You may have heard of hormesis — the idea that intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems, building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress.
We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna, and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list.
As my guest today explains, while we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors — even the good ones — it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve, and why we must intentionally “exercise” our social muscles in a world where they’ll otherwise atrophy.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Jeffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #772 — How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?
- AoM Article: 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood
- AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
- AoM Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness
- AoM Article: Love Is All You Need — Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You may have heard of hormesis. The idea that it intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress. We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list, as my guest today explains. While we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors, even the good ones, it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of Communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve and why we must intentionally exercise our social muscles in a world where the otherwise atrophy after the show’s over, check at our show notes at AoM.is/socialstress.
All right, Jeffrey Hall, welcome back to the show. It’s so good to be here. So you research human relationships from friendships to romantic relationships. We had you on the podcast back in 2022 to talk about your research on how long it takes to make a new friend, and the short answer is longer than you think, and we’ll let people listen to that episode to get the details on it. You got a new book out called The Social Biome that you co-authored. Let’s talk about that title. Social biome. What do you mean by a social biome?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah. Well, I’m really glad to be back again. I always like our conversations and it’s an honor to be a multiple guest appearance. Yeah, Andy and I came up with this idea of the social biome back in about 2019, so pre-pandemic, and the reason that we started thinking about it is that people are very familiar with this idea of a gut microbiome and the idea is that there’s this interdependent system within your guts that make the ability to digest food easier or harder. It gets destroyed if you take antibiotics, but it affects everything from your mood to your sickness, your wellness, even your brain health is affected by our gut microbiome. Microbiome also happens then when we touch people it kind of affects how we are. Well, Andy and I thought, well, there’s also a social biome. It’s this interdependent system of relationships, social interactions, which we have with one another that we both occupy. We live in it, but we also are dependent on other people within it. So how people treat us, whether people accept us, whether people introduce their own germs, if you will, like negativity or conflict or whether they’re actually increasing things to increase our health. And what we know from social interaction research is that these things make a big difference in mortality, morbidity, just like your gut microbiome makes a difference in your health too.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’m sure people have heard about the health benefits of a social life, but for those who aren’t familiar, can you just recap the benefits of having a robust, healthy social life?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah. The thing that’s crazy about this is something that’s been building for about 15 years of momentum. Some of the earliest studies on these things began to say, well, let’s follow up with folks that we surveyed 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago and see whether they live longer or they live shorter lives, whether they had some disease or otherwise. And what they found was one of the most consistent predictors was whether or not people had strong social relationships, whether they had frequent social interactions, whether or not they could say, I have more quality friends or quality romantic partner relationships. So quality frequency and also social interaction all ended up being these important predictors. And what’s fascinating is you also look at the famous Harvard Men’s Study and other studies of longitudinal health. It finds that even if you change in the middle of your life, you can make it better later.
So let’s say that you are in your twenties and thirties, very career focused, and you’re really not making time for building relationships with other people and you move around a lot, but if you change in your forties and fifties, you can actually live a longer healthier life later too. So what’s fascinating about these different longitudinal studies is that it doesn’t really matter when you start investing in your relationships in other people. It’s always beneficial, at least it seems to be always beneficial to your health, your wellbeing, your sense of purpose and meaning, and of course whether or not you are likely to die earlier.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that’s the interesting thing is the longevity research on social relationships, how there’s really a tight correlation between the two.
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, there are a couple processes that people think about are probably why the one that Andy and I spent some time exploring, so interesting is Hess’s idea of stress. So I was talking to a good friend of mine in California and she and I were talking about how lousy it is to approach 50 years old. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’re like, yeah, I exercise pretty regularly. I watch what I eat. I don’t eat a lot of bad food or bad diet, but the thing that my doctor’s always telling me is, you got to reduce your stress. And I’m like, dammit, this is so hard to reduce my stress. And I think that we all kind of have this intuitive sense that when we feel relaxed, when we feel truly at peace with ourselves or accepted, we can feel our stress levels go down.
I don’t know about you, but when I hang out with a friend over lunch or catch up over drinks or have them over to my home or talk to ’em on the phone, I feel like my body almost unwinding, relaxing, feeling safe.
So researchers believe that one of the most important processes of feeling close, connected and meaningful to other people is that it actually reduces our overall stress response. It kind of turns it off. It turns off our stress. And what we also know about that is our body cannot marshal the resources that it needs to fight off infection unless that it is able to kind of put those sort of stressors away. So there’s a famous study that actually found that people who had better social connections and relationships or people who were also able to fight off a virus that the researchers injected into participants to find out how sick they got. So folks who were really social and had really good relationships were able to fight off sickness better. So one of the main reasons we think that it actually contributes to longevity is that over your whole life when you have meaningful relationships, people, you can count on close connections with others. You’re basically living in a de-stressed environment a lot more frequently than you would if you had nobody. And we know that loneliness is extremely stressful for the people who endure it.
