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A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection
We know that social connection enriches our lives—so why do we hesitate to connect?
“One of those rare books that might actually change your life.” —Daniel Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Stumbling on Happiness
There is a paradox at the core of human life. We are a highly social species uniquely equipped to connect with other people and doing so is better for us. Yet we so often choose to be unsocial. We avoid talking to the stranger who sits next to us. We struggle to move beyond small talk with an acquaintance. We are reluctant to express our gratitude to people we appreciate. Every day, we avoid opportunities to connect with strangers, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and family. By missing those moments, we miss out on all the benefits of a more social life—one that is happier and healthier for everyone.
University of Chicago psychologist and author of Mindwise, Nicholas Epley has spent his career studying the way we connect, and he has found that our social fears often keep us from reaching out. But Epley shows us how to seize the small moments with insights such
Social connection is a choice we make based on expectations about how others will respond to us—expectations that tend to be overly pessimistic.Introverts and extroverts alike benefit from choosing to be a little more social.Mistaken expectations can cause us to avoid interacting in ways that create strong connections—such as having a conversation—in favor of less satisfying interactions—such as social media or texting.While many books promise one big fix, making a habit of small connections is much more likely to improve your life.The habits and practices that Epley advocates are approachable. The beauty of this book is that small acts have an outsized impact on the most important parts of our lives.
Bridging the gap between two people is easier than we think, and success more likely, if we choose to be a little more social.
*Includes a downloadable PDF containing data graphs and visuals from the book
“One of those rare books that might actually change your life.” —Daniel Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Stumbling on Happiness
There is a paradox at the core of human life. We are a highly social species uniquely equipped to connect with other people and doing so is better for us. Yet we so often choose to be unsocial. We avoid talking to the stranger who sits next to us. We struggle to move beyond small talk with an acquaintance. We are reluctant to express our gratitude to people we appreciate. Every day, we avoid opportunities to connect with strangers, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and family. By missing those moments, we miss out on all the benefits of a more social life—one that is happier and healthier for everyone.
University of Chicago psychologist and author of Mindwise, Nicholas Epley has spent his career studying the way we connect, and he has found that our social fears often keep us from reaching out. But Epley shows us how to seize the small moments with insights such
Social connection is a choice we make based on expectations about how others will respond to us—expectations that tend to be overly pessimistic.Introverts and extroverts alike benefit from choosing to be a little more social.Mistaken expectations can cause us to avoid interacting in ways that create strong connections—such as having a conversation—in favor of less satisfying interactions—such as social media or texting.While many books promise one big fix, making a habit of small connections is much more likely to improve your life.The habits and practices that Epley advocates are approachable. The beauty of this book is that small acts have an outsized impact on the most important parts of our lives.
Bridging the gap between two people is easier than we think, and success more likely, if we choose to be a little more social.
*Includes a downloadable PDF containing data graphs and visuals from the book
320 pages, Hardcover
Published May 19, 2026
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The Weather Before Speech
In “A Little More Social,” Nicholas Epley turns the smallest social hesitation into a study of warmth withheld.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 16th, 2026
A quiet train car, a red hat, and the almost-spoken hello at the heart of “A Little More Social” – a study in the fragile interval where hesitation, hope, and human contact are all still deciding whether to enter the air.
In “A Little More Social,” the first hinge is nearly invisible until Nicholas Epley slows it down. No slammed door. No operatic betrayal. No late-night confession with rain politely tapping the window.
Just a train car, a stranger in a red hat, and Epley sitting beside her, rehearsing the courteous evasions by which a day stays colder than necessary. What if she does not want to talk? What if he seems strange? What if the next half hour is made worse by his attempt to make it better?
A whole book gathers in that pause. Epley’s real subject is not connection as an abstract virtue, but the weather before speech: the pre-lived awkwardness, the imagined rejection, the private forecast that persuades a generous impulse to stay indoors. Before the hello, there is a prediction. Before the compliment, the thank-you note, the phone call, the useful truth, there is another one. Much of “A Little More Social” argues that this forecast often underestimates the welcome waiting on the other side. Not gloriously wrong. Not wrong in a way that will make strangers clasp hands and sing in railway aisles. Wrong in the smaller, more consequential way that turns possible warmth into another silent commute.
Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Mindwise,” begins with an old truth and narrows it to the moment where it matters. Relationships are not ornaments; they hold up more of a life than we notice. Aristotle got there early, and he did not even have to endure a group text. Epley’s sharper contribution is to ask why people who already know this let the knowledge stall at the exact second it might become useful. His answer is not that we are cruel, cold, or hopelessly antisocial. More often, we are poor meteorologists of our interpersonal futures.
We mistake dread for data. We treat the voice saying “this will be awkward” as if it has already returned from the future carrying proof.
The woman in the red hat becomes the book in miniature. Epley sees a train car full of people physically close and socially sealed, bodies near and voices absent, each commuter protecting a little acreage of solitude. When the woman sits beside him, he attempts the smallest possible opening. His first line is not exactly Shakespeare: he compliments her hat and jokes that he has one just like it. It is the kind of line that, if it had knees, might be knocking them together. But she brightens. Conversation follows. The commute improves. Epley’s fear had felt like information. It was only a guess.
From that scene, “A Little More Social” builds a progression of tests: why connection matters, why people avoid it, what happens when they choose differently, and how they might become, in Epley’s phrase, more wisely social. The structure is nearly diagrammatic, but the diagram earns its keep. The chapters test the idea through train talk, gratitude letters, phone calls, requests, compliments, support, and honest sentences. The sequence matters because it moves from low-stakes contact to more exposed acts of thanks, help, and candor. By the end, sociability has stopped meaning talkativeness and has started meaning delivery – getting attention, gratitude, care, and truth to the person who needs them.
That shift is where the book stops being advice about chatter and becomes an argument about conduct. A lesser version would have stopped at smiling at baristas and called it a day. Epley’s book is better than that. Its strongest chapters show that “being more social” is not an argument for extroversion by attrition. It is a case against leaving warmth undelivered. We feel grateful and leave the thanks unspoken. We notice someone in pain and do not know how to step closer. We need help and do not ask. We know a truth that might spare another person embarrassment or loneliness or confusion, and we choose the safer fog. The book becomes most interesting when it stops asking whether we should talk to strangers and starts asking why so many good things die in rehearsal.
The recurring proof pattern is clear; by the later chapters, the gears begin to show. Commuters expect solitude to be better than conversation, then report the reverse. People worry that gratitude letters will sound awkward, while recipients feel deeply moved. Compliment-givers overestimate how strange they will seem and underestimate how bright the compliment will make the other person feel. Those who ask for help imagine imposition; those being asked often experience the request as a chance to be useful. Honesty, too, is less catastrophic than forecast: what seems, in rehearsal, like a sentence that will detonate a relationship may arrive instead as trust, relief, or long-delayed oxygen. In chapter after chapter, the world rehearsed in the head before we speak is stingier than the one that often answers.
That cycle is both the argument’s engine and its limitation: dread, test, surprise, revised belief. By the later chapters, the reader can sometimes hear the lesson clearing its throat before it enters the room. Epley varies the examples, and the escalation from strangers to gratitude to kindness to honesty gives the book genuine moral movement. Still, “A Little More Social” is most vulnerable when it demonstrates one more time that the feared encounter goes better than expected. Its clarity has a cost. It becomes so good at proving its best idea that one occasionally wishes for a more stubborn case against it.
But some rooms are not train cars. Some silences are not merely mistaken predictions. Some barriers are not wobbly fence posts but built walls: trauma, hierarchy, danger, exhaustion, prejudice, cultural difference, professional risk, the accumulated evidence that a particular room will not receive candor kindly. Epley is not reckless about this. The final chapter’s emphasis on being “wisely social” gives the book’s buoyancy necessary ballast. He is not asking readers to treat every passing human as an assignment. He understands that social anxiety cannot be wished away by cheerful prescription, and that avoidance can sometimes be protection rather than error. Even so, his instinct is toward reassurance. At times, the book is so eager to hand sorrow a useful handle that it sands down the splinters.
Epley’s prose behaves like the advice: it approaches gently, keeps its voice level, and tries not to make the reader flinch. He writes in plain, companionable sentences, often beginning in common experience, opening the window onto research, and landing in something the reader might actually try. He wants the experiment to work in your life by Tuesday.
