The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Ask for Help... and Spread Happiness

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Jia Jiang dreamed of being the next Bill Gates... but an entrepreneur needs the courage and confidence to ask for help. Jia was terrified of rejection - so couldn't fulfil his ambitions. That is, until he decided to beat his fear by seeking out rejection after rejection for a full 100 days.  Many of us share Jia's nervousness about appearing vulnerable and needy, but the science suggests that we and the people around us would be happier if we asked them for help more often.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. We're in a first-grade classroom in Beijing, China. It's about 20 years ago, ahead of the annual holidays. To mark the occasion, a teacher has brought and wrapped presents for her students. The gifts are stacked up in a corner, ready to be handed out. And if she just stopped right there, it would be a great story.

Jia Zhang was one of those excited kids. But she had all of us come to the front of the classroom and said, hey, why don't you guys say nice things about each other? If someone calls your name and says something nice about you, you can go get a gift and sit down. One by one, the kids started sharing kind words about their classmates. It was great when it started. Someone can sing really well, someone is helpful to other teachers, and I would applaud with my turn. But the flow of compliments soon slowed down,

and then petered out completely. Worried, Zhao's teacher asked, um, doesn't anyone have anything nice to say about the students who are still at the front of the class? No one spoke. Three gifts sat uncollected in the corner, and three kids stood rejected at the front of the room. And I was one of them. It was just a fleeting few minutes in Xia's life, but the events of that day cast a long shadow. Xia eventually graduated school, then headed to college

and began a new life outside China. But the thing is, once I came to the United States, I started following like a path of almost like a least resistance. Nearing his 30s, Xia felt like he was being held back from chasing his dreams

and fulfilling his potential. And he traced some of that back to the fateful day many years ago, where he stood rejected in front of his classmates. Pretty sure it didn't help. You see, Jean needed all the confidence, self-belief, and drive he could muster, because he had a dream. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

You know, I actually come from a family of teachers, but I didn't never want to be a teacher. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be entrepreneur because I was inspired by Bill Gates. Becoming the next Bill Gates requires a willingness to put yourself out there. You've got to be prepared to tell potential investors and clients

about your big plans. And you've got to be prepared for them to laugh you out of the room. You have to knock on door after door after door, asking for support and backing until you get the answer you want. And Xia just wasn't sure he could handle that. I just felt like my fear of rejection was really holding me back.

Though now fully grown, Xia still felt the pain of his six-year-old self. And I was just miserable, to be honest, because I feel like I'm getting old. My wife was pregnant, and I just feel like I probably missed my mark to be this entrepreneur that I've always wanted to be. So was Xiaobing to admit defeat and give up on his dream and remain miserable on this path of least resistance? Nope. So that's where I realized I got to overcome this fear of rejection. Even if you didn't get dissed by your entire first grade classroom, you can probably still relate to Xia's lack of confidence. It's not just entrepreneurs who need to make themselves

vulnerable to others. Whether it's in our careers or just in daily life, many of us have a hard time asking for the help we need because, like Zha, we fear rejection. We may worry we'll get a big fat no from a friend or stranger, or we may just hate the idea of bothering busy people. We may fear being seen as pushy or annoying or needy. These fears may feel very real, but do they match the reality of reaching out to the people around us when we need help? By not even opening the conversation, are we actually making ourselves and other people less happy than we could be? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point

us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. I was a former college football player, so asking for help is not the kind of thing I typically did very much. This is social connection expert and Happiness Lab regular, Nick Epley. Like Ja, Nick grew up with a reluctance to ask for help. I was pretty strong and capable and I could do stuff. And that always made me fairly reluctant to ask others for help, to do almost anything. If you've heard Nick on other episodes of this season, you may recall that he studies the way our minds mess up when it comes to happier social connection.

