I'm struggling to be social and confident. What can I do to speak more articulately and gain confidence and impress more people? Well, Tonya, it's a good question. And I can tell you a lot of this is practice. Right. The more you're around people in different situations, the more comfortable you get in those situations.

The more you spend talking about things or explaining yourself or talking to people, the more comfortable and articulate you get in those types of conversations. I mean, I talk pretty, you know, here on this podcast, but in part because I've been professionally speaking since I was in my young 20s.

So I'm sort of used to it. The cadences of speaking, the pacing, the coming up in your head with what you're going to say next. It all just sort of comes with practice. So social stuff really can be practice. You can start with very low key social stuff early on, stuff that you're already pretty comfortable with.

I know this person. I don't mind hanging out with them. So we go to a restaurant or a bar together or go to a movies together on a fairly regular basis. I'm just used to in a comfortable situation, being out in the world with people and talking to them and interacting.

But the stakes are low. Then you can build that up to bigger things. OK, I'm going to go to bigger social events or parties at first, you know, small ones. Here's my friend. That's their birthday party. And you get more confident with that. So a lot of this is just practice.

Now, one of the things I think that is often left out of this conversation is the role of anxiety. Anxiety gets really intertwined with socializing in ways that I think it's hard for people who don't feel that same anxiety to understand. They don't understand how these really get mixed in together.

You really can start to build up a sort of dread or anxiety around different situations. It's why one of the outcomes of pretty severe anxiety disorders would be an agoraphobia where you don't leave your house anymore. It's because often those two things can go together. The same circuits that are related to sociality are often the same circuits that are short circuiting when you're suffering from anxiety.

So if anxiety is a real issue here, Tanya, it's not just, oh, I'm out of practice. What do I do? It's I really feel physically dread and concern and panic when I'm in these situations. I would look towards ACT, ACT-based techniques. They're very good for exactly this situation. So ACT, otherwise known as third wave psychotherapy, stands for acceptance commitment therapy.

It's a very effective evidence based type of psychotherapy that does really well with anxiety, social anxiety, panic type anxiety around other people. It's really based upon separating feelings from your actual actions. It really helps train you to recognize the physical symptoms of something like anxiety and say, yes, but I'm still going to commit to do this thing that I think is valuable.

And I can still do that even if this feeling comes and goes. It helps you avoid labeling that feeling as this is really important. Something really bad is happening. It's really bad to be feeling this way. It breaks that loop of you labeling your feelings and just seeing them as feelings themselves.

We talked about this a little bit in last week's episode. We read Marcus Aurelius' meditation. He had some actually stoic ideas that are connected to modern acceptance commitment therapy. But I just want to point that out there, Tanya, that there is a more serious training you can do with the tools of ACT that are there and available.

And so if the anxiety is really holding you back, that's not permanent. You have to think about that like knee pain. You had knee pain, the doctor's going to help you fix it, though it might take some PT and a little bit of time. Same thing here. Look into acceptance commitment therapy.

There are some good books on it. I think it's The Happiness Trap is one of the famous public-facing books on ACT. That's a good entry place into it. Harris, Russ Harris, maybe. You can look that up, Jesse, The Happiness Trap. But I just want to throw that out there because it can be frustrating if you're on the anxiety spectrum.

I'm on that spectrum. It manifests for myself in interesting ways. I have to do a lot of training on it. But depending if you're on that spectrum, it can be frustrating to just be around someone really social. It's like, what's the problem? Just like come to the thing. Like what could go on?

And they don't realize that you're feeling immense dread. So there's a lot of things you can do there, Tanya, that train. Do the work. It is worth it. Sociality is very important. Yeah, you got it right. It was Russ Harris. Russ Harris. OK. The Happiness Trap. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good book.

All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Ben. In what ways can being ordinary be good in life? This was an interesting question, Ben. I had to think about it a little bit. It resonated a little bit because I think what you're getting at here is this interesting tradeoff when you're thinking about the deep life and how you want to shape it.

There's one way you can go, of course, is towards exceptionalness. I want to do something exceptional. I want to be noted for it. I want to do something noteworthy, have some fame for this thing that I'm doing that's important. That's one particular path for the deep life. The other path for the deep life is I want to build a life around my values, start with discipline, figure out my values, organize my stuff, sacrifice and be a leader on behalf of others, and then find areas of my life that be remarkable.

And you could sort of have this quiet, deep life where you really matter to a lot of people and you find and extract out of life a lot of joy and appreciation of stuff that's fantastic or great or remarkable, all without having to be I am an exceptional X and people recognize it.

You have sort of two paths towards depth here. There's kind of pros and cons of each, especially when we look at that exceptionality path, right? Because there's good there and we shouldn't turn down the good. Why do people want to try to be great at things? Well, first of all, you do gain more autonomy.

Right. You do something really well. There's more demand for it. You often gain more financial reward and or more control over how you live your life. There are several things I do at a pretty high level, and I do have a lot of flexibility in my life. We get a mess around in this playhouse, deep work HQ.

You know, I go away in the summers. I have very high control over my schedule. I don't worry about money, really. That's not really an issue. So there's like great autonomy that comes from doing some things really well. Also, it feels good to be respected in the moment. We're wired for that.

This is the whole tribal leadership thing. We tell ourselves it doesn't matter, but there is ego. And it's it you do feel if something goes really well, you'll feel good about that for a while. There's a reason why people chase it. That is the stimulus that is perverted when we see workaholism.

