do to improve your mental health will improve your spouses too. So generally, I think this hyper focus, this fetishization of romantic love in some ways,

it hurts people that are in these partnerships and feel like you're letting me down because you're not giving me everything. And it hurts single people too because single single people like I was, you know, the one I was inspired to write Platonic feel like even though they do have connection in their lives, they don't recognize it as such. And because loneliness is a subjective experience where it's all about how we perceive our connections more so than whether we actually have them, that single people are going to feel lonelyer because they have this form of connection

that we think doesn't actually count as connection. When it comes to friendship, there's been no small amount of ink spilled of late about what you term the friendship famine. The data that show that we have fewer friends and fewer close friends, and we've ever had in the US and many other Western countries. What's going on and what are the consequences? Yeah, it is very sad that four times as many people now compared to early 90s have no friends.

Friendship networks have been shrinking for decades, and it's not just the pandemic. If we look back into our history, I think Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, really classic, he looks at all these factors that predict disengagement from communities, and he finds that one of the biggest ones was the creation of the television.

Before that, we spent our leisure time around other people. It was a time to hang out with people. Then it became a time to sit in these four walls and watch TV. But not only that, when you watch TV, me and my friend, Michaelin, we termed it the plop effect that you plop down on your couch and you have no energy to do anything else. So you become more lethargic. You don't really want to leave your house anymore.

It zaps the energy right out of you. And so, you know, you can see how the impact of technology that kind of started with the TV can be so much more amplified with the level of technology that we're on right now. And so we started to see real surges in loneliness around 2012. Obviously, correlation is not causation, but what was happening around 2012 was the widespread use of the smartphone. And now, I'm not someone to say that social media technology

inherently makes us lonely. Or it is indeed about how we use it. So there's this theory called displacement theory. And the idea is that if we use our technology to displace our in-person connections, like, I'm just on my TikTok scrolling through videos all night, when before TikTok, I might have spent this time with other people, then we're going to be more lonely. But if we use our social media and technology to facilitate in-person connection, like, I am DMing

my friend on Instagram to say, oh, you know, we should hang out. You just came across my feed. We're actually going to be less oh, you know, we should hang out. You just came across my feed. We're actually going to be less lonely than people that are and on social media. So it isn't part how you use it. The problem is that a lot of social media technology is designed for you to use it in ways that promote disconnection.

It's designed to keep you on it. And so most of us would admit that when we look at our social media use, a lot more of it is spent just lurking. And that's the stuff that is a form of disconnection. That's the stuff that negatively impacts your mental health. Then it is spent commenting with our friends and how much we love them or reaching out to them and saying, let's hang out or having a more vulnerable conversation, doing the kind of things that we can do on technology to foster more connection.

And the consequences here for us on an individual level and a collective level? I mean loneliness is toxic. It's very toxic. In fact, metanalces find that obviously your diet and your exercise affect how long you live, but your social network affects how long you live even more. Pretty much any illness that you get from breast cancer to Alzheimer's, the trajectory of that illness is a lot worse if you are lonely. Fundamentally, what loneliness is, it's not just a way of feeling. We just think of it, oh, I feel lonely. It alters our entire perception of the world.

Because if you think historically, if you were lonely, you were separated from your tribe and you were in danger. So your brain, when your lonely is like, look for threats. Look for threats. Be prepared for the threat. And so being in a lonely state is a chronic stress state that is taxing our bodies. It leads to microwakes when you're sleeping,

where your brain is literally waking up just to scan for threats. People that are lonely report thinking people are rejecting them more than they actually are. People that are lonely report liking their roommates less, liking humanity less, having less compassion for other people, referring to themselves more in conversation, being more hostile and punishing

towards someone that has critiqued them. These are all the things that happen when we're lonely and some of the reasons why loneliness is so, so toxic for our physical health and mental health. And this ladders up to social problems, writ large, like you argue in the book that this kind of distrust that can come out of loneliness or lack of social connection, we see this now playing out in tribalism. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Lonely people are more likely to distrust social institutions.

There's a study from European countries that looked at a bunch of different countries and found are more likely to distrust social institutions. There's a study from European countries that looked at a bunch of different countries and found that there was at least a slight 4% increase in support of right-wing populist leaders for people that were more lonely and socially disconnected. And so it absolutely impacts government. And it absolutely impacts democracy that we are lonely

because in some ways our political decisions are emotional ones that reflect do I feel seen do I feel known do I feel like I'm getting attention who else is getting attention right the same relational questions that we take to the level of groups and that's kind of how we tend to approach politics a lot of the time. And so, yes, it has like ramifications on so many different levels, our level of connection. So, you've made it your job to extol the virtue of friendship, and you make some big statements in the book about what friendship can do to us. I'm going to list a few of them, and then I'll prod you to unpack them. Friendship makes us whole, you say. Friendship

makes us empathetic. Friendship helps us figure out who we are. Friendship makes us friendlier. And this is an interesting statement coming from a scientist, but friendship makes our souls grow. So let's get into some of these. When you say friendship makes us whole, what do you mean by that? Yeah, I think I mean something about our identities that is very necessary to have an entire community. Like, I think there's the shrinking of identity that happens when we're just around one person, because each person surfaces a certain side of us.

So, you know, Dan, let's say you love meditating, and I don't like meditating. Around me, if we were together all the time, you wouldn't be able to express that side of you as much. You would need someone else to express that side of you more deeply. And so, that's the way that friendship makes us whole. Each person allows us a bit of a window to express ourselves more deeply in a different way.