Recently, his lab has turned to the fears that he and so many of us have when it comes to asking for help. And our research and that of many others in the field has been making it crystal clear that many of those fears are miscalibrated. That is, they're exaggerated. We tend to underestimate how positively these interactions are going to go. Nick's work begins from a premise that many researchers argue is a universal psychological truth. We enjoy doing nice stuff for other people. I think feeling happy to have helped is a universal psychological truth. We enjoy doing nice stuff for other people. I think feeling happy to have helped is a very real thing. You go do something kind for somebody else, you'll feel pretty darn good. We usually notice how good it feels to help others when

we're in the role of the helper. We forget that the same maxim holds for the people we ask to help us. Notice that asking for help from somebody else gives an opportunity to do something kind for you. Notice that asking for help from somebody else gives an opportunity to do something kind for you. And by not asking for help, you are really missing out on an opportunity to make somebody else feel good. We sometimes worry that our requests will be a burden on the person we approach, that they'll feel pressured to say yes. But Nick's research shows that that usually isn't the case. Especially when we have a relatively simple request, calling upon another person for assistance can be a gift not just to ourselves, but also to the person we ask. So in some ways, it seems almost selfish to not ask other folks for help when they could give it to you easily,

because you're denying them an opportunity to do something kind for you. The problem is, we usually don't see it that way. And when we fail to ask for help, we don't get to witness the happiness boost it gives us or the person giving us assistance. And so we continue to believe that seeking help is an imposition rather than a wonderful way to bond and make everyone happier. We only get feedback from the things we choose to do. And we don't get feedback from the things we choose to avoid. And in an imperfect world like that,

we're going to get a systematically distorted view of how these social interactions are going to go. That naturally confirms our belief. To test just how deeply ingrained these false beliefs are, Nick designed a simple experiment. He set up a photo op at a popular spot on campus. But the camera he put out there wasn't a modern smartphone. It was a vintage Polaroid instant camera.

And that choice was key, because old-school Polaroids aren't built to let you take selfies. So in the old days, if you wanted somebody to take a picture of you, you had to go up and ask them to do it. So Nick's subjects had to find a stranger to assist them. But before they approached anyone, the subjects were asked how annoyed they thought the stranger would be by being stopped, and how positive their mood would be afterwards. Nick later compared these predictions to what the strangers actually

said about taking the Polaroids. And we found that people tended to underestimate how positively others respond, how willing they would be to help, how happy they would feel helping after they actually did. It was a more positive experience for the person who asked for help than people expected. Nick's subjects also grossly overestimated how inconvenienced the photo takers would feel. Their guesses were six times higher than what the helpers themselves later reported. Six times higher. Our predictions of how other people will react to our helping requests are way, way off. They were likely to want to try to help you, and given that they were perceiving it as an act of kindness,

given that you'd asked for it, they'll feel good when they actually help you out. Results like these prompted Nick to rethink his own resistance to asking for help. Here in Chicago, it sometimes snows in the winter, but if I couldn't plow my driveway, I was often reluctant to have a neighbor come and shovel my driveway. And then our work in part made it clear to me that the neighbor would probably feel pretty good being able to do that for me.

And so I now will ask him if he could do that if I can't shovel it. And it's created lots of good conversations between us where I get a chance to thank him for that. He feels good for it. And I don't think I ever And it's created lots of good conversations between us where I get a chance to thank him for that. He feels good for it. And I don't think I ever would have done that before. Asking for help to take a quick photo or for a friendly neighbor to lend you a hand shoveling snow are great places to start.

But aspiring entrepreneur Zha Zhang was in a hurry. He wanted to supercharge his fight against his crippling fear of rejection. So the approach he took was rather, uh, extreme. He decided to ask people for some pretty fantastic favors. I saw this big guy. He looked like a security guard of some sort. He was sitting behind a desk, and I said,

OK, I'm going to ask him. Then as I was just inching toward him, I just slowed down. I was like, this is so scary. My heart was pounding. I was sweating. We'll hear how all this turned out when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Wannabe entrepreneur, Xia Zhang, wanted to beat his fear of rejection.

So he began where a lot of us do when we're ready for a big behavior change. He did a Google search. Google is like a real Yoda, right? After a few clicks, Jean stumbled on a website that would change his life forever. Rejectiontherapy.com. A site that teaches a practice known as exposure therapy.

