Top 5: How to Act Like an Extrovert

Pushkin.

We've been celebrating five years of the Happiness Lab by resurfacing five of my favorite episodes of the show. We've already gone all the way back to when we started out in twenty nineteen, but this final episode brings us nearly up to date, and my producer Ryan Dilly has it ready to go. Ryan, what's episode number five?

So this is from twenty twenty three, and it's called The Introverts Guide to Extraversion. So why do you want me to get this one out?

Oh? This is one of my favorites because it's also about the benefits of social connection, even for people who might not think they get a lot of benefit out of social connection.

It was a really popular episode, as I remember, and did really well in terms of download but it also prompted lots of complaints. Why didn't that work?

Well? I think it triverts really felt that we were attacking them, but that wasn't really the case. All we were doing was showing the benefits of social connection, even for folks who have persons that might not really resonate with social connection. We got to interview this lovely guest, Jessica Pan, who talked about her book Sorry I'm late.

I mean, this is a subject really dear to my heart. I've always been quite nervous about talking to new people, and I don't think like doing this recording now, So I worked really hard to try and overcome some with that. I think it's been really good for me.

Yeah.

I was wondering if your behavior has changed because of this episode of twime.

Oh for sure, As you know, I'm not the kind of person that tends to talk to people. But in part because of this, I realized that there are many more benefits than even I expected. And so it's definitely been something that's affected how I act.

In the world.

And I hope it might give our.

Listeners some food for thought as well. And so here is the last episode in our birthday celebration reruns, The Introverts Guide to Extroversion.

I feel like college was a real struggle for me. This is author Jessica Pan. I always felt like, when you know college kids would go out and party or go to clubs, I thought we were all secretly waiting to like come home and then you know, get our pajamas.

Jessica had many close friends in college, she couldn't always relate to how outgoing her buddies were. Her besties seemed to seek out noisy parties and busy dance floors, but Jessica was much more at home with small gatherings.

And intimate conversations.

Jessica's friends adored her, but they couldn't always relate to her preferences and just assumed Jessica would want to go big. To celebrate. When she turned twenty two.

They threw me this surprise birthday party.

Friends and family members gathered secretly and waited in Jessica's dark bedroom, ready to pop out and scream.

As soon as she got home and I walked in, there was like fifty people staring at me, and I burst into tears. It was my worst nightmare. That's one of the times I felt very much like, Okay, I am slightly different from my extroverted friends.

But it wasn't just those extroverted friends Jessica also felt different from the people she grew up with.

I often say that my parents are like the two chattiest people in America because they absolutely love talking to strangers to the point where it is embarrassing. You'll be in line for a restaurants, or you'll be on the plane or anywhere, and my mom is talking to someone, and then my dad's joining in, and there it's just, I don't know. They're the complete opposite of me.

Jessica knew her social needs different from the people around her, but she wasn't sure why.

So when I was growing up, the labels introvert and extrovert, they were not these buzzy terms that everybody knew about, so I'd never heard of them. And I think I found out in my twenties what an introvert was, and I immediately recognized myself.

The American Psychological Association defines introversion as an orientation towards the internal, private world of one's inner thoughts and feelings, rather than toward the outer world of people. Compared to extroverts, introverts are more with your reserved, quiet and deliberate.

Someone who concentrates really well is a good listener likes to be alone, gets exhausted, over stimulated by lots of people, and I felt really seen by that definition. I would never raise my hand in a class. That would never happen. I would fake sick if there was a presentation I had to give. I think I got a solo to sing in a choir and I didn't tell my mom about it, and I just pretended that I had a fever. I don't even think she knows about that to this day.

And so Jessica began referring to herself as an introvert with a capital I. It quickly became a badge of honor.

But I began to use that label of introvert as an excuse to say no to anything that gave me any sort of social anxiety.

Jessica sat out important social events, even ones that she knew might be good for her or for her career.

I didn't want to give speeches. I didn't want to host parties. I didn't want to lead workshops because I thought to myself, no, I'm an introvert. Introverts don't do things like that. And I was completely limiting who I was and who I could.

Come at times Jessica did question what she was passing up, like the time she went to a friend's wedding.

The bride stood up and she gave this amazing speech and she was crying and her parents were crying, and I felt like, why didn't I give a speech at my wedding? And I didn't do it because I was too anxious. I was scared I would not sound articulate. I would be scared that I wouldn't look good. I was scared that I embarrassed myself, when actually I wish I had done that, because I think the benefits could have tremendously outweighed the negative consequences.

