We’ve all experienced those moments at some point in our lives: offering a handshake while the other person offers a fist bump, forgetting someone’s name when they clearly know yours, not having anything to say and realizing you left your phone at home so you can’t be distracted by it, getting caught staring at a stranger, starting a conversation with someone you don’t know in a bathroom, someone oversharing and telling a group too much information, overhearing a couple breaking up, noticing food in someone’s teeth but not telling them, and now it’s been too long and bringing it up would be weird.
This emotion is what we know as awkwardness. These are the kinds of thoughts that keep us awake at night when we try to sleep. They are the memories we always want to forget, yet they are the ones we remember the most. We don’t like awkwardness. It makes us uncomfortable and cringe.
But what is awkwardness? Why is it good?
To truly understand awkwardness, we need to put it in context with the entire family of forces that guide social behaviors.
Think if you had a list of all possible behaviors in the world. It wouldn’t be infinitely large because of the limits of science and biology. There are some rules that won’t be broken, like you can’t move faster than light or be in two places at once. Then there are some human rules – the laws of the state. These are the rules all of us agree on and have to obey unless the authorities punish you. Murder, stealing, speeding, etc. Then there are social expectations. It’s not a legal rule that you have to follow, but they are the rules that people want you to follow, meaning it’s up to you if you want to do them, but if you don’t, people will talk about you. This kind of behavior is punished by social ostracism and public opprobrium. Being called rude, gross, mean, or 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. It’s not written how long you should hug someone but it is awkward.
Like touching a hot stove or getting a parking fine or maybe losing friends, awkwardness nudges us to avoid certain actions in the future and smooth things out when they happen.
That is the reason that brains, susceptible to feeling occasional awkwardness, are so common. They are the reason why we are so cooperative in social life. Feeling awkward shows that you understand and are keen on smooth social exchanges.
But it’s also true that 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 ‘easily empathetically embarrassed’(EEE) someone is, the harder it is for them to sit through other people’s cringe-inducing moments, even fictional ones like in cringe comedy.
But researchers did find that being more easily empathetically embarrassed does not correlate to being more easily embarrassed yourself. Instead, it’s linked to being more empathetic, an important capacity for social creatures to have.
You might think that awkwardness is totally different from physical pain or outright name-calling. But your brain tells us otherwise. Because 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” (automatic physiological reaction to an event that is perceived as stressful or frightening), 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 not completely our fault actually, in a way it’s our 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 have been used to increase trust during couples therapy and in the reduction of anxiety and depression. However, 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, and 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 replay 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.
But is it actually true? Are they actually fixated on that awkward thing we did?
A great 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 and what you think about them. And, more importantly, what they think about themselves. You’re not the center 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 about 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 example, the fundamental attribution error.
When evaluating actions, you often view yourself as a complex character, acted upon by various challenges and antagonists, 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 an 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, or 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 fleshed out. But they are.
The realization of this has a name. A name given to it by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, is one of my favorite resources. They wrap profound concepts up in tiny little word packages. 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 look small. But it also makes all of us 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 there…, it’s unbeatable.
