Socialize Well: Five More Habits That Will Weirdly Help You

This is a continuation of my previous post wherein I discussed five things that would weirdly help you socialize better. I’m back with five more.

While the first post largely focused on the mental game, this post is going to hone in on the physical aspect. Each of these items involves an action which requires some physical input. We’re not running marathons here, but they’re more engaging than thought experiments. However, they compliment the abstract side of things nicely. I’ve found each of these points feed directly into the mental game in a sort of yin and yang motion.

Let’s get moving.

Exercise

Exercise? Socialize better? You mean like the dumbbells and the stairmaster are going to engage me in riveting conversation. They’ll wow me with their well-read insights and thoughtful dialog. Obviously not, but bear with me here.

Several things happen when you exercise:

You learn to push through your own hesitations
It releases literal feelgood chemicals
The act of exercise sharpens the mind
It provides you with a feeling of accomplishment

When your alarm goes off in the morning, it’s still dark outside, and your bed is deliciously warm, do you ever want to get up and exercise? Absolutely not. However, if you’re able to swing your legs over the side of the bed at the sound of your alarm and toss yourself into it, you’ve told yourself something.

You’ve let yourself know that, despite the allure of comfort or convenience, you’ve chosen to commit to your goals. The day will be met head on. Repeated little victories like that eventually smooth the mental hurdles to the point that it becomes habit. You condition your mind to ignore the pleasantries in pursuit of a higher goal.

So what?

This has direct carryover into your social life. There’s no doubt you’ll find yourself faced with situations where you’d rather stay home with your phone in hand as you sit on the couch. Through repeated practice by forcing yourself to exercise, you’ll toughen your mind. It’ll be easier to convince yourself to go to that networking event if you’ve denied yourself the short-term gratification elsewhere for a hundred days before that.

The feelgood chemicals are a gimme topic; we’ve all heard that exercise releases endorphins¹. It never hurts to drive the topic home. This brain fairy dust is a godsend. It makes you happier, calmer, less stressed. Wrapped up in a bow, it’s like a magic pill designed to produce positive things in your life.

Am I waxing poetic a bit here? Of course. However, I think it’s important to underline the mental benefits. You can’t get away from the fact that exercise is both physically and mentally good for you.

I’ve personally gone through stretches of inactivity (think weeks/months) that left me feeling depressed and lethargic. It becomes all too easy to wake up, mope around until it’s time to go to your job, come home, do the same until bed. When I finally realize how much of a sloth I’m being, I kick myself back into gear and notice a near-immediate improvement of almost every performance metric in my life. In that way, I

sleep better.

think better.

focus better.

socialize better.

Lately, I’ve taken to wearing a cheap pedometer to insure that I hit a step goal of at least 7000 steps a day. That provides me with a tiny achievement to hit every single day and it forces me to get up from my desk. Additionally, I usually head outside to get the steps in in nature. The cold winter air wakes me up like a cup of coffee. At the end of the day, I feel a small sense of accomplishment having hit my steps.

Going further, dial in on this accomplishment thread. Physical fitness delivers a perceptible boost in self-esteem². From that link:

Among a sample of adult university staff members, increased physical activity influenced self-esteem directly and indirectly. Furthermore, body mass index, perceived physical fitness, and body image impacted independently on the association between physical activity and self-esteem.

That’s a really scientific way of saying, “Exercise makes you feel better and look better.” When you move, you feel good. If you feel good, you move more. After you move more, you look good. Once you look good? Yep, you feel even gooder. Science, baby.

One final thing to tack on. You can’t deny the opportunity for incidental socialization either. There’s almost guaranteed to be a local exercise group for nearly any activity you can think of. So, while you’re already reaping the benefits of all the things I talked about above, you’re also potentially providing yourself with an arena of conversation practice. Even better, you already have a built-in discussion point around your physical activity.

Clean Up Your Eating

Wha… wait, what? Feel free to meet this with the same suspicion as exercise, I’ll swear up and down by it. Healthy eating has a laundry list of benefits and lends itself perfectly to fueling your exercise habits. As a reference point, unhealthy eating has a laundry list of negatives:

Eating ultra-processed food was associated with increased risk of subsequent depression

Greater ultra-processed food consumption was cross-sectionally associated with increased odds of depressive and anxiety symptoms, both when these outcomes were assessed together… as well as separately… Furthermore, a meta-analysis of prospective studies demonstrated that greater ultra-processed food intake was associated with increased risk of subsequent depression… While we found evidence ³for associations between ultra-processed food consumption and adverse mental health, further rigorously designed prospective and experimental studies are needed to better understand causal pathways.