And so when we're interacting with a larger community, we feel more whole. And that's why there's actually a form of loneliness called collective loneliness. And that's when you don't feel like you have a group that you're a part of that's working toward a common goal. And what collective loneliness suggests is that, hey, even if you have a spouse or a partner, you can still be lonely because you could still experience something like collective loneliness, or you can feel like, ooh, I feel the kind of unease of my identity

kind of shrinking in or only knowing myself in a certain way. And I'm like desiring this more expansive experience of myself. That makes a lot of sense. When you say friendship helps us figure out who we are, you may have just touched that a little bit, but maybe say a little bit more if you're open to it. Yeah, I think it's the idea, you know, social learning theory, it's called encyclology, which is like we kind of learn from observing other people. And when we're around other people,

they're kind of like advertisements for all the different ways that we can show up in the world. And so each person I'm interacting with exposes me to this idea that, oh, I could be this type of person or I can be that type of person. And then sometimes I have this sort of ping of recognition that's like, that feels like me, like that feels like it really resonates with me how you're showing up in the world. And so that's why Friendship really helps us figure out our personalities and who we are. It's also why around the times when we're really trying

to figure out our identity, we have the greatest amount of friends. So people around the ages like 25, for example, tend to have the largest amount of friends, and then your network sort of shrinks over time after your priorities become less focused on identity, more focused on having really deep quality connection, because friendship plays such a foundational role in helping us figure out

who we are. All right, so what do you mean then, by friendship, makes our souls grow? There's such an intimacy between our connections and our sense of who we are. Like, if we've had very destructive relationships in the past, it limits our ability to know ourselves because we are kind of stuck in this then survival state where we're always in threat, fight or fright, fear mode, and when we're interacting with people, we're constrained by that. The traumatic relational history that we might have plops itself on top of our entire personality and we're in this sort of reactive state.

And so in some ways, when we have healthy and quality connections and it can ground us and it can center us more, our souls grow because like it helps us figure out who we really are. It gives us the space to be who we really are because we're not in that active state of threat anymore. And I think friendship, good quality friendship, good quality connection, it regulates us. It makes us feel less activated all the time, less reactive all the time, like even a conversation with someone that you don't even

know can increase your well-being, for example. Of course, there's conversations that can do the opposite. But yeah, what I'm saying is that it can kind of pull us out of that reactive state, the regulation that we get from connection, allowing space more for our deeper sense of selfhood. So the term soul you're using in a poetic, not scientific way here. Yeah, and to be honest, this was not my quote. I think this came from philosopher Michelle to montagne. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

Who said friendship helps our souls grow? Not in a scientific way. I realized that for some people the science speaks to them, for some people emotion speaks to them. So I tried to incorporate both in platonic. Montagne is an interesting reference because, well, for me, at least my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein likes to quote Maintain as talking about a kind of radical vision of friendship where if you really love somebody as a friend, anything they do that could possibly be in their interest is good for you. So even if it's better for them, never to see you. Well then that, if you're a true friend, should to use more poetic language, gladden your

heart, which, you know, that's a pretty high bar. Yeah. And there, I mean, there is, if you want me to put this in jargonny research terms, it's a theory called inclusion of others in the self, which is when we get close to someone, we include them in our sense of self. So what happens to them feels like it's happening to us. And we see this at the neural level, like, I don't know, when we see a friend go through distress, it's like the same part of our brain that's active when we're in distress gets

triggered. And so, yeah, that is, I think, some of the powerful healing properties of friendship and the ways that it's linked to our sense of self overall. One of the main points you make in the book is that we bring our history to the process of making and maintaining friendship through attachment style. Can you describe what attachment style means? Yeah, so your attachment style is basically the idea that in your early relationships, you had experiences

that then became part of an unconscious template that you now hold for how people are treating you. And because so much of social interaction is ambiguous, like, where they grumpy because they didn't eat or where they grumpy because they hate me, or did they not text me back because they're busy, or is it because they hate me? A lot of how we're interpreting this ambiguity is based on what we've learned from our past experiences. So people that have had these healthy, positive relationships,

they become securely attached, which means that they don't take things very personally. They assume that people like them, they assume people are trustworthy. They're like optimistic, but not polyhanna. Like, if it shows that you are untrustworthy, they will adjust accordingly. But then you have people that are anxiously attached, and their history has told them that they will be rejected. And the only way for them to stay in connection is to cling and to almost lose their sense of self for the other person.

And so what we see for interestly attach people when they make friends, they're putting in high effort, but not getting as rewarded as the secure. Because they take things personally and feel rejected, they will sort of back away and become cold or become sort of attacking and aggressive because they're assuming that they're being rejected, even if they may not be being rejected.

They're not working through conflict or withdrawing instead again because they think people are going to abandon me at the end of the day, which really limits their ability to engage in these behaviors that create intimacy but are also very risky. And then you have avoiding the attached people and they've learned, if I try to get close, if I try to need anything from you, you are going to reject me. So I don't trust you. I'm not gonna give you that opportunity to reject me or to take advantage of me or to use my vulnerability against me. So we see these avoidantly attach people, their low effort, low reward, when it comes to friendship. They're not putting themselves out there, they're not trying, and they're very suspicious of people.

