Michael here.

Not knowing what to do with your hands

or offering a handshake

when the other person offers a fist bump.

Forgetting someone's name...

Not having anything to say and forgetting your phone at home so you can't

be distracted by it. Getting caught staring at a stranger.

Striking up a conversation with someone you don't know in a bathroom.

Someone oversharing, telling a group

too much information. Overhearing a couple breaking up.

Noticing food in someone's teeth but not telling them and, well, now it's been too

long and bringing up would be weird.

Smelling a fart in an elevator that wasn't yours

but, well, now you can't even react to it or mention that you've noticed it

or pretend to even know what a fart is. All of those things

are awkward.

We don't like

awkwardness. It makes us uncomfortable, cringe.

But what is awkwardness?

Why is it good and who is the main character

of the universe?

To really understand awkwardness we need to put it in context with the entire

family of forces that guide social behaviour.

Think of this sheet of cardboard as a list all possible behaviours.

It's not infinite because of the limits of science and biology.

You can't move faster than light or be in two places at once.

You can't wear pants made out of molten lead.

Next, there are legal limits - the laws of the state.

They delineate what you agree not to do, lest the authorities

punish you - murder, stealing, speeding. What's left

is molded by the finder tool of social expectations.

It's not illegal to chew with your mouth open or

not cover a sneeze on a crowded bus or

act disrespectfully, but it is frowned upon.

Punished not by the police, but by social ostracism,

public opprobrium. Being called rude,

gross, mean, annoying.

Awkwardness is the finest tool. It sands

social dynamics by smoothing out what even etiquette doesn't rule on.

It's not a violation of the laws of physics to accidentally hug someone

for longer than they expected. It's not against the law

either. And the etiquette for how long a hug should last

isn't black-and-white. But it is

awkward. Like touching a hot stove or getting a parking fine or losing friends,

awkwardness nudges us to avoid certain actions in the future

and smooth things out when they happen. People who demonstrate

self-consciousness when needed

are communicating cooperative intentions,

which helps them get along well with others. It's no coincidence that brains,

susceptible to feeling occasional awkwardness, would become so common.

They're successful at cooperating,

at social life. Feeling awkward shows that you understand

and are keen on smooth social exchanges.

Now, too much or too little concern for social rules

isn't healthy, but researchers found that just the right

amount is great.

When a person shows remorse or embarrassment or

awkward discomfort, when appropriate,

others perceive them as being more trustworthy, and their actions as

more forgivable. And it's not just perception.

Such individuals also tend to be more objectively prosocial when tested.

Kinder, more generous. Even when a person is completely oblivious to a faux pas

they've committed,

awkwardness still arises.

People around them can feel uncomfortable. It's called

vicarious embarrassment and it's a function

of empathy - the ability to feel what others feel

or will feel, when

or if they realize what they've just done.

The more 'EEE' someone is, that is

easily sympathetically embarrassed, the harder it is for them to sit through

other people's cringe-inducing moments,

even fictional once like in cringe comedy.

Researchers found that being more easily and pathetically embarrassed

does not correlate to be more easily embarrassed yourself.

Instead, it's linked to being more empathetic,

an important capacity for social creatures to have. Our seemingly

counter-intuitive attraction to viewing cringing moments

like, say, bad American Idol auditions, is perhaps then just a light form

of morbid curiosity. You may think that

awkwardness is totally different from physical pain

or outright name-calling.

But your brain would disagree. You see,

researchers found that social missteps activate, among other regions,

the secondary somatosensory cortex and

dorsal posterior insula - areas of the brain that are also connected

to the sensation of physical pain. Our brains

process the breaking of social standards and the breaking of

bones through similar neural pathways. Likewise

the same sympathetic nervous system that mobilizes you to deal with physical

threats,

"fight or flight", is activated by social challenges

where awkwardness or embarrassment

might be at stake. Like events where you are very aware

of being watched. Speaking in front of a group or

embarrassing yourself in front of onlookers or having nothing to say

on a first date.

Awkward silence...

Your blood pressure increases, causing you to overheat

and sweat.

Oxygen is needed for

fighting and running, so breathing increases and digestion shuts down, causing

nausea and butterflies in your stomach.

Your body instinctively contracts into a protective fetal position and

fighting that reaction to act natural makes you shake.