Let's say you want to get over your phobia of heights. Exposure therapy would tell you to confront that fear by visiting locations a little bit above ground level and then over time climbing higher and higher, so that through gradual exposure, you get used to heights. Rejectiontherapy.com applies that same logic to the fear of asking for help. The website suggests things like challenging a stranger to a game of rock, paper, scissors, or asking for a small discount the next time you buy something. The challenges even have different levels, so you can start with just a mild taste of rejection and gradually build up to going way out of your comfort zone. Ja was ready to dive in.

I was like, this is the best idea I've ever heard. The site recommended a month-long challenge, 30 days of rejection. And I didn't want to do 30 days because I was like, you know, I want to go hardcore. Let me overdose on rejection and see what happens. So I did 100 days of rejection. And rather than performing these challenges privately, Jot decided he needed to film all his interactions and to share them with the entire world. I know if I do this by myself, I probably get a couple rejections and just quit. But if I declare that to the world, I will think people will hold me accountable. So I can't just quit that easily. So that's what I did. All right, this is my first try.

Day one of Jia's rejection marathon started pretty spectacularly. I'm going to try to borrow $100 from a stranger. Jia picked a security guard sitting by a desk in the marble-filled lobby of a nice mall. Excuse me, do you think I can borrow $100 from you? The security guard looked confused, like he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. No? No?

Why? All right. No, okay, sorry, thanks. Xia didn't wait around to answer the security guard's question. I just ran as fast as I could. Xia was downhearted. He assumed the interaction had gone terribly, that the guard had badly rejected him.

But all that changed once he watched the footage. I was like this NFL scout looking at a game film, you know, analyzing myself. Xia was shocked by what he saw, and not by the guard's reaction, but by his own. I looked so scared, and I was like, what he saw. And not by the guard's reaction, but by his own. I looked so scared, and I was like, oh, wow. I didn't know he was a security or someone.

I don't know, he just sits there. He looks like a security guard. I thought he might pull out a gun or just yell at me or something. Watching the video revealed that Zhao had nothing to be scared of. He didn't get the hundred bucks, but the guard was nice. He even gave Shaw a window of opportunity. He asked Shaw why. Like, why did he need the $100 anyway?

I could have said many things. I could have negotiated with him. I could have said, if you can't do $100, can you do $5? You know, can you do $1? I could have explained that I was overcoming our fear of rejection. I just ran. So I said, okay, next time, no matter what happens, I am going to stay engaged. So I'm not going to run. That's the thing. I'm not going to run. On day two of his 100 days of rejection,

Ja headed to his favorite burger joint, Five Guys Burgers and Fries. He purchased a cheeseburger and ate it, and then returned to the counter for the big ask. Yeah, it's really good. The burger's really good. Can I get a burger refill? Could he have a burger refill? That is, another cheeseburger totally for free. No burger. Okay.

All right, I would like you guys a lot more if you could have a burger refill. The cashier said no, but this time, Xia didn't run away. And I started negotiating. I started to stay calm and I tried to explain myself. And when I left, I didn't feel as bad. Like, I felt way better than the first day. Xia was rejected. Five Guys does not offer burger refills, even if you ask politely.

But the no Xia received from the cashier yet again came with more kindness and humor than he expected. Day two was a success. On to day three. By day three, Ja already felt like he was heading for a rejection gold medal. I'm driving to a Krispy Kreme. So his next ask took his odd requests to Olympic-level heights of ridiculousness. I'm going to ask them to make me some specialized donuts. Zhao wanted the folks at Krispy Kreme to make him a set of five donuts

interlocked in the shape of the famous Olympic rings. Well, there's no way they're going to say yes to that, you know, and I would just come in and make a joke, you know, and get rejected and hopefully not be too scared. You want this linked? Yeah. The employee, Jackie Braun, got a pen and paper and asked Jia to help her sketch out the design.

She didn't look angry or confused. She kind of seemed to relish the challenge. And 15 minutes later, she brought me out a box of donuts that looked like Olympic rings. That is really good. That is really good. Yeah. Man, you'll make me really happy today.