But the negative consequences of Jessica's introversion became even clearer when she and her husband moved to London.

It's notoriously not the most friendly place in the entire world, and it's hard to make friends as an adult. And also I was a freelancer, so I was working from home, so it seemed absolutely impossible to make these connections and get out of my shell.

And that was when Jessica decided to embark on an innovative personal experiment, one that wound up changing her life forever.

I was thinking, if I really want to commit to this, I have to do this.

Listen to other episodes in this new season on getting more social. Then you've probably already heard about the benefits of connecting with other people. Pretty much every study ever done on the relationship between well being and social interaction shows that more people time makes us happier. But what if you, like Jessica, dread parties and crowds and spontaneous conversations with strangers. Are you doomed to less happiness than

Hi, Laurie, I'm having trouble connecting my mic, so give you just a.

Sec I wanted to unpack what psychologists have learned about the science of introversion and the unintended consequences it can have for our happiness. And that meant there was one person in the field I really needed to call.

My computer's rejecting the Bluetooth connection.

Sonya Lubermirski is a professor at the University of California at Riverside. She's the author of The How of Happiness, A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Sonya is a world expert on the science of happiness, so not surprisingly, she's very much in demand.

I've been crazy busy, so I'm like, this is like I don't even have time to say hi, Like I bet, I'm going from one meeting to another.

I was super grateful that Sonya made time for us and that she put up with a few technical problems.

Do you can you just keep talking? It's working that great.

In order to share a key finding from her decades of work in positive psychology.

After many years of research, we landed on this cliche, which is that the key to happiness is really connection, and so if you want to increase happiness, you want to make people feel more connected.

It really is that simple.

You will be happier if you interact with more people even if you're an introvert.

What's interesting is clear if the studies have shown that actually both extrots and introverts benefit by more social interaction.

Most introverts predict that social interaction will feel exhausting, anxiety provoking, and crummy, so they don't engage in this activity nearly as much as extroverts do, and the science shows that this choice can have big negative consequences for introverts. Happiness research since the nineteen eighties has shown that, on average, introverts are less happy than extroverts, presumably because they consistently miss out on the well being benefits that social connection provides.

That you're unlikely to be a social butterfly today.

But does that mean that introverts are doomed by their personality, destined never to share the joy of connection that extroverts take for granted?

Sonia didn't think.

So, what is a trade? Is basically ahavior? You know, like when you do something over and over again. If I'm like always making my bed and I'm organized and I'm always on time, people say, oh, Sonia's h conscientiousness. But if you're not high on constanciousness, theoretically you can try to make your meetings on time and make your bed every morning, and so the same thing for extroversion.

Sonia reason that introverts could engage in what she called volitional personality change. If they simply behaved in a more extravert way, maybe they could reap the happiness benefits that come with having a more extroverted personality. To test this theory, Sonya teamed up with her graduate student Seth Margolis and recruited over one hundred college students to take part in

So what did Sonya find.

We found that both introversied extroverts during the week that they were asked to act more extroverted got hugely happier.

Sonia says the boost and happy piness she observed in this be more extroverted condition was one of the largest effects she's observed in decades of studying happiness interventions. But just as acting more extroverted had a significant upside, Sonya also observed an effect of doing the opposite. Subjects who were asked to act reserved in shy showed statistically reduced

I was like, oh, so we can change, we don't always have to be the same, and yeah, I found that really freeing.

When we last left Jessica, she was sad and lonely in her new life in the UK, and that's when she began and reading about the psychology of introverts and happened upon Sonya's new study. Learning that people could volitionally change their personality traits led Jessica to try something radical.

I thought, look, I'm not that happy right now in my life, and I'm a hardcore introvert. What would happen if I live like the other half of the world. What could I gain from that?

Jessica decided to begin her own experiment, but rather than behaving more spontaneously and assertively for just a week, as Sonya's subjects had done, Jessica pledged to act like an extrovert for an entire year.

Her twelve month.

Journey turned into a new book, Sorry I'm late. I didn't want to come one. Introverts Year of Saying Yes, and Jessica's big Year of saying Yes didn't just involve becoming a bit more talkative. Jessica committed to trying out some of the most terrifying social encounters.

Possible, talking to strangers, public speaking, doing improv comedy, things like that. That were my nightmares and.

