Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself

We’re often drawn to people who appear to be true to themselves. Yet showing our authentic selves to the world can be terrifying. This week, we kick off 2025 with a new series, “Wellness 2.0.” We’ll go beyond New Year’s resolutions to take a deep look at how we can approach our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. Today on the show, we begin our series with researcher Erica Bailey, who studies authenticity and what it means to truly be ourselves.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Dance like no one is watching. Sing like you are alone in the shower. Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

• 0:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Countless aphorisms remind us that as we move through life, we have a choice. We can pretend and disguise who we are, or we can be true to ourselves.

• 0:27Shankar Vedantam?

  What does it mean to be ourselves no matter what they say? As the musician Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting, once instructed us. Don't we all contain multitudes? Is there really only one true self?

• 0:43Shankar Vedantam?

  And even if there is, how wise is it to always reveal ourselves? As social creatures, heavily dependent on the people around us, does it really make sense to ignore how others see us and march to our own drummers?

• 1:01Shankar Vedantam?

  The evidence about authenticity seems clearer when the shoe is on the other foot. When we are evaluating other people, most of us are extremely suspicious of people who may not be what they seem. When we discover someone has lied to us, either implicitly or explicitly, we read this as betrayal.

• 1:23Shankar Vedantam?

  We distrust those who say one thing in public and do something else in private. This is why politicians learn to look you in the eye as they speak to you, why they master the art of the firm handshake and the steady voice.

• 1:37Shankar Vedantam?

  "This is really me," they're trying to say. What you see is what you get.

• 1:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Today on the show, and in a companion episode on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, we explore new psychological research into what happens when we are true to ourselves and when we are not. It's the kickoff episode to a new series we're calling Wellness 2.0. We'll go beyond the angst surrounding New Year's resolutions and answer a deeper question.

• 2:08Shankar Vedantam?

  What does it mean to live well? Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about how to keep your cool during stressful times and how to rise to the occasion during moments of crisis. We'll also help you figure out what you actually want in life and how to embrace the role that chance plays in shaping who you are.

• 2:28Shankar Vedantam?

  We begin with what it means and what it takes to live an authentic life. How to be yourself this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:54Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:26Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:57Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Every day, we're called upon to play many roles: parent, spouse, employee, neighbor, friend. Some roles may feel like the real us, and some may feel put on, even fake. What are the benefits of aligning who we are on the outside with who we are on the inside? And what are the costs of those two selves being out of alignment? Erica Bailey is a social scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She has long been interested in the science and the subtleties of authenticity. Erica Bailey, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 5:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica, when you were growing up, you were very involved in the fundamentalist church that was at the heart of your community. What was this church?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  So this was a small religious group in central Ohio. It was related through my parents and people that they knew. It had all of the earmarks, I would say, of what you would consider a cult in terms of being a very high-control group, having really strict ideologies, and a lot of isolation from people who are not part of the group.

• 5:42Shankar Vedantam?

  How much of a role did this church play in your life, do you think, as you were growing up?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  It started off a sort of smaller or a little bit distanced from us. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so a couple hours away. It gradually increased to become an incredibly central part of my life. It was a place we would spend hours and hours every week with people from the community in the church itself. And by the time I was 19, 20, I was kind of all in. I was living full-time with people from the group. I was evangelizing on behalf of the group, and it really kind of took up my whole identity.

• 6:28Shankar Vedantam?

  I would imagine now you must have had close friends in the group. And in fact, maybe much of your social community was coming from this group.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Almost entirely, my social community was this group itself. They really discouraged having outside relationships and really told you or taught you, both implicitly and explicitly, that this should be your whole life, that this message that they had was so important, it was worth sort of forsaking any outside connections that might distract you from what the group was really about.

• 7:02Shankar Vedantam?

  At the time, of course, Erika didn't think she was in a cult. Like all of us, she wanted direction in her life, and the church seemed to confidently point the way.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Most people are drawn to a group like this, I think, because we are incredibly curious and maybe a little insecure about, what is this life all about? What am I all about? What's my purpose? What's my meaning in life? And we're looking for someone who could help provide those answers for us. And the group provided a really appealing idea that we have all of the answers, and if you just stick with us, we'll tell you them, we'll help inform your path, we'll help show you, you know, your ideal path. And even better than just your ideal path, this is the path that God has ordained for you. And that's a really appealing message that can help reduce some of these concerns about what does it all mean.

• 7:57Shankar Vedantam?

