Hannah Seo | Vox

Is America turning on birth control?

2026-02-13T06:00:04-05:00

Birth control in the US right now is full of contradictions.

Access to contraceptives has never been easier. Many states have passed legislation to allow pharmacists to prescribe and dispense hormonal contraceptives directly to individuals, instead of requiring a doctor’s prescription first. Telehealth services have helped make it easier to find different contraceptive methods in more rural parts of the country. The first over-the-counter birth control pill, Opill, hit pharmacy shelves in early 2024.

Yet birth control is also facing cultural backlash. Social media platforms are awash with testimonials from people tossing aside their contraceptives in fear and sometimes anger, saying hormones are affecting their bodies or changing their personalities. Meanwhile, influencers are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control, like that birth control causes long-term hormone disruption or causes cancer.

It’s a weird time to talk about birth control. But understanding the current cultural moment requires more than just agreeing that birth control is good and that those who decry it are wrong.

Rather, it’s worth interrogating where people’s dissatisfactions come from, and tracing how legitimate experiences with and worries about hormonal contraceptives can lead people toward alternate (and often scientifically dubious) sources of education about their bodies.

A history of harm

This backlash against birth control is partially related to growing conversations around neglected issues in women’s health. In the past 10 years, for example, doctors have finally started to take IUD insertion pain seriously. There’s now wider recognition of how distressing symptoms of perimenopause and menopause can be, and conditions like endometriosis are finally getting the research it deserves.

Historically, “women and gender minorities are a medically underserved and medically mistreated population,” says Kate Clancy, a human reproductive ecologist and anthropologist at the University of Illinois, and the author of Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.

Many people with uteruses either have had or know someone who has had horrible experiences with health care that has diminished their trust in medicine, she says — so it makes sense that when people consider hormonal contraception and the possibility of side effects they start to question, “Is this really good for me?”

Racist and classist prejudices also shaped how doctors counseled people on birth control methods over the past 20 years. In the late 2000s, after the first hormonal IUD, Mirena, and the first hormonal implant, Implanon (which later became Nexplanon) were approved for use in the US. At that time, “the family planning community became very enamored with the high levels of effectiveness of those methods,” says Christine Dehlendorf, director of the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California San Francisco.

Doctors began, sometimes inappropriately, pushing these long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) methods on patients, or strongly objecting when people wanted to quit these methods, without listening to or trying to understand their reasoning. There was a sense that this “LARC first” strategy could protect people — especially low-income communities and communities of color — from their own undesired fertility, Dehlendorf says.

It was a demonstration of how, in the medical community, “we haven’t always prioritized reproductive autonomy in the way that we should,” Dehlendorf says. And when people sense their medical providers are acting paternalistically and not prioritizing their own wants and needs, they start to distrust the medical system and begin looking elsewhere for health information. “That then leads somebody to be susceptible and vulnerable to mis- and disinformation.”

And misinformation is in no short supply. There’s a swell of mostly right-leaning influencers now who have gained followings by demonizing hormonal contraceptives and promoting “natural birth control” methods like counting the days since your last period, tracking internal bodily temperature, and assessing the quality of vaginal discharge to gauge when you may or may not be fertile.

Some, like conservative podcast host Alex Clark, spread further fear and mistrust of hormonal birth control by claiming that it hurts women’s fertility and turns some women bisexual, neither of which are supported by data. These attitudes are rife throughout the Make American Healthy Again (MAHA) movement — Surgeon General nominee Casey Means has called birth control pills a “disrespect of life.”

Part of why learning about natural birth control methods is so attractive is because it promises more intimate knowledge of the body that eliminates the need for “unnatural” interventions like hormonal contraception. And while people, no matter their political leanings, want to understand their bodies and how to gauge their own health, the desire to rely only on “natural” interventions for health is a huge feature of MAHA rhetoric.

For those who have tried hormonal birth control but felt blindsided by side effects that weren’t adequately explained by their doctors, natural birth control might feel like a simpler path forward.

Why we keep talking about side effects

The plain truth is that many people on hormonal birth control will experience side effects. And data show that the majority of people who choose to go off the pill or take out their IUDs (not counting those who do so to get pregnant) make that choice because of those unwanted side effects. Some side effects, like mood changes, can go away by themselves over time or disappear when you change the kind of birth control you take. But for others, like changes in your bleeding or vaginal discharge, all that doctors can offer is reassurance that what you’re experiencing is normal.

Hormonal contraceptives are a remarkable, life-changing tool — that often come with trade-offs that others find unacceptable.

Despite the robust body of data and evidence showing that hormonal contraceptives are safe and effective, doctors have no way of predicting whether any one person will experience any number of side effects, says Dehlendorf — a reality that exists in all of medicine and that makes the conversation around birth control and side effects tricky. Moreover, people can have very different experiences on the same hormonal birth control with different dosing, and experiences with one method can differ in different life stages, like before or after a pregnancy.

On top of all that, people’s wants and needs are unique — not every person views every side effect as equally tolerable or intolerable. What one person might find to be a minor and livable side effect, another person might find a deal-breaker. Some patients come into the clinic wanting their birth control to halt their periods (having no period while on birth control is safe and not bad for you), says Bianca Allison, a teen-focused primary care pediatrician in North Carolina and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. Others really want to make sure they keep having regular periods, as reassurance that they’re not pregnant.

Regardless of where your bar is, experiencing an unpleasant side effect you weren’t expecting can be shocking. When Clancy started on a hormonal IUD in her 40s, which she needed as an offset for the estradiol patch she began taking for perimenopause, she spotted. In fact, “for seven months straight, I bled every single day” she says. That’s not uncommon, and Clancy was lucky to have a doctor who had warned her. But a lot of people are completely taken aback by their side effects and dismissed when they express fear or concerns about these side effects, she says.

There are people who will argue to this day that you shouldn’t share the potential negative risks of medication because then patients won’t take it, Clancy says. “My research and the research of others indicate the absolute opposite — when you inform people, and they feel like they can actually trust you, they’re actually much more likely to listen to your recommendations,” Clancy says.

Every person interviewed for this piece brought this up as a key area where doctors and other medical professionals can do a better job supporting patients, emphasizing that people want their doctors to proactively explain possible side effects, and what strategies are available to alleviate them.

Birth control is for preventing pregnancy, yes. But there’s also a bigger picture.

When the first birth control pill was in development in the 1950s, women clamored to their doctors wanting to know how to get their hands on it. Early feminists like Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick argued that having control of one’s fertility was a necessary component of the emancipation of women. And research suggests that’s true. Access to reliable birth control has been shown to increase women’s earnings, allow them greater educational attainment, and decrease their risk of falling into poverty.

And there’s really no contraceptive more reliable than hormonal options. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that birth control pills are about 93 percent effective with typical use. IUDs and contraceptive implants are the most reliable reversible contraceptives with 99 percent effectiveness, while condoms and fertility awareness methods (like counting the days since your last period or measuring body temperature to approximate when you might be fertile) are just about 87 and 77 percent effective, respectively.

That said, the pitfalls of the “LARC first” approach teach us that the ultimate goal of birth control should not be only to prevent pregnancy, but to help people live the sexual and reproductive lives they want to lead, says Allison.