Brett McKay:
I want to go back to this idea of stress because okay, you’re saying here that socializing can reduce stress, but then later on in the book you talk about how socializing is a stressor. We’re going to return to that. I think it’s interesting. Definitely there’s a lot of metaphors we can extract from that. But before we do, so we talked about all these great health benefits, mental wellness benefits of regularly socializing with other people and avoiding loneliness. People probably know about that. There’s so many articles about the loneliness crisis, the loneliness epidemic, and you shouldn’t be lonely nonetheless, people are still hesitant to socialize. What do you think is going on there?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, Andy, and one of the things we really shot for when we were writing this book is to be sympathetic rather than to be sort of like a school marm shaking your finger at telling other people how to behave. You really should be more social for your own good. What we really wanted to do is try to explain, well, why aren’t we? What are the barriers why we don’t? And people have very good reasons for not being social. So I think there are structural reasons, there are personal reasons, and then they’re just sort of routine related reasons. Let’s start structurally, one of the strongest negative associations with time spent socializing is work. We are in a curious economy right now in part, not in 2025, but I mean in modern history where people in the top income brackets in the United States who don’t have to keep working work more.
So it doesn’t matter how success you are, people who are professionals and working harder work even more hours. We also have the emergence of gig economies where people are basically on call all the time to try to make money to Uber somebody around or to DoorDash. We’re in an environment in which we are constantly working in order to make time to be able to live. All of that is creeping into our ability to be social. And there’s really good evidence that the more that we’re working, the harder that we’re trying to make ends meet, the less time we have for being social. The other structural reason I think is really important is we don’t have a lot of third spaces, which are basically these places where we feel comfortable just gathering together and being together. Robert Putnam did amazing work in all the way back to 2000 or 2000 when he released bowling alone.
And at that time it was demise of bowling leagues, of rotary clubs, of Elks clubs and all these kinds of things. Since that point, it’s been the decline of churches and synagogues and places of worship where people aren’t showing up or not attending weekly. Although in the last two or three years we’ve had an uptick, which is good news for socialization. So there are these structural changes that are happening around work, around third spaces or around organized spaces for being social that are in decline. And the other reason is people suck. People are disappointing. People let you down, people hurt your feelings. And one of the things that Andy and I really want to communicate a message on here is, but we have a system of repair. We have a need to belong that pushes us towards continuing to work at those relationships even if they are frustrating.
And I think what people find and lots of researchers to confirm this is we imagine worse outcomes from relational mistakes or things that we feel hurt about or things we think we screwed up like we’re boring or we didn’t make a good impression or we said something wrong. We exaggerate those things in a way that make us feel like we can’t do it. We don’t want to socialize anymore, just not enough. So part of it is because people are disappointing. We don’t want to continue to work at having our relationships with people because we’re like, why bother? It’s just never going to get any closer or this person really stunk and I don’t want to be part of their lives anymore. But the last reason it’s so difficult is routine. One thing that’s been very healthy in my lifetime is I’ve seen people have a lot more consciousness about the importance of a good health routine around exercise.
I think I always knew it growing up, but I feel like people are even treating some exercise opportunities almost like in a religious way. They just really truly believe that this set of exercise routines that they have are going to help them be better. And there’s a very good reason to think that it will. People are only recently waking up to the idea of having a good social routine. And one reporter asked me, do you think there’s been a change of heart about whether or not people actually need to prioritize spending time with friends or create a routine about being social? And I’m like, I hope, but I don’t think so. I think our current way of thinking about it is being social is the very last thing we’re going to do if we have time for it, because we got to make time for exercise.
We got to make time for our families, we got to make time for work, our commute. And then of course, I think a lot of it is we want to make time for the things which are hedonistic pleasurable in the moment, but do nothing for a socially, which is I need to finish that next Netflix series so I can be up on the new episodes that I love. So there’s a sense in which of accomplishment and access to easy media as making it even harder for us to realize that those routines are worth fighting for and they are a fight. We have to find ways to make social life be part of our routines and people generally don’t.
Brett McKay:
Speaking to that idea of the decline of socializing as a routine, one of the things that I’m always struck by when I read biographies of individuals who lived in the first half of the 20th century was how busy their social calendar was every night. They were either at a dinner party or hosting the dinner party or they’re playing bridge or it was like every single night. And I think about, I don’t know if I could do that, but for them it was a given. That’s just what you were expected to do that, and we no longer have that expectation.
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, the expectation part is key. I think you’re absolutely right, Brett. I mean, when I grew up, my parents hosted bridge events in our basement and I remember them pulling out the card tables. My dad told me this great story is when he was a bachelor for the first time, and this would’ve been in the late fifties? No, this would’ve been in the late sixties. Sorry. First thing he wanted to do was set up a bar at his apartment because that’s what you did. You had friends over to entertain them so that drinking wasn’t something you did alone. You had to have it so that you could entertain. I did actually research project recently that found that how many nights a week that people are going out to visit their friends has gone down a lot. But what’s even more surprising is when people idealize what a good night would be, they idealize a less social one.
So in the past when you ask them that question, what’s an ideal night? A lot of people say, oh, time with friends out doing interesting things or spending time together with people who I’m really enjoying or a visit from someone who I care about or visiting someone I care about. Now, when I did the survey just last year, what I found people were saying is spending time alone, quietly in a room watching my favorite program and relaxing in pajamas, there was this glorification of a feeling in which detachment is actually pleasurable. It feels better to be away from others. And so what’s curious is that we’ve had an expectation shift that’s so dramatic, not just I think from the early 19 hundreds, which is absolutely true, but even from the 1950s and 1960s, 1970s and eighties, it’s even palpable if you look at just how people respond to these survey questions from that time period.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I mean you see it sort of anecdotally when people tweet things or Instagram things, they talk about, well, I’m just so happy that people canceled the plans at the last minute. Now I don’t have to do that thing. And that’s the expectation. Now people, the expectation is I just want to be by myself, not be around other people. And you call this world we’re living in now the age of interiority.