As you'll hear when we get back from the break, Jessica found that pushing herself to make every social connection possible required getting more vulnerable then even she expected.

I would need to just go for it and embarrass myself again and again and again.

The Happiness Lab We'll be right back.

So I had this massive fear of talking to strangers. I just couldn't do it.

Introvert Jessica pan was ready for an entire year of extroverting. But where should she start. Jessica figured that some expert advice might help her. First call went out to psychotherapist and Boston University professor Stefan Hoffmann.

He specializes in exposure therapy, so he'll have his patients do really humiliating things like stand on the street and just sing, or ask someone on the subway for like two hundred dollars, things where they are guaranteed to be rejected.

Jessica explained to Stefan that she was terrified of putting herself out there, especially with people she didn't know.

If I was approaching a stranger, my heart would raise. I'd feel like I was gonna throw up. I just had so much anxiety around it. Stefan didn't advocate baby steps. He wanted Jessica to dive head first into the social deep end, and he said, okay, so you live in London and you're scared of strangers. It's what I would have you do is I would have you ask a really stupid question to a stranger. I would have you go up to somebody and say, excuse me, is there

Stefan was making Jessica ask strangers pretty much the dumbest question you could pose to a Londoner because back then everyone knew that there was in fact a Queen of England and her name was Elizabeth. It was an encounter that was set up to make Jessica look as stupid as possible, but as Stefan explained, that was kind of the point.

Look, you know, no one's going to fire you, you're not going to get arrested, your husband's not going to leave you, you're not going to get thrown in jail, so you're just gonna look a little bit stupid.

And to comp I owned her discomfort. Jessica headed to one of London's least welcoming locations.

So I think one of the most awkward places to talk to stranger in London is on the underground because people they don't want to be bothered.

Jessica was ready to push herself, just like Stuffhanhead advised, so she sought out the least approachable stranger she could find. She picked a busy looking businessman in an expensive suit.

I was like, excuse me, and he was like what, And I said, is there a Queen of England? And he was like the Queen of England? And I said, yeah, who is she? And he said it's Victoria and then he walked off.

That wasn't the answer she was expecting. Victoria hadn't been queen for over one hundred years. Was the man walking Jessica giving a stupid answer to her stupid question. Jessica wasn't sure, so she fled down another scary looking businessman and posed the same question again, and.

He also said Victoria. And I didn't know if it was they were just messing with me or what was happening. But then I flagged down a few more women and they told me it was Elizabeth.

Looking idiotic in front of total strangers in a noisy, dirty subway station might not sound like fun, especially for an introvert, but the experience left Jessica feeling elated.

I felt like I could fly. I felt insanely exhilarated because it was so embarrassing and there are other people listening. It was my worst fear, and Stefan was right. Nothing bad happened.

To take her extroverting to the next level. Jessica tagged in yet another expert, one who may sound kind of familiar if you've listened to other episodes in this special season.

Should call him Nick? Or what should I call him?

I'm Nicholas Epley, you can call me Nick.

Nick is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

I had read his research that said that when two commuters are forced to talk to each other, they are happier than they would have anticipated.

You might remember this study from an episode we ran in our very first season entitled Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. In the experiment, Nick found passengers who were about to hop on a train from the Chicago suburbs on their way to work.

We gave them an envelope that had a five dollars Starbucks gift card in it, which turns out to be the most valuable incentive that we know on the planet. People will do anything for a five dollars Starbucks gift card, including doctor strangers on trains.

Nick then told one group to spend the entire train ride enjoying their solitude. They weren't allowed to talk to anyone, which is pretty much what most of us usually do.

And almost nobody talks to strangers on the train.

But Nick asked a second group of commuters to do something a little more radical. They had to spend the entire train ride talking to someone.

We asked them to try to make a connection with the person who sits down next to you this morning on the train. Try to get to know something about him or her. So they were going to have a conversation.

After the ride. Nick surveyed the commuters to find out how they were all feeling. The results were striking. People who were forced to spend their entire train ride talking to strangers felt happier than the ones that were told to enjoy their solitude. When I first read that recon, I was like, what is he talking about? That sounds insane to me. Nick says that Jessica's not the only one with that reaction.

I get a lot of pushback on this because the expectations are so strong.

Nick has even tested these mistaken expectations directly. In a second study, Subjects were asked which would feel better talking to some random stranger on the train or just enjoying the ride.