Just because one birth control method has lower effectiveness doesn’t mean it is an inferior choice for all people. If a person really doesn’t want to be on hormones because of past experiences, and feels ambivalent about the risks of pregnancy, then fertility awareness methods alone might be okay for them, she says. But if they’re choosing to not be on hormones because of misinformation about long-term health effects, or if they think it’ll be as effective and easy as the pill at preventing pregnancy, then that’s something to talk about and maybe correct.

Some worry that politicized attitudes toward birth control will flatten people’s understanding of contraceptives, and create a divide where people who trust and use hormonal contraceptives are “good” and those who don’t are “bad” or vice versa, says Clancy. But the desire to learn about how different contraceptives affect the body — and to critically assess whether they’re right for you — should not be partisan. And no one method to control fertility should be demonized or given absolute primacy.

Hormonal contraceptives are a remarkable, life-changing tool — that often come with trade-offs that others find unacceptable. Being clear-eyed about birth control requires us to understand that the way people assess these tradeoffs and make their decisions can be layered and individual.

If we had a society with easily available contraception, easily available education for all the pros and cons for all the different methods, and easily available abortion, we’d still have a diverse array of people picking all the different options, says Clancy. There are nuances and valid critiques to each of them, “but I 100 percent think that we should have complete unfettered access to them if we need them.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

The next big thing in wellness is…mitochondria?

2026-02-05T16:49:20-05:00

Over the past couple of years, celebrities, tech bros, and biohackers have come to believe they’ve found the ultimate source of good health. Boosting this one thing, they say, will cure all ails, rejuvenate the body, and lead to longer life. They are talking about the star of middle-school biology class: mitochondria.

The “powerhouse of the cell” has gained recognition recently as possibly an overlooked player in our bodies’ well-being. Celebrities like Hailey Bieber and Gwyneth Paltrow are supposedly fans of NAD+, a coenzyme crucial for mitochondrial function, now offered at medspas via injections, supplements, or IV infusions. A crop of biotech startups are selling at-home assessments of your mitochondria (prices range from $349 to $699), and public figures like longevity-obsessed millionaire Bryan Johnson, podcaster Joe Rogan, and Surgeon General nominee Casey Means have spoken publicly about the importance of mitochondria for health.

While this might seem like just another pseudoscientific “wellness” trend, behind the surge in popularity is a growing body of genuine academic research advancing our understanding of how mitochondria work, and how they could contribute to human health. Japanese researchers, for example, recently found that a mitochondrial gene in mice can influence longevity, and scientists at Duke University recently published research showing that replenishing a person’s mitochondria could be a way to reduce the pain of diabetic nerve damage.

Still, it’s reasonable to want to see more evidence before you spend $699 to “unlock the full potential of your cellular health” and “experience the future of NAD+ boosting.” Here’s how to separate what is real from what is marketing when it comes to mitochondria and your health.

How mitochondria help our bodies function

You might remember from biology class that mitochondria are responsible for turning sugars from our food into energy. This means that mitochondria are hugely important for keeping your body functional. They are responsible for your metabolism, and therefore also control how energetic you feel, says Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University who studies mitochondria.

In addition to generating energy, mitochondria are involved in the development of cells, the creation of natural bodily steroids, proper hormone regulation, and ensuring that the right cells are programmed for cell death.

A variety of health issues arise when mitochondria don’t work properly. A few rare genetic conditions can cause mitochondrial malfunction, and people with these conditions often have weak muscles, cognitive disability, liver and kidney problems, and heart abnormalities — though they’re a very small percentage of the population (experts estimate they affect one in 4,000 live births). But mitochondrial dysfunction can also play a role in more common conditions. Research has shown that it can worsen symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and both cause and result from type 2 diabetes. Because of mitochondria’s role in providing our body with energy, experts also suspect that mitochondrial dysfunction plays a role in chronic fatigue syndrome as well, says Picard.

Mitochondria also tend to deteriorate with age. In fact, worsening mitochondrial function is thought to be a driver of biological aging, says Kay Macleod, a University of Chicago researcher who studies mitochondria’s role in cancer. And having lots of well-functioning mitochondria helps to limit or slow down aging, she says.

Are those trendy mitochondrial therapies legitimate?

By definition, most people do not have the rare conditions that make mitochondria dysfunctional, and ordinary people really have no way to assess their mitochondrial health. The companies advertising mitochondria screening might be able to give you a snapshot into your mitochondrial health, says Daria Mochly-Rosen, a Stanford scientist who co-wrote The Life Machines, a book about mitochondria and health. But she doubts the technology is at a place where these tests can meaningfully and thoroughly provide insight into all your mitochondria’s functions. That said, some researchers, like Picard, are optimistic that we’ll soon have saliva or blood-based tests that can provide that.

Macleod is skeptical. For one, mitochondria in different organs serve slightly different needs — the mitochondria in your liver aren’t doing exactly the same job as those in your brain. She doubts any screening could give you a full picture of how all the mitochondria in your body are functioning. And even if they could, she asks, “what would you do with the information?”

While mitochondria are critical for health, not all of the advertised “solutions” for mitochondrial health have merit. For example, while experts know that NAD+ is a crucial molecule for mitochondria’s functioning, the idea of a NAD+ IV drip is a little nonsensical, says Macleod.

“NAD+ by itself doesn’t go inside your cells,” she says.

Since it’s a water-soluble compound, it has no way of getting into your cells, even if it’s piped directly into your bloodstream. When scientists want to increase the NAD+ in a cell, they will treat it with an NAD+ precursor, which cells can take in and then transform into NAD+. One such precursor is nicotinamide riboside, a form of vitamin B3, which you could take as a supplement, says Macleod, but it’s better to just get it through a healthy diet.

Another trendy “remedy” for mitochondria is methylene blue, a medication that’s mostly used today as treatment for methemoglobinemia, a rare blood disorder. Bryan Johnson experimented with it, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been suspected of using it. In response to a question about whether people should look into methylene blue for their mitochondria, Mochly-Rosen just laughed and said, “Um, no.” (Macleod hadn’t even heard of methylene blue.)

What actually helps your mitochondria function

The best thing you can do for your mitochondria is embrace the healthy habits you’re likely already familiar with: exercising and eating healthy.

The link between mitochondria and exercise is particularly strong. A 2019 review published in The Journal of Physiology describes exercise as “the most potent behavioural therapeutic approach for the improvement of mitochondrial health.” Other research has shown that exercise can improve the mitochondria of sedentary adults and spur the production of more mitochondria and mitochondrial proteins. Research from scientists at York University in Toronto also suggests that, through exercise, you can get your mitochondria to more closely resemble those of younger adults.

Diet is also an important factor for mitochondrial health. Eating too much sugar overwhelms mitochondria, says Picard, which can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes.

And like everything else in your body, mitochondria need to rest and recover. “Metabolically, mitochondria switch from using glucose during the day to using fat during the night,” Mochly-Rosen says. Some research suggests that if you eat a particularly late dinner or have a midnight snack, you force your mitochondria to keep processing glucose, and they don’t have time to rest. To offset this, Mochly-Rosen suggests not eating too late at night, though she declined to recommend a specific regimen.

As for supplements that claim to be formulated for mitochondrial health, Picard says he’s “not sure boosting mitochondrial health with a supplement stack is a solution.” From Macleod’s point of view, the whole culture around dietary supplements feels a bit misguided. “A lot of the time in biology it’s important not so much to have very low or high levels of something, but to have the right level,” she says. People will hear that a vitamin or mineral is crucial for good health and then take a supplement that contains way more than the daily requirement. Too much of a good thing is possible, Macleod says, so the better option is to just eat a balanced diet.

