A Simple Trick To Make Best Friends As An Adult (+ The REAL Reason It's So Hard)

There's so much advice on the internet about making friends as an adult. I have given so much advice on this podcast. And yet, most of us are still lonely. Most of us still find ourselves scrolling instead of having the social time that we need and crave. I just moved to a new town in the Bay Area, and I have been trying to prioritize making local friends. And I kept meeting people and putting their numbers in my phone, or I kept clocking these really fun local events. And then I still couldn't get it over the line. I'd find myself coming up with excuses to not go to the events or taking forever to respond to the texts. And I was like, wait, Liz, you want friends. What is going on here? And then I figured it out. There is a key part of the friendship equation that we are all missing these days. And unfortunately, our society is set up in a way that is making it worse every single day. This is why it is so hard to make new friends and to make best friends. This is why so many of us feel so lonely despite following all of the friendship advice that we read in books and see on social and listen to in podcasts like this one. Yes, I'm calling myself out too. Today, we are going to get into the real reason why it is so hard to make best friends as an adult, and I'm going to tell you exactly how to fix it. Welcome to the Liz Moody Podcast, where we share real solutions that fit into your actual life to the trickiest problem so that you can feel as good as possible every single day. I'm your host, Liz. I've been a journalist for over two decades. I have spent my career learning how to ask the right questions, even if they're taboo, even if they're uncomfy, so that you can get the answers that will actually change your life. Here's the thing. Making new friends kind of sucks. There's a period that I like to call the cozy era, which is when you feel truly comfortable with your friends. You can sit in silence together. You don't feel like you have to like turn it on or entertain them. You know about their family and their other friends and the general narrative of their life, and they know about yours. So there's a lot to talk about. You can be like, how is that ballet class going? Or what happened with that guy who was speaking over you in meetings at work? It's kind of like when you're in the middle of a book, you know the lay of the land, you know the characters. You're not trying to build this mental map in your head. So reading feels easy, which makes you want to keep reading. It makes sitting down to decide to read feel way easier. That is the cozy era. But to get to the cozy era, you have to go through this other era. I will call it the creation era. And this era is by default gonna be uncomfy. You don't know this person's life. You cannot ask about their sister. You can't ask about their cat training regimen. this period, the creation era of friendships has always been tricky. It's been difficult to navigate. And right now, it's uniquely difficult. We all talk about how lonely we are. We talk about how hard it is to make friends. And people, myself very much included historically, act like it's an exposure problem. You just need to meet more people, go to a yoga class, go to a coffee shop. It is not just an exposure problem. Exposure is part of the equation. If you sit around in your house all day, the chances of a new best friend waltzing through the door are probably fairly low. And this is the part that we've all been missing. This is the real reason it's hard to make best friends as an adult. It is a discomfort problem. Never before in history have we had less tolerance for discomfort or more ability to avoid discomfort in our own lives. You can order pretty much anything on an app and have it at your door in hours instead of having to leave your house and get in the car and park and get out of the car and whatever weather is going on at the time and then fight your way through crowds with a shopping cart. Amazon Prime has tricked our brain into normalizing being annoyed if something takes more than two days to be delivered, which is a tactic that actually loses them money on shipping, but effectively lets them outcompete every single small business who cannot afford to take that hit. Our world is set up to help us never leave the comfort of our own homes. And on top of that, because of social media, we are more aware than we have ever been before of how we're perceived, which psychologically makes us much less likely to try new things and to experience the discomfort of being bad at something, of learning. Even if we're not filming ourselves for content, we see the internet reactions. We see people getting laughed at. We see people being called cringe. And we internalize that that is undesirable. and we do not want that. We also see all of the best people in the world at anything that we might wanna pursue, they are right at our fingertips and we think, well, I'm never gonna be that good. So why try? Why put myself through that discomfort? This is all coupled with the fact that the easiest, most frictionless form of interaction is within five feet of your body at all times. Look, mine's right here. Within five feet of my body right now. Our phones are designed to eliminate friction at basically every single turn. They are designed to keep you scrolling on social media or to trap you in a Wikipedia hole about the Ottoman Empire. They are designed to be addictive so that we can no longer tolerate even a microsecond of boredom. Do you scroll on your phone when you brush your teeth? Be honest. I do. Do you scroll when you go to the bathroom? When you are stopped at a red light, do you mindlessly reach for your phone without even having a real reason to look at it? I do. I hate that I do, but I do. And the reason that I do is because our phones are designed for it. They are designed to hijack our attention. They are designed to make us bad at boredom. And if we are unable to tolerate the discomfort of a moment with our own thoughts, how on earth are we supposed to tolerate the awkwardness of forming a new friendship. It