Like, if someone tries to be friends with them, they're like, they have an all-tier emotive, if someone does something loving to them, they're like, oh, you know, they're doing it because they want something out of me, for example. And so that's how these unconscious templates we've have almost become self-fulfilling prophecies because they push us to behave in ways that create the reality in which we fear. One of the fascinating points you make is that it's tempting to blame your attachment style on your parents,

but actually it's more complicated than that. I do, because I feel like in a society in which we live, wherein parents have very little help and support with their kids and having a kid is so expensive and families have become so nuclear, and it's all dependent on you. First of all, at a social level, it feels hard for parents to always be there,

responsive to their kids' needs, and you don't have to always be there. You just have to be good enough. But it seems like harder with the societal structures that we have set up. But the other thing is that your attachment style, it changes based off of new relationships that you have that there's research data that finds

that if you had someone outside your parents who was there to support you, you're more likely to be secure. Even your previous experiences of friendship can alter your attachment style to and research that finds that even knowing about attachment theory can make you feel a little bit more secure. So I do want to make the point that it's malleable because sometimes people hear me talk about attachment theory and they're like, well, thanks for telling me I'm doomed then

and good for those people with healthy relationships. And I'm like, that is not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is I hope that it's empowering to know this information because if you don't, you just think nobody can be trusted. It's all the problems all out there or everybody's going to reject you. The problems all out there. You have literally no agency in getting the outcomes that you seek. So my hope is that if you know your attachment style, you can understand what some of your liabilities are. You can understand the types of relationships that you really need.

You can understand what adjustments you can make to get the connection that you might be looking for. And maybe you can understand other people. I mean, this is where one of the phrases that I listed from you earlier, but didn't get you to dive into, comes to mind for me, which is that friendship can make us more empathic. If you get a sense of why people do what they do, well, then that's, that's actually a relief for you and for them. It is. I think sometimes we get caught up in thinking that everyone has the same psychological hardware that we do.

And we don't understand that my anxiously attached friend is asking for reassurance because they literally feel unbearable, intolerable pain without this reassurance. And I might not need that. But that doesn't mean that that's not what they're experiencing. Or my avoidantly attached friend is literally feeling a sense of threat and disgust when I try to get too intimate with them too deeply. And although I might not experience them be confused, but I would also be really uncomfortable if I felt threatened and disgusted. And I might also try to escape those feelings. So yeah, I think it does help us understand other people and also not personalize other people as much. Coming up, Dr. Merce G. Franco talks about the hidden symptoms of loneliness,

the difference between vulnerability and oversharing, how to reframe social rejection and the theory of inferred attraction. Keep it here. Theory of inferred attraction. Keep it here. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night,

you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So a lot of the book talks about how to make friends and maintain those friendships. And I want to dive into some of the strategies and tactics you recommend. But let me ask an overarching question. And maybe this is just me, but we've talked about friendship on the show before. And a question that

sometimes comes up in my mind is, is there maybe something a little at least apparently, or you know, could be in the minds of some people pathetic about trying to make friends or admitting that maybe you don't have enough friends or that you have trouble with this? This seems like dicey in that way. Or maybe it's just me. Yeah, it is, I think, an unfortunate cultural proclamation that people come up against that, you know, it's sad, you're alone, something's weird about you.

But when our rates of loneliness are so high, it's like more typical to be lonely than it is to be connected. And I just feel like how could there be shame in something or something wrong with you when so many people are struggling with this issue? You know, like I just, I guess I think it's just really unfortunate that they're shame about this because it means that all the people that need help the most feel like they can't address it or do anything about it or like speak to this problem.

I remember when I was getting training as a psychologist, my supervisor was like, let every aspect of the human experience be within you. And I think if you're chaining people for being lonely, are you not in touch with the ways that you're probably lonely too and you're feeling disconnected to and that they are you? Right. It's just so much more normal to be lonely than to like have a great group of friends. Sadly, like that's the state of affairs. And there is actually research that finds that we think other people are more connected than they actually are,

which I think makes us feel even more lonely. And so I just want to normalize that and say for people that are struggling with connection and are lonely that, hey, you're actually more normal than the people that have great friends and have a great social network. So it's okay to be where you are. There's societal reasons why you are where you are and also that I have hope that you can come out of it

and you can find connection again. I think that's massively helpful. And I would add, although I don't really know what I'm talking about, so I'll defer to you, but I suspect that even for people who might not technically qualify as lonely, like I don't think I would technically qualify as lonely, I'm always in the market for new friends and new friends are always additive. Yeah, you know, and I think as you said, like, technically qualifying as lonely is like a really complicated thing because I didn't think I was lonely.

And then I took, this was back when I was a professor at my first institution. I had moved to New City and I felt kind of isolated in my department, but I was around people all the time. And I was literally administering the UCLA lowliness scale, which is kind of like the most commonly used scale to assess lowliness. And I was like, why don't I take this scale? And there were questions on it that were not just about like, not being around people, which at the time is what I thought lowliness was.

But were like, do you feel seen and known? Do you feel authentic around the people around you? And I was like, ah, I guess I'm lonely. Like I don't feel like they really know me as a person. I don't feel like really seen by them, even if I'm around these people all day. And I realized that I was lonely. And even now, because I know like all these hidden symptoms

of loneliness, like for example, if you're lonely, you are more likely to be in a bad mood. Now, I'm like, when I'm in a bad mood, I'm like, oh, is it just because I'm lonely? Like, there's no clear reason why I'm in this bad mood. And then I'll, you know, go hang out with someone and all of a sudden I'll feel better. And I'll be like, oh, that was like loneliness disguised

or even like having random anxiety. I'm just like, okay, where has this come from? It's loneliness disguised or even when I think I. I'm just like, okay, where has this come from? It's loneliness disguised, or even when I think I want to reach out to someone, I'm like, they don't want to hear from me. Loneliness disguised, you're more likely to think you're going to be rejected, or when I'm thinking about my friendships

in a really cynical way, and I'm just thinking about how my friends are flawed in this way. And then I get connection again, and all of a sudden, I'm like, you know, they're not so bad. Like, they have their limitations, but overall, they're not so bad. Like they have their limitations, but overall they're a good person. And so it's just, it's so much more complex than I think we think it is to even like recognize

and realize they're lonely. Again, massively helpful and appreciated. So let's talk about some of your recommendations. The first is to take initiative. What do you mean by that? So our issue is that for a lot of us, when we were children, we were just hanging out on the playground, we sat next to someone in class, we became friends.

