How to throw a self-aware party

Or: People feel anxious at parties sometimes

Summary

• I’ve often felt like house parties are a mixed bag: often joyful, often anxiety- provoking. Usually full of unexpressed feelings and coordination problems.

• Self-awareness, in general, allows us to understand ourselves better and make better decisions. 

• I was wondering whether a group of people at a party could use self-awareness to understand the group’s feelings and make better decisions too!

• So I threw a house party where people had to fill in data about their experience every hour. This data was then presented back to all guests via a live dashboard.

• I want to do this again.

Parties are okay

I don’t go to a lot of parties, but I go to enough that I’ve noticed some patterns in my party-experience. Namely that they are mixed. Often they are fun and exciting, I like spending time with friends, meeting some new people and maybe dancing. But they can also be social-anxiety-inducing and tiring. So much so that sometimes I’m left questioning whether I even enjoy parties, or whether I just enjoy seeming like the-type-of-person-who-enjoys-parties.

Negative party experiences have sometimes made me feel pretty lonely. “Everyone seems happy and I’m sitting here feeling insecure and sorry for myself”, I would say, to no-one. 

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate

When I started hosting parties, I wanted to avoid people feeling like they were alone in their negative emotions (because they likely weren’t). I also knew that there were probably a lot of unexpressed positive emotions at parties I’d been to! I express a tiny fraction of the gratitude that I feel when I spend time with lots of people. It’s a shame there’s often not enough space for that.

My final gripe with parties is that they were often a victim of bad coordination. It seemed like I'd often go to parties and notice that a bunch of people wanted to dance, but no-one wanted to dance alone, so no-one danced… this is a tragedy, and I wanted to find a solution.

What is a self-aware party?

Collecting data on myself has been hugely powerful for self-understanding. Noticing patterns in my feelings and motivation has led me being more self-aware and has helped me make better decisions (I’ve written about this here). Collecting data is the hammer I have, and everything looks like a nail. So when I was thinking about how to improve parties, I hit it with my data hammer. 

Last year, I organised a group of my friends to get together for a party while collecting data on their experience. That way, we could become more self-aware as a group and make better decisions. It was a self-aware party.

The format was simple: throughout the evening, every hour, I sounded an alarm and everyone filled in a form about their experience in the last hour (see that form here).

The main data points captured were:

• Mood (1-10)

• Level of social relaxation (or “chill”) (1-10)

• Total alcohol consumption (0-20 units)

• Emotions experienced (multi-select from a long list)

• What the person had done in the last hour and what they want to do in the next hour (multi select from a short list)

• What they are grateful for (free text)

This data was then projected onto the wall of my flat. Here is what that looked like at 11pm (the peek of the party)

The rest of this post is a summary of some of the most interesting patterns across the whole evening.

The most common emotion that people felt was “connection”, followed by anxiety and excitement.

I sort of love that anxiety and excitement are near the top. There are the emotions I feel most often in a room full of people, so it makes me feel more connected!

People felt more connected, joyful and tired as the night went on

I like how in this graph connection and attraction follow the same pattern and excitement and anxiety seem to follow each other a bit too (I sometime have a hard time telling these pairs of emotions apart…).

The most common object of gratitude was….”Toby”!

This was the part of the data I liked the most (not just because I received a lot of gratitude). Both expressing and receiving so much gratitude was really lovely. It was really nice to see this data every hour!

The emotions correlated with each other a bunch

The below graph shows more purple where people reported feeling that emotion together in the same hour more often. Red lines mean that they were negatively correlated (so were less likely to coincide in a given hour)

I don’t have many conclusions about this one, it’s just a cool graph.

People were slow to start dancing and didn’t lie down as much as they would have liked

People wanted to dance pretty early on, but no-one really danced until suddenly half the party was dancing. Interest in dancing then waned quickly:

Laying down was neglected:

My next party is going to encourage a lot more laying down

Did the self-awareness affect the party’s behaviour

A few things were obviously different about this party:

• Several poeple mentioned that they felt better about their social anxiety because they could see the general level of anxiety. This was great and one of the main goals (the awareness, not the anxiety).

• There was a lot of gratitude expressed and people felt good about this!

• In an unusual example of Goodhart’s law, at one point a party attendee decided that they wanted to try and experience every emotion on the list. They apparently succeeded. Their attempts to experience disgust also made other people feel disgust…

• There were a number of conversations about the specific definitions of emotions. I love this topic, (see my disambiguation of gratitude here) so it made me feel joy (or maybe gratitude, or maybe just happiness?)

Overall, I really liked hosting this party. I want to throw more self-aware parties (whether using graphs of something else), and want to encourage others to throw them too!