  In time, however, Erika started to have doubts. For example, she knew people who were gay and in warm and loving relationships, but the church declared gay marriage was wrong. She wasn't quite sure how or whether to speak up.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  On the one hand, it was incredibly challenging to feel that I had differing beliefs to the people around me, and that voicing those beliefs could get me in trouble, or get me sanctioned, or at least have a stern talking to. At the same time, I really desperately wanted them to approve me and to accept me and to value me in the group. And so I was willing to sort of not say what I was really thinking, or hide those beliefs in exchange for maintaining these relationships that I valued so much.

• 8:44Shankar Vedantam?

  How did the church treat congregants who stepped out of line?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  There were lots of ways that you would be sort of disciplined, quote unquote, and usually it would be, you know, your disgust and the church leader would mention something that happened in a sermon. So you're sort of, you know that he's talking about you. You feel that shame that everyone must know that you made the wrong choice. Or you had really intense one-on-one conversations where you were reprimanded and told that what you had done was out of alignment. It wasn't the right path. It wasn't the godly path. And frustratingly, those individual conversations could happen at any time. And sort of one thing that you did one day could be right, and that could be the spiritual choice. And then another day, it would be the wrong choice.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  And so you're always kind of questioning which decisions were right and which decisions were supported. And those who were sort of in the know would just know the right answers. And what I know now is that was a way to sort of control our behaviors. You never felt like you really were settled or secure. You always were looking for guidance. And that was an incredibly confusing experience.

• 9:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that you were always academically inclined. Tell me about what happened when you graduated high school and you had to make the choice about whether to go to college.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt very adrift in terms of what the right thing to do is because I had sort of disconnected from school, from my peers who maybe were going to colleges or applying to college at the same time. I almost didn't know the right steps to take and ultimately felt this pressure to follow along with the path that the church had outlined for us, which was to take a year to invest heavily in my faith and to try and bring new people into the group and do that instead of going to college, which was sort of the worldly choice. So even though I always was very bookish, I was very nerdy, I was very inquisitive. I always really wanted to go to college.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  It was sort of implicitly discouraged that that was sort of the lesser path. That was the earthly worldly path.

• 10:58Shankar Vedantam?

  And what did you do that year?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I moved to a small town with a group of people from the church and we sort of set up a satellite group in that town. And we went around talking to people about the message of the group and trying to recruit people into our group.

• 11:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering whether at some point you started to speak up about the beliefs and practices that you disagreed with and how that was received by your peers and by the church.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  What really shook my whole sort of belief system is we had a death in my family. My niece passed away. And it was one of those experiences that sort of jolts you awake. It's really nice to have these ideas that the church gave us about how special we are, how powerful we were, how logically our life path would unfold. And then when this happened, it felt like one of those moments where I looked around to realize, you know, I'd been holding on to sand and I had nothing. And these stories that I had been told about myself, about the world, about the way my life would unfold were not accurate or they were empty.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And that moment is really when I started to feel like I had to really voice those questions and concerns and I had to start saying, actually, I don't think I agree with what they just told, you know, my sister after her daughter passed. You know, I don't actually agree with maybe these other stances that are more about how we treat other people. Maybe it's okay to have friends who are not part of the group. Maybe it's okay to think differently about the world and the purpose of life and how people outside the group should be valued and appreciated.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  That moment was fairly dramatic and things kind of happened quickly after that. I started to voice my unhappiness with the way the situation was handled, with the way we were treated. And that also kind of brought up all these feelings I'd been holding in about things I disagreed with, policy-wise, things I disagreed with, the way we even talked about other people of similar religious faith.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  It was sort of a cascading experience that just really snowballed really quickly from that point.

• 13:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point you went to a movie, which is something that the church had actually recommended that you not do.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, you know, these, these rules about church attendance and things like that. They're never formalized. They weren't written down anywhere. But of course, we had really deeply believed them. I had internalized them. And one morning, I just decided I don't want to go to Sunday service. I want to hang out with a nonreligious person. I want to just go to a movie and have a bowl of popcorn. You know, I'm, I'm 20 years old. And that felt like very small. I'm sure, you know, no one in the movie theater would have thought I was doing anything brave. But to me, it was a first step towards reclaiming my autonomy and realizing that, you know, maybe it's okay to have the desire to go see a movie and to just follow that desire.