Jeffrey Hall:
Yep. Yeah. The age of Interiority idea came up a while ago. I got a report for the Wall Street Journal on this topic of declining time spending being social, and then it was this time decline was not just in the United States. It happened in UK data and data from Australia and other less precise measurement throughout the global north, but also places like Japan and so industrialized world in general. And what’s interesting about this is this decline of sociality happens it seems over longer periods of time and kind of a pendulum swing. So on one side of the pendulum is this idea that being alone is something to be glorified. So we can see this in the romantic era where people are like, I’m wondering lonely like a cloud or to move away from civilization is the only way to find oneself and the monastery or the monk or the aesthetic who is completely in denial of social contact, almost to a hermit like status.
These people were glorified as being either closer to being divine, which kind of was the contemporary understanding of what it meant to be enlightened or maybe your full self, right, unencumbered by others. And then there were other periods of time. If you look at the discourse and the time, it was like people who are on the margins of society or outcasts, people who are hermits are misanthropes. People who are seeking their own time are selfish that we are obliged to one another and that obligation to one another carries incredible benefits in terms of democracy and discourse and comradery and a sense of purpose and meaning or community or I think people of faith talk about this as a brotherhood or a sense of this is what communion looks like. What’s interesting is when that pendulum swings back and forth, people seem to turn either towards or away from the idea of being solitary is a good thing.
I think we are in a time of interiority. The pendulum has swung towards Putnam forecasted it and his bowling alone time use trends are forecasting it. Now you offer that example of people having top Google searches, how do I get out of plans or how do I stop showing up? But we also see that at my daughter’s, one of my favorite places, her favorite places to shop for socks, and she’s a fan of fun socks, is a place called Attic Salt. And I took a picture of socks that say, friends don’t make friends hang out. It’s curious. It’s everywhere is the sense that not interacting with others is something to be celebrated. And I think when we think about this in one way, this normalization of being alone and isolated is something that I see everywhere throughout our media and our representations of what’s being valued, but in another way, it’s making sense of something.
We’re collectively trying to come to terms with the fact that we don’t have a social life, we don’t have opportunities to connect. We’re too tired, we’re too stressed out, we don’t have the bandwidth. So we need a remedy. We need a solution that makes us feel soothed and comforted by the fact that this is the reality we live in. And the age of interiority is also basically making sense of a situation we don’t like, but we need to make sense of it. We say it’s okay to be alone. It’s okay to spend more time away from others because other people suck and friends don’t make friends hang out.
Brett McKay:
We’re engaging in some ex-post facto reasoning, some after the fact reasoning because we find ourselves not having much of a social life. And instead of facing that fact and maybe letting ourselves be a little sad or disturbed by that lack, we tell ourselves, well, you know what? I’m glad I don’t have to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize anyway, okay, so the reason why things are so hard or people have social inertia to socialize the structural aspect of it, we’re working more. Our work schedules are completely different. It’s not like 50 years ago where everyone nine to five, then everyone’s got different schedules. I think related to that, the structural aspect too, I’ve noticed as a parent with pre-teen and teenagers, kids are just doing all sorts of different stuff. It used to be maybe 60 years ago you either did boy scouts and you did the little league in your town and that was it. Now your kids can be involved in volleyball and dance and student council. And so you have parents who are trying to shuffle their kids to these different things. And because these things are all out of sync, parents can’t get together and hang out and the kids can’t get together and hang out. That’s another structural aspect to that.
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, I think you nailed it, man. I think you nailed it. And I’ll point out something I will tell you is a bright spot in the data. So the bright spot in the data is that people who are families who are married with children are spending as much if or more time at home with their kids in social time. And that’s a good thing. We know that strong bonds with children are good for children. We know that strong bonds with children are good for parents, and we see a particular uptick, and I would say this for your listeners out there, for men, it looks like married men with children are spending more time with their kids than they have in the past. And this is a good thing and it’s something to celebrate. I think it’s kind of one of those things you don’t often hear good news about men and boys, and I think this is something that’s really great.
Fathers are more invested in the context of a married relationship with their children, and I think that what’s important about that is where does that time come from though? And you’re alluding to the ideas that time has to come from maybe time parents went with each other. And that’s what cracks me up when I think about it. I’m like, well, where was I when my parents were down in the basement playing cards with their friends or when my parents did stuff, did they expect to be entertaining me? We’re in this kind of curious time where I think a lot of parents, especially ones who are upper class or upper class aspiring, are trying to cultivate this sort of perfect experience for their kids because they’re concerned in a broader sense. Their kid won’t have every opportunity that they need to be successful to get into college or six career-wise because they have felt this broader sense of social anxiety or economic anxiety, and frankly, the age of AI and the kind of conversations like pretty soon we won’t even have any jobs because AI will take all of ’em, does not help.
As a parent of a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, I’m like, God, I have no clue what’s coming to pass. So it makes you feel more anxious that you need to be making your kid is studying and learning and engaging in extracurriculars. As a consequence, this cultivation of childhood has the positive consequences of parents spending more time with their kids, and that’s good, but has the negative consequences of us trying to micromanage a perfect experience, which means parents aren’t spending time with each other, they’re not going out with their friends. They feel like they can’t prioritize their own time one-on-one with their own friends because in some ways that’s really not a good long-term economic decision for their families. So one of the pieces of advice that I give a lot in these things is couples should support each other. Having friends that are not couple friends that are individual friends.
