How to Embrace Awkwardness
This week, Savvy Psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen discovers that Melissa Dahl, journalist and author of Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, looks at awkwardness in a different way: as an emotion. And that’s a feeling we can all relate to, whether we’re Sheldon Cooper, Michael Scott, or even you or me.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How to Embrace Awkwardness
Awkward! It’s what we feel when we cringe, recoil, or shudder at our own or someone else’s behavior. For example, we feel it when we’re hit out of the blue with a humiliating memory from our past, when we hear our own voice on a voicemail, or when watching pretty much anything involving Larry David. Luckily, journalist and author Melissa Dahl has us covered. This week, Melissa and Ellen discuss:
- How awkwardness and cringing are distinct, yet connected.
- How you and Michael Scott likely experience awkwardness differently.
- What is the “irreconcilable gap” and how it explains awkward moments.
- How you are not alone if you are inexplicably and randomly thunderstruck by awkward memories.
- Two strategies to try when these “cringe attacks” strike.
- How, through the spotlight effect and the invisibility cloak illusion, we all think others are paying attention to what we’re paying attention to.
- What happens when you “lean in” to awkwardness.
- How to navigate the most common awkwardness minefield: the workplace.
Melissa Dahl is a senior editor at New York Magazine’s The Cut, where she covers health and psychology. In 2014, she helped launch Science Of Us, New York Magazine’s popular social science vertical. Her first book is Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness. Pick up a copy wherever you like to get your books.
Ellen Hendriksen: So your book is called Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness. Let’s define those two terms. What is awkwardness, what is cringing, and how are they connected?
Melissa Dahl: Yeah, I was thinking about this. So I think that if I want to kind of differentiate between the two, I kind of think about awkwardness as an atmospheric condition, you know, if that makes sense? When someone says something, it doesn’t even have to be you who said the awkward thing, but it just kind of—there’s this tension, this, like, feeling kind of permeates the room.
This just happened at a dinner party I was at this weekend. Someone said just a really off-color joke and you could just feel the tension kind of come over the table. It felt really awkward. So that’s how I think about it. Like awkwardness is almost this cloud that expands to fill the shape.
And then I think about cringing as more personal. Like, cringing to me is something that I kind of feel internally. It’s something I do when I think about my actions, or when I’m maybe cringing at someone else’s actions, but cringing feels a little bit more individual, I think. And maybe awkwardness is a little more…yeah, atmospheric, widespread. Does that make sense?
EH: Yeah. So awkwardness is kind of more public, maybe, or shared? Whereas cringing is more personal, like cringing is the reaction to the atmosphere?
MD: I think so. Yeah.
EH: That makes sense. So your book was helpful in me kind of changing or looking at awkwardness in a different way because I generally thought about awkwardness as a personality trait like Larry David or Michael Scott or Sheldon Cooper. Tell us more about awkwardness as an emotion.
MD: Yeah, so it just became more interesting to me to think about it this way. Basically when I told people while I was working on this book that I was writing a book about awkwardness, they would say to me, “Oh, you don’t strike me as particularly awkward.” And I would say, “Well, I’ll take the compliment, thank you, but I feel this way all this time!” And so I think it just became more interesting to think about it as a feeling because if you think about those folks you just mentioned like Michael Scott or Larry David, I’ve been rewatching The Office the last couple weeks, and I think we can certainly say Michael Scott is perhaps an awkward person. But I don’t think he often feels awkward.
He will say something that is kind of offensive, or you know, kind of makes everyone else in the room feel weird, but I don’t think he feels it himself. So for me, it just became thinking about “Who am I writing for?” I’m writing for people who are bothered by this. I’m writing for people who want to kind of change, who want to feel more comfortable in their own skin and I don’t think a lot of so-called awkward people struggle with that. So yeah, it just became more interesting to me to look at it as kind of an internal thing. Oh, and, not to just kind of drone on and on, but we know that emotions are contagious, right?
EH: Yes.
MD: Kind of like, I can pick up anger from you and then I’ll start to feel a little anger, or I can pick up anxiety from you and I’ll start to feel a little nervous. And I think awkwardness works that way too, like I was saying, it’s kind of atmospheric. If you say something that makes the feeling in the room a little weird, I’ll pick up on it and so will the person next to me and we’ll all share this feeling.