• 14:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering how the church responded to your evolution. You told me in the past, they had not looked kindly at people who stepped out of line.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  So they were not a fan of what I was doing. They were not a fan of the things I was saying. The way that that was communicated was in a couple of one-on-one meetings. And then the people really closest to me trying to implore me to sort of step back, to change my behavior, to sort of come back into the fold. At that point, I felt that that had been so severed that it almost felt like I couldn't come back. It felt like I was living in a totally different reality now from these people. And I, and I couldn't sit in the same rooms that I was in before. So it started off with these conversations and then it very quickly escalated into formal excommunication, which is I had to move out of my apartment where I was living with another member of the church.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I lost contact with my immediate family at the time. Thankfully, we've, we've reconnected since then. And I lost connections with pretty much every single person that I knew, including people I would consider family at that point.

• 15:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow, wow. That must have been extraordinarily destabilizing, Erica.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It was really destabilizing and it was really, really painful. Some of these relationships have still not been repaired. I still feel them like open wounds of these people that I really cared for. And what I try to remember is they believe that they're doing the right thing. They think that you have to cut someone out of the group in order to maintain the functioning of the group and also in order to teach that person a lesson that if we release you out into the world, you'll sort of learn the world is wrong and you'll want to come back in. So slowly but surely, every person that I knew gave me a call and said, hey, I'm sorry, but we can't, we can't talk anymore.

• 16:26Shankar Vedantam?

  At one time or another, we've all felt the painful disjunction Erica is talking about. A mismatch between how we feel on the inside and how we're expected to be on the outside.

• 16:38Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the costs of being inauthentic and the benefits of being your true self. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 17:00Speaker 02

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• 17:31Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:27Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 18:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Social life often calls on us to act in ways that don't match up with what we feel or believe. What are the consequences of this mismatch? And what do we gain when we bring our inner and outer selves into alignment?

• 18:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica Bailey is a social scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the psychology of authenticity.

• 18:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica, we just heard about how painful it was for you to feel that your inner self was not in accord with the community that surrounded you. Scholars in your field have found that your experience was not unique. When the inner self is not in alignment with the outer self, this can produce feelings of stress and exhaustion?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this feeling we refer to as inauthenticity. And inauthenticity has a couple of sources or variants. On the one hand, you can feel inauthentic because you don't know who you are. So you feel like yourself is somewhere separate. You feel disconnected from that true self, and it feels inaccessible almost to you. On the other hand, inauthenticity could also be, I know very well who I am and what I want to say in this moment, but for whatever reason, I'm choosing to deny that. I'm choosing to express myself in a way that's counter to that internal experience.

• 19:45Shankar Vedantam?

  And that sounds more like the experience you had with the church.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew very clearly, or I felt at least that I knew who I was internally, or I had some sense of inner self, but I was not able to access that or bring that forward in the group.

• 19:59Shankar Vedantam?

  What do we know, not just in your individual case, but in general, about the effects of inauthenticity on our experience of stress and exhaustion?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Inauthenticity is a really taxing psychological experience. It can make you feel anxious, it can make you feel depressed, and it really separates you from being able to make genuine connections with other people because you're so concerned with how you're coming across and managing that impression that you're creating in the other person.

• 20:28Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the interesting dimensions of inauthenticity is that in the workplace, we often sometimes feel like we cannot be the real us. Social scientists sometimes call this emotional labor. What is the idea of emotional labor, Erica?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  When sociologists talk about emotional labor, what they're referring to as this act of managing your impressions or the way you're coming across in these professional environments, where we usually have norms about how to behave, norms about how to express yourself, and these can even be formalized rules about the way you need to dress, the way you need to appear, and how you need to treat those people that you're interacting with. So that experience of having to manage how you're coming across at times when that is conflicting with your inner self requires some labor, where the emotional labor term comes from. It requires some effort on your part to sort of keep up appearances. One example that sociologists mention is the service with a smile.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  So customer service representatives have to appear cheery and open and agreeable to people that they're interacting with, even if they are having a bad day, or they're tired, or they're bored with the person they're talking to.

• 21:51Shankar Vedantam?