Whether you’re living for your mitochondria or not, the basic recommendations for health and longevity essentially remain the same. If thinking about the well-being of your mitochondria motivates you to embrace exercise or eat more vegetables, then by all means, dive in. If, however, you are someone with an established foundation of healthy habits, thinking more about your mitochondria probably won’t make a huge difference — which is fine. After all, what’s good for mitochondria is good for the rest of the body, and vice versa.

How fit do we really need to be?

2026-01-13T08:48:13-05:00

Should we all strive to be marathoners? | Chen Jimin/China News Service/VCG/Getty Images

If 2025 proved one thing, it’s that Americans’ interest in maximal fitness is higher than ever.

Participation in running races broke records. The New York City Marathon in November had almost 60,000 finishers, breaking the previous year’s record by several thousand, and ultrarunning events, which involve running longer-than-marathon distances, recorded historic participation levels. Meanwhile, extreme workout regimens are going viral. That includes 75 Hard, which dictates 75 consecutive days of drinking a gallon of water, forgoing alcohol, following a new diet of your choice, reading 10 pages of nonfiction, and twice-daily 45-minute workouts (one of which must be outside).

While there is also undoubtedly a social component to this exercise maximalism, the aim of all this exertion is to be “fitter,” a word we tend to use as a synonym for “healthier.” We all know that getting regular exercise is critically important for our physical and mental well-being, but what’s less clear is just how fit we need to be for health. Should we all be striving to be ultra-fast marathoners, or is there a middle ground in fitness, where we can be just as healthy without those lofty exercise goals? After all, far from all of us will become elite athletes. When it comes to fitness, is more really more?

The answer is a little complicated. Improving your fitness through exercise affects health in a number of ways. It reduces the risk of diseases like heart failure or dementia, but it also makes your body more functional, so you’re able to open heavy doors or carry your groceries. Researchers have found that the biggest improvement to health — for longevity but also your quality of life — appears when a non-exerciser begins to add some light exercise in their routine. Going from only light exercise to more intense or prolonged exercise does have additional health benefits, but there do seem to be diminishing health returns on the investments of your time and efforts. Complicating the issue is the fact that fitness can’t be boiled down to just one thing, or one measure.

What exactly is fitness?

Experts typically divide fitness into two categories you are probably familiar with: muscular strength and cardiorespiratory (or cardiovascular) fitness.

Muscular strength is simply how strong you are, and can be developed by resistance training like lifting weights. The primary connection between muscular strength and health is in the fact that maintaining good muscle mass prevents frailty and allows people to do the activities they want to do without injury.

The benefits that resistance training in young adulthood might provide for long-term health and longevity are a little unclear. But what is clear is that maintaining muscular strength is incredibly important for the health of older adults, since muscles weaken as you age. There’s also some mixed scientific evidence suggesting that resistance training can possibly improve brain health, help with managing Type 2 diabetes, and reduce cancer mortality.

Cardiorespiratory fitness is how well your body can utilize oxygen while exercising, and is improved via aerobic exercises, including running or biking. There’s much more robust research connecting cardiorespiratory fitness to health than with strength fitness, with evidence showing that it reduces the risk of heart disease and death by cancer, and it also improves longevity in general.

This type of fitness is typically measured using a metric called VO2 max, which describes how many milliliters of oxygen the body consumes per kilogram of body weight per minute of exercise. To complete any function, our bodies require a constant supply of oxygen, which is supplied as our lungs breathe in air, hearts pump oxygenated blood throughout the body, and muscles extract and make use of that oxygen. If any one of these components is weak or inefficient, that limits the amount of exercise the body can complete as it struggles to meet oxygen demands. So a higher VO2 max means a person’s body is better at transporting and utilizing oxygen, which typically means they’re capable of more exercise.

Another important measure of cardiorespiratory fitness is metabolic equivalents (METs), which is the ratio of how hard your body is working during any task or exercise compared to when your body is at rest. So a MET of 3 means your body is working 3 times harder than if you were sitting still. Improving cardiorespiratory fitness will eventually allow you to exercise at higher METs than before and improve your VO2 max.

Together, strength and cardio make up what we think of as “fitness,” which is ultimately the ability to go about your daily life and all its activities without injury or discomfort. There is some research showing that people get the greatest health benefits when they exercise both components. There is currently much more granular evidence showing exactly how cardio benefits health and longevity compared to strength training.

Is there a cap to fitness benefits?

When it comes to cardiorespiratory fitness specifically, researchers have found a clear link to longevity. “Individuals who have higher levels of [cardiovascular] fitness live longer,” says Mark Haykowsky, a professor at the University of Alberta who researches aging and quality of life. In a paper he coauthored, published in 2024, data revealed that people who can run a mile in under 4 minutes — an incredibly difficult feat that would require a high VO2 max — live on average about 5 years longer than their predicted life expectancy.

But you don’t need to be an elite runner to see longevity benefits from cardio. In a study of Danish men, researchers found that when participants had higher than average VO2 Max levels in middle age, they ended up living longer on average. A 2009 study from Japan found that just improving your maximum exercise abilities by 1 MET can decrease your risk of mortality by 13 percent.

In another study, Duck-chul Lee, a professor of health and human development at the University of Pittsburgh, found that even small amounts of running can affect fitness and longevity. The results suggested that running for just one hour can add seven hours to your life, regardless of your pace. “That one-to-seven ratio is really sweet,” Lee says. Of course, you cannot run away from death indefinitely, and by his numbers this benefit caps out at around 3 years (which you could hypothetically achieve by running an hour a day for more than 10 years).

When it comes to muscular strength, however, the relationship between being stronger and living longer are less clear. “Interestingly, evidence would suggest that elite power and strength athletes don’t receive that same longevity benefit” as endurance athletes, Haykowsky says. It still could be possible that an hour of strength training has some effect on longevity, like an hour of running does, but “we need more data,” Lee says.

Regardless, immense physical strength by itself does not seem to be associated with better health. Bodybuilders, for example, tend to live shorter lives than the average population — though that link is muddied by the potential health impacts of steroid use.

So should we all be running marathons?

When it comes to cardiorespiratory fitness, it does seem that more is more. There’s no cutoff point where health benefits drop off.

However, it’s important to distinguish fitness from exercise. While being fitter is better for health, that does not mean that more exercise is always better, says Lee. Doing intense vigorous exercise for prolonged periods won’t necessarily improve your fitness at a better rate than taking a more moderate approach.

In his study, Lee found that “runners running less than one hour a week and runners running three hours or more per week showed almost equal benefits on mortality.” Running more than four hours didn’t lead to a decline in health benefits, simply a plateau.

James Smoliga, a professor of rehabilitation sciences at Tufts University, is personally fed up with the popularity of marathons and wishes that people would focus more on doing higher-intensity exercise for shorter periods of time. Alternating between short bouts of intense cardio and rest, also known as high-intensity interval training, has been shown to improve VO2 max more effectively than doing moderate cardio for longer. “Being able to run a slow marathon doesn’t necessarily make you more fit than somebody that runs a good 5K,” he says.

