You're Stressing People Out

Many years ago, I had a friend who was extremely kind, generous, gregarious, interesting... and seemed to annoy a lot of other people we knew. I remember being stumped why she wasn't more popular: I couldn't really point at anything she was doing wrong, and so many things she was doing right.

Eventually I had the thought maybe she's trying too hard? – there was always a sense that she WANTED everyone to have a good time, too, that she needed you to enjoy yourself as much as she was.

I think that was the right direction, but one step short. Like a lot of my favourite people, and a lot of the people I know who are not as universally beloved as they should be, I think she was stressing people out.

There's a lot of different ways to stress people out. Certainly one of them is "being needy", which is unfortunate, because a lot of people are e.g. genuinely feeling anxiety, and asking for reassurance for that anxiety, and in the process self-fulfilling their anxieties.

Meanwhile, people who have status and power and popularity in a given social circle will inevitably find it easier to be relaxed and at-ease in that circle. What can I say? To those who have much, more will be given.

I am under no illusions that merely realising "you might be stressing people out" is enough to be able to tackle it: as mentioned, some amount of your ease-of-being is a hard-to-fake signal of how you're feeling. You cannot un-stress yourself by stressing about it.

But I do think that try not to stress people out is a specific instruction that you can try out in social situations, with different implications than other possibilities you could try. I have written before that parties are like babies, and that if you're stressed while holding them they will get stressed too. But I actually think every social situation is like this (approximately), and if you think in conversations my job is to be at ease rather than my job is to be interesting, you will likely get more of both? [Edit: or my job is to have fun, or some other instruction that suits your personality!]

How do you be at ease? Some things to try are:

• focus on your breathe, physical presence etc – I don't know if this is scientifically true but I really do feel like there's a fake it till you make it element to physical ease
• no matter where you are, imagine that you're the host of a gathering, and specifically that you're (say) a 90-year-old grandparent hosting your beloved family at your long-time home: your job is to make everyone else feel welcome and at ease
• accept people's answers to questions. Like... if you offer someone food/a drink and they say no, accept that no and let it go (even though it really might not be true!) If you say "next time we should all go to XYZ" and people murmur vague agreement, let it slide and follow up later rather than pushing people on an answer. This isn't a universal cure-all, and I think if you're skilled at reading rooms there's lots of times when you should push people a little past their first answer, but as a first-pass solution I think "notice what you don't-let-go-of and just let it go" is a helpful thing to try.