He can be funny without elbowing the reader in the ribs. Children, he notes in effect, are not a steady source of bliss but an emotional roller coaster; if all parents did with children were fun things, parenthood would have another name. The humor does not cheapen the feeling. It keeps the book from developing a halo and drifting off into the wellness ether.
The imagery stays close to the ground because the argument needs trains, phones, notes, and queues. Epley’s world is made of the places where people stand near one another while pretending not to: coffee lines, waiting rooms, office corridors, DMV queues, the little public stages of private withdrawal. The phone is not the villain here; it is the alibi, always ready to give solitude the look of business. One of the book’s sharper contemporary threads is the difference between being reachable and being reached. A text can maintain contact. A voice can restore a person.
The obvious comparison is to “The Power of Strangers” by Joe Keohane, another book interested in the neglected possibility of people we do not yet know. But Epley’s more revealing shelf-mate may be “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert, because both books are about the mind’s confidence in its own misread futures. Epley is less mischievous than Gilbert and less journalistic than Keohane. He is warmer, more practical, less stylishly barbed. His book wants not simply to be admired, but to be enacted in small, testable increments: one call, one note, one honest sentence, one greeting that does not get smothered before it reaches the air.
The family material lowers the book’s voice. Epley writes about the death of his unborn daughter, Sophie, and the later adoption of Lindsay, a child with Down syndrome, not as memoir garnish but as the premise tested by grief and adoption. The research on connection does not stay safely in train cars and coffee shops. It enters disability, uncertainty, family, and love. These pages are moving because Epley does not inflate them. He lets them show a harder version of the same principle: social courage is not always cheerful. Sometimes it means asking people what their lives have actually been like. Sometimes it means allowing other families’ testimony to correct your fear. Sometimes it means discovering that love is larger than the imagined catastrophe.
The book is strongest and most vulnerable in this same move. Epley’s gift is to turn advice that can sound embroidered into testable behavior. “Relationships matter” is agreeable enough to be nearly inert. “You may be misreading how your warmth will be received” is sharper. It gives the reader something to examine in real time. Am I avoiding because this is genuinely unwise, or because I have mistaken discomfort for prophecy? Am I protecting someone, or am I protecting myself from the feeling of being awkward? Am I being kind by staying silent, or have I merely dressed fear in good manners?
The book does not need to advertise its relevance; the train car supplies it. We live in a phone-bright present of abundant contact and persistent loneliness, of platforms crowded with expression and rooms full of people not speaking. Epley does not belabor this, which is wise. He does not write as if screens invented avoidance, or as if the cure for isolation is to become aggressively charming in public spaces until city ordinances intervene. His claim is quieter and more durable. The tools have changed; the hesitation has older roots. Human beings have always feared rejection, bungled gratitude, postponed truth, and mistaken silence for safety. The current age has simply made it easier to look occupied while doing so.
Formally, Epley stays on a well-marked road, but he walks it with purpose. “A Little More Social” belongs to the popular behavioral-science tradition: anecdote, study, finding, application. Within that recognizable design, though, it completes its chosen task with unusual steadiness. It makes the next human act feel both less grand and more consequential. You do not have to be dazzling. The compliment can be inelegant. The hello can wobble. The gratitude note can contain a sentence that will not trouble the anthologies. Warmth does not always need good tailoring.
My rating: 84/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars on Goodreads. The score reflects a humane, lucid, practical book whose friendliness has more structure beneath it than first appears, while acknowledging its repetition and the limits of its optimism. It is not the final word on loneliness, social fear, or the harder politics of who gets safely to speak. It is better understood as an intervention in the instant before impulse becomes conduct.
The book’s last and best service is to make that instant visible – that tiny place where kindness either enters the world or quietly turns back. A hello with a question mark can remain tucked behind the teeth, where nothing happens and no one is rejected. Or it can step into the air, imperfect and alive, and become a period.
Early compositional thumbnails searching for the right balance of solitude, proximity, and suspended possibility before the final image found its quiet social weather.
A faint graphite underdrawing mapping the architecture of the scene, where posture, distance, and the slight turn toward another person begin carrying the book’s emotional argument before color arrives.
A figure study refining the seated body, the turned head, and the held-back physical tension that make the almost-hello feel human, vulnerable, and believable rather than merely symbolic.