So if you are in any kind of marriage or long-term relationship, you should encourage your partner to have friends and go spend time with their friends. And that may seem obvious, but there’s actually a lot of counter discourse that say, don’t go out with your friends because maybe they think that their friends are going to have a bad influence on them in early parts of relationship, or you’re not spending enough time with your own kids. If you’re married with children or you shouldn’t be going out, you should be at home with us. But what’s interesting is there’s lots of good research that says A happier marriage is also one where couples, each member of that partnership has friends.
Brett McKay:
I’ve seen that in my own life. Whenever I hang out with my friends, I just show up better with my family.
Jeffrey Hall:
And it also shows that you’re being cared for and nourished by the folks. As a person who actually studies friendship a lot, I’ve thought very deeply about the idea that one person can’t provide everything for you. You need a community of people to help you feel a fully robust and rich person. And frankly, my wife is wonderful, but my friends provide different advice. They have different stories. They’re willing to talk about NBA basketball with me, they’re willing to shoot the shit about politics in a way that my wife and I just don’t. So there’s a different communication. There’s a different topic, there’s a different depth, there’s a different way of knowing me, and I think all of those things make me better in my relationship and more able to have a long-term meaningful relationship with my partner.
Brett McKay:
So barriers to socializing the structural aspect, work intensive parenting. Then the other barrier is just people suck. People let you down. They can disappoint you. And then the third one, third obstacle is just routines of socializing. We don’t have them anymore. There’s no longer the expectation that there socialize regularly. What’s interesting though, so socializing is hard, as you said, you’re trying to be very sympathetic and letting people know, yes, yes, it’s good for you. But yes, it’s very hard to come by. But what’s interesting, I still think a lot of people have the expectation that socializing should be easy even though there’s all these obstacles. How do you think that mismatch between expectation and reality also gets in the way of socializing?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, it plays a big role, and I am very sympathetic to this because I have a group of high school friends that we try to get together and it is really hard to schedule something. There’s five of us. We have very different schedules. Some of us work jobs that have to commute a lot. Some people have busy travel schedules or family schedules. It’s hard. So it’s legitimately difficult to get people together. Part of the reason that we have this weird expectation that should be easy though, I think comes from the fact that during developmental times in our life where we found the most friends, which tend to happen during elementary school to high school period, and then for some people go to college, that’s also an important time as well. During all of those times, the structure created time. So I’ll just give you enough, for instance, I went to a high school that I knew a lot of the folks that went to high school with me from middle school and some of them from elementary school.
I lived within driving distance of most of them as most people who go to high school in the United States do. I did activities with them during the day, such as we took similar classes, but I also did activities with them After the day was over, we did cross country or swimming. The creation of a school system necessitated lots and lots of my time being spent with the same people over and over again. That is the recipe for friendship. So when I say that those times your life were easier to make friends, that’s just fact, but it’s fact because it was necessary to spend time together in order to do any of those things. What’s interesting is if you think about or you disaggregate what school does and put that into your regular life, what would that mean? That would mean you would see people during the day, you would pick activities you enjoy together and do them together.
You would also date from that same group of people and be single, which is usually characteristic. Not only high school students have a partner. What that means though is you’re open to the possibility of new relationships. As we mature and move into emerging adulthood, which is roughly between 22 and 30 and then later middle age adulthood, what we start doing is closing off all of those avenues. We say, I’m now living with a partner, so I’m not going to go out without her or him. We say, now I have children, so I can’t go out because I need to be a good parent. We say, well, I have to work extra hours because I’m committed to this. All of those foreclosures of our time and openness to making friends makes it harder and harder to make friends. But we don’t remember that school was a time in which you had tons of time, tons of people available to be made friends with lots of activities to do together, and this is critical.
You were in a time of your life where it was developmentally important to be connected with other people that were not people from your family of origin. What happens in later life is your developmental period focuses on new family, new connections that you now solidify and bring into fruition. So what’s interesting is that people don’t see the developmental changes, and frankly, academics like myself do a very bad job of talking about adult development. We just don’t talk about it very much. We don’t think about it, but essentially that means is people don’t even understand. The reason it was so easy in the past was the circumstances created that ease and we just can’t see it, So when we’re young, we’re brought together with peers by default, it’s automatic. It’s built into the structure of our lives. We don’t have to try. It’s just really easy to make friends, but then we carry that expectation over into adulthood even though we’re in a very different stage of life, and that old pattern from our youth where we don’t have to be intentional doesn’t work anymore. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors, and now back to the show. I’ve seen this mismatch of expectation and reality when it comes to socializing, making friends and different groups that I belong to, and it’s frustrating for me people’s inflated, inflated expectations.
Brett McKay:
I was in charge of the men’s group in our church, I think it was 10 years ago, and a common complaint was there’s not enough fellowship. So okay, well let’s do something about it. Let’s plan some events. We plan some events, and we would do a lot to communicate that this isn’t the time we’re doing it. Here’s what’s going to happen, who’s going to come? And we get show of hands and we get this buy-in, and then the day of the event would show up and it would just be the leaders there. You’re like, okay, then. So you’d go like, oh, hey, we had this event. People couldn’t make it. And the common excuses were like, I was just busy, or I was just tired. I had something else going on, and well, okay, we’ll plan another event, and no one would show up. And then people would just continue to grouse. Well, there’s no fellowship. And you’re like, okay, guys, we’re trying to create this for you, but it’s going to take some effort to make this happen. And they just get upset. It’s like, why don’t we have fellowship? And it’s like, well, it’s hard. You got to show up. You got to make the effort. You got to make it a priority. And if you don’t, then you’re not going to have that thing you want.