Jackie didn't even charge Ja for the donuts. It's on me, she told him with a big beaming smile. So when I was walking out of that donut shop, I was like, wow, how many yeses have I missed in my life? Because I was expecting a no. So that was a magic moment for me. Pleased with his success, Ja went home and posted the day three video. But it didn't get the handful of views he was expecting. Millions of people watched that donut

clip. It got so much attention that his Olympic ring donut story wound up on daytime television shows. I think Krispy Kreme stock actually went up that day because this is like a marketer's dream, right? I asked them for donuts that looked like Olympic rings. And I was like, no way they're going to say yes. They couldn't say no to me. They were like, yeah, how can I make this? And when I left there, I just had tears in my eyes because I just couldn't believe this world is much nicer than I thought. It's much kinder than I thought.

Xia's donut success was a turning point for him. It convinced him that he could successfully ask for just about anything. And Shaw really did ask for rather strange things. He asked to become a mannequin in a department store, to give the safety announcement on an airplane, to slide down the pole at a fire station, and to feed a lion at the zoo. There we go.

Uh-oh. Hold on, hold on. It's okay. It's all right. It's all right. The videos that followed were as hilarious as they were popular. Like when he asked for a haircut from a dog groomer. Can you treat me like a German shepherd? Like Tibetan Mastiff or Chow Chow or something. Zhao's videos eventually attracted the attention of a certain psychologist. And I thought, this is fascinating, right? This is an extreme version of what I did. Psychologist Nick Epley's research

had already shown that people are more willing to help us out than we think, that they react more positively than we expect to simple requests, like taking a quick Polaroid photo. But watching Zhao's YouTube videos, Nick realized people may also agree to far more complicated requests.

I mean, it's off the charts what he asked people to do. Nick carefully analyzed Zsa's videos, counting exactly how often his pleas for help got rejected. And it turns out, less often than he's accepted. Most of the time, a little over 50% of the time, to these crazy requests, the person does it. Nick also watched to see the reactions of the strangers that Shaw approached. Did the donut makers and flight attendants and zookeepers get mad and yell at him and tell him to go away? Or were they genuinely trying to be kind and accommodating? Nick's analysis was striking.

In the vast majority of interactions, people reacted completely positively. Jha's extreme experiment in rejection therapy is a great example of two things that our lying minds often get wrong. First, we don't get rebuffed nearly as often as we fear. And second, the people we ask for help are usually much happier to oblige than we expect. But my guess is that hearing Jha's story didn't exactly prompt you to go out and demand weird-shaped donuts, or to borrow money from strangers on the street, or to head into a lion's den at dinnertime.

So what simple strategies can we all employ to be more comfortable in asking for help? Things that will allow us and the people around us to enjoy the happiness benefits that come from bonding over a helping hand. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns after this quick break. I'm dividing my life into BD and AD, before donuts and after donuts. It was a watershed moment for me because it opened up this whole new world to me.

A decade after asking a Krispy Kreme employee to build him the Olympic ring of donuts, Zhao now runs the very company that inspired him, RejectionTherapy.com. He's also an in-demand speaker and the author of Rejection Proof, How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection. I didn't and became invincible through 100 days of rejection.

I didn't plan this. I didn't plan this thing to go viral and someday I'll write a book, someday I'll do a blog, you know, someday I will give a TED talk or be on Laura Sandel's show. I never planned all that. All I did was like, I'm gonna do something. And the viral videos Ja made are now used by clinicians to help patients with social anxiety. They may seem extreme, but Zhao says they can still teach us important lessons that we can apply in everyday settings. His first takeaway is, people are actually much nicer than we think. People are actually very open, especially if you ask them wacky stuff. A second lesson is that your fears that people will angrily reject you or think

less of you if you ask for assistance are likely to be very, very misplaced. Ja is living proof that you'll hear no far less than you expect. When I started, I thought I was going to get 100 rejections. You know, maybe like I got some yeses if you get really lucky, but as it turned out, sometimes just by asking, you get a yes. But to get to that yes, Zha says we also need the courage to expose our vulnerabilities and to ignore any worries we may have about seeming needy. I don't want to bother other people. I want to be independent, right?