But how good is good enough? National guidelines recommend 150 minutes of “moderate” intensity aerobic exercise in a week — Smoliga says you can gauge “moderate” as the highest intensity exercise you can do while still carrying on a conversation. Over time, the bar for “moderate” will get higher. At first, you might only be able to chat while running at a 14-minute mile pace, but over the months or years, you might find you can still converse while pacing at a 10-minute mile. You’ll be able to do more while not necessarily feeling like you’re working harder, up to a point. When eventually that drop-off does happen, it’s fine to stay in that moderate-intensity band of workout, says Smoliga. You’re still moving your body and contributing to your health.

While you definitely don’t need to pay attention to measures like VO2 max or METs to work out well and improve your cardio over time, it can be a good way to track your own personal progress. Many fitness trackers these days will display estimates of your VO2 max, and some might even provide longevity scores based on that and other metrics. But while it can be encouraging to track how your VO2 max changes over time, especially since that’s the best measure of cardiorespiratory fitness, other simpler measures like pace or mileage can be just as good for gauging your progress. Plus, focusing too much on improving any one measure can distract from the one variable that should matter most when you’re exercising: Does your body feel better?

It’s also important not to discount the importance of strength training, especially in older age. Fitness, especially muscular fitness, naturally decreases throughout the lifespan, so staying strong past midlife becomes much more of an uphill battle. Preventing that loss of strength via strength training is important — weaker grip strength in older adults is linked to disability, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.

If you’re young, generally healthy, and able, it makes sense to pick cardio as your primary focus for exercise and fitness, says Haykowsky. There’s more evidence that you’ll get more long-term bang for your buck. But starting in your 50s, as your natural muscle tone declines, “I would say lift weights as your primary focus, but be sure to still be walking and moving as your secondary focus,” Haykowsky says. You still want to include some cardio, but the greater immediate threat to health will be frailty, so strength training should be the priority.

Things like balance and flexibility are also elements of fitness, says Smoliga, just less talked about. But they contribute to health in that they help you live your life without incident, so you don’t injure yourself while lifting a package or stepping out of the shower.

While there’s no one level of fitness we should all be striving for, experts say that the most important thing is that you’re exercising at all. Lee emphasized the fact that the greatest health bump experts observe in people happen when they transition from no fitness to some fitness. Going from some fitness to more fitness is good too, but getting started is what’s most important.

How to turn casual friends into close friends

2026-01-06T15:44:10-05:00

Having strawberry friends is like tending a garden. | NurPhoto/Getty Images

When Sam Dylan Finch was in his early 20s, he had the friend group he thought he always wanted. “We had holiday dinners, and game nights, and it felt really lovely,” he said.

But then, some dating within the friend group and then a death in the circle split them apart. People split up and chose who they wanted to stay friends with, Finch said, “and I was not the chosen friend.”

The whole experience sent Finch into “hermit mode,” where he began intensely analyzing his friendships and their patterns. He realized certain tendencies: He struggled to prioritize friendships the same way he prioritized romantic prospects, he was a people pleaser who felt he always had to earn people’s kindness, and he often sought friendships with people who were not emotionally available to him. And he would feel nervous when people were kind to him right off the bat — “It didn’t feel earned, and I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”

Realizing his patterns, Finch was determined to break them. He wanted to start intentionally cultivating friendships with the people who were kind, whose interactions left him feeling safe and nourished. He started by making a list of everyone in his orbit, from current friends to old friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Then, in his phone contacts, “I challenged myself to put a strawberry emoji next to the people who were really kind to me,” he said. “The kind of warmth and kindness that made me nervous.”

This handful of “strawberry people” became Finch’s priority friends, and he even told some of them about his intentions to cultivate their friendship. He also put seedling emojis next to the names of people who challenged his ways of thinking and helped him grow.

“It completely changed my life,” said Finch. Clearly marking where he would channel his energy gave him a roadmap to building more purposeful relationships. Previously, he would get easily overwhelmed by text messages, opting to respond to no one. But now, if a text from a strawberry person popped up on this phone, the emoji acted as a reminder to Finch that he values this friendship and should try to respond without too much delay, even if he was tired.

The practice also made Finch more mindful about how interactions with others really made him feel. After hanging out, he made a practice of asking himself “how did that feel?” or “how did that feel in my body?” He noticed times when he was tense versus relaxed and nourished versus drained and made sure his strawberry people were those who left him feeling the former.

A strategy for everyone

Inspired by the impact this little change made in his life, Finch posted about the strawberry people strategy in a thread on X, which is likely where social psychologist Devon Price heard about it. Price included the strategy in their book Unmasking Autism, which was where psychotherapist Michaia Walker heard about it.

“The meta conversation, the conversation about the relationship, is normalized in romance and not enough in friendship.”
Sam Dylan Finch

Walker, who practices virtually from their home in New York City, began talking about the strategy with clients earlier this year. “It’s really similar to a concept of ‘safe people’ that we often use with folks with neurodivergence,” they say. People with autism are often encouraged to find “safe” friends who they can let their guards down around and not worry about being themselves, said Walker, and the strawberry people method can be super helpful for keeping track of those people.

In times of crisis, or in moments when you need to find a person to lean on, most people reflexively turn to family members or the friends they see most often, Walker said. But those might not actually be the people who can best support you emotionally. Attaching a strawberry emoji to the friends with whom you feel emotional intimacy provides a good visual reminder and mental shortcut, Walker said.

Walker said that this strategy could be really helpful for anybody looking for ways to track and maintain emotionally close friendships, whether you’re neurodivergent or not. And you can make it your own. If you wanted to differentiate your strawberry people a little more, you could, for example, “put a strawberry and a suitcase for work friends, and then a strawberry and a flower for regular friends,” they say.

You could choose a different meaning of the strawberry, or a different emoji, based on the aspect of friendship you’re trying to focus on. You could even teach this method to kids to help them learn from a young age what a healthy and emotionally safe friendship is supposed to feel like, said Walker.

How to make this work for you

If you’re interested in implementing this strategy, Walker recommends starting small, with just three to five strawberry people at first. If you’re not used to actively cultivating friendships, having more than a few strawberry friends can be overwhelming. But depending on your capacity and what you want out of your social life, “you can build up to 10 or more,” Walker said.

Their suggestions align well with psychologists’ understanding of our social bandwidths. Given our own limited tanks of social and emotional energy, no one is capable of maintaining huge numbers of close friends. In fact, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has posited that we only have the capacity to maintain three to five very close friendships at a time, though his research suggests we can have up to 15 “best” friends (your main social circle and the friends you might turn to for favors like child care) and 50 “good” friends (your “big-weekend-barbecue people,” as Dunbar has described them).

Once you have your designated strawberry people, decide what purposefully building a friendship means to you. Do you want to check in regularly with them? Or are these simply the friends who you’ll always respond to in a timely manner? Clearly outlining how your treatment of these friendships will differ from others will help crystallize the meaning of the strawberry.

Finch, who uses this strategy to this day, said he’s found the strawberry people method most impactful when you tell your friends what you’re doing. You don’t necessarily have to say “you’re one of my strawberry people,” he said — “that requires more explanation than is actually necessary” — but it can be nice to voice to them that you want to be intentional about cultivating your friendship.

“The meta conversation, the conversation about the relationship, is normalized in romance and not enough in friendship,” said Finch. But that conversation can be so powerful because, unless you tell them, “it’s difficult for people to know how important they are to you.” Telling someone that you are serious about your friendship can help make sure you’re on the same page and invites them to make this a joint endeavor.

