The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Don't Make Friends Where You Make Your Money?

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Work and friendship don't mix, thought Katherine Hu. A recent graduate, she found it harder to form bonds with colleagues than she'd expected. But then she concluded that not having friends at work helps you set boundaries and remain professional. After all, work is fundamentally a financial transaction, right? Well, we spend many of our waking hours at work - and the science suggests that if we decide not to use that time making meaningful friendships then our health and wellbeing could suffer.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. At a very young age, my mother would always tell me that your friends will be your family. Meet Catherine Hu. She was very worried about me growing up as an only child and not having that sort of built-in friendship that she had growing up. But Catherine's mom didn't need to be worried, because Catherine had a knack for connecting with others. And when she started college, Catherine quickly got to know many of her fellow students. Like, it was one of those things where you ran into people all the time just by virtue of being on campus and walking around the same places. So when Catherine moved to D.C. to start her first job after college, working for the Atlantic magazine,

she assumed it would be just as easy to make friends in the office as it had been on campus. But it wasn't. I felt really disillusioned with young adult life. I kind of felt like I had been tricked that young adult life was promised and like pop culture and all these TV shows as this wonderful thing. You're like finding yourself,

you're in this new city, you're starting to forge your path. And I just felt really disappointed. Catherine was experiencing a feeling she hadn't known in college. She was feeling kind of lonely and she wasn't alone. As she spoke with friends in other cities, she learned that many of them were in the same boat. They too just weren't meeting people they felt close to in their new jobs. Catherine wanted to figure out what was wrong. Why wasn't she able to connect with new people? What had changed? In the end, she decided the problem wasn't with her or with moving to a new place. The problem Catherine decided was work. The work environment is one where you don't have control over a lot of factors and is already a place of a lot of stress.

Catherine began to see her time in the office not as an opportunity to connect with like-minded colleagues, but as an opportunity cost. Being at work sucked up the time she could be spending finding non-work friendships. I think we all have this urge to have something more than just our nine to five. It's almost as if I have to carve out time to live life. Catherine became so disillusioned with the possibility of making connections at work that she shared her experience publicly. She wrote an article which ran in the Boston Globe entitled, My Generation Isn't Looking to Make Friends at Work,

and It's Better This Way. Catherine argued that Gen Z saw the workplace primarily as a source of income, not companionship. And her article maintained that it was healthier not to make friends there anyway, since a boss who was also a friend might guilt you into doing more work than you're paid to do. The article painted a gloomy picture of

the modern workplace, one that really resonated with readers. The op-ed went viral. It became one of the globe's most read articles of that entire year. And the comment section that followed exploded. Many readers left long accounts of work friendships that felt unsatisfying, hollow, and even exploitive. Other comments were more succinct. One reader responded to Catherine's attack on work friendships with a single word, bingo. I'm guessing that at least some of you listening right now also agree with Catherine,

that friendship and work don't really mix. You might share the view that making friends at work will be hard or awkward, or that it'll lead to problems like favoritism or drama. You might tell yourself that work is about being productive and getting paid, and that time spent socializing is just an unprofessional distraction. But what does the science say? Could we be missing out on an important path to friendship and happiness, one that's available at the very same time we're earning our paychecks? One that's available at the very same time we're earning our paychecks.

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. I came across Catherine's viral article when we were planning this special season on connecting better. But that wasn't the first time I'd encountered Catherine or her work. I looked back and realized that we did have a correspondence when you took the class. Yeah, wow, I do remember emailing you, actually. You see, Catherine is one of my Yale students. She graduated back in 2021. And like thousands of her classmates, she chose to enroll in my

famous happiness class. We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, not feeling loneliness. But if we had one, that's what I would want in life. I would want to feel the opposite of loneliness. A class, mind you, that spent weeks and weeks talking about the happiness benefits of social connection. I would charge you to find any study in the history of psychology that shows that social connection doesn't make you happier. That's how profound these effects are. And that's why Catherine's article affected me so deeply.

Here was this hit article that totally rejected the benefits of connection at work. And it was written by somebody who had taken my happiness class. Shouldn't my student have known better? Had Catherine totally missed everything I taught her? I asked Catherine what she remembered from the course. She quickly launched into a cherished memory from class. A homework assignment in which I gave students the opportunity to try out happier ways of spending their free time.