  In her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, the sociologist Ali Hochschild said that emotional labor is something that is in a variety of different professions. So daycare workers and nursing home attendants might need to suppress their feelings of frustration when the people they are caring for act up. You know, a bill collector might need to come across as unforgiving when he might actually be feeling bad for the person he is talking with. You know, cops might need to come across as tough when they are feeling scared. So basically, the idea is that you're not just being hired to do a job, but you're required to manage and produce feelings that you might not actually be feeling, which of course is another way of saying you're required to be inauthentic.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or at times, you're required to be inauthentic. As someone who worked in restaurants, sometimes you are having a great conversation with someone, you are smiling because you're having a good day, but that's not always the case. You know, we've seen a lot post-COVID of these videos of customer service representatives, essential workers, airline attendants that are having to deal with people who are speaking to them in a way that's inappropriate or not respectful. And you know, deep down, they must be hurting, they must be upset, but they have to maintain that air of professionalism even under those high-pressure situations.

• 23:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. You know, I was at a bar in Chicago a couple of days ago, and there were these two men sitting at the bar who were having a debate with one another. And the bartender was standing behind the bar, and she had this, you know, this fixed smile on her face. And I was wondering what was going through her head, because these two guys were really going at it, and they were just going on and on and on. And she kept this smile on her face, and I couldn't help but think that she probably was rolling her eyes on the inside and smiling on the outside.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  She might have been rolling her eyes, looking at the clock, pretending to wash some cups underneath the, you know, far down at the other end of the bar to stay away from them so she doesn't get dragged into it.

• 23:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you really see everything working in restaurants.

• 23:53Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that early in your career, you worked as a consultant at IBM. And in your first weeks, you got some training that showed you not just what the company expected of you in terms of the work you had to do, but also what they expected of you in terms of your emotions. Tell me a little bit about that, Erica.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Like many companies, IBM has what we call newcomer socialization, which is where they try and teach you about the organization's norms, the culture, help you understand the broader mission of the company. And as a consultant, that was particularly important because we would be going out to client site on behalf of IBM. So they wanted us to have a clear sense of that organizational identity and be able to sort of bring that persona to our clients. So this came in the form of sort of how we looked, looking professional, being on time. You know, we even had, everybody had the same ThinkPad computers. We had the same cell phones. You know, we were really well branded as IBMers. At the same time, some of these, again,

• 24:55Speaker 01

  are just sort of internalized norms. So I'm a person that has visible tattoos and I was so concerned of anyone seeing my tattoos because surely this is against IBM's policy. And I asked a HR person. They said, oh, we have no policy about tattoos. Feel free to show them as long as, you know, the client thinks it's fine. We think it's great.

• 25:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, so long as you're carrying your ThinkPad and you're on time, the tattoos don't matter.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. As long as your shirt is ironed, you can show your tattoo.

• 25:23Shankar Vedantam?

  But I am wondering in some ways, Erica, whether some of us feel the need to conceal parts of ourselves. And perhaps this is especially true if you're someone who is breaking a barrier to enter a profession. So a woman working on an oil rig or a man working as a nurse might have to go out of their way to conceal parts of themselves that might play into the stereotypes that others have of them. And again, this might be a prescription for inauthenticity.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I, you know, we're being lighthearted about it, but I don't want to ignore the fact that for some people, you know, their authentic self could bring significant interpersonal costs. It can be a life or death matter to express some identities that people have. So sometimes that is a really serious thing that people manage, where they keep parts of their personal self separate from their work self. At the same time, that's a really difficult psychological experience for that person. And what I usually tell people is that's the job of the manager, to think about maybe how to create an environment that's more welcoming or open or accepting of different identities, different individuals who are coming into a space

• 26:33Speaker 01

  where they might look the same as everyone else, but they're carrying something internal that we can't all see.

• 26:50Shankar Vedantam?

  So we've seen how emotional labor can come with feelings of stress and feelings of exhaustion, but there are other costs as well. When people are inauthentic, they seem to be at greater risk of engaging in unethical behavior that can also harm others. Can you tell me about this research, Erica?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  This research followed what I think is a real intuitive idea, which is we all have a personal and professional self. Most of us don't behave in the workplace identically to the way we behave at home. So you can think about these two circles of two selves. And the researchers thought about the way that we think of those disparate circles as integrated or segmented. So they're either overlapping, they're coherent, they make sense together, or they're really far apart. And what happens when those two identities are really far apart, when your work self is very different and segmented from your home self, is that you can pick and choose that, you know, at work, I can be unethical, immoral, I can lie, which is what the experimenters looked at,

• 27:48Speaker 01

  because it's not diagnostic of my real self, my core self, the person I am at home. And that separation allows people who see themselves as otherwise moral to engage in immoral behavior.