In silence.

People overwhelmingly thought that being in the talkative condition would suck. They predicted the exact opposite of what Nick's results showed. Like Jessica, most of us think that connecting with strangers will feel awkward, but we're wrong.

That's not what people's experience actually is.

Nick's subjects also mispredicted how much the stranger they chatted with would enjoy the experience of being talked to.

That is, they underestimated how social other people were. And notice that belief then becomes a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. If I think, Glori, you don't want to talk to me, then you know I'll sit down next to you at a conference, say I won't talk to you. You will

But author Jessica Pan was ready to try it. She met with Nick and quickly realized that he really practices what he preaches.

Nicholas has no issue talking to strangers.

Nick talks with people on trains and planes and buses. He chit chats with waiters and baristas and cafes and cashiers at his local grocery store.

We know all of them now, often by name. They know our kids, and that's fun. Once you start the conversation, it's pretty easy to make it go. That's not hard. It's starting it that's hard. It's like a speed bump at the top of a hill, and you have to get over this speed bump to actually get things going.

Speed bump what Nick thought of as a bump in the road a mountain. To an introvert like Jessica, I felt like he.

Could not relate to my anxiety at all, and I couldn't relate to his total nonchalance about chatting with people.

But Nick did share one fact about social connection that put Jessica a little more at ease. He said, look, Jessica, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. Like you have to be the first person to make a move, and if you do that almost one hundred percent of the time people will If you wave to someone, they'll wave back. You say hi to someone, they'll say hi back. Jessica began to realize how rarely she put in the work to make that all important first move.

So I feel like in the past, I'd go to a party and I'd linger in the hallway or the doorway. I wouldn't want to go fully in. I would hover near the cheeseboard or the drinks and the kitchen, or look at my phone, and then I would probably leave.

But if Jessica was committed to being the one to open a conversation, what she wondered should she start talking about? Are there particular topics that are more effective for really connecting people. In the rare cases in which Jessica did talk with someone new, she usually stuck to the easy stuff, what Nick calls shallow or surface talk.

Surface talk is like we talk about our commutes or what we had for dinner or the weather. In deep talk is our hopes and our dreams and our fears, and so much of our life is rooted in just doing surface talk. You know, you could see the same person every day for ten years and you might not actually know what's going on with them because you literally just talk about very topical things.

But Nick has found that there's a much more effective style of conversation if your goal is to truly get to know someone, to truly connect. It's what he and other researchers have called deep conversation.

It's sharing our human experience of struggling and loneliness and things that actually bring us together.

In one study, Nick asked people to engage either in shallow talk talking about the weather or their favorite TV shows, or in deep talk. And the deep talk conversation starters were pretty heavy, things like can you describe a time that you cried in front of another person? And if you could undo one mistake you've made in your life, what would it be?

And these deep conversations go much better than people expect they will, and they're much less awkward than people expect. People pretty dramatically underestimate how much they are going to enjoy deep conversation.

Armed with all of Nick's advice, Jessica threw herself into the conversational deep end. She signed up for a professional networking event, and rather than hiding away in the corner like she'd normally do. She immediately headed over to a group of people, started chatting and, going against all her instincts, took the conversation deeper.

I felt like people really responded to that, and they would sort of go, oh, this person's here to be real, to be honest, to actually make a connection.

Jessica went from feeling like a shy wallflower to the life of the party. I could visibly see the difference in people's faces.

They were having that dopamine hit two because we were connecting, we were laughing, we were bonding over something, and I realized that we all have the power to steer the conversation into something deeper. But Jessica knew that talking was only half the battle. She had succeeded in initiating deeper conversation,

It.

Really is this underrated magic skill that we can all have, and that really transforms how they treat you because they like being treated that way, but they like being treated special.

Jessica left the event feeling over the moon. She had proven to herself that she could not only talk to strangers, but also that it felt great. Her experiences inspired her to go even more hardcore in her quest to extrovert.

I'm very much an all or nothing person, So I thought, if I'm going to do this insane year of torture and extroverting, then I'm not going to leave anything.

Out exactly what torture was just planning for her introverted self.

It felt like, Okay, if I can survive that, then I can survive anything.

You'll find out when the happiness lab returns in a moment.

I think I always thought that to be a good public speaker, you need to have total confidence when you get on stage and before you even do the thing.

All if you're an introvert. Jessica Pan had always hated speaking in.