You suspended class that day and you were like, go do something joyful that makes you very happy. And it was my friend Olivia who took the class, and it's still one of my best friends, and she's like very outdoorsy. And so she was like, we should go to East Rock. East Rock is a state park a few miles from Yale's campus. It's one of my absolute favorite spots.

We climbed it. It's one of my absolute favorite spots. We climbed it. It was beautiful. And I still actually have this photo that I took of her where she's just kind of looking off into the distance. And then afterwards, we went to the East Rock coffee shop. We got a little coffee. We met up with some friends. And it was one of those beautiful college days that you don't really forget. I listened to this sweet story feeling a little baffled because Catherine had clearly recognized the value of connection while she was in college and not just on the unforgettable day that she climbed East Rock with her best friend. I think Yale does a very good job when you enter the

college environment of putting you in situations with people who you may not have naturally drifted towards. And I feel like that helped me access parts of myself that I didn't even realize existed. And I think that's a really beautiful thing. So what was behind Catherine's change of heart? Why was she so down on the possibility of work friendships? Well, for starters, Catherine began her new job during the pandemic. Like many recent college graduates, her introduction to work began on a Zoom screen. It definitely amplified my feelings of disconnection at the time. But rather than blaming remote working, Catherine began appreciating its benefits,

like not having to worry about dressing up for work or acting a certain way all day, every day. My physical body cannot be seen. My expressions can't really be seen except for on Zoom for maybe like 30 minutes. It is really just based on the quality of my work. Remote work also shifted Catherine's views about weaving together her job and social life. When your work takes place in literally the same physical space as your personal life, namely your home, Catherine says it's even more important to keep the two realms separate. It is a huge portion of our lives.

Like sometimes when I step back, I'm like, it's shocking that this is the norm of how we do the balance between work and life. I would actually say it's not a balance. It is very much teetered in one direction. And so those boundaries become even more important because work has already encroached upon life. Catherine worries that the expectation to socialize at work can further threaten those boundaries. I definitely have friends who work at workplaces where they tend to like ask you to go out to dinner with the company after.

And then they go to drinks. And then they also want to see you on the weekend for another event that is like kind of, you know, optional, but also really mandatory. And I think it gets into this fuzzy space where like socializing becomes part of your job and is tied to your job performance in a way that is icky. And I do feel like Gen Z does not enjoy as much. And if the reaction to Catherine's article is any indication, some boomers and Gen Xers share this Gen Z aversion. Older readers left comments like, you work with your colleagues, but you hang with your friends. One person was even blunter. Just let me do my job and leave me the heck alone. You know, it's actually easier now because I don't

have to do the schmoozing. I don't have to do the networking. I can just be judged on the quality of my work. And that is very refreshing. Catherine doesn't claim to speak for her entire generation, but she does think that Gen Z's resistance to work socializing is part of a broader shift in attitudes towards labor and happiness. With Gen Z, like work is important and if they can excel in it, it's great, With Gen Z, like work is important and if they can excel in it, it's great, but it does not affect how highly they think of themselves in the same way that maybe it does for other generations. It is an important part of their lives, but it is still just a part of their lives. And I think that this younger generation also tends to see the skeleton of like what is really happening in a workplace much more clearly. So yes, your job does give you a lot of belonging and identity and all of these things. But at the end of the day, it is still a job where someone pays you money to come and perform a service.

come and perform a service. And if you don't perform that service well enough, then they might decide they're not interested in paying you anymore or having you at that company. It is still a financial transaction, fundamentally. If it can be more than that, that's fantastic. But I think that Gen Z tends to not be able to and doesn't want to ignore the fact that it is still a transaction in some form. This might make Gen Z sound a little mercenary, but Catherine says there are pressing reasons her peers put this transactional nature of work front and center. I watched 2008 happen when I was pretty young and I wasn't old enough to understand it, but it was one of those things that I did actually remember and was in my psyche from a young age. And then graduating in a pandemic

and thinking that a recession was going to happen and we're still in a very shaky place. I think that the economic history of the last few decades has necessitated a generation that does place the financial rewards of their labor a little more first and foremost than some other things. Fair and reliable paychecks in a time of economic flux, a healthy work-life balance, having control over your working environment and how your performance is evaluated. Catherine thinks these things matter for happiness at work way, way more than having friends in the office. But is Catherine right? What does the science say really matters for happiness on the job and beyond? We'll get some surprising answers when the Happiness Lab returns after the break.