EH: And then you and the person next to you will exchange glances.
MD: Exactly!
EH: Whereas if I’m Michael Scott, I’ll remain oblivious.
MD: Yeah, exactly.
EH: Okay. So there’s a phrase you use in the book that I want you to explain. What is the “irreconcilable gap” and how does that fuel feelings of awkwardness?
MD: Oh my gosh, so I read that—this was something that I came across in my research that just kind of blew my mind and just helped lock everything into place for me.
So to back up, I came across this report from this anthropologist in the 1970s who went to go see this tribe in Papua New Guinea. And he believed, he had reason to believe, that they had never seen what they looked like. They didn’t have any cameras, they didn’t have any mirrors. They’d never seen what they looked like. And so he came and he brought cameras and he brought mirrors and he kind of wanted to record what happened. And in his notes—he published this paper a couple years later—he writes that they ducked their heads and they covered their mouths and their stomach muscles betrayed great tension. And I’m reading that and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like what I do when I’m cringing at myself, you know?” When I remember something stupid I said or did or when I feel kind of judged in the moment, like I said something awkward. So that made me think that maybe when we say something makes us cringe, maybe it means that we suddenly are seeing ourselves from somebody else’s point of view. It kind of frees you out of your own perspective and you see yourself the way you must look to other people.
This really brilliant Emory psychologist Philippe Rochat has a term for this called the “irreconcilable gap” which he says is the distance between the version of yourself you hold in your own head and the version of you the world is actually seeing. And I think that moments that make us cringe are the moments that kind of illuminate the fact that those two are not always one and the same.
EH: Yeah, it’s like those memes you see online, like, “What I think I look like when I’m running,” and it’s like this Olympic runner, and then “What I really look like when I’m running,” and it’s this flailing toddler running and tripping over her own feet.
MD: Yeah! It’s the feeling like when you hear your voice played back on a recording, or you see a picture of yourself and you’re like “Oh no, I didn’t know I looked like that!”
EH: Right, right. “Does my hair really look like that?”
MD: Yeah!
EH: So there is one particular concept from the book I really want to touch on, because this was so helpful to me. Tell us about “cringe attacks.”
MD: Oh my gosh, yes, so this was another kind of thing where if you have a term, it kind of helps you get your arms around a phenomenon. When I was writing this book, I didn’t have this term, and then I kind of was searching online and this is kind of what people call it online. A cringe attack is basically those moments when an embarrassing memory comes back to haunt you. It could be years old but it comes back and, I mean, I say this in the book, but when it happens to me, I react physically. Like, I’ll shake my head and I’ll usually whisper something like “Oh, that’s so embarrassing!” And I thought I was the only person that happened to.
EH: Me too!
MD: Yeah! And it is not at all. A lot of people say this. A lot of people I interviewed say this, you know? You’re not alone in it and neither am I.
EH: So in the book there was this was wonderful story. You write about this acquaintance of yours who was just brushing her teeth and then this memory from years prior—about how she got high on ecstasy at a Halloween party and then made out with two guys—and while brushing her teeth, she just yelled at her reflection, like, “Oh my god, oh my god, why did you do that?”
MD: Yeah!
EH: And I was like, oh, wow, this is so validating. Because when an embarrassing memory pops into my head, it’s also usually when I’m doing something mindless, like it’s usually while I’m bike-commuting or folding laundry. And then this memory just out of the blue pops into my head and I have a physical reaction and I say something out loud like “No, no, no!” or “Arrgh!” And it was so validating to hear about this and just not feel alone in this. So that was so great.
MD: I’m glad. Because I’m there with you.
EH: So with that, is there anything we can do when we experience them, or is just knowing that we’re not alone and this is totally normal sufficient?
MD: For me, I think both things have helped me. Just hearing from other people that this happens to, that was so helpful for me. But then I kind of tried to dig around to find some things that might help minimize the pain of when this happens, because it’s really, really unpleasant. So one thing that some research says works is that your instinct is to push the memory out of your brain as quickly as possible. But there are some folks who did a study a couple years ago about all sorts of painful memories, not just embarrassing memories but actual trauma too. And they say that one thing that helps is to stay in the memory but to try to remember the non-painful parts. Like if it’s an embarrassing memory, try to remember other things, like neutral things, like what did it smell like, what did it sound like, who else was there? And they say that that is supposed to help lessen the pain. Which is interesting and kind of counterintuitive.