Jeffrey Hall:
You have to make it a priority. And what does that mean to make it a priority? It’s very something we should really dwell on in the sense that people think about, oh, I prioritize friendship, but what does that actually mean in practice? One thing is showing up. Because I wrote this book, I’m very aware of showing up, so I really work hard to show up. If people invite me to a wedding, I’m like, I’m going, it’s going to be uncomfortable or difficult, or maybe I want to do something that day, but I’m going to go anyway. And I tend to have a better time than I thought. People invite me to a going away party or retirement party or a baby shower. I show up, I show up because it sucks to have a party and no one comes. I mean, is there something more insulting to someone to have a party that no one shows up to?
I’m going to be the person that shows up. I show up to funerals because I figure that I would want someone to come to my funeral if I was to pass away. I show up to everything that I possibly can, and I almost in some ways work with my wife because we almost joke with each other and my wife will be like, I don’t really want to go. And I’m like, come on, show up. Because showing up means that you show your care and concern for other people. But fellowship is showing up, right? Friendship is showing up. You cannot have the benefits of conversation, friendship, or fellowship without showing up. And so the key part of what it means to make it a priority is to show up for others when invited and say yes, not to make excuses and go anyway. And one of the things that I think is critical here is that the research evidence bears out that this is good for you.
There’s plenty of excellent research that says that people way overestimate how bad of a time they’re going to have at these things and underestimate what good things are going to come from it. So they are negatively forecasting something and it’s not true. It’s a false belief that’s not helping. But the other thing they forget about is showing up once makes it easier to show up the next time. So one thing we talk about in this book is this idea of a social battery or basically your social energy. And what we know is the more familiar you are with people, circumstances and conversations, the less work it takes from you. So every showing up is easier. So in the case of your men’s group, let’s say that you’re a person who shows up the first time and you’re a little uncomfortable. You’re worried that people don’t think you have to say is good.
Maybe you haven’t done the reading. If you’re having a Bible study group or something like that. I didn’t do the reading, maybe I couldn’t come. And then you go, and then you’re feeling those anxieties. They work themselves out. The next time you go, the research would suggest that you fill all of them less. It’s less work. So what’s happening is simultaneously, as your brain and your social behavior adapts to a new circumstance, it becomes less work. What’s also happening, which is great, is you’re actually contributing an investment of time into a relationship with other people. So each time you show up is more time kind of put in the piggy bank of investment towards friendship. So what’s fascinating about this is when you start thinking about it as I’m showing up over and over again, makes it easier to keep showing up and there are additional benefits of comradery, friendship and all those things, you begin to realize that this routine has this wonderful self-sustaining ability. In the same way that we talked about the negative feedback loops. There’s also a positive feedback loop, but you have to start with showing up.
Brett McKay:
Well, this idea of showing up, this goes back to that idea that I wanted to explore further. We mentioned earlier where, okay, socializing actually reduces stress in your life, but this idea of showing up in overcoming these barriers to socializing, it makes socializing sound like a stressor. It is stress. That’s why a lot of people avoid it. It’s like, well, there’s all these obstacles. People are terrible. It takes a lot of effort to socialize. So in that sense, it is socializing is a type of stressor.
Jeffrey Hall:
It absolutely is, and people are a major source of stress. But there’s also some fascinating research that suggests it’s maybe good stress, it’s good stress for you. I’ll give you an example which I find really fascinating. There are several studies that have found that they count up questions of who are your close friends or who are the family members you can count on? And then survey researchers will ask another question, which is, so who’s a stressor in your life? Who are family members that are really stressing you out and frustrating you? And what’s weird is that even the people who are frustrating or difficult are also people who help abate loneliness or keep it at bay. And what that means is, is that even when we’re contributing to people who are difficult, we are still feeling important to a community. I’ve actually also started to rethink when people stir up stuff.
I don’t know if you have a family where there are members of family who are stir something up, create conflict when it’s not there or get mad about something. In some ways, what’s curious is now that I’ve kind of taken some time to step back from it, I’m like, well, part of this is that they understand by engaging in this, they’re actually getting people to talk to them to have something to talk about. They have emotional drama to be able to resolve, and it makes them feel connected to part of a broader system. Now, it’s not a particularly functional way of doing it, but that stress interestingly also probably makes them feel valued and connected by the group because they’re trying to work on something in that family or in that dynamic that’s struggling. And we need people in those communities. In my mind, people like my mom who worked really hard to keep everybody engaged with one another and it’s a thankless task, but if she wasn’t doing it, my brothers and I probably wouldn’t talk to each other as often as we would otherwise.
So what’s interesting is social stressors are not necessarily bad things in the long run. They bring us into a community of connection. But the other thing I think is important for us to keep in mind is that’s also the good stuff. Being important to other people means you also have to see them through difficult times. One thing that Andy and I talk about in the book is if I’m a good listener to a close friend and they’re struggling and I have had friends go through divorce, I’ve had friends go through major losses in their life, I’ve had friends struggle with their parents, ill health and all of these things I imagine will continue to come as my life continues on. It is work for me to listen on the phone. It is work for me to show up for them and know that they’re going to do 80% of the talking, and it’s mainly going to be about them.