You know, all of us have stressors happening to us often every day, right? This is Robert Waldinger. Not a problem as long as the body goes back to equilibrium when the stress is removed. And what we think relationships do so well for us is they're stress regulators. Like if something upsetting happens to me during the day, I can go home and talk to my wife or I could call a friend

and I can literally feel my body calm down. Robert is an expert on how relationships affect our physical health. What we think happens is that people who are lonely don't have those people to help them manage stress, that they stay in a low-level fight-or-flight mode. You know, higher levels of stress hormones, higher levels of stress hormones, higher levels of inflammation. If you think this sounds like it'd be very bad for your body, you'd be right.

Regular Happiness Lab listeners may remember that Robert directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an epic project that followed a group of men for decades to see what keeps people happy and healthy as they go through life and reach old age. The big surprise was that the people who had the warmest connections with other people were the people who stayed healthy longer. So friendships don't just make you happier. They also help protect you from stress-related

illnesses. Robert found that people with super stressful jobs and tough life circumstances stayed healthier through those challenges so long as they had enough social connections. Friendships are stress regulators. People who had better relationships were less likely to get heart disease or type 2 diabetes or arthritis. But just like Catherine Hu, some of the men in Robert's study found themselves surrounded by friends at one stage in life, but then suddenly struggling for companionship. And one of the things we saw in our study was that people who were in their 20s and had lots of friends would find that when they didn't take care of their relationships, over time those relationships would just wither away from neglect.

Perfectly good relationships that eventually fell away so that people would wake up in their 30s or 40s, look around and say, oh my gosh, I don't have any friends. Adult friendships, it seems, take a lot more energy to maintain than the ones formed in our younger years. If we're not diligent and careful, any of us could see our social circles dwindle. It's a practice that you want to develop, this ongoing practice of taking care of relationships. Robert's book, The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, explores why we often fail to invest in social connection as we age.

One reason, he says, is that people assume a good life stems not from close relationships, but from high achievement. Many of the men in Robert's study spent their lives focused on accumulating money, accolades, and promotions. What we found in our study is that if people sacrificed their well-being to work, they ended up looking back saying, gosh, that really wasn't worth it. When we asked people once they got to their 80s to look back on their lives

and talk about what they regretted the most. The thing that people named the most often was, I wish I had spent more time with the people who mattered to me. Now, that doesn't mean you can't work hard. That doesn't mean you can't do meaningful work. It's the sacrifice of your own well-being and the sacrifice of time with people you care about that turns out to fill people with regret. But the hard reality is that most of us do need to work.

And that's one of the reasons Robert is such a big advocate of investing in work friendships. Think about how much time we spend at work. It's enormous. Why would you exclude interpersonal connections from that chunk of time in your life? I told Robert about Catherine Hu, her lonely transition from college life and her disinterest in finding new friends at the office. Many of us have been in situations where we could take it for granted that be a lot of people around our age, many times with similar interests. So let's say in high school or college. And so we say, I've got that covered.

I never have to really make an extra effort to make friends because we haven't been in situations where it was difficult. So really, it's when we get to the working world for the first time that we say, oh my gosh, actually, it's not so easy. But Robert says that making friends at work really is worth the effort. It has a host of benefits we may not realize. I'm going to quote a study that I'm sure you know, which is from the Gallup organization that did a survey of 15 million workers. And they asked the question, do you have a best friend at work? And what that meant was, do you have somebody you can talk to about what's going on in your life, in your personal life. Gallup found that around 30% of people said, yeah, I've got a best friend at work. And having that best friend seemed to have a huge effect on people's performance on the job.

They did better work according to their supervisors. They were less likely to jump around between jobs because they had people they wanted to show up for. The people who didn't have a best friend at work were much less engaged in their jobs. Making social connection a priority is not just good for our happiness, it's also good for the bottom line of any work organization. Making friends at work isn't a distraction or a waste of time. The Gallup data show that all these water cooler conversations may be the motivational engines that keep us engaged at work. That's also how new ideas get sparked, where you see a co-worker who works in a completely different area of your workplace, who has a different take on things, and suddenly you

get a new idea that sparks your own creativity. But Robert says that work friendships don't just make us more creative. Close relationships with coworkers also help us handle problems more effectively, especially when our stress levels rise. What we find is that if we're good at bringing in other people to help us through difficulties and help us solve problems, that we're much better at our work, we're much stronger both as people and as workers. These stress-busting effects of a work bestie