A border study testing how the frame itself could echo the book’s themes through spare motifs of transit, communication, and withheld contact without crowding the central stillness of the image.
A swatch sheet translating the cover palette into watercolor terms, establishing the cool blues, muted neutrals, and warm brown accents that give the final piece its restrained emotional temperature.
The first wash settling over the pencil scaffold, where the train car begins to gather atmosphere and the image starts moving from structural thought into felt emotional space.
A process detail of the red-hat focal moment, where the painting narrows to its smallest hinge and the book’s central drama becomes visible in one hesitant human approach.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
In “A Little More Social,” Nicholas Epley turns the smallest social hesitation into a study of warmth withheld.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 16th, 2026
A quiet train car, a red hat, and the almost-spoken hello at the heart of “A Little More Social” – a study in the fragile interval where hesitation, hope, and human contact are all still deciding whether to enter the air.
In “A Little More Social,” the first hinge is nearly invisible until Nicholas Epley slows it down. No slammed door. No operatic betrayal. No late-night confession with rain politely tapping the window.
Just a train car, a stranger in a red hat, and Epley sitting beside her, rehearsing the courteous evasions by which a day stays colder than necessary. What if she does not want to talk? What if he seems strange? What if the next half hour is made worse by his attempt to make it better?
A whole book gathers in that pause. Epley’s real subject is not connection as an abstract virtue, but the weather before speech: the pre-lived awkwardness, the imagined rejection, the private forecast that persuades a generous impulse to stay indoors. Before the hello, there is a prediction. Before the compliment, the thank-you note, the phone call, the useful truth, there is another one. Much of “A Little More Social” argues that this forecast often underestimates the welcome waiting on the other side. Not gloriously wrong. Not wrong in a way that will make strangers clasp hands and sing in railway aisles. Wrong in the smaller, more consequential way that turns possible warmth into another silent commute.
Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Mindwise,” begins with an old truth and narrows it to the moment where it matters. Relationships are not ornaments; they hold up more of a life than we notice. Aristotle got there early, and he did not even have to endure a group text. Epley’s sharper contribution is to ask why people who already know this let the knowledge stall at the exact second it might become useful. His answer is not that we are cruel, cold, or hopelessly antisocial. More often, we are poor meteorologists of our interpersonal futures.
We mistake dread for data. We treat the voice saying “this will be awkward” as if it has already returned from the future carrying proof.
The woman in the red hat becomes the book in miniature. Epley sees a train car full of people physically close and socially sealed, bodies near and voices absent, each commuter protecting a little acreage of solitude. When the woman sits beside him, he attempts the smallest possible opening. His first line is not exactly Shakespeare: he compliments her hat and jokes that he has one just like it. It is the kind of line that, if it had knees, might be knocking them together. But she brightens. Conversation follows. The commute improves. Epley’s fear had felt like information. It was only a guess.
From that scene, “A Little More Social” builds a progression of tests: why connection matters, why people avoid it, what happens when they choose differently, and how they might become, in Epley’s phrase, more wisely social. The structure is nearly diagrammatic, but the diagram earns its keep. The chapters test the idea through train talk, gratitude letters, phone calls, requests, compliments, support, and honest sentences. The sequence matters because it moves from low-stakes contact to more exposed acts of thanks, help, and candor. By the end, sociability has stopped meaning talkativeness and has started meaning delivery – getting attention, gratitude, care, and truth to the person who needs them.
That shift is where the book stops being advice about chatter and becomes an argument about conduct. A lesser version would have stopped at smiling at baristas and called it a day. Epley’s book is better than that. Its strongest chapters show that “being more social” is not an argument for extroversion by attrition. It is a case against leaving warmth undelivered. We feel grateful and leave the thanks unspoken. We notice someone in pain and do not know how to step closer. We need help and do not ask. We know a truth that might spare another person embarrassment or loneliness or confusion, and we choose the safer fog. The book becomes most interesting when it stops asking whether we should talk to strangers and starts asking why so many good things die in rehearsal.