When talking about strawberry people, Finch likes to remind folks that it’s not about ranking your friends or creating some exclusive top tier. “We’re not doing a MySpace Top 8,” he said. Rather, for him, the strawberry emoji is simply an indicator of where he can find kind and fulfilling friendships and a reminder that these are the folks he wants to intentionally build closeness with.

The strawberry emoji is also not a permanent designation; people can gain or lose strawberry emojis or seedling emojis over time. “I think of it like tending a garden,” Finch said.

The unexpected link between your diet and your anxiety

2025-12-15T13:49:33-05:00

By May 2024, Ebony Dupas knew she had a problem. She had started to feel a mild anxiety about her sense of direction and purpose in life earlier that year, but within a couple months, that had spiraled into a paranoia that she could neither shake nor explain.

Referred by her doctor, Dupas began consulting with different psychiatrists, all of whom considered diagnosing her with generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Most wanted to put her on medication right away. But one psychiatrist first ordered bloodwork to see if something else might be going on. “I was mostly depleted of magnesium,” Dupas says.

Most people being treated for mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression typically use a mix of just two strategies: medication (usually an SSRI) and psychotherapy. But there’s increasing interest in the connection between food and the brain, and especially how nutrition could affect psychiatric conditions. Researchers have not only found a connection between the gut microbiome and mental health, but also connections between deficiencies in certain micronutrients, including magnesium or choline, and conditions like anxiety and depression.

What’s less clear is how supplementation could alleviate certain symptoms. We don’t have robust clinical trial data showing how micronutrients affect people’s mental health, and the role of supplements in mental health is understudied, particularly because the research can be so challenging. Most supplements also don’t require approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to go to market, meaning there’s an abundance of different options, most of which have different formulas that aren’t robustly studied.

While researchers have long understood that nutrition is important for brain health, people don’t typically look to their diets as a way to improve their mental health, and doctors don’t always think to connect mental health with diet. The link between food and the brain “is overlooked by most people,” says Uma Naidoo, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the 2023 book Calm Your Mind With Food. Future research to clarify the link between micronutrients — through either food or supplements — and mental health outcomes could help us stop underestimating that link.

How diet is linked to mental health

The connection between diet and the brain seems counterintuitive, but it’s actually linked to basic biology. “The same environment where food is being digested is also the environment where neurotransmitters are produced,” Naidoo says. The gut produces most of the body’s serotonin, as well as a good portion of the neurotransmitter GABA. Drugs used to alter levels of serotonin are frequently used to treat depression and anxiety. The most common group are known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

One of the best understood links between nutrition and mental health involves how food affects the gut microbiome. Researchers have known for years now that gut inflammation and changes in the gut microbiome are linked to mental conditions like anxiety and depression, and possibly other psychiatric disorders. But there’s also a growing and ongoing interest in how specific vitamins and minerals affect the brain.

“The brain and mental health are no longer just ‘above the neck’ problems.”
Uma Naidoo, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Mass General

Deficiencies in several different micronutrients, including magnesium, B vitamins, vitamin D, omega-3s, choline, and L-theanine have been shown to affect mental health conditions. Researchers can induce anxiety in mice, for example, by manipulating and lowering their magnesium levels. The extent to which supplementation affects mental health in humans is less well-established.

The research so far is a little sparse and mixed. A 2024 review found that “supplemental magnesium is likely useful in the treatment of mild anxiety and insomnia,” especially in people with already low magnesium. But across studies, results showing how much magnesium supplements can help people with mental health conditions like anxiety or depression are often inconsistent, likely because there are so many different forms these supplements can take.

Magnesium, for example, can be taken as a supplement in the forms of magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium oxide, magnesium chloride, and more. How well the body can make use of magnesium in these different forms, and how good these different forms are at delivering magnesium to the brain still needs to be better studied, says Alexander Rawji, a psychiatrist in Long Island, New York, and the lead author of the paper. Similar challenges exist for other micronutrients.

As you may have learned in high school biology, eating varied foods rich in certain vitamins and minerals is crucial because your body cannot make its own supply and yet relies on them to perform critical functions. And research suggests that most Americans don’t get nearly enough of many micronutrients. Previous national survey data said that as much as 94 percent of the US population does not get adequate daily vitamin D, 52 percent don’t get enough magnesium, and 92 percent don’t get enough choline.

Few people would argue that diet is completely unimportant for brain health. But while a connection between nutrition and brain health is clear, the persistent gaps in scientific knowledge make it difficult to really say what role supplements should play in the treatment of mental illness. Ideally, future research would get us to a place where we better understand how micronutrients in the diet distinctly affect the workings of the brain, as well as which supplements are best absorbed by the body and brain. On top of that, we don’t even fully understand the mechanisms that cause most mental health disorders.

What role should nutrition play in mental health care?

Once her blood test results came back, Dupas’ psychiatrist put her on a regimen of supplements — magnesium, L-theanine, B-complex vitamins, and omega-3s — in addition to a small dose of an SSRI. But Dupas didn’t stay on the medication for long. After a couple weeks, “I felt really clear again,” she says. “I could focus again and not feel paranoid that people are coming after me.”

Dupas could be an outlier. Research suggests the vast majority of people with a mental health condition won’t see dramatic improvement of their symptoms from supplementation alone. Nevertheless, she’s grateful that she stumbled across a doctor who actually ordered bloodwork to see if there may be any hidden culprits exacerbating symptoms and hopes more patients get similar treatment.

Providers should be ordering bloodwork for patients, especially if they have multiple health conditions and medications that could be affecting their health, Rawji says. And if they have a deficiency, that’s certainly something to address. A complicating factor, however, is the fact that blood panels can’t always give you a perfect picture of what’s going on — tests to detect magnesium levels in blood serum often come back normal even if their body stores of magnesium are low.

Regardless, Rawji uses supplements as “part of a multipronged approach” in his treatment of patients, he says. How much the supplements will help will vary person to person, and they definitely shouldn’t replace other treatments, including medications like SSRIs or benzodiazepines. “If you expect magnesium to be a benzo for anxiety then you’re going to be very disappointed,” he adds.

Not all psychiatrists are trained to ask questions related to diet when assessing patients or to look for nutrition deficiencies, according to Naidoo, the doctor from Mass General. This could lead to ignoring relatively easy interventions that can make real differences. Furthermore, overemphasizing supplements comes with its own risks. If you eat a healthy, well-balanced whole foods diet, you’ll probably get more than enough of the vitamins and minerals you need.

There’s “almost always” an opportunity to use nutrition to improve mental health, since no one really has a perfect diet, says Naidoo. If you’re particularly concerned with including more of certain micronutrients into your diet, she suggests eating more green leafy vegetables, nuts, and legumes for magnesium. Milk, eggs, and whole grains are good sources of B vitamins; eggs, beans and cruciferous vegetables are good for choline; fatty fish and eggs are good for vitamin D; and you can get L-theanine from green tea.

Nutrition is a huge, consequential tool for how we maintain our bodies. And we understand, now more than ever, that the importance of food for the body includes benefits for the brain. “The brain and mental health are no longer just ‘above the neck’ problems,” Naidoo says.