Eating ultra-processed food was associated with increased risk of cognitive decline

In a cohort study ⁴of 10,775 individuals, higher consumption of ultraprocessed foods was associated with a higher rate of global and executive function decline after a median follow-up of 8 years.

These findings suggest that limiting consumption of ultraprocessed food could be associated with reduced cognitive decline in middle-aged and older adults.

Eating ultra-processed food was associated with increased feelings of fatigue

According to Dr. Darius Schneider⁵, a Sharp Community Medical Group board-certified endocrinologist, one of the first signals of poor nutrition is fatigue. “Some foods can cause or worsen fatigue and even lead to mood disturbances and depression,” he says.

These fatigue-causing and mood-altering foods include fast carbohydrates, saturated fats and foods with nitrates. However, other foods, such as berries, green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds and fermented foods combined with plenty of hydration, can improve mood and wellbeing.

Exercising and eating well are what I consider things Charles Duhigg (author of The Power of Habit) would call “keystone habits”. These habits essentially hold up all of the other aspects of our lives. In other words, neglecting keystone habits leads to adverse outcomes in other seemingly unrelated areas of our life.

Think about it. Do you feel highly motivated after eating a fast food meal full of greasy food and washing it down with a sugary drink? Does a large helping of dessert allow you to sleep well at night? Further, after having a single meal big enough to feed two, is running or exercising on your mind?

All of these little dings add up in a big way. Our food is our literal energy source, so we owe it to ourselves to burn clean energy if we want optimal performance. Personally, I’ve found low quality foods to cause brain fog and indigestion. These are distractions as you try to socialize efficiently.

On top of that, I just feel sluggish after eating like crap. So, as someone who sometimes needs motivation to get out there and interact with others, this saps my drive. It’s far too easy to finish a large meal and just stroll out to the couch for TV time. Instead, that time could be better spent in a group setting, making connections, and living life outside of my ironically named living room.

In addition to exercise, clean eating will help you achieve a fitter body. I’m not talking about six pack abs or sports model physique, I just mean a body that functions well and looks good. As a callback to the above, “~~Exercise~~ Clean eating makes you feel better and look better.” When you eat well, you feel good. If you feel good, you eat even better. After you eat even better, you look good. Once you look good? Yep, you feel even gooder. Science again, baby.

Also like exercise, clean eating provides a group activity opportunity as well. Rather than hitting the drive thru, take someone to buy ingredients at the store. During that time, converse along the way before heading back home to cook it together. You’ve now tripled the amount of time with the other person and engaged in a hands-on activity that you can both enjoy. If that’s too hard, find a restaurant that serves quality food and suggest a sit-down meal there. The effect is nearly the same.

Posture

Human bodies are such complex, interwoven organisms that it’s mindboggling. The littlest of things can have a ripple effect throughout the entirety of your being, and I count posture as one of those things. Standing up tall can have a literal effect on your mental state.

Stand up straight
Pull your shoulders back
Don’t allow your chest to cave
Set your neck back so your head levels
Lightly flex your core so your hips can align
Just stand there for a minute or two and see how you feel

Chances are, you feel slightly better after holding the position for a moment. Obviously this isn’t going to change your entire life after just three minutes of standing with good posture, but it’s a feedback loop. Your brain feeds your physical state and your physical state feeds your brain. When we make an effort to stand tall with poise and confidence, we tell our brains that we are confident.

There’s an excerpt in a previous post of mine that highlights the importance of this mind/body feedback loop and its ability to help you socialize effectively:

Imagine you walk into a room and convince yourself that everyone in the room has stopped talking amongst themselves to stare at you and judge you. How do you react? It’s likely that you physically shrink down. Your gaze lowers to the floor. Your head hangs loosely on your shoulders and you slump in place. Now the room has an actual reason to notice. Who’s this person that entered the room and instantly deflated like a punctured balloon? They’re completely ignoring eye contact and kicking imaginary rocks. That’s definitely odd.

Follow that up with the opposite scenario where you enter the room with poise and confidence:

Imagine instead that you pause briefly outside of the room, take a few calming breaths, and then stroll in like you haven’t a care in the world. You don’t make eye contact, but you look straight ahead and carry an easy-going smile. Rather than hiding in the doorway, you make your way to your seat without breaking stride. You’ve produced a completely different vibe.

Big difference, right? Indeed, it takes dedication to fix your posture since it requires conscious effort. However, it can make such a large impact on how others perceive us that it’s worth the effort. It also has the added benefit of forcing you to be more present.

Make little mental check-ins throughout the day. Are you standing up straight at this very moment? How about tension? Could you relax your shoulders a bit and project more confidence? All in all, these micro adjustments eventually train your mind to perform them subconsciously, so you won’t even have to think about standing confidently. You’ll be doing it by default.

