The Profound Act Of Self-Care

Claybanks Township Park, Michigan

May 24, 2022

From Susan David:

Imagine you’re on an airplane, cramped and tired, eager to reach your destination. The flight crew is passing by with the snack cart. You’re not feeling particularly hungry—perhaps you availed yourself of an overpriced sandwich back in the terminal—but you notice that the gentleman sitting beside you is treating himself to a bag of M&M’s.

You’ve never met this person before and exchanged only a cursory nod as you took your seats. Still, research shows that you are now 30% more likely to spring for some candy of your own.

How can this be? How can the choices of someone you don’t even know have such sway over your own decisions? The answer is fascinating: You’ve caught a social contagion.

Social contagion is the phenomenon by which behaviors become normalized and then adopted.

Remember that several-year stretch where it seemed like everyone you knew was getting married? Those couples didn’t each come to that decision in a vacuum. Wedding fever spread through your shared social network, and suddenly your summer weekends were all booked up!

The same process holds true for a wide variety of decisions. Large scale epidemiological studies show that if someone in your social network puts on weight or gets divorced, your likelihood of doing the same increases substantially. This is the case even if you don’t know the person. They might be the friend of a friend of a friend, but their actions have far-reaching ripple effects.

However, the research also shows that not everyone is equally susceptible to social contagions. People with a clear sense of their values have proven to be more resilient to the pressures of their community.

Let me give you an example. Women in professions with a high degree of gender bias are more likely than their male colleagues to quit when faced with setbacks. Without even realizing it, they can internalize the messages snaking through their work environment, the ones telling them that they don’t belong.

But when these women are asked to perform a simple exercise in which they clarify why they are in their career—why it is of value to them—they become insulated from the toxic social contagion. They are more likely to hang in there when the going gets tough.

This is why it’s so important to know our values. They are more than accoutrements that make life more pleasant. Our values help to inoculate us against making decisions that are not our own.

Whatever your values may be—intimacy, honesty, adventure—I encourage you to remind yourself of them daily. This straightforward act of enumeration is not only a step toward self-knowledge. It’s a profound act of self-care.