And as we become adults, we rely on the same idea that friendship should just happen organically. I shouldn't have to try. I should have to put myself out there to make friends. And then I read the study that finds that people that think that friendship happens organically are lonely or five years later. And people that think that it takes effort are less lonely five years later because they're making the effort. And so I want to disabuse that idea from people.

Friendship and adulthood does not happen organically. There's the sociologist Rebecca Gianams. She says, friendship happens organically when we have repeated unplanned interactions. Like we're seeing people regularly and it's not necessarily something that we reached out to plan. Like work, maybe, or like the soccer league,

or your place of worship, but there's also shared vulnerability. So we're sharing things about ourselves, we're getting vulnerable. And most of us, as adults, unless we're putting ourselves out there and finding groups, we don't necessarily have those settings in our lives.

Like we go to work, sure. Now it's more and more virtual, but also like, are you really vulnerable at work? Like, do you really share your struggles and the deeper things that are going on at work? Like, often no. And so we're just not inhabiting the same infrastructure that can lead us to just rely on things

to kind of just happen and friendships to flow into our lives. And we're going to have to try. We're gonna have to put ourselves out there. We're gonna have to reach out to people we'd like to connect to you and say things like, I've so enjoyed talking to you. I'd love to connect further. Are you open to exchanging contact information? We have to take the initiative.

So how do you get over the hump and do it? Tea. So yeah, we're very afraid of rejection. And it's a huge barrier to making friends. You know, I'm a professor and we do these like events for our students and we have this trip to the aquarium. And I think a lot of the time students come on these trips because they hope to make friends. But what I see is that the students that really want to make friends are listening to music

on their phones and not talking to anyone and seeming completely unapproachable. And the truth is that often when we fear rejection, we come off as reject tick. We come off as cold and withdrawn because we're too scared to be friendly. We're too scared to be warm. And so one of the tips that I share for making friends is to try to assume that people like you, and this is based off of research on something called the acceptance prophecy that found that when researchers kind of deceived people and told them, hey, we know that when you go into this group, you're going to be liked. It was a lie, but people actually became friendlier and warmer and more open. And so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, I know that's easier said than done. I think some of the ways that we can try to make this assumption is that when we fear rejection, when we're lonely, again, our brain is getting for threat, intentionally scanning for safety in an environment like, oh, who's smiling at me? Who seems like open? Who did someone to hold the door for me? And trying to find those moments of safety

to put us in a state where we can kind of internalize more cues of acceptance from others. And yet rejection is a real phenomenon. It's likely to happen to anybody who takes a risk and puts themselves out there. So how do we deal with that? Well, yeah, I think the problem of rejection is that we assume that it shouldn't happen

rather than assuming that it's just part of the process of connection. So if you're getting rejected, you're doing something right, you're initiating. Like, I think we can't judge ourselves on the outcome that we can't control, which is the other person. We can only judge ourselves on our own behavior. So if I initiated with you, hey, I'm succeeding because I'm getting this new skill and I'm initiating. But I think it is really also important to recognize that rejection is part of the process of connection.

Because I do hear from people who are like, I wanted to make friends and I asked one person to hang out and they said no, and I never asked anyone again. And I'm just like, no, like, no, you have to like, kind of persist and expect that rejection is going to be part of the process, just like endating. And it's not a sign because one person rejected you that you should never ask anyone again

and everyone's going to reject you till the end of time, it's a sign that you're on the course. Rejection is going to be part of the experience and sure you might need some time to like lick your wounds and feel okay again, but I think the problem with projection is we really generalize it. We take one person's reaction to us and think it's going to be everyone's reaction to us. And so just reminding ourselves that even if this person reject us doesn't mean everyone's going to us. And so just reminding ourselves that even if this person reject us doesn't mean everyone's going to reject us, even if this person rejects we still want to be really proud of ourselves for taking that initiative and putting ourselves out there. Another recommendation from you as it pertains to this process of making friends

is to express vulnerability. Please say more. Yeah, so there's a lot of research on this that finds, for example, that freshmen, college students who share their negative emotions are more likely to make friends with other people that when we're vulnerable, according to something called the beautiful mess effect, we underestimate how much people see it positively, overestimate how much they might judge us. There's research that finds that just having people answer increasingly intimate questions. By the end of it, some people feel closer to that one person that they answered these questions within anyone in their lives, like 30% of people

feel closer to that person than anyone in their lives. So vulnerability is just a really powerful way to feel connected to someone. In some ways, I think when we're vulnerable with someone, we do something important, which is that we convey that we trust them and we like them. And connecting with people is there's this theory called the theory of inferred attraction, which is people like people that they think like them. And when you're vulnerable with someone you're saying you're special to me, you're important to me, that's why I'm sharing this information with you. Of course, there's those people that overshare,

and it seems like they'll share with anyone and dump on anyone, which is why oversharing doesn't work, because it doesn't convey that person that they're special to us, and that they make us feel particularly safe or we trust them in particular. And so overall, I think vulnerability

is just so important for our ability to connect with one another, so important for our ability to connect with one another, but also for our mental health in general. Like I said, a study in platonic that finds that out of 106 factors that influence depression, the most pronounced factor that protects us is having a confidant, having someone to confine in. I think in general across this conversation, we see that things that we do to better connect with people are also the things that we do to better connect with people

are also the things that really improve our mental health. There's just such a huge overlap between those two things. So I think in practice, this looks like sharing with people something that you've been struggling with, for example, even sharing something that you're really joyful about can feel kind of vulnerable. I have a friend, she, Mines she'll message me and she won't just ask how I'm doing, but first she'll share like all the ups and downs going on in her life and then

she'll ask how I'm doing. And I, I'm like, oh, that's really nice. She's like taking the time to share what's going on. I start doing it. Now I text people when I ask them how they're doing, this is what's going on with me, the good and the bad. Because you know, usually we take that, how are you? And it's just like, we give a one dimensional, oh, this is cool. I'm glad that this happened. And we don't give people the, we don't give people the vicissitudes of our lives or our experiences. And I think the more that we can feel comfortable doing that with people that are safe for us,

the more connected we'll feel to them, the more connected they'll feel to us. Let me just get you to dwell for a second on oversharing because I am completely with you on the power of vulnerability. And yet I do have people in my life who do it wrong and I would include myself in that category occasionally. Is the problem with oversharing just that it doesn't have the effect of making the other person feel special. Can it also be that you are literally saying too much or burdening somebody with information that it's kind of inappropriate for them to hold? Yeah.