can also provide benefits to the people we care about outside the office. Overwork and the stress that comes from loneliness at work means that we are more depleted when we go home. Whereas if we are emotionally nurtured at work, if we take care of ourselves through connections at work, we've got more energy when we go home. It makes a big difference. A skeptic like Catherine Hu might acknowledge some of these findings, that work friendships may help us feel less stressed and perform more creatively. But, Catherine might say,

do these benefits of office camaraderie really outweigh the risks? After all, the core argument in Catherine's article was that becoming friends with coworkers and managers can leave you open to exploitation. It's harder, Catherine asserted, to ask a buddy for a raise or to tell a friend that the assignment they want you to do falls outside your contractual duties. It is still a financial transaction, fundamentally. Many of the readers who commented on Catherine's article agreed. Work should be a place to make money and guard your rights, unencumbered by any bonds of affection. Some readers even doubted that genuine work friendships were possible. Work friends end up screwing you over, one wrote. On balance, Catherine thinks, you can still do a good job at your workplace,

even if you're not best friends with your colleagues or your manager. But are we right to think of work fundamentally as a financial transaction? Or does that miss an important part of the sense of purpose we can get on the job? My name is Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve, and I'm a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford. Jan just completed one of my favorite new studies, one that upends many of our deeply held assumptions about the factors that are important for work-life balance and for keeping us happy. Jan gave a huge sample of employees and managers a long list of possible sources of happiness at work. And we asked people, can you rank order these? What is most important to you or your team?

Their top pick, as you might guess, was compensation. The people he surveyed said salary was the most important thing for their happiness at work. So far, so unsurprising. But Jan wanted to test what really mattered for happiness at work. So he partnered with the job website Indeed, which just so happened to have surveyed actual work happiness in the over 15 million workers who use their site. And this is where Jan's findings get kind of shocking.

I think the most surprising bit for most people would have been the relative unimportance of an income. The Indeed data showed that fair compensation was a driver of people's happiness at work, but it wasn't first on the list. It was sixth, like one, two, three, four, five, six. What was first on the list? It wasn't work-life flexibility or having good management. The biggest driver of happiness on the job was having a sense of belonging at work, a metric that included three parts.

The first was believing that there are people at work who care about you. The company treats me as a human being. They see me as a human, not just as an input in the production process. The second piece of having a sense of belonging was the belief that the people in your company benefit from the work that you do.

Knowing what you mean to the others in the organization, so your impact throughout the organization. But the final part of having a sense of belonging at work, this metric that mattered even more than salary and flexibility and good management for happiness at work, was having an office best friend. We know it's much more important that people tend to think. Yon's Indeed study shows that we have some pretty big misconceptions when it comes to

the importance of social connection at work. Having friends at work is more critical for our happiness and performance than our lying minds usually assume. So if you're convinced by the data, how can you find that ride-or-die office buddy? And how can you make that connection while still avoiding the pitfalls that worried Catherine so much? How can we get the benefits of work friendships and set healthy boundaries? We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. find out when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I am somebody who just loves relationships.

I've been studying relationships for 15 years. Shasta Nelson is the author of The Business of Friendships, making the most of our relationships where we spend most of our time. Shasta helps companies find ways to get their employees to build more social connections. Time and again, the managers and workers she spoke with mentioned two big challenges affecting their happiness. People were like, I don't have time to make friends. Like that becomes the number one excuse why people don't have close friends. The second complaint I kept hearing over and over and over was our employees have lots of turnover and they're not happy and our mental health is an issue and we don't know how to like help people feel like they belong at work. And I was like, friendship and relationships at work

is the answer. And yet I can attest that very few employers are Googling friendship experts. Shasta argues that the only way our society will be able to fight the loneliness crisis is by finding more companionship on the job. It's almost virtually impossible for us to get our social needs met during the day

if we aren't taking advantage of work hours, this is the place in life where we are spending the most time and the place where we have our passion or like making our contribution in the world. So those are things that really help create friendship and create bonding and help us want to be supported in those areas. And I think it's so funny because we send our kids to school and we never say to them, okay, now when you're at school, you are there to learn. And so that means don't talk to people. There's too much drama. Don't have friends because that will interfere with your learning. Like we understand and that the more connected our kids feel at school and the safer they feel, the more relationships they have, the more likely they are to thrive at school.