Public when actually it's so obvious, but you have to be scared to do it, and then when you survive, that's where that confidence comes from, because you survive doing the scary thing.

So for the pinnacle of her ear of acting like an extrovert, she decided to push herself to the limit, and I.

Thought, okay, so the final step in this is to perform for an audience where they're often encouraged to heckle you.

Jessica was going to try stand up comedy. She signed up for a comedy course. When it came time for the first class, she was terrified, so terrified that she climbed into bed and assumed the fetal position. Is that not what other people do? That feels really natural to me, hoping somehow to muster the necessary courage. But that first comedy class went well, and in a few weeks it was time to perform for real.

The first show I did was with my other fellow classmates and our friends and our partners at this pub downstairs in central London, and I was so nervous. I felt like, I don't know, I felt like I was on fire or something, and in a way, Jessica was on fire.

She got a ton of laughs.

The first performance went really well. My friend and I decided, let's go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is like the epicenter of comedy, and let's perform on an open mic night.

Performing in front of a small crowd of friends and supporters at a low key gig isn't quite the same as getting up on stage at the premier comedy festival in the world.

It did not go as well.

Jessica now admits that she was a bit unprepared for Edinburgh.

In that particular act, I talk about living in England and loving living in England, and I forgot that Edinburgh is in Scotland, and I was like, yeah, loving and I love it here. And it was like an audience full of Scottish people who were like boo, like, get off the stage. You're not in England. And for a delicate, shy introvert, that's enough to kill you. But I didn't actually die.

Jessica had made it through her year of living extrovertedly. She'd embarrassed herself on a tube train, talked candidly with strangers at parties, taken a comedy class, and had bombed in front of an angry crowd at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But in spite of it all, she'd still emerged unscathed.

The lesson from the year is that I learned a lot and nothing really bad happened to me.

Jessica hasn't quit her day job to become a stand up regular, but she does still practice many of the social skills she learned during her year long experiment.

I would say one of the biggest lessons from the year was to go deeper and be vulnerable and be willing to do it.

First.

Most people want to talk to you, and most people are nicer than we imagine in our heads, because I think we build up these big, scary judgments that oftentimes don't even exist.

Jessica now uses a series of go to social hacks to overcome her introversion, little rules that she puts into effect whenever she feels daunted by a scary situation. The first involves breaking her usual cycle of avoidance. If she's invited to a party, she goes, and she even tries to show up early.

If you show up late, everybody looks like they're already in those little clicks and circles, and you feel like you can't join in, and it's so intimidating. But if you're the first person there, like the second person there, it's not as scary.

But Jessica also warns that you shouldn't underestimate the discomfort you might initially experience doing something new, and this means you need to give yourself a little self compassion and patience.

You know, when you go swimming and you get in the water, it's absolutely freezing, but then your body adjusts to it and it doesn't feel so bad. I mean that's a cliche metaphor, but I think it really works. Like after you break the ice with one person, it's not as scary with the second one, and it's not scary with the third one, and by the fourth you know the life of the party.

Jessica has learned to appreciate the benefits of social connection, but the extroverted habits she now engages in regularly haven't fully dismantled her true personality.

I'm definitely still an introvert, like I definitely prefer to be at home or in a small group of people. But I now know I can give a speech, I can talk to a stranger, and that hard won social confidence that came from this year long experiment has had a big impact on Jessica's well being. I had more friends, I had less anxiety. I you know, in my neighborhood. Now I talk to tons of people. I recognize lots of people. That feels like the small little village in

When Jessica first encountered the extroverted psychologist Nick Eppley, she was floored by the ease with which he talked to complete strangers and how quickly he struck up friendships with the workers he met in stores and cafe. Jessica didn't think she'd ever be that comfortable in getting to know strangers herself, but a year into her experiment, she had really changed. A barista in her local coffee shop was one of the first to notice.

And he said, I remember when he used to come in here, like a long time ago. And I was like, yeah, I remember that too, and he said, you didn't talk it to us ever, like anybody, and I was like, yes, that's correct. And he's like, now you're like friends with each other and I was like, yeah, exactly. And you know, I didn't say here's the book and here's why, but he had noticed it. And it was really strange to

The science shows that we can all enjoy the well being boost that comes from social connection, no matter what our personality type is. But to get those social connection benefits, we need to actually connect with the people around us, whether we know them well or not. So why not