So, I differentiate between vulnerability and oversharing because I think the motivation is different. When we're vulnerable, we're discerning. We discern that someone is someone, something about the mixes feel like we can trust them and we feel safe with them to be vulnerable. When we overshare, it's actually quite the opposite. It's typically a fear-based compulsion

where we actually are afraid they don't like us and we are trying to kind of pull them in and get them to like us or to test them and see if are you going to stick around if you know all these things about me. And in that case, it's not actually authentic because instead of admitting, I'm kind of afraid this person doesn't like me. We're trying to use our vulnerability to kind of protect ourselves from what we're actually feeling and what we're actually sensing. And so my question of whether it's oversharing or vulnerability is like, is this coming from a place of fear that you're over sharing?

Fear that these people don't really like you, which is why you're over sharing. Or is this coming from a sense of safety? And again, that's not something, is not necessarily if you've known someone for years to feel, for you're somewhere in your body to feel like they're a safe person. And I think the oversharing it almost tends to be compulsive. It tends to be word vomiting. Like, oh, all this stuff is just like kind of coming out of me.

Whereas I think the vulnerability tends to be a little bit more deliberate. And so it's the motivation in terms of how I define the difference because for receivers, how we perceive someone's vulnerability also depends on us. Like people that are avoidantly attached, for receivers, how we perceive someone's vulnerability also depends on us. Like, people that are avoidantly attached, for example, are not drawn to vulnerable people. People that are securely attached and anxiously attached,

they are. They feel closer to people who are vulnerable with them. And so whether people think we're oversharing or just being vulnerable, I think it's important to recognize it doesn't just depend on us and what we're sharing. It also depends on them and their history around trust, history around emotions, what they've been taught around, how to relate to emotions, what they've been taught around, what it means to like be strong or their unwritten rules around do have to be perfect in order to be loved, for example. There's a word you've used a couple times in this conversation, authenticity or authentic.

I'll own that this is me being personicity. I don't love that word. I would, just because it can sound a little anodine. I love the concept. I don't love the word. I kind of fall back on like realness as the best possible alternative. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. That's probably me oversharing right there. Anyway, authenticity. What do you mean by it? What is the connection to vulnerability? And how does it help us in this process of friendship? Yeah, so I'll tell you about this through. I went to the Zoom class and the woman was like, she shows up late and then at some point, she like stops dancing and I'm the only one there.

And she like, I think she's just seems tired. So she just stops dancing. She tells me to dance on my own. And then she comes up to me and she's like, you know, I did that. I allow you to dance on your own. And I take it slow for you because if you're a beginner here, I want to adjust to your level of training and not overwhelm you.

And I was just like, this lady is clearly tired right now. And she's coming up with this kind of explanation about how she's doing this for me and my best interest rather than just acknowledging that, hey, I've been working really long days, so I'm tired and I'm trying to do the best I can with you right now. And so I would consider that an inauthentic act, because I define vulnerability in platonic

as a state of presence where you are not hijacked by a defense mechanism. And a defense mechanism is a way to obscure, ignore, cover up a deeper emotion that you have, right? So for example, instead of admitting that I feel jealous, I start to put down my friend. Instead of admitting that I'm tired, I start telling you I'm gonna do this for you and for your best interest. Instead of admitting that it's hard for me to talk with my friend about them having kids

because I've been struggling with my own fertility issues, I tell them that you're talking about this all the time and you need to stop. Like, often these defense mechanisms, they try to protect us from this vulnerable feeling we don't want to look at, but at the cost of our relationships. Like we're just taking things out on other people or, you know, I don't want to be your friend anymore.

And instead of acknowledging that I just ghost on you. There's just all these ways that we try to obscure or disconnect from this deeper emotion in ways that really bring down our relationships. And those are those sort of inauthentic acts. Even aggression often can be an inauthentic act. Like you hurt my feelings. And instead of me saying you hurt my feelings, it's like you suck,

you're disappointing. Let me tell you about yourself. And so I think authenticity is really important for friendship because if we were in touch with the feeling that's underneath the defense mechanism and we could be vulnerable with that feeling, we would be a lot more likely to maintain our friendships than if we're constantly in this reactive state of defense mechanisms where we're trying to obscure that deeper feeling and sacrificing our relationships along the way.

Yeah. And people really respond when they feel like you're real or authentic. It just, you use this phrase earlier. It's like you can feel it somewhere in your body. Hmm, I like that. Coming up, Marissa talks about when to walk away from a relationship instead of working at it, conflict and its connection with intimacy, flaccid versus dynamic safety, how to make friends, and keep them across racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines,

how to deal with social anxiety, and how our evolutionarily wired negativity bias can impact the process of making and keeping friends. After this. So, I want to keep going with some of your recommendations here. Another is to be generous.