And the same is true for adults in the workplace. Yes, you may not be there to make friends, but you are actually better off doing your work and being more engaged and being more productive and being happier and being healthier if you have friends when you're doing it. So it's really an outdated idea that we should not be using our workplaces to be a place of friendship.

In her consulting work, Shasta often hears arguments against friendships in the workplace. Worries just like those voiced earlier by Catherine Hu. What if it gets in the way of, like, if you have to discipline your friend, so we start naming all these, like, awkward things that could happen? People worry that friendships fuel favoritism or prompt the spread of rumors. We assume that buddies at work lead to cliques and drama, the sort of unhealthy behaviors that are emotionally draining

and the opposite of happiness-inducing. But Shasta says our intuitions here are wrong. Those aren't things associated with friendship. Those are things associated with interaction. And I would actually state that those things go down in a workplace where we're actually teaching people, inspiring them, and fostering them to have healthy relationships. One reason we get work friendships wrong, says Shasta,

is that we have some pretty mistaken notions about what healthy work friendships really entail. What we want at work are people who actually feel like we have each other's backs, that we feel like we can show up as who we are. And the truth of the matter is, when asked, every single one of us wants to feel liked, we wanna feel loved, we wanna feel appreciated, we to feel known. And those are building healthy relationships.

And Shasta says those healthy relationships don't need to involve the kind of people we think. We really don't have to be twins to be close and to bond with each other. The powerful thing about the research is it's showing that we don't have to have the things in common with each other that we think we have to have in common. Commonalities are not what bonds us with each other. Spending consistent time with each other, having positive feelings, and sharing with each other. So I call that positivity, consistency, and vulnerability. Those are the three things that we know have to be present to bond. And we can do that with way more people than we think we can. Positivity, consistency, and vulnerability. These are the three factors Shasta says

are essential for not just forming, but also for deepening social bonds at work. So let's take a look at what positivity, consistency, and vulnerability actually mean in practice. First, positivity, which, contrary to what you might think, is not about being optimistic all the time

or making only pleasant statements to the folks in the office. It's about leaving both people feeling better for having interacted. And sometimes that means empathy and validation to hard feelings, and that's an act of positivity. Sometimes it's leaving each other more hopeful, more grateful, more inspired. Sometimes it's words of affirmation or a smile or a hug. So there's thousands of ways to practice adding positive emotions into a relationship. And Shasta is quick to point out that positivity

doesn't mean avoiding negative emotions in our work friendships. Times get tough and emotions get frayed in all relationships. And that's okay in work friends too, so long as the negative experiences get balanced out by the positive ones. So we always have options about

how can I either decrease the negative things with forgiveness or having a conversation about boundaries or naming my needs. We can always figure out what can I do to decrease me feeling negative and what can I do to like bring more positive emotions. The second of Shasta's three-step path to work friendships is what she calls consistency. We need to have enough repeated interactions in order to turn a casual acquaintance into a friend. We need enough of a shared history together to trust one another. We start feeling like we can rely on each other because of how you've acted in the past.

I feel like I can predict how you're going to act in the future. And the wonderful thing about making friends at work is that we're there on a daily basis. Our jobs automatically provide a consistent, shared context for social connection. And that's why work is that we're there on a daily basis. Our jobs automatically provide a consistent, shared context for social connection. And that's why work is so important, because it gives us hours together, it gives us experiences together, it gives us an opportunity to get to know each other without having to schedule it on our own, which is hard to do

these days. The third step in Shasta's three-step path to work, friends, is the one she thinks is the most important and also the most misunderstood. Vulnerability. Vulnerability is where we reveal a little bit about who we are. We start knowing each other's opinions and ideas. We feel safe problem solving and brainstorming and we can be authentic and then we can be curious. And so our vulnerability is so important for us feeling known and appreciated. Vulnerability isn't about sharing your deepest, darkest secrets. It's about demonstrating the softness and openness that pave the way for intimacy. So when people are uncomfortable with vulnerability, I ask them, do you want a team to feel comfortable brainstorming and problem solving?