It’s work for me to check in on them and send a message and sometimes send a message that they won’t even respond to because they’re overwhelmed with the circumstances they’re in. But guess what? Every action of putting that work in is good for you as the giver, but it’s even better for them. It’s even better for them to feel cared for better for them to feel like they have someone they can talk to. And you might be the only person in their life that’s reaching out like that. When we begin to realize that our actions to put work into and the stress into these relationships are actually things we do for other people, it reorients our thinking rather than going, well, I got to do this for myself. I need to go to the gym so I’m not unhealthy. We begin to go, I am engaging in social activity, good for other people, and it’s giving to other people to check in on them and make plans with them and care for them and listen to them. It warrants our thinking, I think, in a way that really helps us get out of our own sense of interiority and towards another people which is healthy.
Brett McKay:
No, I love this idea of socializing as a good stressor. It made me think about how exercise is a stressor in our physical life. Exactly. And so when we exercise, we stress our bodies, but by stressing our bodies acutely regularly, we actually diminish chronic stress in our lives. And I think the same thing goes with socializing. So if we think of socializing as a good stressor, if you get doses of it every single day, it reduces our overall chronic stress and increases our overall wellbeing. And like you said, it’s something we can do for the good of others, but at the same time, it does do a lot of good for us.
Jeffrey Hall:
Absolutely, there’s a quote that I have in the book that I really like Nick Cave, for those of you who may or may not known, Nick Cave was actually a member of a pretty hardcore kind of post punk band. And at the time, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and then there was one before that as well. And he lost his teenage son to a tragic accident. And he talks about the importance of communication. When you’re at your worst, you feel, I mean, I cannot imagine the grief of losing my own son. And Cave says, it seems to be essential even if just a corrective for the bad unexpressed ideas, we hold in our heads to communicate with others. And what I really love about that quote is that he’s conveying this idea that it is healthy for us to get out of our own heads and relieve our stressors that are internal by being stressed socially.
So I’m stressed out about all kinds of stuff, my kids, my work, my situation, and whatever it is, there are stressors in my life. There’s plenty of really good data and excellent research that says when we express those stressors to other and share them and laugh about them and see them outside ourselves, they actually have this wonderful restorative power to not only bring people together and sharing that burden, but also you actually feel less stress in the long run. So it’s like the stress in the moment of caring for others is not only great for building a relationship and a sense of belonging, which prevents long-term chronic stress and loneliness, but the stress of thoughts unexpressed in our head that we’re not sharing with others because we’re afraid of being vulnerable or afraid of admitting weakness also can be benefited by communication, by talking about it and by talking about it, we can laugh about it and see perspective. And another person says, oh yeah, I’ve gone through the same thing and it stinks and it’s not fair. And then you go, oh, I’m not alone. My ideas are not just corrosively sitting inside of me, but they’re actually being expressed in a way that another person can see me more clearly and I can see them.
Brett McKay:
And also the reason why I like this idea of socializing as a stressor and kind of relating it to exercise as a physical stressor, it made me think of that theory of an evolutionary biology of evolutionary mismatch.
So people talk about, it’s so weird that people go to gyms and walk on these treadmills and lift these weights. Why do we do this? Well, we live in a world where you don’t have to do a lot of physical work to live. You just sit at a desk all day. So we need physical activity. So we have to intentionally put our bodies under physical stress by going to these weird buildings with these contraptions that look like torture devices to get that stress. And it’s the same thing with socializing. We are evolved to socialize, to connect with the group. We now live in an environment where there’s a mismatch. Opportunities to socialize aren’t as automatic and built into modern life as they used to be. They’re not going to happen by default. So we have to intentionally inject social stress in our life the same way we intentionally inject physical stress into our life.
Jeffrey Hall:
I think that’s really brilliantly said. We’re living in a time where it seems conceivable that you can be in a room, never interact with another human being, have all of your food delivered to you as long as you’re making enough money to pay for it, never socialize even with another person. And in the age of ai, have your therapist, your girlfriend, and your best friend all be an AI program. We have created an environment where we can take all of the friction of human society and take it away and replace it with technological affordances of being delivered our food, our comforts, even our social life. So we are at a very huge evolutionary mismatch right now. And it wasn’t even all that long ago in the past where the concept of friendship was deeply born by the fact that we are in the world making exchanges and building trust with one another.
Brett McKay:
So how can we socially exercise?
Jeffrey Hall:
There are simple steps. So if you think about the idea of first thing is enough reflection of where you’re at, where are you at in the continuum? Are you a person who have plenty of social life? You’re given out to everybody around you. You’re the person that people can call on. You’re very busy. And in that case, the book probably is just in some ways just kind of patting in the back and saying, good job. We also do say in the book, you can be overtaxed, you can go too far. You can get to the point where you’re spread too thin and you need some time alone. You need solitude also to balance that out.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that’s a good point. So socializing is a good stressor, but any stressor, it’s on that U-shaped curve exactly as you go up, it’s good. And then at a certain point you have diminishing returns and actually is bad. Same thing with physical exercise, moderate exercise is good, but if you go past a certain point, it’s going to be detrimental.
