How to Reconnect With an Old Friend: Text Someone You Already Talk To First

In 2024, psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Lara Aknin gave people everything they needed to reconnect with an old friend: a name they cared about, a few quiet minutes, and an open message box. Fewer than four in ten sent anything. In one study it was 28%. If you’ve been carrying around a “I should text her” name since last Thanksgiving, that’s the real story of how to reconnect with an old friend. The advice online is mostly about what to say. The research says the words were never the problem. The send button is, and the fix that worked in the lab has nothing to do with the old friend at all. You warm up on someone you already talk to.

The script isn’t what stops you from reconnecting with an old friend

Search for advice on reaching out to old friends and you’ll get the same handful of tips: be honest that it’s been a while, mention a memory, suggest coffee, don’t over-apologize. All fine. None of it addresses why the message stays in your drafts.

Sandstrom and Aknin’s paper, “People Are Surprisingly Hesitant to Reach Out to Old Friends,” ran seven studies with almost 2,500 participants. According to the University of Sussex summary, 90% of people had lost touch with a friend they still cared about, and 70% felt neutral or negative about getting in touch right then. When the researchers asked people to rank how willing they’d be to do various everyday things, messaging an old friend landed about level with picking up litter or talking to a stranger, per Scientific American’s write-up of the work.

The reasons people gave weren’t about wording. They worried the friend wouldn’t want to hear from them, that it would be too awkward after so long, and they felt guilty for letting it lapse. Being too busy came in last. So a better opening line isn’t going to move you, and neither, it turns out, is reassurance.

Reassurance didn’t help, and the evidence says it should have

The researchers tested nudges you’d expect to work: send it without overthinking, imagine your friend’s side of things, remind yourself rejection isn’t that bad. None of them raised the send rate. That’s frustrating, because the fear itself is badly miscalibrated.

A 2022 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Peggy Liu and colleagues, covering more than 5,900 participants, had people send a short note (sometimes with a small gift) to someone they hadn’t been in touch with lately. In every experiment, senders “significantly underestimated” how much the recipient would appreciate it, according to the American Psychological Association’s release. The gap was biggest when the message was a surprise, when it broke from the usual pattern of contact, and when the tie was weaker. In other words, the friend you’ve drifted furthest from is the one you’re most wrong about.

You can know all of that and still not send the text. Most of us have a name we’ve typed into a message box and deleted more than once. Knowing the odds favor you doesn’t change how your stomach feels with your thumb over the button, which is exactly why the reassurance nudges flopped.

A three-minute warm-up text roughly turns one send into one and a half

What did work was boring. Before writing to the old friend, one group spent three minutes messaging people they were already in regular contact with. The comparison group scrolled social media for the same three minutes. About half of the warm-up group went on to message an old friend, compared with about a third of the scrollers, a jump the Sussex team describes as more than two-thirds.

Here’s what that looks like on your own list. Say you have five people you’ve lost touch with and keep meaning to contact before the holidays. Going in cold at the study’s roughly one-in-three rate, you’d expect to actually message about 1.7 of them (5 divided by 3). With the warm-up and a one-in-two rate, it’s 2.5. That’s close to one extra reconnection out of every five names, and the cost is three minutes of texting your sister about what she’s bringing on Thursday. If you’d rather send cards, mailing all five at the current 82-cent Forever stamp price (up from 78 cents on July 12, 2026) is $4.10 in postage. Cost was never what held anyone back, either.

The warm-up probably works because it lowers the activation energy. You’re already in messaging mode, your thumbs are moving, and the old friend becomes the fourth text instead of a Big Decision. The study didn’t test why, so treat that as my guess.

The holidays hand you the occasion, so use the next two weeks

Participants in the Sussex studies rated a friend’s birthday as the most compelling reason to get back in touch, with reminiscing about a shared experience close behind. Asking for a favor ranked last. That matches what the Liu research suggests: a message that’s clearly just about her lands better than one that wants something.

Thanksgiving week is full of those natural openings. AAA projected nearly 82 million Americans would travel over Thanksgiving in 2025, a record, and plenty of them head back to the same hometowns at the same time. Driving past her parents’ house, the diner you both worked at, the song that was playing at prom: any of those is a reason to write that doesn’t need explaining. “I just drove past Steak ‘n Shake and thought of you” is a complete message. Expect it to feel a little awkward anyway. The Sussex team’s advice is that awkwardness is normal and doesn’t mean the friendship is gone.

The plan I’d actually use is simple. Tonight, write down the names. Before Thanksgiving, pick a moment when you’re already texting people (a group chat about who’s bringing what is perfect), send two or three warm-up messages, and then send the old-friend text while you’re still in the flow. Keep it short, mention the specific memory, and don’t promise a big catch-up. If she writes back with a coffee date, great. Rebuilding a close friendship still takes real hours together, which we walked through in our piece on the 200-hour math of making friends as an adult, but an old friend isn’t starting from zero.

Most guides on how to reconnect with an old friend try to make the message perfect. The data says the message just has to exist, and the easiest way to make that happen is to be mid-conversation with someone else when you send it.