People are nicer than you think

2025-12-15T13:50:32-05:00

It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought I was a complete idiot.”

But research shows, they probably didn’t. In a phenomenon dubbed the “liking gap,” people consistently tend to like you better than you think they do. All sorts of other “gaps” — or “social prediction errors,” as experts would call them — govern our social lives. We consistently underestimate everything from people’s empathy toward us to how willing they are to help us. These patterns are strongest when we interact with strangers or acquaintances but can persist for many months into a friendship. They permeate relationships with all kinds of people, from classmates to roommates and coworkers. This pessimism about other people’s attitudes toward us also has consequences, like undercutting our own willingness to connect with others.

One particularly stark example of this misjudgement is how likely people think it is that a random stranger would return your dropped wallet to you. This question is often used in surveys as a measure of social trust, says Lara Aknin, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University who studies social relationships and happiness. When you take people’s responses and compare them to the results of real-world “wallet drop” studies, where researchers drop or leave wallets in public spaces and observe the rate of return, Aknin says, “Wallets are returned way more than people expect.”

In one of the most well-known wallet drop studies from 2019, researchers followed more than 17,000 “lost” wallets containing various sums of money in 355 cities across 40 countries. They found that “in virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money” — a result virtually no one predicted.

We misjudge not only other people’s altruism or empathy, but also how they’ll react to our overtures. Other research shows that people consistently underestimate how happy someone will feel after we show them a random act of kindness, pay them a compliment, or shoot a message just to get in touch. This all starts at a pretty young age, too. One 2021 paper found that the liking gap begins appearing in children as young as 5, and research from 2023 showed that children as young as four underestimate how much another person will appreciate an act of kindness.

To some, these may feel like pretty minor points — who cares if people enjoy our compliments more than we think they do? But experts say that these misperceptions of others can be a big obstacle to forming connections, especially in our purported loneliness epidemic.

What we lose when we underestimate others

We doubt others at our own cost, according to Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. If we don’t think someone will appreciate a compliment, then we won’t give it. If we don’t think a friend will be happy to hear from us, we won’t reach out. “We get nervous, and then we turn inwards,” Sandstrom says, “and so we’re less happy and more fearful.” We behave as if others don’t like us, possibly shutting them out, hurting our chances of connection, and curtailing any possibility for building new friendships. “If you don’t trust someone will be tender with you, you won’t get vulnerable with them, and you’ll just stay at surface level.”

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she adds — if you don’t think someone will help you, you’ll behave in a way that signals that you don’t expect kindness from them, and then they really won’t help.

The cycle reinforces our doubts, and over time it “undercuts our willingness to reach out and engage with other people,” says Aknin. After all, people generally try to hew to norms and behave according to how they think most people behave. It doesn’t help when so many of us are inundated with bad news, reading and hearing stories that highlight people’s bad qualities. That “reduces our expectations of other people’s kindness” and makes the world feel like a riskier place, she says, one where you maybe don’t want to ask for help or extend a hand.

And so, “we’ll miss social opportunities,” she says, “which we know by and large to have a pretty direct impact on our happiness.”

To hammer the point home, Aknin points to the World Happiness Report, which she helps to produce every year. For the 2025 report, researchers assessed how various factors — including unemployment, doubling your income, or believing that it’s “very likely” that your lost wallet will be returned to you — impact self-reported life satisfaction. More than any of the variables they looked at, believing that others will return your wallet to you was most strongly linked with greater well-being, an effect that was almost eight times larger than for doubling your income. The message is clear: Trust in other people and happiness go hand in hand.

One theory behind these persistent underestimations is that people are “naturally super driven to stay connected to the group, and super vigilant for signs of rejection,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. “We get super cautious about putting ourselves out there because we don’t want to take social risks,” she says. “But we forget that other people are also driven by those same concerns.”

Insecurity — or at least self-consciousness — about our competence, charisma, or likability plays a big role in how we misjudge our interactions. Research shows that we tend to assess our role in conversations by how competent we were, whereas other people tend to focus on our warmth or how nice we seemed.

In the case of giving and receiving compliments, we can all probably think back to a time when someone said something nice out of the blue, and how warm and happy we felt, Bohns says. But in times when we’re about to give a compliment, “we lose all perspective about what it feels like to be in the other role — we’re so focused on how awkwardly we’re going to deliver that compliment, the fact that maybe we’re interrupting them, or that maybe they don’t want to be approached by us right now.”

How to recalibrate

So how do we beat back the pessimism and stop underestimating others? The research so far says there’s no easy answer, says Sandstrom. You can tell people about the data and teach them that people enjoy interactions with you more than you’d predict, but that doesn’t tangibly change people’s attitudes or behaviors.

“The only thing that’s really worked is just making people do the scary thing,” Sandstrom says. When people regularly exercise the muscles of talking with strangers, paying compliments, or reaching out to old friends, and see that they go well and are received kindly, then their outlooks start to change. But without regular practice, it’s easy to forget.

“You don’t need to drop your wallet and see if it’s returned,” says Aknin, “but give yourself opportunities to be proven right or wrong about people.” Because “if the data are right, people will be kinder than we expect.”

All close relationships start somewhere. And that process requires you to open up, be vulnerable, ask for help, and offer it, says Sandstrom. And if you can muster up the bravery to go ahead and trust that the person you’re talking to will be kinder and more open than you instinctively feel, that can open up a lot more opportunities for connection. After all, she says, “somebody has to go first.”

Missing a friend from the past? You should reach out.

2024-08-06T10:02:55-04:00

This story first appeared in The Highlight, Vox’s digital magazine unpacking the big ideas changing our present and shaping our future. Become a Vox Member to read these stories first.

When Joanna Li was 10 years old, her life was upended as her family moved from Guangzhou, China, to Vancouver, Canada. A shy girl with imperfect English, Li quickly bonded with Aoi, another Asian girl in her class who had recently moved from Japan. Li and Aoi were basically inseparable. “She was the very first friend I ever made, she was my only friend,” says Li. They did playground gymnastics on the monkey bars, played catch (Aoi was a big baseball fan), and bonded over their love of Sanrio characters. They saw each other almost every day. But after only a year together, Li’s family moved to Toronto, and the two never saw each other again.

“I think back on it as such a good time in an otherwise really difficult year,” says Li, now a 28- year-old research assistant in Montreal. She still thinks about Aoi from time to time and wonders what happened to her. She sometimes thinks about getting in touch, and has even gone so far to cursorily look her up on social media. But something stops her from making an earnest effort to reconnect.

“I don’t really know who she is now, where she is, or what she’s like as a person,” Li says. The prospect of reaching out but failing to recapture their old camaraderie, or to connect only for the relationship to stagnate is enough of a deterrent for Li, who worries that a disappointing outcome will leave a sad tinge on her warm childhood memories.

Li is hardly alone in her fears about reconnection. While most people report having an old friend they care about but have lost touch with, shockingly few are actually willing to reach out, says Lara Aknin, a professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. It’s a common conundrum for many, especially in the midst of a so-called “loneliness epidemic,” in which many of our social connections seem to be fraying.

We don’t reach out as often as we should

Aknin and her research partner, Gillian Sandstrom, recently published new research composed of a series of surveys and experiments across more than a thousand participants, all aimed at better understanding why it’s so hard to reach out to old friends, and what we can do to encourage the act of reconnection.