Another thing that works for me, though, is kind of digging around in the research about self-compassion. A lot of that research compares self-compassion to self-esteem. And some of the studies they’ve done is to have people recall an awkward or embarrassing memory from their high school days and the self-esteem folks in that condition will try to pump themselves up and say, like, “Oh, it wasn’t really my fault,” or like, “That wasn’t really me,” or “It wasn’t really that embarrassing.” But the self-compassion folks, I thought this was so interesting. They kind of look directly at the memory and kind of let it all in and say, like, “Okay, maybe that was pretty embarrassing. And, you know, people did see, and I am the kind of person who – I don’t know – does silly things.” But taking a direct look at themselves seems to be more helpful in withstanding the pain than trying to push it away.
EH: So there are two kinds of buckets of tools. One is to try to think of other details from that memory to kind of give it more of a context, maybe fill in the picture more so it’s not just this embarrassing thing in isolation. And then the second is, like you said with the self-compassion, to look at it head-on and to have some acceptance around it, like welcome it in. And to realize it’s okay to have embarrassing moments and that everybody else on the entire planet does as well.
MD: Yeah. And so the other piece of the self-compassion literature I should also mention is folks who are high in self-compassion kind of tend to recognize that they are part of an interconnected whole. You know, like, nothing they’ve done is the worst thing ever. Nothing they’ve done is the most embarrassing thing ever. So that has really helped me. Something that I’m kind of haunted by—I’ve been writing on the internet as a journalist for the last, like, eleven years, and I have some really embarrassing stories out there associated with my name, and sometimes those will come back to me. And what I do now is I try to do that, to put myself in this wider context of interconnected online journalists, I suppose. And I just think about, “Okay, yes, maybe that story was kind of cringeworthy in retrospect, but everybody who writes online feels this way. Everybody who writes feels this way about things from their past.” So that has been something that’s been really helpful for me, just to think about it—to put myself in a wider context. To kind of say, “I’m not that special and isn’t that kind of a relief?”
EH: Yeah. That’s a really nice way to put it. So I talk about the spotlight effect with people who have social anxiety, which is our overestimation of how much attention other people pay us. So we might feel like everybody is watching us, but in reality it’s many fewer people than we think who actually notice our foibles or our screw-ups. But it’s not true that no one notices. People do notice when we trip over the sidewalk or we have a coughing fit during an exam or we have toilet paper stuck to our shoe. It’s just not as many as we think. Okay. So that’s the spotlight effect. But you brought up a different phenomenon that I wasn’t aware of, called the invisibility cloak illusion.
MD: Yeah.
EH: So what is that? And then, later, let’s talk about how we can reconcile the two.
MD: So I was so annoyed at the existence of the invisibility cloak illusion, because I’m writing this book and I thought that the spotlight effect was basically kind of a peak moment. You know, like, “Oh, it turns out no one’s paying attention to your embarrassing moments anyway,” like, dance like no one’s watching. You’re great. And then the study comes out last year where these researchers claim this term “the invisibility cloak illusion,” and it’s kind of this thing where we walk throughout the world assuming we aren’t looking at one another. For example, on my commute into the office today, I was on the train assuming that no one was really looking at me, because I’m just going about my own business, nothing remarkable. But you know, I definitely saw the girl across from me and I looked at her shoes and I looked at her jacket. We all kind of watch each other just in mundane moments like that, but we assume people aren’t watching us.
Which is true, but then I was like, “But how do I reconcile that with the spotlight effect, this idea that people think that everybody’s looking at them?” And the way these researchers reconcile the invisibility cloak illusion with the spotlight effect is they say that basically we just are all too focused on what we’re focused on, and we’re assuming if I’m paying attention to the fact that there’s a coffee stain on my shirt, so are you.
If I’m not paying attention to myself on the train right now, I am assuming you’re not either. But that’s not true! People pay attention to all sorts of things, and so it’s kind of just another reminder that people have minds of their own and we can’t always know what other people are thinking.
EH: And so here, even if people are watching, people have minds of their own and might be paying attention to us or our shoes or our jacket…are they necessarily judging us?
