 So if you find yourself scrolling for hours on end, getting caught up in social media cycles, we've talked about that in the past on the show, that's actually one of the first signals that you are craving social connection. You are craving those social bonds. So redirecting some of that attention away from the screen and actually to strangers is going to be a very important first step towards helping that mental health around loneliness. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Let's jump in first talking about why this is so important. I know as an introvert myself, I've tried to avoid small talk. I labeled it as boring. I went a long time in my high school and college years avoiding small talk because I just didn't find it much fun. But the science proves that we actually should be engaging in more small talk, right Michael? Yes, for sure. There's this concept that we're all familiar with, which is called loneliness and the scary thing. And this is something that I found deeply troubling and also very interesting in my own research for this episode. And that is that you can kind of get conditioned to being lonely. So the definition of loneliness is this discrepancy between how much social interaction you want to have and how much interaction you actually have. Now, this is one definition to talk about, but it's yet another definition to talk about when you're actually the pandemic, which furthers this sort of like healthy need to be lonely in a very scary way. And the important thing here is this idea of getting conditioned to it, just like if you're on a diet for a couple of weeks, it's kind of okay, it's a diet. You're losing weight, you're gaining weight, whatever it might be. But after a certain amount of time, your body gets used to the increased or decreased amount of nutrients, and it's the new normal. And it's the same thing with loneliness. The first couple of weeks, the first couple of months, it kind of hurts us and we feel that deprivation. But after a couple of weeks, after a couple of months, this becomes the new normal. And that's really dangerous because being deprived of the social relationships that you want to have that you ideally have in your life, it reduces your physical health, your mental health. It's a really dangerous state to be in. And due, I wanted to say thanks to, but due to the pandemic, this has become the new normal. And we really need to be aware of that, that we need to step out of our comfort zone again in a very healthy manner, of course. But we need to make more than ever a conscious effort of reaching out to people and forge that connection. Whether that is talking with a barista when you get your coffee, which is a study we can get into a little bit deeper later, or talking to the person you're sitting next to at the bus stop, consciously bringing more of that in. So whereas a year ago or two years ago, when we last recorded an episode around the concept of breaking the eyes with strangers, back then it was, okay, meet new people. Now it's more important than ever because now we're really talking about your mental and your physical health. And this is a skill that is as important as your ability to get back in the gym whenever, you know, you need to, you need the feel to, you feel the need to work out. And what's interesting is the science is now showing that our need to consume social media is one of the first signals that we're seeing around this loneliness and this need for social bonding. So if you find yourself scrolling for hours on end, getting caught up in social media cycles, we've talked about that in the past on the show, that's actually one of the first signals that you are craving social connection, you are craving those social bonds. So redirecting some of that attention away from the screen and actually to strangers is going to be a very important first step towards helping that mental health around loneliness. Well, our mental health has been on decline since in rapid succession due to iPhone and social media. The hockey stick growth and mental health issues has went hockey stick around 2009, 2010. And the pandemic has expedited that situation even further and faster than the trajectory that it was already on. Absolutely. And I think an important thing of note here, right? Why are we talking about breaking the ice? Well, when we are talking to strangers, someone we don't know, there is tension, there is concern about being rejected, about being ignored, about being judged. And that's what creates that icy feeling. Like we have to physically break something, break that tension in order to get someone's attention, approval, acceptance and get into that conversation. But the science is pretty strong that shows when we are engaging even in the lightest of small talk with the barista, with the person sitting next to us at the bus stop, with the person who happens to be grocery shopping nearby. Those small interactions actually create those positive chemicals in our brain that allow us to feel good, to feel more socially connected, even if that person is a complete stranger. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. There are two studies that really stand out to me in that regard. And I invite everyone listening to this to actually try this out. One study, and I remember we've talked about this study a few times on the podcast. So it's an evergreen because it's that powerful. It's called minimal social interactions lead to positive belonging and effect, being a scientific term for emotions. And what the researchers did in that experiment was they incentivized people to go into a Starbucks or any coffee shop of your choice and actually start a very minimal conversation with a barista as maybe as little as, hey, how's your day going? How are you doing? How's your weekend? And what they found was that compared to the control group, which was told to not say anything, just order your coffee, those that just asked that small little question, they felt significantly better for the rest of the day. And another study was done by Nicholas Epley, who did that a similar experiment in the commute using public transport, where they incentivized people like giving them like a couple of bucks, if they followed up on the experiment to just start up a conversation with a person sitting next to them. And again, in that commute where a lot of us spent a scary amount of time in, those that spoke to the person with just a, hey, how are you doing? How's your weekend? What are your plans for the day? They reported later that they felt a lot happier than the control group that again was told to just look at your phone and just listen to that podcast, nothing wrong with the podcast, but just listen to your podcast, just, you know, just, just check social media, but don't talk to anyone. And I think that's such a big takeaway for us and also to tap into the idea of extroverts versus introverts, that talking to people just makes us as homo sapiens happier. And the difference with introverts and extroverts, and maybe I'm jumping a little bit ahead here, but the difference is that the introvert, if asked, will say, hey, I don't think I'm going to feel that much better if I talk to a stranger. And the extrovert will say, oh, yeah, of course, if I talk to strangers, that's going to be awesome. But the result of that was both groups felt better. The introvert as well as the extrovert, they felt happier after they had that interaction with someone. Now, introversion is not an excuse to avoid human contact. And I know it is a convenient one for many of us who feel shy, who maybe don't have the necessary strategies in place to be more effective with breaking the ice. One of the things I want to talk about is we often overrate our awkwardness and underrate our social abilities. We talked about this with Vanessa Bonds on the show last year, and we even saw that this week. So we had a military training here in Las Vegas working on their emotional intelligence. And of course, these military members go through a ton of training. They came in with a bunch of strategies in mind, thinking that, okay, there are some simple ways to get things moving. And a couple of them, notably before we kicked off the program, said, I do feel awkward in these situations. I do find that I struggle to come up with the right thing to say around small talk. And then of course, much like all of our programs, whether it's our virtual programs in X Factor or in person, we film them interacting with other participants and our coaches. And without fail, whenever we play back the video, whether it's a military program, the bootcamp or the X Factor program, when we're feeling awkward, we're turning inward, we're diminishing our own skill set, we're very self conscious, but the other person doesn't feel that way and does not show up on video, this overwhelming awkwardness. It's an internal feeling and an internal barometer that's often wrong, that often over indexes on how awkward we're going to feel and how awkward the other person feels. And inevitably, at the end of that interaction, we'll ask the other person on the other side, did you feel that awkwardness? Did it feel awkward to you? And they'll smile and say, no, it didn't feel awkward. So if you're listening right now and your first thought is, but I always feel awkward in small talk, I don't know if I'm going to know what to say and I don't want the other person to judge me or feel awkward, you can rest assured that that internal feeling is not what's happening in reality. The other person is not feeling that awkwardness as much as you are. And I think that's that's really interesting because here's what happens cognitively if I were to speak up in a big podcast, my mind is telling me, oh, you could have done so much better. There was this other thing you could have mentioned, I might go back to not back, I might go back to bed after this, this time I'm not going back to bed. So after this answer that I so eloquently gave in this answer right now, I might, I might go to bed and think, oh man, you could have, you could have said this, you could have said that, you could have mentioned your Nobel Prize in Literature, you could have mentioned that quote, my mind knows that, but the person listening to me doesn't know what else there was. All they have is, oh, there was actually a pretty smart remark that this guy just gave, right? They don't know the the the headspace that was to our own answer. They don't know what our inner critic is throwing at us. They only know, hey, that was actually quite interesting. And I have another answer. I have another follow up question to what they just said. I think a lot of people go into social engagements and they wait for people to come up to them. It's a lot easier. It's a defensive strategy. And what we're looking to do is acquire more offensive strategies with our defensive strategies. So that we're maximizing our opportunities. There's nothing worse than showing up to an event and and not maximizing the opportunities that that you have in front of you who who wants to live life just through the tip of the iceberg, right? It's about maximizing the opportunities so that you can save time, you can save energy and showing up to an event waiting for people to talk to you is certainly not the well, hope is not a strategy. And in your in your you're placing your your hopes on on things working out when you could be making those things happen.