The recurring proof pattern is clear; by the later chapters, the gears begin to show. Commuters expect solitude to be better than conversation, then report the reverse. People worry that gratitude letters will sound awkward, while recipients feel deeply moved. Compliment-givers overestimate how strange they will seem and underestimate how bright the compliment will make the other person feel. Those who ask for help imagine imposition; those being asked often experience the request as a chance to be useful. Honesty, too, is less catastrophic than forecast: what seems, in rehearsal, like a sentence that will detonate a relationship may arrive instead as trust, relief, or long-delayed oxygen. In chapter after chapter, the world rehearsed in the head before we speak is stingier than the one that often answers.
That cycle is both the argument’s engine and its limitation: dread, test, surprise, revised belief. By the later chapters, the reader can sometimes hear the lesson clearing its throat before it enters the room. Epley varies the examples, and the escalation from strangers to gratitude to kindness to honesty gives the book genuine moral movement. Still, “A Little More Social” is most vulnerable when it demonstrates one more time that the feared encounter goes better than expected. Its clarity has a cost. It becomes so good at proving its best idea that one occasionally wishes for a more stubborn case against it.
But some rooms are not train cars. Some silences are not merely mistaken predictions. Some barriers are not wobbly fence posts but built walls: trauma, hierarchy, danger, exhaustion, prejudice, cultural difference, professional risk, the accumulated evidence that a particular room will not receive candor kindly. Epley is not reckless about this. The final chapter’s emphasis on being “wisely social” gives the book’s buoyancy necessary ballast. He is not asking readers to treat every passing human as an assignment. He understands that social anxiety cannot be wished away by cheerful prescription, and that avoidance can sometimes be protection rather than error. Even so, his instinct is toward reassurance. At times, the book is so eager to hand sorrow a useful handle that it sands down the splinters.
Epley’s prose behaves like the advice: it approaches gently, keeps its voice level, and tries not to make the reader flinch. He writes in plain, companionable sentences, often beginning in common experience, opening the window onto research, and landing in something the reader might actually try. He wants the experiment to work in your life by Tuesday.
He can be funny without elbowing the reader in the ribs. Children, he notes in effect, are not a steady source of bliss but an emotional roller coaster; if all parents did with children were fun things, parenthood would have another name. The humor does not cheapen the feeling. It keeps the book from developing a halo and drifting off into the wellness ether.
The imagery stays close to the ground because the argument needs trains, phones, notes, and queues. Epley’s world is made of the places where people stand near one another while pretending not to: coffee lines, waiting rooms, office corridors, DMV queues, the little public stages of private withdrawal. The phone is not the villain here; it is the alibi, always ready to give solitude the look of business. One of the book’s sharper contemporary threads is the difference between being reachable and being reached. A text can maintain contact. A voice can restore a person.
The obvious comparison is to “The Power of Strangers” by Joe Keohane, another book interested in the neglected possibility of people we do not yet know. But Epley’s more revealing shelf-mate may be “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert, because both books are about the mind’s confidence in its own misread futures. Epley is less mischievous than Gilbert and less journalistic than Keohane. He is warmer, more practical, less stylishly barbed. His book wants not simply to be admired, but to be enacted in small, testable increments: one call, one note, one honest sentence, one greeting that does not get smothered before it reaches the air.
The family material lowers the book’s voice. Epley writes about the death of his unborn daughter, Sophie, and the later adoption of Lindsay, a child with Down syndrome, not as memoir garnish but as the premise tested by grief and adoption. The research on connection does not stay safely in train cars and coffee shops. It enters disability, uncertainty, family, and love. These pages are moving because Epley does not inflate them. He lets them show a harder version of the same principle: social courage is not always cheerful. Sometimes it means asking people what their lives have actually been like. Sometimes it means allowing other families’ testimony to correct your fear. Sometimes it means discovering that love is larger than the imagined catastrophe.
The book is strongest and most vulnerable in this same move. Epley’s gift is to turn advice that can sound embroidered into testable behavior. “Relationships matter” is agreeable enough to be nearly inert. “You may be misreading how your warmth will be received” is sharper. It gives the reader something to examine in real time. Am I avoiding because this is genuinely unwise, or because I have mistaken discomfort for prophecy? Am I protecting someone, or am I protecting myself from the feeling of being awkward? Am I being kind by staying silent, or have I merely dressed fear in good manners?
