When you hear “peer pressure,” do you still picture someone in a school assembly warning you not to do something stupid just because your friends are? Same. But, no one really talked about how positive peer pressure might actually help us.
Rethinking Peer Pressure
Growing up, I learned about peer pressure almost entirely in the “don’t do drugs in a parking lot” sense. The message was simple: your friends might convince you to ruin your life, so be careful.
In How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman, she talks about how powerful it can be to show people what others are doing, both in helpful and not so helpful ways. Seeing that “people like you” are doing something makes you more likely to follow along.
That made me realize something: if peer pressure is that strong, why not flip it and use positive peer pressure on purpose?
Use People To Shape Your Habits (Nicely)
If we’re being honest, a lot of our habits are social.
We eat like the people around us. We move like them. We talk, rest, and even spend money like them. Most of that tuning happens automatically. You don’t sit down and say, “I will now adopt my friend’s snack schedule.” You just slowly drift that way.
The upside is you can use that same effect as positive peer pressure. If you surround yourself with people who are working toward the lifestyle you want, you quietly raise the chances that you’ll drift in that direction too.
The trick is choosing those people well.
The Chess Problem
For a long time, I wanted to learn chess. The problem was my peer groups were all wrong for it.
- Some friends didn’t play at all, so they never wanted to play with me.
- Others loved chess and had been playing for years, so they absolutely demolished me in an embarrassingly low number of moves.
Both situations stalled me out. With non players, there was no practice. With experts, there was no chance to build confidence. Losing instantly is not a great on ramp.
It took me time to find the right version of positive peer pressure: people who were interested in learning, but couldn’t really play yet either. We were all bad together. That made it fun, not humiliating. We improved at a similar pace, and every little win felt earned.
The Running Group That Was Too Much
At another point, I had a friend group that loved running. This sounded like a perfect positive peer pressure situation at first.
Then I realized they were all training for a marathon.
Their pace, their schedule, and their goals were way beyond what I actually wanted. For them, running was serious. For me, at that moment, it needed to be casual. If I had tried to keep up, I would have resented it, burned out, or gotten injured.
So I politely declined that particular flavor of peer pressure. I still liked them. I just didn’t want my default social context to be “anything less than 20 miles is basically a warm up.”
Find Your “Just Right” People
The bottom line with positive peer pressure is that it works best when the people around you are:
- A bit ahead of you, so they pull you forward.
- Not so far ahead that you feel hopeless or miserable.
- Actually working toward the same general kind of goal.
Too far behind, and you’ll feel like you’re dragging. Too far ahead, and you’ll feel like you’re constantly failing. Right around your level, and suddenly improvement feels possible and even normal.
That can apply to:
- Movement and fitness
- Food and alcohol habits
- Money and spending
- Learning skills or hobbies
You don’t have to engineer this perfectly, but you can be a little more deliberate. Notice which groups make it easier to be the version of you that you like, and which ones make it harder. Then gently bias your time toward the first kind.
Positive peer pressure is happening either way. You might as well pick peers who pressure you in a direction you’re happy about.