• 28:01Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, at an extreme level, I can see somebody who's a mobster who basically says, you know, I can go out and kill someone as part of, you know, something that's happening in my quote unquote professional world, but I can come home and I can love my, you know, my partner and my children and I'm a good, I'm a good husband, I'm a good father, I'm a good person, even though I've done something terrible 20 minutes ago.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or on the other hand, some people become so invested and so their identity becomes such a part of their work identity that the only thing that matters to them are these work successes or achieving something at work or climbing the corporate ladder. And sort of what happens, how they treat their friends, their family members, people outside of the workplace are irrelevant to sort of where that source of self-esteem comes from.

• 28:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Some years ago, the comedian Ellen DeGeneres came under fire for creating a toxic work environment at her show. Ultimately, three producers were dismissed and Ellen DeGeneres apologized to her staff. You say that this story has something to say about the nature of authenticity. How so, Erica?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Ellen DeGeneres, like many social figures, looms sort of large in people's minds. We all felt, or most people who watched her show, felt like we knew her or felt like we understand this person. She presented sort of this image of someone that's kind, someone that's very easygoing, lighthearted, and very authentic, while from these reports, what we've heard is that she could be very different to the people that were working with her directly and create an environment where they did not feel that she was really accepting and open the way she was presenting herself to the world.

• 29:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk a moment about some of the benefits of authenticity. What are the effects of authenticity on our well-being and self-esteem, Erica?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Authenticity is linked to greater subjective well-being. So this is feeling like you're satisfied with your life and also feeling positive affect or happiness and good feelings. So authenticity is really predictive of having that view of your life that things are going well. It's also related to feeling like you have meaning in your life and having better satisfaction with your relationships. And in some of my work, we've also tried to extend that into the workplace to find how authenticity relates to the way you engage with your work tasks. So feeling authentic at work or feeling like you can be your authentic self at work also helps you focus on the tasks at hand because you're not taking up so much mental space or engaging in that emotional labor about how you're coming across or how is everyone thinking of me in this meeting?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  You can really just be present and engaged with your work tasks as they come.

• 30:47Shankar Vedantam?

  So one domain where people face an ever-present tension about whether to be authentic is on social media. Do you present your true self to the world or do you present an idealized picture of your life to the world? You ran a study looking at the well-being of more than 10,000 people who were either more or less authentic on Facebook. Can you describe the study and what you found?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would be happy to. So this was co-first authored work with Sandra Mads at Columbia Business School. And we were interested not just in whether social media is good or bad for well-being. We were really interested in for whom is social media good or bad in terms of their well-being? And are there decisions that people are making with how they engage with these tools that differentially impact how that tool use relates to themselves or their view of themselves? So what we looked at is 10,000, over 10,000 Facebook users. We compared their self-rated personality, so what we call their self-view, with the way they express themselves on Facebook. And what we found is sort of that distance between the way you see yourself and the

• 31:53Speaker 01

  way you were expressing yourself on social media was correlated with subjective well-being, such that if you're closer in terms of your self-view and your online persona, you had higher well-being.

• 32:06Shankar Vedantam?

  So it's so striking, Erica, because I think many of us notice that when you look at social media feeds, especially Facebook and Instagram, we're often confronted by the fact that people are sharing very positive images of their life. So people are sharing the best moments, the happiest moments, the most glowing moments of their lives. And we sometimes contrast that with the messiness of our own lives. And we say, you know, other people are living perfect lives and I'm not living a perfect life. But I think what you're getting at is actually something really interesting, which is that this disjuncture doesn't just affect me looking at somebody else's social media feed and saying that person has a perfect life and I don't. You're saying that if that person is expressing they have a perfect life, but in fact, they don't, it actually is bad for them.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there's this phenomenon where people will gaze upon their own social media page and they'll sort of like look at this version of their life they've created. And that can be a really dissonant experience if that's really different than your day to day or your emotional experience.

• 33:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Feeling phony extracts a high emotional and psychological cost. Acting in tune with our inner core grants us a sense of meaning and satisfaction. When we come back, the steps we can take to get in touch with our true selves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 33:45Shankar Vedantam?

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• 34:28Shankar Vedantam?

  can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily. Based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar.

• 34:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed, it's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation.

• 35:28Shankar Vedantam?

  A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at SNHU.edu/brain.