The book does not need to advertise its relevance; the train car supplies it. We live in a phone-bright present of abundant contact and persistent loneliness, of platforms crowded with expression and rooms full of people not speaking. Epley does not belabor this, which is wise. He does not write as if screens invented avoidance, or as if the cure for isolation is to become aggressively charming in public spaces until city ordinances intervene. His claim is quieter and more durable. The tools have changed; the hesitation has older roots. Human beings have always feared rejection, bungled gratitude, postponed truth, and mistaken silence for safety. The current age has simply made it easier to look occupied while doing so.
Formally, Epley stays on a well-marked road, but he walks it with purpose. “A Little More Social” belongs to the popular behavioral-science tradition: anecdote, study, finding, application. Within that recognizable design, though, it completes its chosen task with unusual steadiness. It makes the next human act feel both less grand and more consequential. You do not have to be dazzling. The compliment can be inelegant. The hello can wobble. The gratitude note can contain a sentence that will not trouble the anthologies. Warmth does not always need good tailoring.
My rating: 84/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars on Goodreads. The score reflects a humane, lucid, practical book whose friendliness has more structure beneath it than first appears, while acknowledging its repetition and the limits of its optimism. It is not the final word on loneliness, social fear, or the harder politics of who gets safely to speak. It is better understood as an intervention in the instant before impulse becomes conduct.
The book’s last and best service is to make that instant visible – that tiny place where kindness either enters the world or quietly turns back. A hello with a question mark can remain tucked behind the teeth, where nothing happens and no one is rejected. Or it can step into the air, imperfect and alive, and become a period.
Early compositional thumbnails searching for the right balance of solitude, proximity, and suspended possibility before the final image found its quiet social weather.
A faint graphite underdrawing mapping the architecture of the scene, where posture, distance, and the slight turn toward another person begin carrying the book’s emotional argument before color arrives.
A figure study refining the seated body, the turned head, and the held-back physical tension that make the almost-hello feel human, vulnerable, and believable rather than merely symbolic.
A border study testing how the frame itself could echo the book’s themes through spare motifs of transit, communication, and withheld contact without crowding the central stillness of the image.
A swatch sheet translating the cover palette into watercolor terms, establishing the cool blues, muted neutrals, and warm brown accents that give the final piece its restrained emotional temperature.
The first wash settling over the pencil scaffold, where the train car begins to gather atmosphere and the image starts moving from structural thought into felt emotional space.
A process detail of the red-hat focal moment, where the painting narrows to its smallest hinge and the book’s central drama becomes visible in one hesitant human approach.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
May 31, 2026
I received a free copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway!
I always feel weird rating non-fiction, but I particularly feel strange rating this one. I don't think I'm the target audience here, but I'm trying to not let that make me a harsh critic. I do think this is a worthwhile and helpful read for folks that experience social anxiety.
1. I think this is a great *starter* for people that experience cognitive distortions or catastrophize. The "why" is laid out: "The purpose of our sociometer--our self esteem-- is to steer us into situations that keep us positively connected to others, and away from situations that leave us disconnected or rejected. This doesn't mean that our sociometer functions with perfect accuracy" (11). I like explanations like this that teach us how our feelings show us our needs. This is a common conversation I have with people (e.g. anger isn't "bad," it tells us that something needs to change; anxiety isn't "bad," it's trying to protect us). What feels like is missing from the book is the next part: Sometimes, though, because of trauma or other signals that our body is picking up, the feelings might be disproportionate. This is why we can't logic our way through feelings, etc. etc.. Which leads me to:
2. I understand the framing of social interaction as a "choice," but it's hard for me to truly back and suggest this book because it lacks an acknowledgement of regulation. For the people who read this book and still struggle, pointing them towards anxiety management skills + somatic grounding techniques would be helpful. In other words, when people do want to (or have to) socialize but feel like they can't, teaching them the other choices they can make to help them get to that point. I know that this isn't a "coping skills" book, but I would've liked to have seen more acknowledgement of this concept.
3. Not enough asterisks/caveats in this book for me! Very familiar with a strengths-based approach (which in this book is optimism vs. pessimism). I like the spectrums of approach to avoidance and that kind of concept. When talking about a story where a young girl converses with an intruder and he ends up not harming her or her dad, the takeaway is like /the power of conversation/, which, yes, is powerful, but we can't just be one-dimensional in psychology. It is well-known (like in that one episode of Grey's Anatomy where a character starts telling a shooter personal facts about herself) that humanizing yourself can make an attacker less likely to hurt you, but we should really just acknowledge that proper safety really is important, too. (Going back to anxiety serves a purpose).