MD: No! I mean, I think that’s the spotlight effect. You know, the spotlight effect is kind of the assumption that people are noticing your bad hair days and your embarrassing moments.
And the invisibility cloak illusion is more about mundane moments, you know, you’re in a waiting room and you’re kind of observing other people but you’re not really conscious that other people are observing you. But for me the way to reconcile the two is just the idea that just because I’m focused on something doesn’t mean somebody else is.
EH: That makes sense. So let’s round this out with some useful tips. So what are your highest-yield tips that you came across in your research to feel less awkward or, on a slightly different wavelength, to feel more comfortable with awkwardness?
MD: So I attempted to write a book that was going to be kind of an anti-awkwardness guide. That’s even in my book contract, that I’m supposed to write a guide to overcoming awkwardness.
EH: Mmm.
MD: And I feel like I ended up almost exactly the opposite. I felt like I wrote more a book about kind of embracing this feeling and understanding it so it doesn’t hold you back from doing things you wanna do. Learning how it can be useful. So I think the irreconcilable gap is something that really helped me with this. I think you can learn to become more comfortable with awkwardness if you think about it that way, if you think about these moments where you kind of do something embarrassing and you cringe at yourself. They’re sort of a gift if you think about them in a generous way because they free you from your own perspective for a minute and you can kind of see what you look like to somebody else. And that’s hard to do. We can’t always get a full picture of what we look like. So I think that if awkward moments kind of illuminate this gap between who we think we are and how other people are seeing us, then sometimes (not always) these moments can kind of be opportunities to become a little closer toward that…the person we think we are, that we wish we were. So I hope that’s helpful.
EH: Also in the book you did a lot of things deliberately. You put yourself kind of through an awkwardness bootcamp. And so—and I don’t remember who this was in the book—somebody said to you, “I think you’ve become immune to awkwardness.”
MD: Yeah.
EH: So tell us a little bit about what you did and what happened as you deliberately put yourself in these awkward moments?
MD: Andrew, my fiancé, said that when I came back excitedly telling him about my amateur improv class. Chatting about how “We did three-line scenes today, it was a pretty big deal.” And he just laughed at me, like, “I think you’ve become immune to awkwardness. That is the most awkward thing I can think of. Amateur improv.”
So that was one of the things I did, and I did that specifically because I don’t love situations that feel unpredictable. I like to feel like I have some control. I’m not very good at thinking on my feet. And so I wanted to do something to put me into that kind of awkward situation, the kind that felt weird and there wasn’t a roadmap. So that’s one of the things I did. I participated in a show called Mortified where people get up on stage and read from their teenage journals. I read from my seventh-grade journal. There’s a lot about Hanson in there as it turns out, the 1990s boy band. I visited a professional cuddler because I can feel a little awkward around physical contact sometimes. That one didn’t go so well, I kind of cut out halfway through.
EH: Yeah, that’s fine! That makes sense.
MD: I did a ton of weird stuff. The point of it, a little bit, was kind of the idea of exposure therapy, to kind of become more comfortable with this feeling and see if it can be useful. And I kind of think it was. I came out the other side a little braver, a little less afraid of being direct and just kind of encountering awkwardness and not being afraid of it. So I think it helped me.
EH: So how can our listeners embrace awkwardness? Should they deliberately do awkward things or when awkward things inevitably happen, what mindset would you suggest they take towards it?
MD: Well, one place where I think a lot of awkwardness arises is in the workplace. Like, when you are kind of discussing uncomfortable things. Like if you are a manager and you have to deliver negative feedback, especially for a new manager, that can feel kind of awkward. Or as I was writing this book we had a re-org at work and I didn’t know who my boss was for a minute.
I felt incredibly awkward to have to ask about that, and normally I would have just waited for context clues to figure it out, but I just asked about it and I felt a little awkward and it was a little ridiculous, but I just think there is some power in facing these situations that feel awkward head-on. And in a lot of cases, you kind of just either have to face the awkwardness or just have to live with the thing that’s bothering you in a workplace situation. I hope that’s helpful.
EH: Yeah! Absolutely. This whole thing has been very helpful. So thank you so much for talking with me, and it was a delight to chat with you.
MD: Yeah, you too! This is great.
EH: So Melissa Dahl’s first book is Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, and you can pick it up wherever you like to get your books.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.