Jeffrey Hall:
And I give a talk recently in Kansas City about social, and I was surrounded by young women professionals who were social networking professional reasons, but also to give back to the community. And I said to them, I’m like, I’m guessing I’m in a room of people who are such deeply committed to their social life that they actually need to hear the solitude part of my talk. So I’m going to start with the solitude part of my talk, and I really want to reinforce for folks out there. I’m not saying if you are on the far end and the reaches of being socially stressed to keep doing what you’re doing, nourished solitude is critical for restoring our sense of connection to one another, that shutting off and letting go of our social responsibilities, particularly the social responsibilities that come through our phone is really important. We need to find time to restore restorative, solitude, critical.
And that use shape curve, you describe exactly in the middle part of the curve. Small acts of sociality are probably all you need for a person kind of in that middle part. You’re not too social and you’re not totally alone. Things like talking to your neighbor, talking to a stranger, making small talk at work, making time to make sure that you meet up with friends once a month. Recognizing that small talk gets such a bad rap that we have to reorganize our thinking about it and realize just checking in with another person and showing them dignity and respect, whether that’s your barista or the person that works at your office or a neighbor, is critical in building community. So small steps, nothing big. Some things once a day, like checking in with a stranger or person in your world, something once a week, checking in with a close friend or with someone that you want to really talk to. And once a month, maybe that’s a longer sort of, if you have time for it and you should make time for it, like a dinner together or out together to do something fun, whatever it is that you like. So you can make that work. But it’s really important to realize you have to know where you are to start. So the big thing about breaking social inertia is knowing where you begin.
Brett McKay:
One thing you’d also do in the book, you talk about different ways we can communicate with others and socialize with others, and we have the internet. It’s just so many different ways you actually create a hierarchy on which ones are better than the others. If you’re going to reach out and connect with someone, walk us through that hierarchy. What are some of the ways we can and which ways are better?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, I do a lot of research on social media, on texting, on phone calls. It’s one of my major areas of research. And there’s a hierarchy essentially. And when we think about what that hierarchy is, is I’m encouraging people to move up the ladder of connection, is what I call it. And at the very, very bottom of this ladder of connection is actually scrolling mindlessly on social media. There are mixed studies. I don’t think the evidence is unequivocally that this is harmful for you, but there’s plenty of research that say, depending on the type of content that you’re consuming, it is, it can be very harmful in the sense like doom scrolling. I also think that for certain demographics, like younger adults seeing things that are constantly making them feel that they’re being left out fomo or they’re not as good or they’re not as accomplished, they’re not as successful as other people, those are all pretty bad for you.
And if you can think about ways to minimize the amount of time you’re doing those things, it’s good. So that one is not more or less. The next level up from that is texting. Texting is actually I think kind of an unsung hero of connection. There’s a lot of fun studies that have been done recently that finds that even people you haven’t talked to for a while appreciate a text that just says, Hey, I’m thinking of you people don’t use email anymore. But if you are of the demographic and also of the age group or email’s comfortable, send one of those. One step up from texting would probably be a phone call or a video chat, scheduling a time to check in, have a longer conversation back and forth, whatever. Also, a lot of young adults, interestingly, are more adept at using video chat just to hang out together.
So they just leave it on and then they go about what they’re doing. People long distance relationships do that as well. And then the top of that hierarchy is face-to-face communication. So if you are a person who finds themselves just lacking for time to do any of these things, all I’m asking is one step higher. Maybe if you’re pretty good at keeping in touch on text and you have group chats going on with lots of folks, you can have one you want to check in with and call in the next week, make an appointment to call them. And that’s the only way I keep in touch with my friends, by the way, is by an appointment. So it’s not like I’m just seeing if my friend Craig’s going to pick up the phone. I know he’s a busy guy with kids. We make it time to do that. So I’m just asking one step up, one step up at a time and to recognize that any step up is actually shows empirical evidence to be beneficial.
Brett McKay:
I thought it was interesting the research about the difference between video calls and just regular phone calls.
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah, that one’s interesting too because I think that’s an evolving norm. Some stuff suggests that video chat actually makes you feel a little more lonely because it actually makes you feel perhaps that you’re missing that person more when you see them. And some people really love talking on the phone. I would include myself as one of them. The sound of another person in my head makes me feel so close and connected to them. But when I’m on video chat, I get distracted and confused and I feel like I need to be more aware of my facial behaviors, which makes me feel weird. So I think kind of think a jury is still out. A lot of people are stuck on video chat all day long at work, which I think also degrades its sense of efficacy. But young adults have taught me that they seem to really get it. That video chat’s a good opportunity to just kind of have someone in your room while you’re doing other things.
Brett McKay:
It might be a generational thing. I don’t like video chat.
Jeffrey Hall:
Me neither.
Brett McKay:
And it’s a reason why on the podcast, I don’t do video. I just like to do audio only.
Jeffrey Hall:
Hey, can I give you a shout out for out? Thank you. It’s a lot less work on my part. I think I can watch my words a lot more closely and really think about what you’re saying, but if I’m watching the interaction, I’m way too attentive to what I’m doing.
Brett McKay:
And you don’t have to worry about the lighting or what your hair looks like.
Jeffrey Hall:
I’m having a good hair day though, Brett.
Brett McKay:
The tricky thing about socializing is it requires other people. And so it’s a collective action problem. So if you want to socialize, that’s great, but if the other person doesn’t or there’s no one else to socialize with, well then you’re kind of out of luck. It’s like wanting to play catch. There’s no one to play catch with. That’s what a conversation is.