4. A huge miss for me in most psychology things is when we don't talk about technology more. There's a little bit of it in the beginning where Epley mentions that people are too busy being on their phones to talk to each other on the train, but what's missing for me is the idea that the "choice" to socialize is also the choice to put the phone down. Then we get to the same issue I had in #1, where the "how" is missing. How do you put your phone down! It's addicting!
4. I love the graphs! The notes section is perhaps my favorite part. Lots of good data in there.
5. I also like the acknowledgement that learning how to have a conversation is often a learned skill, and that tools can help us converse (like that card game, We're Not Really Strangers).
Overall, I do think Epley is aware of all of the points above. He is a professor and intellectual. But to make a pop psychology book, things unfortunately have to be simplified or narrowed down :/
I always feel weird rating non-fiction, but I particularly feel strange rating this one. I don't think I'm the target audience here, but I'm trying to not let that make me a harsh critic. I do think this is a worthwhile and helpful read for folks that experience social anxiety.
1. I think this is a great *starter* for people that experience cognitive distortions or catastrophize. The "why" is laid out: "The purpose of our sociometer--our self esteem-- is to steer us into situations that keep us positively connected to others, and away from situations that leave us disconnected or rejected. This doesn't mean that our sociometer functions with perfect accuracy" (11). I like explanations like this that teach us how our feelings show us our needs. This is a common conversation I have with people (e.g. anger isn't "bad," it tells us that something needs to change; anxiety isn't "bad," it's trying to protect us). What feels like is missing from the book is the next part: Sometimes, though, because of trauma or other signals that our body is picking up, the feelings might be disproportionate. This is why we can't logic our way through feelings, etc. etc.. Which leads me to:
2. I understand the framing of social interaction as a "choice," but it's hard for me to truly back and suggest this book because it lacks an acknowledgement of regulation. For the people who read this book and still struggle, pointing them towards anxiety management skills + somatic grounding techniques would be helpful. In other words, when people do want to (or have to) socialize but feel like they can't, teaching them the other choices they can make to help them get to that point. I know that this isn't a "coping skills" book, but I would've liked to have seen more acknowledgement of this concept.
3. Not enough asterisks/caveats in this book for me! Very familiar with a strengths-based approach (which in this book is optimism vs. pessimism). I like the spectrums of approach to avoidance and that kind of concept. When talking about a story where a young girl converses with an intruder and he ends up not harming her or her dad, the takeaway is like /the power of conversation/, which, yes, is powerful, but we can't just be one-dimensional in psychology. It is well-known (like in that one episode of Grey's Anatomy where a character starts telling a shooter personal facts about herself) that humanizing yourself can make an attacker less likely to hurt you, but we should really just acknowledge that proper safety really is important, too. (Going back to anxiety serves a purpose).
4. A huge miss for me in most psychology things is when we don't talk about technology more. There's a little bit of it in the beginning where Epley mentions that people are too busy being on their phones to talk to each other on the train, but what's missing for me is the idea that the "choice" to socialize is also the choice to put the phone down. Then we get to the same issue I had in #1, where the "how" is missing. How do you put your phone down! It's addicting!
4. I love the graphs! The notes section is perhaps my favorite part. Lots of good data in there.
5. I also like the acknowledgement that learning how to have a conversation is often a learned skill, and that tools can help us converse (like that card game, We're Not Really Strangers).
Overall, I do think Epley is aware of all of the points above. He is a professor and intellectual. But to make a pop psychology book, things unfortunately have to be simplified or narrowed down :/
Review of advance copy received from Author
While it’s common knowledge that experiences are better with other people this book explains why. And it offers clear paths to extracting more joy and meaning from daily life. Fantastic illuminating writing.
May 25, 2026
Research on social practices and acts. By being more social during our days can bring joy to both parties.
May 25, 2026
Some good takeaways- mainly, learn to engage others and be an interested conversationalist. In general the book is a bit redundant and pretty dull.
May 26, 2026
I appreciate how this research is presented in an interesting and funny way. It shows us how small social changes affect our happiness and health.
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