Yeah. Anything that we do that benefits another person, makes them feel loved and valued, is going to create connection with other people. And so I talk about affection in the book, telling people that you really love and value them, but also just like doing things for them. I like to think about like whatever you're talented at or good at, can you turn that into an active generosity? For me, I really like to learn. So I've like given my friends presentations on financial wellness, for example, because that's what I could offer to them. Other friends, they're good at cooking or baking. So they'll invite me over for dinner. And that is, I guess it goes back again to that theory

of inferred attraction that people like people that they think like them. So anything that you could do to make someone feel liked is going to deepen your sense of connectedness to them. You do say though that we should be mindful of our motives as we embark upon generosity or affection. Yeah, so here's the thing, anxiously attached people use generosity. I would call this kind of an authentic.

As a way to try to get people to like them, rather than as a symbol that represents how much they like them already. So anxiously attached people, what that means, is they'll often give to people who treat them like crap, to try to get these people that treat them like crap to like them. So, I talk about in the book, you know, this woman named Melody who is being bullied

and she would make these bully sandwiches to try to get them to like her, right? And what that does, this unhealthy generosity, is that it invites unhealthy relationships into your life, because you're investing in people that are not invested in you. And you're putting all your energies into relationships with people that do not treat you right. And so you want to invest in the people that are invested in you. I say in Platonic, if people are not treating you well, walk away, don't work harder.

Because the angiocally attached person is driven when someone's not treating you well, walk away, don't work harder. Because the interest of a touch person is driven when someone's not treating them well to work harder to earn their love. Like that's literally what is encoded in their nervous system for how love works. They get it when they try and they cling and they fight and they find these people that are unavailable and they try to earn it.

But no, find the places where love is given more freely and invest in those places. Be generous with those people in your life. Speaking of investing, let's talk about the sensitive issue of conflict. How do we view it and handle it when we've got beef with one of our friends? Yeah.

So this is, and is my biggest growth area for friendships. I thought it'd be a good friend meant just getting over it on my own. Until I realized I was indeed not getting over it and withdrawing from people that I really loved in my life. So I read this study that was like having open and pathic conflict with people is actually linked to deeper sense of intimacy.

And I realized, oh wow. So I'm like limiting the amount of intimacy I could have with my friends by not having conflict with them. And then I, you know, there's this psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner who says you could have this flaccid safety, which is we feel safe because we pretend nothing's wrong, or you could have dynamic safety, which is we feel safe because we pretend nothing's wrong, or you could have dynamic safety, which is we feel safe because we rupture and we repair and we rupture and we repair.

And just think about how much more sustainable a friendship is when you know that when there's an issue, you can talk about it and address it. And it's not that you have to white knuckle the friendship till the end of time, right? And so reading that research is what propelled me to actually address problems with my best friend, but I also learned that it's not necessarily addressing conflict that brings you together. It's how you address it. And so doing things like framing, which means you open up the conversation in a loving way. So I want to address this with you because our friendship's really important to me. So I don't I want to make sure nothing simmers between us using those eye statements.

I felt hurt when you didn't show up to my party that you told me you were coming to or you canceled last minute asking for their perspective. And I was wondering, I just want to check in. Like, was anything going on in your end? Deescalating if they kind of escalate the conflict and they say, well, no, but I don't know why you're so sensitive. I have a life outside of you.

Oh yeah, like I understand that you have like other obligations totally like your kids, like it totally makes sense. And asking for what you want in the future. So, but like next time if you aren't able to come, maybe just tell me earlier and that won't hurt me. And so that's something that you would be willing to do. Very different from you suck, I'm disappointed in you. You're horrible. You're awful. Like

conflict can look like an active love and an active reconciliation. If we know how to do it in the right way. Again, totally agree. And a lot of the recommendations I saw in your book are similar to recommendations that I've personally received from, I have these communications coaches I've worked with for many years now, Dan, Claremont and Moodita Nisker. And I'll put a link to the episode I did with them in the show notes here. But they talk about de-escalation through what's called reflective listening that you just described.

And I know you described in the book that is sort of stating back to your interlocutor what you've just heard them say, which makes people feel seen and heard. And that can calm their nervous system. They talk about sort of opening with your positive intention, which you also modeled in your hypothetical conversation there, where you're saying, like, I'm only bringing this up because I care about this relationship, which again, could put the other person at ease and really create fertile ground for having the conversation. So yeah, I plus one on a lot of that. Let me ask about a few other issues related

to friendship that I think might be coming up in the minds of people listening. We've done some episodes on social anxiety. It's a real thing. If you've got social anxiety or you're on the spectrum of the socially anxious, well, doesn't that make everything we've just discussed much harder? Absolutely. I mean, you know, people that have social anxiety, they just don't think that they're worthy of connection. And like I said, like when you're in this place of fearing rejection, it's very hard to be social and be loving because you're in this self-protective mode where you're just your biggest priority is to survive. And I think when the desire to survive and the desire to connect conflict with one another, the desire to survive is always stronger

or what your brain is telling you is survival, which might be withdrawing from other people, and, you know, avoiding other people. And I know you interviewed Ellen Hendrickson, she's a friend of mine, and I remember this like study that she cited in her book on safety behaviors, which are like people that are socially anxious to things to avoid rejection. Like maybe talking really fast, always trying to fill a silence or just with drying completely. And the study found that when people were asked to avoid engaging in those safety behaviors, they were actually liked more. And people felt more connected when they stopped trying to avoid rejection.