• 35:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In one sense, we are always ourselves. Even when we are pretending to feel something we don't feel, or say something we don't believe, the things we feel and say are also us. Our desire to pretend to be someone we are not is also who we are. But social scientist Erica Bailey says there are moments we all feel fully and truly ourselves. We feel real, genuine, and authentic. She and others have studied how we can make those moments more frequent. Erica, can you paint me a picture of a time in your own life where you felt truly authentic?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  What you're describing is this experience of state authenticity, or those moments where you feel really aligned and connected with your core self. One moment that is really small for my own life, but that I go back to often, was a time in high school where we were driving around with my friends in the car. It was a sunny day, the windows were down, music was playing, and we were all singing at the top of our lungs.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  And that moment felt so authentic because, you know, I was so happy. You know, being a kid, you feel free for the first time when you're in a car. There's no adults around you. And I was experiencing that connection with my friends over this music and song and really feeling like this is where I belong in this moment.

• 37:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Why do you think it's useful for all of us to remember moments like this, Erica?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Moments like this can help clue us into how authenticity is so fun and also sort of complicated, right? So I ask a lot of people to tell me about these moments in their lives, and people will mention things like the birth of a child. And it's a moment where you feel really authentic, really connected, but of course, your identity has just changed dramatically. You know, you've now got a new identity, you know, being a father, being a mother, being a parent.

• 37:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Right.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  And yet you still feel very authentic, like this is now what my life is, this was how it was supposed to be. And that helps clue us into how this true self, this inner self, can constantly evolve and change.

• 38:07Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm wondering if this might be one of the reasons people turn to alcohol and other drugs, you know? So a drink might actually loosen our inhibition, so we feel like we can dance like no one is watching. But it might also be that the drink gives us permission to loosen our inhibitions, to feel like we can truly be ourselves.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  My advisor, or one of my advisors, Adam Galinsky, has this work about disinhibition and how things like being anonymous online, being able to, you know, pass a message anonymously to someone else, or having a drink can help us feel free from these social constraints to express how we really feel. Unfortunately, on social media, sometimes that comes across really negatively. But sometimes having, you know, that moment with someone else where you're sharing a glass of wine and you feel like, oh yeah, maybe those concerns I had about how this conversation would go were in my head and I can sort of relax into the moment and be really present with this person that I'm talking to.

• 39:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, Hidden Brain listeners are a very cerebral group of people. We might think that the best way to feel authentic is to reflect and introspect about what it means to be authentic. You say this might not be the best path. What's wrong with thinking our way to authenticity? And what is a better path?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Thinking our way into authenticity, or trying to maybe just look inwards to find that core central self that's really going to make us happy, is challenging because, you know, social psychologists would say, if you look inwards, there's not really anything there. What you have is like almost a mess of data. You have all these impulses. You have all these decisions that you've made, some of which you're proud of, some of which you're not, some of which you were proud of in the moment, and now you've come to regret. And so, turning inwards, you are left to try and sort out or try to understand sometimes really conflicting bits of data about who you are. And so, what I often recommend to people is, instead of focusing too much internally, where things like self-criticism, or self-doubt,

• 40:08Speaker 01

  or social comparison can come into play, sometimes it helps to look outwardly and think about those situations where you really felt authentic as clues for who you are. You can also think about trying on different identities. Like, maybe I don't know if I like playing pickleball, for example, that's my new identity. And so, you have to try it. And you can feel in that moment, pay attention to how that moment makes you feel. Does it make you feel alive? Does it make you feel connected with who you are? And if it doesn't, no harm, no foul. Now, you've learned something important from that situation.

• 40:52Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, when you think back to that moment in the car when you were singing with your friends, it wasn't just a feeling of being authentic. What you're saying, it's almost diagnostic. It was actually telling you something about yourself.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like a way to learn more about yourself, become more aware of who you are through reflecting on these experiences, or through going out and having those experiences and bringing back self-knowledge into that internal experience.

• 41:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand, Erica, that you had an experience along these lines when you first started teaching. Tell me what your first day in class was like.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  The first day of class, my teaching assistant wasn't able to be there. So sort of my lifeline, my comfort person, was not there. I just had like a binder with all my notes and sweaty palms, and I felt very inadequate to be the one standing in front of the room. But what I did in the moment was that sort of fake it till you make it, where I stood on my two feet, said good morning to the class, and thought about what value I could provide for them in the moment. So even though I was incredibly nervous, even though I was sweating, even though my voice was probably shaking at the time, I tried to approach them with sincerity, with openness, and allowed that experience to maybe feel uncomfortable,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  but approach it in a way that, you know, I am competent and I can do this. And it's only after, you know, that first lecture, left first lecture and a half, where I realized, actually, I really like this. This is really engaging. This is really interesting. And they brought me amazing research ideas and examples that I can bring back into my other identity as a researcher.