is always, always going to be easier to sit with our frictionless devices at home versus endure the many, many frictions that come with building new, real friendships. Increasingly, that's what many of us are choosing. We are exhausted from long days at work. We are emotionally wrung out by the hellhole of news that we face on a daily basis. in that state of depletion and in a world designed to make us intolerant of awkwardness, intolerant of boredom, intolerant of friction, of course we gonna choose to stay home and watch TV or scroll on our phones instead of making conversation with a stranger Who wouldn choose that Our digital lives have trained our brains to prefer interaction without effort But the interaction that we're getting is hollow, and we're feeling that. We're all feeling really fucking lonely. This is the reason it is so hard to make friends as adults. We have made ourselves intolerant to discomfort, and discomfort is an unavoidable part of building new friendships. We can meet people, we can have one-off conversations at parties or Pilates classes, but we're not gonna sit through the hours of the creation era that's required to get to the cozy area. That era is uncomfortable. This is a huge problem. And the good news is that awareness is half the battle. And the better news is there are, and as you might've come to expect on this podcast by now, we always have this, I promise. There are pragmatic action steps that we can all take that do significantly help. The first action step is related to the awareness because once you've connected these two things that are decreasing tolerance for discomfort is directly impacting our ability to make friends as an adult, you can lean into discomfort in your life and know that it will increase your ability to make new friends. Leaning into friction is gonna rewire your brain to not avoid friction like the plague. So when you're making awkward conversation on your first friendship date, your brain is like, it's cool, I can tolerate this. Reading books, even if they feel a little hard to get into. Working out, not picking up your phone, even when you really, really want to. Brushing your teeth in silence. Sitting with your own thoughts for five minutes or ten. These are all going to change the structure of your brain and make it easier for you to tolerate the discomfort that's inherent to making new friends. I was talking to my therapist sister about this problem, this intolerance of discomfort, and I asked what she would recommend to clients dealing with it. And she said 100% rejection therapy. If one of her clients is struggling with discomfort tolerance, she'll have them ask the barista at their coffee shop for a discount, one that's like not advertised, just, hey, can I have 20% off my coffee today? It feels scary as fuck in the moment. Your heart is pounding. you are asking this stranger for a favor, but then you do it and you realize nothing really happens. Maybe they say no. Maybe they even snicker at you a little bit with their coworkers, but you are fine. You move on, you live life, the world doesn't end. And maybe, maybe they say yes and you realize the incredible things that await you on the other end of discomfort. Either way, you are training your brain to tolerate asking somebody on a friend day and having them say that they're busy or feeling embarrassed because you got pizza sauce all over your shirt during one of your first hang sessions. You are training your brain that you will survive and maybe even thrive, maybe even thrive. Why can't we have the best case scenario sometimes in these uncomfortable circumstances? The coffee shop discount is a really great intro to rejection therapy. It's kind of the classic example. You can also ask to sit at a table with strangers. You can ask somebody on the subway about the book that they're reading. You can ask your boss for a raise. It's real like never be the one to say no to yourself energy and you can be as playful with it or as serious with it as you like. You can tell a stranger on the street your biggest dream. You can tell them your biggest fear. You can ask a group if you can join their conversation. But looking for these moments to intentionally teach your brain that rejection is not the end of the world, that discomfort is not the end of the world, is gonna make it so much easier to make new friends. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor. One of the easiest micro habits to change your diet is to stop giving yourself the unhealthy option, the option you don't wanna reach for in the first place. Because on days when I'm running around nonstop, I am not thoughtfully planning snacks. I am grabbing whatever's quickest, and that usually means something that is loaded with sugar and additives that's not gonna make me feel good because that's just like what you can buy when you're out these days. 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That's P-I-Q-U-E life.com slash Liz Moody. there are very few skincare products that i think pretty much everybody should have in their routine and one of them is retinol it helps with cell turnover and it's just one of the most effective products that exists in terms of making skin look clear smooth and bright but a lot of people experience a lot of irritation with different retinols and it absolutely is not helping your skin if you are hurting your barrier layer or drying it out a ton and it's also really hard to be consistent with skincare if it's making your face flake off, and consistency is the number one thing that gets results. That's why I'm so excited to introduce you guys to Osea's Dream Night Serum and Night Cream, which contains bio-retinol derived from algae. It's far less irritating than traditional retinol, and you can actually use it day or night, which you do not want to do with normal retinol. 