Blood vessels in your extremities contract to prioritize major organs

leaving you with cold fingers

and toes and nose. These symptoms don't

alleviate awkwardness, they compound it.

But that's history's fault.

Long before human social dynamics were complicated enough to involve

"is it one kiss or two?" or politics

at Thanksgiving dinner, we developed primitive reactions to

physical threats and haven't had enough time yet to evolve

newer ones. Self-conscious

anxiety can be tough to get out of our minds after we've done something

awkward. Fixating on social blunders is

easy and hard to overcome.

Why was I so unsure, so unconfident,

so awkward? Well, some of the blame

may lie with the neurotransmitter oxytocin.

Oxytocin is sometimes called "the love hormone"

because it modulates prosocial feelings, like trust

and attachment, which it does. In fact,

nasal sprays of oxytocin are being used to increase

trust during couples therapy and in the reduction of anxiety

and depression. Though there are fears that it could also be used to

deviously increase trust and make a person more susceptible

to con artist schemes. But oxytocin

also modulates negative social feelings like

fear and anxiety. A dose of it

makes people better at recognizing the facial expressions for disgust

and fright. It's also involved in the feelings that make us

approach or avoid certain social stimuli.

And it may play a role in making positive and negative

social interactions more salient

in our memories; that is, stand out more,

command more of our attention after the fact, make us

think about them more. Negative ones

especially because of what psychologists call

negativity bias. All things being equal,

negative social interactions and negative emotions

have a greater impact on our mental states than positive ones.

In fact, we have more words for negative emotions

than positive ones and a richer vocabulary

to describe them. Thus such memories and thoughts can be tough to just

get over. What does the other person think of me?

I was so awkward. Are they telling other people? We replace social encounters in

our heads over and over again.

Surely, the person we were awkward with remembers us the same way

we're remembering ourselves and is equally fixated on that

awkward thing we did. Or are they?

A great wet blanket for smothering the fire of self-conscious anxieties

is perspective. Consider the famous advice of Eleanor Roosevelt:

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you

if you realized how seldom they do."

As much as you

obsess over yourself, you're not the first thing on everyone else's minds.

They're worried about themselves, what

you think about them. And, more importantly, what they think about

themselves.

You're not the centre of their world.

Another famous old piece of advice tells us that in your twenties and thirties

you worry about what other people think about you. In your forties and fifties

you stop worrying what other people think about you. And then

finally in your sixties and seventies you realize that they were never

thinking about you

in the first place.

The tendency to act and think as though you are the true main character of the universe

has been called protagonist disease.

It seeps into our behavior all the time.

For instance, the fundamental attribution

error. When evaluating actions you

often view yourself as a complex character, acted upon by

various challenges and antagonist, whereas

other people are seen as just one-dimensional background characters

with simple unchanging

roles. The guy who took way too long ordering in front of you this morning,

well, he's obviously just innately annoying person.

That's his entire purpose. But when you take too long ordering,

it's because the staff was unhelpful or you were flustered,

preoccupied by an earlier conversation.

You are the main character after all. You know a lot more about what's going on

in your life. It's easy to live like that.

There isn't time or mental space to consider every other person

as complicated and fully flushed out. But they are.

The realization of this has a name. A name given to it by The Dictionary

of Obscure Sorrows, one of my favorite resources

and now, YouTube channels. They wrap profound concepts up in tiny little word

packages.

To be sure, giving something a name doesn't show that you know it or

how to feel about it but nonetheless words put handles on things,

so we can manipulate them, hold them down, offer them to others,

feel bigger than the concepts they label.

Now, their word for acknowledging that you are just

an extra in other people's stories, not even cast in most of them,

is 'sonder'. This is their definition of it.

"Sonder - the realization that each

random passerby is living a life as vivid

and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions,

friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—

an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling

deep underground, with

elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives

that you’ll never know existed, in which you might

only appear once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background,

as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a

lighted window at dusk."

Acknowledging this makes your awkwardness

looks small. But it also makes

all of you look small.

Tiny. A needle in a giant haystack,

but nonetheless in possession of a big

idea. Your blemishes are

lost from far away, and so is your uniqueness,

but the view from way up here... Well,

it's unbeatable.

And as always,

thanks for watching.