“People are not averse to the idea of reconnection in general, but mainly about the idea of having to be the one to initiate it,” says Aknin. Study participants mentioned that they feared being an intrusion; feeling like their overture might be inappropriate or awkward; and worrying that their old friend will think it’s weird that they’re getting in touch. This resistance is surprisingly hard to get over, even in the smoothest of circumstances.

Aknin and Sandstrom tinkered with their study set-ups to make it as easy as possible for people to take the leap and make contact. In one setting, they asked participants to pick an old friend they cared about and would like to get in touch with — specifying that this must be a friend whose contact information they already had and who they did not have a falling out with. The team gave each person three minutes to draft an introductory message to that friend. Next, participants were given a moment of pause and invited to actually send that message out. “Regardless of what we did, it didn’t seem to matter,” says Aknin. Across the board, in the easiest of circumstances, most people didn’t want to reach out. Less than a third of participants were willing to send an old friend their digital message. “We were a little dumbfounded,” says Aknin. “I thought we were going to be at 70 or 80 percent. We thought this was low-hanging fruit.”

Interestingly, when other participants were asked to estimate how many people would send their messages, they guessed that just over half would. Maybe that’s why we don’t reach out, says Aknin, because we expect other people to do it.

Aknin and Sandstrom’s research also suggests that people struggle to find adequate justification for getting back in touch with someone. Survey participants cited “being in a friend’s neighborhood,” “wanting to share a meme,” “saying that they were thinking about them,” and “wanting to share a memory” as not good enough reasons to get back in touch with an old friend.

Of course, there are a number of very valid reasons to not reconnect. Yasmina K., 32, who asked not to use her last name for privacy, says that she lost touch with a lot of friends during her college years. She felt really lost during that time, and needed to get to a place where she felt more secure in who she was before she could start rekindling those old relationships. Once she got to that point, she started remembering the friends from her past who she valued and missed — it made natural sense to try to get back in touch.

Aknin’s research also suggests that “the more an old friend feels like a stranger, the less likely people are willing to reach out to them.” This certainly was the case for Hema Rao. By the time Facebook came around in the mid-2000s, Rao, 53, was living in Pennsylvania and hadn’t seen her college or high school friends from India in well over a decade. She found a few of them easily on social media, but hesitated to reach out. “I gave it a lot of thought for some time,” she says. So much of their lives was unknown to her — where they lived, what they were doing — it felt almost inappropriate to intrude on their lives, she says.

The pleasure and benefits of reconnecting

Both Yasmina and Rao ended up reconnecting with their friends, despite their initial apprehensions, and both led to fruitful, reignited relationships. In the last year or so, Yasmina met several friends from grade school through reunions, getting mutual friends to arrange hangouts, and serendipitously running into them in real life. In every instance, Yasmina has reminded herself that you really will never know unless you try. “Whatever is meant to come from it will come from it,” she says, “but only if you just make the move and do it.” Though she felt so many doubts before reaching out, Rao has, too, felt so much joy in her reconnections. They’ve taught her that being the initiator is a low-risk, high-reward proposition. “At the most, they’re going to say no, or ignore you, and that’s not the end of the world,” Rao says.

Interestingly, Aknin and Sandstrom found that the people who sent off their messages to old friends reported feeling happier than the people who did not. “We can’t say for certain that it made people happier, because happier people may have been more likely to send their messages in the first place,” says Aknin. But it’s not a totally implausible idea.

A large body of research also shows that people consistently underestimate the value of different social interactions. Researchers know that we tend to underestimate how much people enjoy talking to us, the impressions our conversations have on others, and people’s interest in making new connections. Past research has also shown that people tend to be happier to hear from us than we expect. As the authors of one 2022 paper put it: “undersociality is unwise.”

Research on networking and “dormant ties”— broadly defined as work-related connections that subjectively feel like they’re no longer active, where you’re no longer in touch — could also provide insights to the benefits of reconnecting with old friends. This research about professional contacts shows that there are different benefits to meeting up with someone you’re already close to, compared with a new acquaintance, says Daniel Levin, a professor at Rutgers University who researches professional networking.

When you meet with someone you are already connected to, that interaction benefits you by building on an established sense of trust and closeness. Connecting with a new acquaintance, on the other hand, brings the advantage of introducing novelty into your world. One paper co-authored by Levin found that when you reconnect with someone you’ve lost touch with, you “double dip,” he says. That connection reawakens a dormant tie, and the result is that you see both a building sense of trust and closeness and the novelty each person brings after so much time apart.

Socializing is a skill to practice, just like any other

So how can we muster up the willpower to get over our fears and press send? You might just need a little bit of practice.

In their new research, Aknin and Sandstrom also crafted an intervention that they hoped would get people more comfortable with the idea of reaching out. To test it out, they gave participants three minutes to write and send messages to current friends and family. Another group of participants were given three minutes to scroll on social media. After that time passed, all participants were encouraged to spend the next couple minutes sending a message to an old friend they haven’t been in touch with for a while. The people who had spent their three minutes sending messages to family and friends were about 70 percent more likely than their social media scrolling counterparts to message their old friends in that time.

Aknin isn’t quite sure why this worked, but other existing research suggests that the more people practice socializing, the more trust they gain in their own abilities. People are also more likely to reach out to others when they learn that social skills are indeed skills that can be learned and improved on, says Levin. “If you’re of the mindset that some people are just born great networkers, then you’re less likely to reach out to other people,” he says.

Aknin has access to all the messages people wrote in preparation for contacting an old friend, whether those messages were sent or not. Notably, early analyses show that those who wrote messages with a vague mention of future plans, like “we should hang out sometime” or “let’s get coffee?” had a higher likelihood of actually sending their notes.

New friends are wonderful, says Rao, but it can be hard to feel like they properly understand where you’re coming from when they don’t have access to your history. With old friends, especially ones who you grew up with, “you seem to relate to the same situation,” she says. And she’s grateful to be able to think back on those times together. “It’s hard to put in words … it’s such a pleasure.”

And that is, in part, what Li is seeking as well. Aoi was “the only one who really shared that part of my life with me,” she says. “It’d be nice to reminisce with someone and be like, hey, remember when we were 10 and we didn’t know English and were new to the country? Did you feel the same way I did?”

The case for inviting everyone to everything

2023-11-09T17:53:38-05:00

When a friend from college told Melissa Chan that he was coming to visit her in New York City, she was thrilled. It was 2018; she hadn’t seen him in four years, when they had studied abroad in Vienna together. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is a big deal. Let me throw you a party,’” Chan remembers. This friend didn’t know anyone in New York, but that didn’t matter. Chan invited a bunch of her friends, and told them all her usual encouragement to “just bring whoever.” Leading up to the party, her friend mentioned that he had chatted a lot with the two young people in his row on the flight over. “He was like, ‘Oh, is it weird if I invite them to the party?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, that’d be so fun.’”

And it was fun. Having two strangers who were totally unconnected from anyone, save for the serendipitous flight seating plan, made for a great icebreaker, and it sparked a lot of dynamic conversation. Although Chan didn’t keep in touch with the pair, she and her visiting friend remember that night fondly. It sort of encapsulated Chan’s general philosophy when it comes to parties and socializing: Be free and easy with your invitations. “When there’s more of a melting pot at an event, it’s just a more interesting environment and way more conducive to diverse conversations and making new friends,” she says.