Well, yes. Okay, that takes vulnerability. Do you want employees who apologize and forgive each other? Yes, that takes vulnerability. Do you want employees to apologize and forgive each other? Yes, that takes vulnerability. Saying, I don't know, can you help me? Vulnerability. It is the soul and the heartbeat of what you're trying to create on a team and with your product. But Shasta says we also need to find the opportunities and time needed to open up. We have this belief that we need to come into a team meeting and, okay, get through the agenda, not waste anybody's time. And we treat agenda items as though they're the whole point of why

we're gathering. But it's amazing. It's not that hard to take five minutes and say, share a little bit of a highlight from your weekend. I mean, it can be as easy as that, or it could be as big of, let's share with each other one thing that we are really proud of that we're doing at work right now. You might predict that sharing in this way would feel awkward or uncomfortable, or that if your boss used this strategy, you'd roll your eyes and withdraw. But Shasta says that won't help you get all the benefits that come from feeling connected. Like most good things in life, opening up does take a bit of effort and initial discomfort. We understand on a physical health level that when we go to the gym or when we go running, that we need to sweat.

And in fact, when we lift weights, our muscles actually tear a little bit. We actually understand that physical health is on the other side of exertion and sweat and muscle tearing. And yet when it comes to our social health, I feel like as soon as we kind of start socially sweating, so to speak, or feel uncomfortable or get nervous or get insecure or get worried about rejection, well, we think this isn't good. I just need to go back to where it felt convenient and safe. But we forget that social health is on the other side of that. When Catherine Hu's Boston Globe article came out damning work friendships,

it caused quite a stir. She seemed to be saying out loud something that a lot of people had been thinking privately. But while many praised her candidness, lots of people didn't agree with her extreme position. As I scrolled through the comments section, I found more and more readers who doubted that Catherine's strong stance against work friends would last. And it turns out, they were right. It really started by just us all getting lunch at the same time. Like, if we were going to eat lunch, we might as well all eat it together. Catherine was an outspoken advocate for keeping office relationships purely professional. But as she

returned to an in-person office, she began more consistently hanging out with the folks she worked with and having more and more positive experiences. Over time, she began opening up, especially with one co-worker in particular, Mateo. I think at some point we just sort of sat down and I was like, particular, Mateo. I think at some point we just sort of sat down and I was like, I really think we've transcended being work friends. Like, I think we are just really close friends now and I think that's kind of beautiful. So for me, it was really just like being honest about it. So Catherine now has a bestie at work and the benefits Mateo's friendship brought quickly began outweighing the problems she'd anticipated. There's no one else that really kind of understands that level of what you're going through

in that amount of detail as someone else who's literally going through it as well. So yeah, it has been really lovely. And just as psychologist Robert Waldinger would have predicted, having Mateo as a best friend on the job was a huge stress reliever. You can talk about work together and sort of have that safe space to like process and vent and discuss things and then have that as a space where it can allow you to come back to work happier and healthier.

It allows me to be more professional in other aspects of my job, too, because I know I can process these things with someone who also gets it. You know, even my partner doesn't understand the exact context through which I go through 40 hours of my week. The pair now shares a great deal, but not everything. Before our interview, Catherine hadn't really mentioned her previous and well-publicized rejection of work friendships. When I got the email from you, he said, well, if you're going to do the podcast, then I want to read the article. And so I was like, okay, fine. You can read it. It was time. It was time. What did he say? He, you know, is very kind about it. And he was like, it is kind of funny now to read in hindsight, but he also was

very kind about it. It was just like, it is really well written. You should be proud of the thoughts that you put out. And, you know, it was really nice to have that sort of affirmation. So he didn't feel like dissed or anything? But no, not at all. Not at all. Which is great. I'm very glad. Catherine still stands by the core thesis of her viral article, that work and work friendships don't need to be your whole life. But she now recognizes that what she learned in my happiness class back in the day was right. That taking time to invest in social connection on the job can offer more benefits than she realized.

Work friendships do have their challenges, but we can get the benefits without the drawbacks. So why not take advantage of getting the happiness boost of social connection at the same time as you get your paycheck? To do so, I'd suggest following the advice of a recent convert to the cause. I think I would really recommend that you go in with a level of vulnerability that allows for you to get something real out of a friendship and see if this is a friendship that you have chemistry in, for instance, but to also still balance that with protecting yourself and not oversharing until you feel that you're ready. Because, you know, at the end of the day, it is a workplace. If you can make a friend at work that becomes an outside of work friend, that is a really beautiful thing.

Thank you. 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.