And I think Ellen's advice is really good where she says, focus on the other person. The problem is that you get so in your head, you're so self-conscious, but focus on like the other person, just try to shift your attention there. Obviously, I think social anxiety can also be a pretty deep issue that going to therapy might also be helpful if it's something that you're struggling with,

but achieving a sense of presence, doing things to like I said, looking for things that indicate safety because your social anxious brain is looking for all the signs. Is it that tone that means that they don't really like me? Always looking for signs of disapproval. So instead, be intentional about looking for signs that people actually like and accept you. Whether that means they're smiling at you, they ask you a question, they see

them engage, there's a history of them engaging with you, and make sure to try to kind of, if you're doing like a manual override them engaging with you and make sure to try to kind of, if you're doing like a manual override in some ways, you're trying to, yeah, shift the attention of your nervous system away from the confirmation bias of disapproval towards active focus on signs of approval that also exists. I like that manual override. What about friendships across privileged lines, economic privilege, race gender?

Yeah, so what I recognize in studying connection is that you can feel disconnected from people, but you can also feel like your group isn't valued by society. And that's another form of loneliness. Like I think discrimination is a form of being ostracized. Sometimes I think as a friend of expert, people expect me to not engage in systems of oppression,

but I'm like, these are systems of disconnection too. Like they're teaching us to dehumanize each other. There's reasons why, for example, people are a lot more likely to be friend people of their race based on our history. And so we need to think about that. And what I talk about in the book is like something called mutuality,

which means when you are a friend with someone, you're thinking about your perspective and their perspective and trying to balance the two, right? So this is what's important to you, this is what's important to me. Let's hold those in the same regard and weigh those equally. But the truth is that when there's differences in privilege we don't have a blank slate

in which we're interacting. Like society has made it so that I've had to understand your opinion a lot more often than you've had to understand mine. And I'm going to be a lot more hurt by this conversation because when you say something hurtful to me, you trigger an entire history of people saying these hurtful things to me, or maybe even my ancestors having had these hurtful things said to me, and we need to acknowledge that system. We need to acknowledge that we're not coming into connection with, in a state of everybody's on an equal playing field, and that's going to play out in terms of how we connect with people.

So I kind of encourage, based on some research that basically found that I think this was on, like as people from Israel and Palestine and also white people and Mexican people that when the white people and the Israelis shared their hardships and the marginalized groups were asked to listen. They didn't get as much of it as when the opposite happened. And the people with privilege were actually asked to listen to the marginalized people that if there's things that we are privileged on because it's not an equal playing field, we need to be more intentional about listening.

We need to be more intentional about hearing the other person's perspective because they've had to do that for us a lot. And we haven't even noticed it. We haven't even acknowledged that that's been going on for a very long time. And I think, you know, when you have a privileged identity, thinking of it as like, this is a gift for you,

for someone to share, because a lot of times people with marginalized identities, they're not even willing to put themselves out there and share when something hurts them, because, you know, feeling like people don't care. You know, Bell Hooks, I really value her. She's a black intellectual. She talks about how the ways that black people

have to had to exist to get along with white people are unhealthy, unhealthy relationship tactics. Like, you've had to be overly polite, overly nice, lose your sense of self to make people feel comfortable. So nothing, no harm comes your way. And so I think we need to acknowledge those systems and how they trickle into how we interact across differences. And when we are privileged, take more of a role to be the one listening and trying to understand. What if you're in the marginalized group, how do you make decisions about who's safe to befriend?

It's an interesting question because I feel like people have... there's such a wide range of opinions on this where I think some people are like, if they say one thing that's hurtful for me, it's over. And other people are like, well, you have to work with people and you have to really come to a place of understanding. Otherwise, we're never going to, you know, bridge our very polarized divide. And I say, it depends on you. Can some people are really dysregulated by a single comment? And you can't just ignore that you're very dysregulated, right? It's not, it's not an intellectual decision. It's an emotional

decision that your body is having that if you engage with someone who makes hurtful comments even unintentionally, it always dysregulates you. And the fact is continuing to engage in conversations where you are dysregulated is not going to create connection for you or for them. So you might not be in a place where you can give the benefit of the doubt. And you have to acknowledge that in yourself. And we see that happening on the larger social scale, right? There's periods of time, for example, when you see like black people being murdered, where black people tend to hibernate with other black people, or Asian people experiencing hate crimes, where Asian people desire that hibernation period.

They don't have the capacity or the resources to be regulated to give the benefit of the doubt. So it requires you to understand you and your nervous system. And like, what do I have to give? If this is like too miserable for me to try to engage with this person, then I have to listen to that. I can't just ignore that and keep putting myself in places where I'm deeply uncomfortable. But for other people, based on their history, like I talk about a friend of mine,

he's black and he grew up in Germany. And he had a lot of mine, he's black and he grew up in Germany, and he had a lot of disparaging comments put his way. So he was kind of, I would say, habituated, unfortunately, to discriminatory comments, and at least that I'm not as a black biracial woman who grew up in New York City. And so he, I think, had more space to just be like, I'm gonna continue to interact,

and I'm gonna try to give grace and sustain these relationships with people who are saying things that are harmful and our nervous systems have a different reaction to people saying things that we're harmful or bias towards us. And the fact is that we don't have to have a one-size-fits-all solution when we all have different nervous systems and different histories. That makes a ton of sense. You finished the book with a section called The Path Forward. What are you referring to there and what is it in tail?