Right. So with a addiction, there's usually some sort of very powerful stimulus that becomes the driver for the addiction. The feeling of intoxication, right. Workaholism is really that feeling of, wow, I did this thing well and people recognize that. And my boss rewarded me. That's a very strong stimulus.

That's why you can build a whole addiction around it. On the flip side, though, it can be very stressful and anxiety producing to try to do something exceptionally well. It's hard to do. And it puts you in a bigger, more stressful circumstances. You have to navigate. You get more people, perhaps you like want your time than you have nearly enough time to actually give.

And you have to start saying no to people and people think that you're being snobby or elitist. High stake things are just anxiety producing. And you have to figure, is this worth the anxiety? Is this one not? Things can fall apart. It's hard to do things at a high level.

So there's negatives that come with it. I mean, I constantly have to make these decisions. There's things I, you know, television things I've turned down, for example, that may be in isolation. You say, well, that's cool. Like I know that show. That would be really cool to go on.

And it's like, I can't do all of these things. And if I did, it's going to overwhelm me with time constraints. Anxiety, I have to be careful about how I make my path. So it's tricky. So I think it's a really good question, Ben. If you're going the route of let me just be exceptional, you can build depth around that.

And there are some real positives you're going to get, but there's also negatives. And I say that because I think that then when you get the scale between the quiet remarkability approach versus the exceptional, notable, famous remarkability approach, when you put the cons with the pros on this ladder, the scales become about balanced.

And so you really if you're going the quiet remarkability approach, a life that, you know, it's Lorelei Gilmore and the Gilmore Girls, not famous outside of Star's Hollow, not like exceptional at anything, but in that world, you know, is really well known and has built this really interesting life.

And people really know her and appreciate her and she's involved in people's lives and having a positive impact on that town. But she's not famous outside of that small little town. That's quiet remarkability, not so bad of a path. And again, I don't want to say the other path, the sort of exceptional remarkability is bad.

I'm just saying when you have the pros and the cons, it's no longer like, well, this is clearly better if you have the skill, you know, you have the whatever. I can shoot a really good jump shot. I could go that way. If you have the possibility to go that way, it's not bad, but it's also not a no brainer.

And if you don't see an obvious way to get to the exceptional remarkability, you shouldn't feel bad about it because, again, these things balance out. Steph Curry versus Lorelei Gilmore, that old famous comparison like there's I don't know, there's plus and minuses to both. So neither should be dismissive of the other.

That's a weird I might be the first person in history to make that particular comparison. Probably. I mean, I can't imagine it's come up in the locker room, you know, the NBA finals stuff. And this is your Lorelei moment, buddy. This is it. You got to just get out there.

I want you to man up and Lorelei this. All right. I mean, you got to your dribbling should be like the fast speech cadence of Lorelei Gilmore confusing people with as you move back and forth verbally through various things. And this is the Kirk of your town. But you need to get the ball to Luke.

There's probably some basketball strategy metaphor. The end of that speech would be like, hold on one second. Someone's hand me a piece of paper and I'm fired. And then the coach just walks out. So that story ends. Like, yeah, that makes sense. And I was fired. All right. Nonsense.

Stop the nonsense. Let's move on. What do we got next? All right. Great. Next question is from Samantha. How important are having friends in life? If it is important, how would you recommend an introvert go about finding some? Also, can you provide some advice on moving on from certain friendships that could be holding someone back?

So it's a good compliment to Tanya's questions about being more social and confident. Friends, as I mentioned, there are critically important. And for a friendship to be real, it has to involve non-trivial sacrifice of time and attention. Otherwise, your brain doesn't treat it as real. So just texting someone all the time doesn't count.

Commenting on their social media doesn't count. Being active in a WhatsApp channel with them also does not count. As far as your brain is concerned, they're not a friend until you're going places and doing things with them, doing things you might not otherwise want to do, but you're doing it because they're your friend.

That's when your brain begins to take the relationship seriously. So this should be a regular part of your weekly planning, especially if you're trying to build up friendships as something that's more important than a regular part of your weekly planning should be. What am I doing this week to strengthen or develop friendships?

You have to be pretty systematic about it, especially if you're sort of getting back in the saddle, so to speak. So fortunately, I can point you towards a resource here. There was a segment we did a few episodes back on this notion of the friendship recession, this idea that Americans in particular have less friends than ever before.

There was a segment where I had my friend Jamie Kilstein come on and talk about what he went through to gain a new group of friends in his 40s as a male, where this is kind of difficult. So we got into the weeds in that episode about specific things you can do to actually find and cultivate friends.

So I won't repeat that all, but I will say find that segment on the friendship recession. That was a final segment on a relatively recent episode. Maybe Jamie you can look or Jesse. Jesse knows whenever Jamie's on, I begin just furiously messing up their names. Because as Jesse has pointed out is maybe it's because Joe Rogan's podcast producer is named Jamie.

So it's just in the collective conscious of like Jamie is what you call the other person on a microphone when you're podcasting. So it doesn't take much to tip me into that. He'll look that up. But anyways, I think it was 266, 266 take control of your technology habits.

Right. Episode 266, deeplife.com/listen. You'll find that in the video for it's there as well. So look at that discussion with Jamie, because I think this is critically important, especially if you do not have a robust group of friends. Think about that, like getting in shape. It's going to require a lot of work on a regular basis with some tried and true tactics, but it is absolutely, absolutely worth doing.

All right, Jesse. See, I almost said Jamie there. I'm telling you, it's like very difficult once you start thinking about that. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.