• 42:41Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, it goes back to what you were saying a second earlier, which is that when you recognize that you're in the flow, you're feeling authentic, it actually tells you something important about yourself.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I learned that teaching is a huge part of my identity. It's something I find really rewarding and really valuable, and I appreciate and look forward to that time in the classroom with my students.

• 43:10Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the things you said a second ago just struck me, Erica, which is that one way we can feel more authentic is to remind ourselves about our core values. Tell me about the research carried out by another former guest of Hidden Brain, the psychologist Sheena Ainger.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Well, Sheena Ainger is my advisor, so I got to spend a lot of time with her. And together with Paul Ingram, who's another professor at Columbia, they walked students through this exercise, which is a values exercise. And what this helps you do is iterate through a set of values until you feel like you've identified sort of your core values and you understand like, what's the most important value to you? What's your second and third most important value? What they found is that having students remind themselves of these values before giving a presentation led them to come across as more authentic to the audience. It was that ability to remember the core values that one has, to remember that, you know, I'm not just here to give a meeting.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I'm here to maybe help someone achieve something with their business. I may be here to help motivate my employees to take the next step or to take that risk. And reminding themselves of those values actually helped those speeches seem more authentic to the audience.

• 44:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Why do you think it is that reminding ourselves of our core values would help us come across to others as more authentic, Erica?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  One thing I've found in a couple of studies is, you know, sometimes we are stuck really up here in our heads. And we forget that we sort of need to bring people into our backstage. We need to explain ourselves more than we think we do. We have all these internal motivations and feelings and evaluations that are going on behind the scenes. And we think they're so perceptible to those around us. But of course, they're not, you know, they're locked up inside our minds. And it can help to identify your values, your motives, why you're doing the things you're doing, and to articulate those to other people. It helps them make sense of what they're seeing in terms of, oh, that's how they really feel behind the scenes.

• 45:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica, researchers have found that one way to generate a sense of authenticity is to engage in self-compassion. Can you tell me about this work and why self-compassion might be connected to feeling authentic?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  So this paper started with this question that a lot of authenticity researchers have, which is, we sort of have all agreed that authenticity is a good thing, but how do we get there? What's the steps that we need to take to experience more authenticity in our lives? And what they theorize is that this idea of self-compassion can help people feel more authentic. So self-compassion is having kindness towards yourself. It's also about recognizing that we're all human, and part of being a human is being imperfect and making mistakes, and having the ability to reflect on those mistakes with sort of composure and awareness with acceptance. And what they found is that self-compassion, people who have higher trait self-compassion experience greater trait authenticity, but also experimentally inducing self-compassion,

• 46:21Speaker 01

  or having people engage in reflection exercises with more or less compassion, predicted how authentic they were in that moment. And part of why that happens, which I love from this paper, is it's associated with an increased optimism. So when we feel like we can approach our mistakes with kindness and with acceptance, we also feel like, maybe I can do that tomorrow, and maybe if I make a mistake tomorrow, I can have this same mindset of kindness towards myself and the belief in future growth, and that can help me feel authentic in these moments, even when reflecting on something that in hindsight, we wish we would have done differently.

• 46:58Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm also struck by the fact that when we try and identify our authentic self, you know, and we look inward, we're obviously going to see things that are virtues, but we're also going to see things that are flaws. And in some ways, being able to see ourselves authentically means to see the whole us, you know, the good side and the bad side. And perhaps this is where self-compassion comes in, because as you start to see the flaws in yourself, it might help to look at them with a little self-compassion.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. It can even help you recognize that those are parts of who you are and think about ways to make progress towards them, instead of using those aspects as a way to punish yourself or to feel badly about what you could have done or how you should be.

• 47:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica, I understand that there are challenging parts of your own mental makeup that you strive to handle with self-compassion. Can you give me an example?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  One example from my own life is I struggle with anxiety. It's something that was absolutely exacerbated with grad school and the pandemic and the many historical experiences that we're all living through. Part of what has helped me with recognizing I have anxiety is obviously being in therapy, but coming to understand where those anxious thoughts come from has helped me have compassion for that side of myself. So when I'm ruminating over these experiences or having nightmares about how my first day of class is going to go, I can recognize that that's my body's way of trying to prepare me for those situations, trying to walk through the worst-case scenario so that when it happens, I won't be so surprised.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And of course, that's really not effective and I never feel prepared for those experiences. But recognizing the source of that and where it comes from has helped me approach that side of myself with more kindness and acceptance and has even sort of lessened its impact on my daily life.