Jeffrey Hall:
Totally.
Brett McKay:
So what do we do about that? Because that collective action problem, it’s structural, the way our time is scheduled up, how our space is arranged, what can we do to improve the structure of our lives so that socializing is maybe a bit easier, can’t be completely easy or completely frictionless. I think the effort is part of what makes it good for us, but how can we approach it to facilitate it being a bigger part of our lives?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah. One of my good friends from high school, she had this phrase, she went to social work and she talked about the idea that you need to basically follow the weaker impulse. And I love that phrase because it gives you kind of a sense in which that how you need to be alert to the tendencies to not do this stuff. And what I mean by following the weaker impulse when it comes to being social is you had a hard day, there’s a social event that you haven’t been planning for a while, and you’re like, oh, I don’t want go. You need to follow the weaker impulse, which says it’s a good thing to go another way. Encourage the people in your life to be social. Maybe that’s your partner, maybe that’s your kids. Encourage the people around you to set a norm and an expectation that being social is something that’s worth fighting for and worth doing.
I think structurally and socially, this is a very, very hard problem. Robert Putnam, who I’ve mentioned before, has been counseling every president since Bill Clinton about how to build social interactions and build social community. And they have not been able to reverse the trend. I don’t know how our trends around work can be fixed, but some of this is about acknowledging that we are also engaging in trends that we have probably more control over than we perceive. And I think the big one is how we choose to use our leisure time around media entertainment. I think we have to reorganize the way that we think about what’s valuable about consuming media and say that maybe this is really not the thing that needs to be occupying my time the whole time. And if I make an exception by saying, this night of the week, I’m going to reserve for catching up with a friend or otherwise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to do so.
What’s hard is I wish for a world in which we could return to a sense of social obligation to one another. I wish for a world in which that it became more normative, that people would reach out and care for the people, especially those who are needed and isolated. But the biggest thing that I got to recommend is the only change that I think you really have control over is to recognize that making it a priority in your life means showing up, doing so consistently and taking your knocks when people can’t be there for you. People can cancel on you, you forgive them, and you try again. If people don’t text you back It’s okay. It doesn’t mean the text didn’t matter. You chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store and that 16-year-old rolls their eyes at you because some middle-aged white dude telling them this or that. That’s okay. I take my knocks. I recognize that every social interaction is not going to be a great one. But the fact that I’m trying in my world and my community, I think makes me a person who’s trying to build a healthier biome for living for everyone.
Brett McKay:
So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.
Jeffrey Hall:
You got it.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And I think the idea is if you start making it a priority in your life, hosting parties, hosting, even just small get togethers with your friends reaching out, the idea is that it can act as a social contagion. People are like, oh wow, this guy’s having a get together where he just has beers and sodas and it’s nothing really big, but I had a really good time. Maybe I could do that.
Jeffrey Hall:
And I think what’s curious about this is that we also know from other research on social norms and contagion is this is how it happens. People begin to understand that this is something that can be done and they see pathways to doing it. Any major social change happens because enough people have modeled it and demonstrated how it works to make it work again. And I’m hopeful. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.
Brett McKay:
So if listeners were to take one small action this week to build up their own social biome and the social biome around them, what would you recommend?
Jeffrey Hall:
Yeah. I would say make a plan with somebody that you love. If that’s your romantic partner, if that’s your best friend, if that’s your family member or brother or sister, make a plan to talk to ’em. Make a plan to have lunch. Make a plan to check in, make a plan to make a phone call. Put it on your calendar and do it. And even if you’re just listening right now, send that text. Say, Hey, we haven’t caught up for a while. Would you like to get together? Or, we have this thing coming up. Or When are you available to have lunch? Again, do it while you’re listening to this conversation that Brett and I are having. And then keep being persistent. If that person says, oh yeah, definitely, but I need to get back to you. Get back to them. Follow up, keep working at it. And once you have that opportunity to connect with them, the best piece of advice is to say, let’s do it again. And not just do it out of politeness, but actually put it on the calendar to do it again. And once you start doing it, it becomes easier and easier.
Brett McKay:
It’s true. After I read this book, I told you this in the email that I sent you before this interview, it inspired me. I set up a ruck with some guys here in town. Very cool. Saturday morning, eight o’clock, eat some donuts along the way.
Jeffrey Hall:
That’s awesome.
Brett McKay:
And it was easy. I could have done this so many times, but that social inertia. But looks like a lot of guys are going to show up and it should be fun.
Jeffrey Hall:
And I would also say, if not all of them show up. Do it anyway. Yeah,
Brett McKay:
Do it anyway.
Jeffrey Hall:
Do it again. And maybe new people will show up next time because they weren’t available this time. I think we’re too quick to assume that social failure means it’s not worth doing, and that’s just not the case.
Brett McKay:
Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jeffrey Hall:
Absolutely. So my run of relationships in technology lab here at the University of Kansas, and my research is posted there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m really active on posting about research related findings on LinkedIn. The social biome specifically is something I promote on Instagram and I’m Jeffrey Hall, PhD at Instagram. So those two kind of places are in which people can kind of see updates on what my work is being doing. So I’d love to have you there too. Fantastic.
Brett McKay:
Well, Jeffrey Hall, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, thank you. My guest today is Jeffrey Hall. He’s the coauthor of the book, The Social Biome. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/socialstress. You can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A one podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
