You‘re Actually Not Bothering People Enough

A psychologist and a man who spent 100 days collecting rejections make the case that asking for help is less risky than our anxious minds assume

Most of us would rather struggle alone than risk hearing “no” if we ask for help. On The Happiness Lab, host Laurie Santos argues that this instinct is not just unnecessarily painful, it’s backwards: asking for help tends to make both people happier, and we’re wildly miscalibrated about how badly it will go.

A Childhood Rejection That Followed Him for Decades

Entrepreneur Jia Jiang remembers a holiday gift exchange in his first-grade classroom in Beijing, where students had to earn a wrapped present by saying something kind about a classmate. Compliments dried up before three kids, Jiang among them, were called on. “Three gifts sat uncollected in the corner, and three kids stood rejected at the front of the room,” Santos recounts. Decades later, as an adult in the U.S. dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur, Jiang found that same fear of rejection paralyzing him. “I just felt like my fear of rejection was really holding me back,” he said.

We Underestimate How Much People Want to Help

Santos turns to Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who has spent years studying why people avoid asking for help. His research, including a 2022 study with Xuan Zhao, found that people consistently underestimate how willing strangers are to help and how good it makes those strangers feel. In one experiment, Epley had subjects approach strangers with an old-school Polaroid camera to ask for a photo. Participants guessed strangers would find the request six times more annoying than they actually did. “It was a more positive experience for the person you asked for help than people expected,” Epley told Santos. He’s since applied the finding to his own life, asking a neighbor to plow his snowy driveway instead of struggling through it alone. “It’s created lots of good conversations between us,” he said.

One Hundred Days of Asking for the Absurd

Determined to obliterate his fear, Jiang discovered RejectionTherapy.com and committed to 100 consecutive days of deliberately outlandish requests, filming each one. Day one, he asked a mall security guard to lend him $100 and fled before hearing the answer. By day three, he’d asked a Krispy Kreme employee, Jackie Braun, to build him five donuts arranged like the Olympic rings, certain she’d refuse. She did it for free, and the video went viral, eventually landing Jiang a TED Talk, “What I Learned From 100 Days of Rejection,” and a book, Rejection Proof. When Epley later analyzed Jiang’s footage, he found people said yes to Jiang’s increasingly bizarre asks, including one to feed a lion at a zoo, more than half the time, and reacted with warmth far more often than fear predicted.

The Beautiful Mess Effect

Santos ties Jiang’s experience to what psychologists call the beautiful mess effect, documented in a 2018 study by Anna Bruk, Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless: showing vulnerability makes us seem more relatable, not weaker. “If you give and take, that really builds relationships,” Jiang said. “The fact that you’re asking shows that I need you, and that really increases the bond.”

How to Ask Without the Dread

Jiang’s practical advice: start small rather than borrowing $100 from a stranger on day one, explicitly tell the person it’s fine to say no, and remember how you’ve felt when a friend didn’t ask you for help they needed. “Go outside of the comfort zone a little bit,” he said. “You don’t have to come in and bench press three hundred pounds.” Jackie Braun’s donut moment, meanwhile, made her a minor celebrity within Krispy Kreme, complete with a visit from the company’s CEO, proof, Santos notes, that saying yes can be as rewarding for the helper as for the person who finally worked up the nerve to ask.

Listen to the full episode on The Happiness Lab.