• 49:03Shankar Vedantam?

  In other words, your mind is functioning like a smoke alarm that might be overly sensitive and it's going off and it's distracting and unpleasant, but it's not trying to be distracting or unpleasant, it's actually trying to help you. It's just, it's set, its threshold is set maybe slightly lower than it needs to be set.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. One example is I get anxious when I first wake up in the morning and I'll feel really anxious when I'm in my kitchen making my coffee. And what I sort of tell my body is like, I know that you feel like there's a tiger in the room, but there's not a tiger in the room. I'm just making my coffee and we're going to get through this coffee and then we're going to approach our day with some calm and just kind of take it one step at a time.

• 49:46Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to contrast what you just said with, I think, what we often do, Erica, which is we have these feelings, we are anxious, and we try and push the anxiety away and say, you know, why am I feeling anxious? And now you're not just anxious about whatever's happening in your day, you're anxious about being anxious, and then it becomes this vicious cycle. And I think what you're pointing to in some ways is that by sitting with the unpleasant emotion and in fact welcoming it into the kitchen and basically saying, I recognize why you're here, I recognize that you're trying to help me. It might not actually be helpful in the moment, but I recognize that your intentions are in the right place. In some ways, that lowers the temperature in the room. It lowers the intensity of the anxiety.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And recognizing where that comes from and sort of where its bases are irrational can help me take it less seriously, almost. That's part of where the idea that there's a tiger in the room makes me feel better. It's my body's having a really strong reaction. That's sort of divorced from reality. And to the extent I can maybe poke fun at it or lessen its impact, I can almost embrace it and it feels less serious. It feels less all-consuming. And it's still a part of myself, but it's one I can approach with more grace.

• 50:59Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I often find, Erica, that when I talk with other people, my thoughts become clearer to myself. When I'm describing a problem that I'm having to someone else, all of a sudden, I can see and understand the problem much more clearly than if I just have it, you know, going round and round in my own head. Is it possible that talking to others in some ways can help us get in touch with what's happening inside ourselves and can be an engine of feeling more authentic?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  People often talk about conversations, especially with friends or close others, as a way to feel more authentic or moments where they really felt like themselves. Part of why that happens, I think, is people give you the space to explore those feelings, to talk about them in more detail. And they'll often ask questions or have you look at that problem from a new angle. With respect to anxiety, you know, when I talk to other people who have anxieties and they tell me the things they're anxious about, it seems like, why would I be anxious about that? And having that reaction to their anxiety makes me realize, oh, my anxiety is also probably a little silly. Like, this is probably an irrational fear that I have. And it almost helps you look at your own anxiety or your own troubles in a different way.

• 52:20Shankar Vedantam?

  In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we will look at a paradox. As we have discussed many times on this show, we are a deeply social species. All of us, in one way or another, rely on the kindness of strangers. Other people's opinions of us not only matter, they help constitute how we see ourselves.

• 52:40Shankar Vedantam?

  How do we square the imperative of being authentic, of marching to our own inner drummer, with the fact that other people play a large role in shaping how we feel about ourselves? How can we both care about other people's views and not care about other people's views at the same time?

• 53:00Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, that episode should be available in your feed right now. It's titled "The Us in Authenticity." If you're not yet a subscriber, you can sign up at apple.co/hiddenbrain. If you're using an Android device, you can sign up at support.hiddenbrain.org via our Patreon membership page.

• 53:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Erica Bailey is a social scientist at the Ha School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Erica Bailey, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Shankar.

• 53:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow-up questions about authenticity for Erica Bailey? If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. That email address again is [email protected]. Use the subject line "Authenticity."

• 54:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week in our Wellness 2.0 series, Curveballs and Catastrophes. We look at the traits of people who cope extraordinarily well in moments of crisis.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  He says, "I'm taking your vitals right now and you're completely calm." Like, your blood pressure's fine, your arousal's fine, your heart rate is normal. Like, how is that possible? And we heard that in her voice, the calmness in her voice, which is what was needed at that moment in time.

• 55:03Shankar Vedantam?

  That's next week in our Wellness 2.0 series. I hope you'll join us. Happy New Year from all of us at Hidden Brain. We look forward to bringing you lots of new ideas about human behavior this coming year.

• 55:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 55:42Speaker 04

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