The idea of hosting or even attending a large social event where there will be plenty of strangers, or people from disparate friend groups, can generate a lot of anxiety for some. It can be easy to overthink about who may not get along, or catastrophize the potential awkwardness of talking to groups of people with whom you have little in common. Research, though, suggests that a reluctance to reach out and connect is unwise, that we underestimate others’ interest in connecting, and that people like Chan are really onto something. Of course, you cannot invite everyone to everything; an intimate game night will by definition include only a few people, and your dinner parties will be constrained to your number of place settings. If you are able to include more people, though, research suggests you should, and that it could benefit all involved. Especially in a purported epidemic of loneliness and isolation, putting yourself in a place to form new and surprising connections could lead to revelations. So why not broaden the invitation?

Broadening the invitation means more than just including new acquaintances or strangers at social events. It can also mean reaching out to people you haven’t spoken to in a while, welcoming neighbors who you haven’t really socialized with before, or just encouraging your friends to bring plus-ones.

Inviting someone to an event where they may not know others can feel awkward, especially if it’s been a long time since you last spoke or if you just don’t know them very well. But research shows that you should take heart — chances are that person will be way happier to hear from you than you expect. One study found that people we know are consistently happier to hear from us than we anticipate, especially when the overture is more surprising and unexpected. “People are much more reluctant to reach out to old friends than they should be,” says Lara Aknin, a professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada who studies how relationships affect well-being. But despite the research, “It’s surprisingly hard to get people to move the needle on this.”

Another thing people commonly find challenging is reaching out to people when it seems like they aren’t very close. Still, asking to hang out with those beyond your closest circles of friends can reap so many other rewards, Aknin says. “I think it’s intuitive to us that our strong relationships matter. But we overlook all these possibilities for contact with people who are all around us all the time,” she says.

For example, one study found that people who mingled with more loose acquaintances or strangers in a day reported better moods and a higher sense of communal belonging. Similarly, a paper assessing people’s “social portfolios” found that people whose regular social interactions ran the gamut of closeness (all the way from family members to coworkers to strangers) reported higher life satisfaction and better quality of life than those with less diverse social lives. Researchers have also documented what they call “the liking gap,” where after conversing with a stranger, “people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.” Some introverts may expect to feel worse after a social interaction, but even they benefit; all but the extremely introverted tend to feel happier and more energized after socializing.

Interacting with a wide circle of loose friends and acquaintances is also valuable because each person provides more information about the world outside your bubble, says Robin Dunbar, a psychologist and author at the University of Oxford. A lot of important context gets to us “through the information percolating through the friends in your network,” he says. This can be anything from the next fashion fad to a different worldview or philosophy.

In other words, even people with little regular presence in your life can have a big impact on your happiness. So for people who tend to have diverse but disparate friend groups, this means that hosting events where you bring all your worlds together not only benefits yourself, but also “could reasonably be interpreted as a kind of service to others,” says Aknin.

“Generally, the more connected our networks are, with lots of tendrils and different camps, the better individuals feel and the higher they report their well-being to be,” she says. And there’s “a ton of work about how just belonging to multiple groups is strongly associated with health and happiness.” Researchers have linked belonging to multiple social groups — like recreational sports teams or book clubs — with higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression.

Auburn Scallon, a writer in Jackson Heights, New York, loves socializing with diverse mixes of friends. For her, hosting these events brings an added ease of scheduling: “If I met up with everyone I loved only one-on-one, I’d see each person once a year,” she says. Getting everyone together in a big to-do means “I can see the people I love more often.” Not everyone you invite will be able to attend everything, but that’s okay, Scallon says — she makes it clear her invites are low-stakes, and she doesn’t take a “no” personally. She remembers a friend in the early 2000s who, after turning down the fifth invite in a row said: “But please keep inviting me! I’ll make it eventually.” That sort of response is totally welcome, she says; she’d love to see them, but if not now, there will always be next time.

It can also be cool to observe how people are when they’re talking to people whom they likely wouldn’t have met otherwise, says Scallon. It’s another thing she loves about mixing her friends: “You see a different side of people.” And it’s always thrilling when people end up connecting and tell her, “I enjoyed meeting so-and-so,” she says. Science, again, backs her up. Research from 2014 found that playing friend matchmaker increases happiness and well-being. And the more unlikely the match, the more rewarding facilitating that connection is.

If you have two friends who you think might get along, it can be easier to introduce them in a larger, more casual group setting, says Chan. Counterintuitively, it seems like larger groups can put people more at ease because it takes the pressure off of every little interaction, she thinks. Regardless of whether those bonds turn into long-term relationships, “it’s still a moment of human connection enjoyable in the moment, and that’s inherently enjoyable.”

If two friends do hit it off, that opens up doors for you to invite them both to something smaller and more intentional, Scallon says. It can be trickier and more awkward to invite two people who don’t know each other to hang out when it’s just the three of you. But if they’ve already met and got along, then you’re in the clear.

Regardless of the size and scale of your social planning, Scallon says it’s important to stay mindful of certain things. She remembers living in Seattle and asking a friend along to a function — it was only when they got there that Scallon realized her friend was “the only person of color in a room full of white people.” She felt so apologetic and now tries to think about these things in advance. If she invites someone shy to a big gathering, “I try to be intentional about introducing people and providing context for who they’re talking to.” She’ll host things with open-ended time periods so that friends with work- or family-related time constraints can come whenever they prefer, and she’ll try to communicate as clearly as she can what vibe people can expect.

Part of communicating that vibe includes Covid-safety expectations. Scallon is still extremely Covid-conscious, so social gatherings for her have been few and far between ever since 2020, and it’s been several years since she’s organized a large social event. These days, if she does socialize, it’s as a guest — “it’s easier to be safe on my own than to impose precautions on my own guests,” she says. But it’s not the same. Taking precautions while it seems that others have resumed socializing with abandon is isolating, says Scallon, and over the past few years she’s felt a slight shift in herself; she thinks she’s become a little more reserved and introverted as her social muscles grow cold from disuse. But “I do miss it,” she says — the hosting and organizing and bringing friends together. It’ll be exciting when the time comes to resume the practice and reconnect.

Socializing in big groups of people is intimidating. And people are terrible at predicting what social situations will make them happy, says Aknin. “Honestly, I also think we have overly pessimistic views of other people,” she adds. It comes from a reasonable place: “We’re trying to avoid the worst-case scenario which could be a big flop, an awful conversation. But many times we are really positively surprised by other people, by their kindness, by their warmth, by their appreciation, and by our own abilities.”

Thankfully, the research suggests that the more we practice interacting with strangers in novel situations, the easier it becomes and the more positively we begin to view future interactions. “The more we’re exposed to something, the more we like it,” says Aknin.

Being more open to mixing your social groups and extending invitations to people even if you don’t know them very well is about giving yourself, and your friends, more opportunities for connection. You simply cannot make friends with someone if you never cross paths with them, or if you don’t allow for time to converse and find common ground, says Aknin.

Yes, broadening the invitation can mean embracing unknowns, Chan says, but who’s to say those potential unknowns won’t be great? By extending invitations beyond your inner circle, beyond what is known and familiar, you at least give yourself the possibility to make a new or interesting connection. If you don’t, those possibilities are zero, and that would be the greater shame, she says: “People are more capable than you give them credit for.”