Pursue Engaging Hobbies

Have you ever been in a conversation where the other person seems like the most interesting person in the world? They’ve been skydiving, they’re scuba certified, and they just got back from a trip to upstate Vermont where they routinely hunt badgers with a slingshot. Your fingers start to sweat around the once-cold Red Solo cup in your hand as it comes to your turn to speak about all of the amazing things you do. Frantically, you think back to the weekend you spent sitting at your desk watching YouTube for ten hours straight.

As you open your mouth to speak, it feels inexplicably dry and you only manage to force out a croak in response. “Work’s been pretty crazy lately. That’s really all I’ve had time for recently.”

Now, we both know that work hasn’t been that crazy. And we both know that’s not really all you’ve had time for recently. Clearly, this is a certified “caught with your pants down” moment. You could keep stumbling along on this thread. The person across from you will likely politely engage and ask you what’s been going on that’s keeping you so busy. Also, they’ll politely ask what exactly it is you do again since they forgot. Blah blah blah.

Don’t be caught here. This is one of the easiest traps to avoid. Be interesting! Mainly, take an interest in yourself. We get so caught up in the ease of at-hand entertainment and distraction that we forget to live sometimes. In a way, our hobbies are a piece of the larger whole that define us as human beings.

Certainly, hobbies are a window into what makes you tick and this window gives other people something to engage with. Don’t mistake me here. Admittedly, this could sound like I’m telling you to get a hobby based on what other people care about, but that’s not my intent. I want you to find something that truly excites you. Notice how I didn’t specify which hobbies you should pursue, I just said you should develop some.

Moreover, I suggest being a generalist here. It’s okay to really like restoring antique toasters if that’s what floats your boat, but people will get tired of hearing about it if that’s the only thing you bring to the table. Hobbies can feed other hobbies, so maybe you also take an interest in the tools you’re using to restore your toasters.

Now, you’ve become the person who knows how to restore antique toasters and knows a lot about hand tools. Naturally, this could expand even further to knowledge about the best toolboxes for organizing said tools. I’m beating a dead horse with a toaster here, but you get my point. Don’t sell yourself short when there are an infinite number of things you can experience in life.

If you find yourself interesting, chances are good that other people will as well. This sort of social currency boosts your confidence because you’re now a person with convictions, interests, and individual thoughts. You socialize effortlessly because your hobbies act as springboards for conversation and people showing fascination in them further boosts your self assurance. People like a person with passion.

Writing

Stay with me now! I want to toss writing into the mix because I think it’s the single most effective way to organize your thoughts. I’ll be quick.

Personally, so much of my trouble in social situations comes from my mind running at breakneck speed. Darting between things I want to say and think to the point that I don’t even hear what the other person is saying. Writing helps me channel that into a smoother outlet.

Thoughts are scattered energy. I mean, literally. If you look at an image of neurons in the brain, they’re a mesh of scattered cells that communicate by throwing chemicals and electricity at one another. That’s metal, right?

The downside to the speed at which you think is it sometimes moves faster than your mouth. This is where writing comes in. If thoughts are scattered energy, then writing is the cartoony crystal at the end of the laser that focuses them into a continuous beam. By the same token, it gives you an opportunity to turn your thoughts over in your hand. Examine them, discard some, refine others.

Putting pen to paper can do several things:

Release pent up anxious thoughts
Physically track ideas that you’ve been holding onto which frees up mental space
Expose holes in your logic or reasoning
Produce even more ideas
Give you another hobby in your toolbelt that you can discuss with others *wink*

Finally, any physical writing (pen and paper are better here, ignore that laptop) cements those thoughts in your mind. So, not only does it organize them, but it also allows for easier retrieval later. This helps with deeper ideas like your thoughts on politics, morals, the meaning of life.

Obviously these topics will be reserved for more serious conversation, but that doesn’t mean the benefit isn’t still there. You can socialize seamlessly if you’re not stumbling over your words every time you try to explain your opinion on some topic.

Putting a Bow On It

In conclusion, I have five things for you to try to become the slicing, dicing, socializing wizard that you’ve always dreamt of being:

Exercise
Eat well
Work on your posture
Get a few hobbies that you’re passionate about
Write

That’s not so bad, right? Nobody says you have to do all of these either. Start with one and see how it feels. Give it a few weeks and drop it if it’s not doing anything for you. In time, you may find that one action feeds directly into the others.

You start eating well which makes you feel better which translates into energy that you want to burn by exercising which fixes your posture once you develop your physical fitness which translates directly into a new hobby of yours that excites you… and then you write about it.

Seamless. *chef’s kiss* Thanks for reading.

– Two-Bit Stoic