And the research backs this up. Psychologists have long found evidence for what's known as the beautiful mess effect. We assume that people will avoid us if we seem needy or dependent on help, but it's actually just the opposite. People like us better when we show weakness or express emotional vulnerability or seek their help. Being messy makes us seem more open and relatable.

Really good friends, they ask for help. They ask for opinions, they ask for help, and they're vulnerable to each other. If you give and take, that really builds relationships. In fact, sometimes the fact that you're asking shows that, okay, I'm asking you because I need you. And that really increases the bond you have with each other. But connecting with potential helpers also requires changing the negative mindset

that many of us have about soliciting assistance. Your attention while asking for help can make the whole interaction less comfortable for everyone. It's something that Xia learned early in his days of rejection therapy. I was expecting rejection. And all my focus was how I could deal with that rejection. I couldn't even think the possibility that people would say yes to me. And if you don't bring this aggressive energy, you're not that tense, people actually relax when they talk to you. To decrease that tension, Zha advises that you really do need to

come to terms with the possibility of being rebuffed and to relax about it. That's actually the key. If I'm coming in and if I'm open to rejection, then I'm fine. If I give the other person the freedom to say no to me, I give myself the freedom to ask whatever I want. One way to do that, Shah says, is to explicitly admit that what you're asking for might not be doable. And that it's totally cool if the person can't help you. That you know they're not doing it to spite you or because they don't like you. I say, okay, I know I'm making a big request here. I know this is a little bit weird and it's okay if you can't do it.

If I put that thing, what they're doubting up front, it actually put people at ease. He's saying that I can say no to this. And if you're still feeling guilty about your request, Ja suggests thinking back to how you felt when someone asked for help. Would you really be annoyed if the situation was reversed? Ja says he even thinks back to cases where he felt frustrated when good friends failed to call on him when they were in need. I had a friend, and he spent like almost a year

looking for a job, and he didn't ask for any help. It was really hard for him. I was like, you could have told me earlier. That job, I know someone who was hiring for that job. Why didn't you tell me earlier?

But Zhao has one final strategy that may seem counterintuitive given his own experience. He recommends not going as hardcore as he did. Go outside of your comfort zone a little bit. Don't go like way out. You don't have to come in and ask for $100 like I did. That was a big step. It's like an exercise, right? If you've never lifted weights, you don't want to come in and bench press like 300 pounds. You're going to get crushed. But go out of your comfort zone a little bit

and just test the water and then gradually expand your comfort zone. You can start doing this again and again. And every time you do, you become so much better than before. And Josh should know because asking for what he needed publicly and fighting his fear of rejection

didn't just change his life. Jackie from Krispy Kreme, right, the person said yes to me to make Olympic donuts. It changed her life, too. Jackie Braun also went viral for those Olympic donuts. A viewer of Ja's video even made her a Facebook page entitled, Give Jackie at Krispy Kreme a Raise, and thousands of people signed the petition. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you very, very much. She received a personal visit from the CEO of Krispy Kreme, and she now stars in training videos that are used by the entire corporation. She become like a celebrity within

her company just all because she said yes. Sometimes saying yes is more fun than saying no. And Jha thinks we'd all benefit from the fun of asking for help more often. Rejection therapy has become a movement. It just fills my heart because I hope this movement can keep going and to help people overcome their fear. So many of us are missing out on making new social connections or deepening our bonds with existing friends just because we don't want to ask for help or favors. That may be because we don't want to ask for help or favors. That may be because we don't want to appear annoying or vulnerable, or because we fear the humiliation of our pleas being rejected.

But the science shows that our worries about being pushy and needy are unfounded. People are way more happy to help than our lying minds think. And our reluctance to ask for help winds up preventing the people we care about from receiving the happiness boost that comes with being kind. So why not follow Zsa's advice and push your rejection comfort zone a bit? You don't need to ask a stranger for money or demand specialized donuts, but you can make sure you give the people in your life opportunities to support and care for you. It'll make them and you feel much better than you expect.

The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Fiennes offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben Davis, and all of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.