The Washington Post was folded open on my breakfast table, and the headline stopped me mid-sip: “The mental benefits of chatting up a stranger.” I read it twice. Not because the idea was new to me, but because it named something I have been doing my whole life without ever thinking of it as a practice or an experiment.

Growing up in India, talking to strangers was not an anxiety to be managed. It was just Tuesday. On a train from Hyderabad to Delhi, you did not sit in silence for eighteen hours staring at the window. You learned the name of the family across the aisle, their village, their reason for traveling, and by the time the chai wallah came through the second time, you had probably been offered food from their tiffin. Silence between people in proximity felt strange. Conversation was the default.

I carried that habit to the United States, where it sometimes lands differently. I have learned to read the room. Some mornings on the Metro, people have their earbuds in and their faces set, and I respect that. But I also know what it feels like when someone on a flight or a conference shuttle opens up, and both of you arrive somewhere slightly better than you boarded.

Some of my best conference conversations have happened not in the keynote hall or the breakout sessions but in the bathroom line. There is something about that particular waiting that strips away the professional performance. Nobody is networking. Nobody has a badge-glance agenda. At PopTech in Camden, Maine, I struck up a conversation with a journalist while we were both just standing there waiting. We talked through the line and kept talking after. We are still connected on LinkedIn, years later, which is a small thing and also not a small thing. It is proof that the conversation was real.

The other habit I have developed at conferences, almost without noticing, is this: if I see someone standing at the edge of a room looking a little lost, I go over. Not to be helpful in some formal sense, just to say hello, ask what brought them here, and if I am sitting with a few people, bring them into the group. It costs nothing. It happens in maybe thirty seconds. And I have watched people visibly relax when it does, the way you exhale when you realize you are not as alone as you thought.

The article profiles Nick Epley, a behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago who began studying this after noticing people on his train commute sitting elbow to elbow and completely ignoring each other. He challenged himself to talk to the woman next to him. It changed his life and eventually became a book. The research finding that struck me most was not about extroverts, who you might assume would already know this. It was about introverts. People who considered themselves shy, who worried the other person would not want to talk, who feared they would say the wrong thing, who felt their jaw go sealed with anxiety at the very thought — they also felt better after talking to a stranger. Not worse. Better.

There is a journalist in the piece, Maggie Penman, who ran the experiment herself for a month. Commutes, elevators, the street while walking her dog. She describes that specific fear: what if she didn’t want to talk? What if I said the wrong thing? I recognize that moment. Even I feel it sometimes, after all these years. The hesitation before speaking is not really about the other person. It is about the story we have already written in our heads about how it will go wrong.

Most of the time, it doesn’t go wrong.

I think about the conversations that shaped my understanding of this country. A retired schoolteacher at a diner in Ohio in 2003 who asked where I was from and spent the next forty minutes telling me about her daughter who had married someone from Pakistan and how the family had come around slowly. A man waiting for a delayed flight in Atlanta who turned out to have grown up ten miles from a neighborhood in Hyderabad that I knew. A grandmother at a neighborhood event in Northern Virginia last year who had immigrated from El Salvador in the 1980s and whose path to citizenship had taken eleven years and who told me about it matter-of-factly, the way you describe weather.

None of those conversations were engineered. They were just the result of looking up and saying something.

Epley’s research suggests that people consistently underestimate how much others want to connect, and overestimate how awkward it will feel. We predict discomfort and receive warmth instead. That gap, he says, is why we stay silent. We are bad at forecasting the experience, and so we protect ourselves from something that was never going to happen.

I read the article all the way to the end, then set it down and looked out at the street.

A neighbor I have seen a hundred times was checking his mail. I know his face completely and his name not at all. We have nodded for four years. I have meant to learn his name every single time.

Today felt like a reasonable day to finally do it.