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Right now we have a special discount just for our listeners. Get 10% off your first order site-wide with code Liz Moody at OseaMalibu.com. That's Liz Moody at O-S-E-A Malibu dot com. If you're like, whoa, Liz, I am not there yet. I'm not comfy enough with discomfort for rejection therapy to do any of the stuff that you just said. That's totally cool. Let's go in the other direction. One of my favorite hacks is to know that it's always a little bit awkward to make new friends and then to build in padding for that awkwardness. Invite a new friend on a date where you're both being entertained together. you're watching a comedy show or you're taking a cooking class. This is one of the reasons why men who are even less comfortable than women with the discomforts inherent to friendship, surprise, surprise, often gravitate toward watching sports together as a main social activity. You chat for a bit, you fall silent, you watch the game again. Sports are an incredible way to eliminate that discomfort at the beginning of relationships because they make the silences way easier to tolerate. If I had to choose the absolute worst first friend date, it would be grabbing dinner or drinks. Yet this is probably the number one thing that we invite people to do. When you get dinner or drinks, you are sitting across from each other making conversation for an hour straight. It is so much pressure. If you're an extrovert, maybe that sounds fine to you. I am not. I am an introvert and getting dinner or drinks on a first hang sounds so needlessly difficult. Why add that amount of pressure to your already exhausting life? Hang out in ways that build padding around inevitable silences. Run errands together. Do a life admin day together. Co-work together. Meal prep together. Create any scenario where the conversation can naturally flow in and out, where you can chat, chat, chat, and then the conversation peters out, and it's totally fine. You go back to sending emails or sauteing onions. And then when either of you has something new to say, you chat, chat, chat again. It takes so much pressure off to hang out in ways that lend themselves to occasional silence. According to research, it takes 50 hours to become casual friends, 90 hours to become real friends and over 200 hours to become close friends. These tactics are going to make those earlier hours easier so you can get to that 50 to 200 hour range and you can enter the cozy friend, far more effort-free territory. Another secret here is to have an about, something that you have in common with people that gives you an opportunity to rack up those hours. I have a whole podcast about this with the New York Times friendship expert, Anna Goldfarb. I can link it for you in the show notes. But in short, abouts can be sports. Abouts can be a book club. Abouts can be watching a show together. They can be anything that you have in common that you can bond over, that gives you a reason to keep showing up over time that lets you build those hours. And, and abouts also create that padding for silences. You're learning to knit together. So you chat, chat, chat, you knit a little bit and then you chat some more. You can chat about knitting. About are huge for lessening discomfort and making it way easier to get over that friendship hump and into the cozy stage. The big thing is knowing it's gonna be awkward before it gets good. Knowing that the world is set up to make you want to avoid that awkwardness and to keep you isolated and lonely and choosing the frictionless scroll of your phone and knowing that you have the power to take back your control, to lean into that discomfort, and to choose a better life anyway. Does this resonate with you? I'm curious if you're like, aha, this is the reason that I'm not making friends, or if you think it's something else. So please let me know in the comments. The loneliness crisis is so real and it's making all of us feel like shit. And I shall not rest on this podcast until we solve this problem and we all have thriving communities. Speaking of, send a link to this episode to a friend or to a co-worker that you want to become a friend. Podcasts are such good about. You can listen to episodes weekly and you can discuss them and you can pad those awkward silences as you build in those friendship hours. Sharing the podcast is also the single best way to support the show, and it is so, so appreciated. Also, if you could just take a really quick second, super fast, I promise, and follow the show, especially if you're new here, it signals to the algorithms that people like the content, which makes the algorithm show the content to more people, and it also makes future episodes show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on content that could change your life. It's that little plus sign that says follow on the main page, the one that lists all of the Liz Moody podcast episodes on Spotify and on Apple. And it's the subscribe button and then hitting the little bell button and selecting all on YouTube. I promise, I solemnly swear, I will make it worth your while. We interview the world's leading experts. We dive into the research to get all of the latest information and solutions to your problems. And we share stories along the way so that you know that you are in no way alone, no matter what you are going through. As always, you can find all of the discount codes that you heard in this episode at lizmoody.com slash codes. Buying from our brand partners lets us continue to make this content for you completely for free and for you to save money on our personally vetted products that we trust, that we love, supplements, workout apps, mattresses, and more. I love you guys. And I am excited for all of us to face discomfort head on and reap the rewards on the other side of it. I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. Not all sourdough is made equal. In fact, most of the sourdough that you get at the grocery store does not have the benefits of sourdough at all. I lived all over the country during Nomad Life, and let me tell you, there are not many bakeries making real sourdough, which offers gut benefits, metabolic benefits, and more. This is why I cannot stop talking about Wild Grain. It is the first Baked from Frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and fresh pastas, and everything bakes in 25 minutes or less. 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