Why Talking to Strangers Is the Best Thing You Can Do for Your Mental Health

What I’ve learned so far is that I’m fine with accosting people as long as I have an excuse. But there’s a world of a difference between introducing yourself to strangers in the service of some enabling background purpose — an interview, say, or when you’re networking, or attempting to sell them something, or maybe just asking them for directions — and striking up chit-chat purely for the sake of connecting with another human person. What I’m less sure of at this point is how sticking my neck out in this way is supposed to confer any sort of benefits to my mental health. I seem to have swapped a state of pleasant equilibrium for a self-inflicted anxiety attack, spiked with a fair amount of social humiliation.

“If you’re in a bad mood, the last thing you want to do is talk to someone,” she says, “but probably it’s going to be super-effective at pulling you out of that bad mood.

While in general we’re strongly motivated to belong to close-knit social groups, this will often manifest as a need to win people’s acceptance and approval, even from people we’re never likely to bump into again. This, says Sandstrom, is “why we’re so worried about rejection. Because, evolutionarily speaking, rejection was basically a death sentence.” In a world where food was scarce, predators were abundant, and you needed to cooperate to survive, “If you’re booted out of the group, you’re dead. It really, really mattered to be part of the group. So that could explain why social rejection feels so bad.”