Hmm. Yeah. It first entails us to acknowledge how deeply we need connection. We've talked about in this chat, it affects how long you live, more than your diet, more than how much you exercise, how connected you are. It's affecting your mood, it's affecting your sleep, it's affecting your illnesses and whether they get worse. And what that means is once you acknowledge that,

you're gonna have to try. Like don't be passive about this, the most important thing of your life. You can't just wait for these friends to come into your life. Don't wait for it to happen organically. Put yourself out there, ask people to hang out. Reach out to someone to reconnect and say, you know, hey, wait for it to happen organically. Put yourself out there, ask people to hang out, reach out to someone to reconnect and say, you know, hey, I just have this

memory of us. When does he how you're doing? And then it just takes remembering that your ability to connect with others, it's not based off of whether you're like funny or charismatic or impressive with all this pressure we put on ourselves. It's a lot more about how you drink other people. Find ways to be intentional about making the people in her life feel valued and feel loved. You know, by niece Angelica, she read my book and her summary of it, I think, was quite brilliant,

which was for friendship to happen, someone has to be brave, so be brave. Well said, Angelica. Within this path forward section, you talk about a practice called Heal, H-E-A-L. It's an acronym. I believe it was originated by Rick Hansen, who's also been on this show. Can you describe the practice and why you thought it was so important that you use it right at the end of the book? Yeah, so I told people to assume people like you. And Rich's research is all about like, how can you actually,

not just have good experiences, but receive them and internalize them, so they become part of your nervous system. And that's what his heel framework is. It involves having a good experience enriching it, which basically means focusing on it until it stirs something in you emotionally, absorbing it, which basically means picturing it, like kind of being absorbed into your body. And then he has this like linking stage where like you think of something really positive and have something negative in the background so that it alters your relationship with the negative thing

in your nervous system. And I just think we should be applying Rick Hansen's framework to social interaction. Like when you have something positive happen in your life could be so small again. Like someone held the door for you, someone smelled it at you, you pet someone's dog, someone texted you back. If you struggle with feeling alienated and loved and socially anxious, practice heal, like pause. Focus on the fact that this person's texting me. Let it stirs some gratitude, some appreciation, some feelings of being loved and cared for. Picture that experience and those feelings kind of being absorbed into your body and make this a regular practice over time so that you can absorbed into your body and make this a regular practice

over time so that you can go into your interactions, assuming the positive more and feeling a little bit more safe. Yeah, and just also having a better life. I think it was, as I was listening to you speak there, I was remembering a comment that I believe came from the Buddhist teacher, Kyra Jule Lingo, who's been on the show a couple of times. And I think she has a recommendation, sorry, Kyra, if I'm either misattributing this or mangling it.

I think she has a recommendation to, when something good is happening, to just call it out. And it can be, it doesn't have to be like some fancy Buddhist ritual. It can just be like, this is fun, which again, I think just reminds your whole nervous system and perhaps the people around you to take this in. This whole being alive thing goes quickly and I feel that more acutely at age 51 than I did at 31, for sure.

And just to call things out, I try to do that with my eight-year-old, I try to do it with my wife and my friends. I don't know, it's a nice and I think healthy pause that you can throw into the mix. You know, at almost any time. Yeah, I totally agree. You know, Dan, I wanted to write Platonic because I feel like a lot of times the friendship advice doesn't acknowledge our nervous systems, right? Like go out there and join a hobby and make friends, right? It's this very practical advice that doesn't acknowledge,

well, it's not that we don't know that we maybe should be doing these things. It's that we're scared and we're socially anxious and we have all of this baggage, right? And I think when I wrote platonic, I was just more concerned with who are we as people or are we, since ourselves? What's our internal hardware? How do we do things that recreate how our body or ants in an environment?

What does that look like? What does that deeper work look like to foster connection? What does that deeper intimacy with ourself look like so that we can understand our emotions and we're not engaging in those defense mechanisms. I just wanted to make it a lot more complicated than we seem to make it out to be. Like positive vibes only join a meetup group because I just think that that's just like not real. It's like we're humans, we're scared. We've had baggage, we've been betrayed. We've, you know, we're, nothing threatens us more than other humans. And yet we need them.

How difficult of a dilemma are we in all of the time? And I just like really wanted to acknowledge all of that complexities and find ways. Just like what you shared, just like acknowledging positive moments where we can change our relationship with our body in order to make friends and make connections. I love acknowledging the conundrum, the paradox here that Jean-Paul Sartre said, hell is other people, but hell is actually the lack of other people. Yeah.

And it is true, we really need other people to be happy. And it's also true that other people can be a Titanic ass-ic. And so it's like, how do we manage all of this? And so I think acknowledging the nervous system aspect of this is really useful. Before I let you go, two little questions that they don't have to be a little actually, but the two questions I kind of end most of my shows with. One is, is there something I should have asked but fail to ask?

Well, I think if we pull out a theme from our conversation, it's the negativity bias, which is what our brain predicts how our social interactions will come off. We are often inaccurate and more negative than the truth. So research on something called the liking gap finds that, for example, when strangers interact, they underestimate how liked they are by the other person. We talked about the beautiful less effect in terms of vulnerability. We see this in research on affection, that when you're loving towards someone,

you predict it comes off as more awkward than it does. You underestimate how much they value it. There's a recent research on reconnecting with people that we underestimate just how much people value when we reconnect with them. And so I guess like, in general, the message here is, things might be better than your brain is telling you. People might like you more than your brain is telling you and leave some humility for

that. Well said. Can I in closing prod you to plug your book and anything else you've put out into the world that you want people to know about? Of course, yeah. So the book is called Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends. And I also have a website, drmercigeefranko.com, where you can reach out for any speaking engagements on connection and belonging, or you can take a quiz that assesses your strengths and weaknesses as a friend, gives you some suggestions. I also provide evidence-based tips for how to make and keep friends on my Instagram. And that's at Dr. Marissa G. Franco, DRMA-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. All right, M-G-F, Dr. Marissa G. Franco, thank you very much for coming on the show. So much fun to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a great conversation. Thanks again to Marissa G. Franco. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davie and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer.

We get our scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio, and our theme music is from Nick Thorburn, go check out his band, Islands. We'll see you all on Wednesday for the fourth and final installment of our Valentine's Day Counter-Programming series. We're going to talk to Florence Williams about the science of heartbreak and rejection. 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. you