How a sweaty armpit can alleviate loneliness
I'm doing what I can
Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about human connection. To support my life’s work, upgrade to a paid subscription, buy a guide, follow me on OnlyFans, follow me on Twitter, support me on Patreon, or just share this post 🙏
~~~~~
This is interesting. A new study shows that smelling other people’s sweat, along with mindfulness meditation, reduced social anxiety in women. (Hat tip Dr. David Ley.)
This is more grist for my theory mill that exposure therapy is helpful for alleviating loneliness.
We know that loneliness is self-reinforcing. And it may be helpful to think of socializing like exercise.
I was having a think the other day about how much self-consciousness is ideal. Too much concern for how you’re coming across and you end up with social anxiety. Or so I’ve heard. Too little, and you end up being really obnoxious.
But like, what is obnoxiousness, really? It’s obviously subjective. To some extent at least, it’s a judgment call. Different people are annoyed to different extents by the same behavior.
Neurodiversity drives some of this. For example, people on the Autism spectrum tend to be more annoyed by stimulus than neurotypical folks. One of my sisters takes care of a severely Autistic man who vocalizes in a particular way that I find almost unbearable. And when she was driving the family to Florida for Thanksgiving, she spoke so loudly, for so long, that I played the book I was listening to on the way back for the whole van to avoid it.
She doesn’t mind her charge’s vocalizations. And she isn’t bothered when people talk for a long time at high volumes.
But how annoyed you are by other people is also part of the cycle of loneliness. People who are more annoyed by other people probably spend more time alone, and people who spend more time alone are probably more annoyed by other people.
As someone who’s probably on the high end of annoyed by other people, it’s not in my best immediate interest to tell people to worry less about being annoying.
But as someone who’s deeply interested in reducing loneliness, I wonder how much it would help to for most of us to focus less on being less annoying and focus more on being less annoyable.
When I imagine a world where everyone is less annoyable, I think about what my friend told me about visiting Mexico City. People are loud and in each other’s space. It’s vibrant and happy.
When I imagine a world where everyone is less annoying, I think about Nordic countries. People are quiet and reserved. It’s calm and easy.
I, personally, in my day-to-day, minute-to-minute, tend to optimize for clean, quiet, orderly. But when I zoom out a bit, I think trying harder to optimize for vibrant, chaotic, and loud would make my life more interesting and meaningful.
The difficult thing is that, at least right now, chaos and loud noises exhaust me.
My question is whether, after enough exposure, they would exhaust me less and fulfill me more. The more I read about loneliness, the more optimistic I become that it might work that way.
Going back to the benefits of sweat, as a prolific sweater, I’m proud to say I’m doing my part. Fun fact: In my first threesome the woman noted how sweaty I was.
The study reminds me of feeling nervous about being smelly in cuddle puddles in SF. I wonder how much MDMA helped with the anxiety going in. It’s funny, people talk about how orgies do or must smell. I honestly don’t remember once even noticing a smell at any I attended. I have noticed a foot smell at yoga studios. To be fair, between the allergies and the snortables, I’m kind of hard of smelling.
Maybe I could have replaced the MDMA with a whiff of a sweaty armpit. Maybe in the future, we all will.
~~~~~
This ⬇️ is an affiliate link! Sign up today to support me!
Join the reading revolution! Get key ideas from bestselling non-fiction books, distilled by experts into bitesize text and audio. Explore our vast library of over 5,500 titles and stay up-to-date with 40 new titles added each month.