How To Break Through Loneliness

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Again, there's a sense of shame that people have and even admitting to others that they need some more human contact, that they need some time with their friends, they don't want to seem desperate or needy or somehow, you know, again, not likable.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. For much of human history, we relied on our connection to one another as a means of survival. Today, most of us aren't reliant on our relationships for daily survival, but connection to others remains a vital component of optimal health. In fact, chronic loneliness can put us in a state of chronic stress, which research shows can lead to inflammation and a host of other precursors to disease. Earlier this year, just before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Dr. Hyman sat down with the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

To discuss his work on loneliness and how we can overcome it in our own lives. The truth is whether you're feeling lonely right now or whether you're not, you undoubtedly know people who are lonely and all of us are at risk of loneliness at various points in our lives. Loneliness isn't something that you're born with and affects you for your entire life. We go through natural periods of connection and disconnection in our life. And the question is how do we prepare for that? How do we deal with it? How do we build a strong foundation of connection to begin with? So there are a couple of things in the book that I I go through that are, I believe, helpful in building that connected life. One of them unexpectedly is service. It turns out that when we serve others, we actually break some of these very negative patterns of loneliness that get in basically launched within us as a part of our evolutionary history. Those patterns being the focus on self and also the elevated threat level that we experience when we're lonely. Because when you help somebody else, first of all, that takes you away from a focus on yourself and you're focusing on another person. But the second thing is it's also disarming. Like when you're helping other people, you're also reminded of what value you have to offer to the world. And that's actually reassuring, that lowers your sense of threat. So service is a powerful way to connect with others and also to reconnect in a sense with our self, our own sense of self-worth and value. The second thing though that can help us on an individual level is to think about where we're spending our time when it comes to social relationships. So number one, are we making sure that we have at least five to ten minutes a day that we're spending with people we love? That could be spending in person, it could be speaking to them on the phone or through video conferencing. But are we spending five to ten minutes with someone that we love every day? and this might seem very simple, but you'd be surprised how many people can go for days without having a meaningful conversation with somebody. But even just that five minutes can make an extraordinary impact. And that comes down to also another point about the quality of time that we spend. So, you know, technology is really interesting, and we can have a conversation about technology and how it's impacted our connection with one another. But one of the things that I think that many of us do now, and I certainly have been guilty of this, is we have allowed technology, particularly our phones, to dilute the quality of our interactions with other people because we bring our phones off into the dinner table or and we might convince ourselves, hey, I'm not really paying attention to it. I've got it on silent. I've put it face down. I'm not really paying attention to it. But we actually know from studies that when there is a phone even within sight, even if it's on vibrate and face down, it actually changes how people feel about the conversation in a negative way. I think there are, you know, In the book, what I will try to do is I try to share some stories that lay out some individual steps we can take in our lives, but also stories that talk about what schools and workplaces can do and are doing already in some cases to create a culture of connection. Because at the end of the day, Mark, if we want to create real connection, if we want to build a people-centered life and a people-centered society, it's going to involve more than programs. It's going to require us to shift culture and to ask ourselves what's really important. Now, if we got a group of 100 people together on any street corner in America, my guess is if you ask them to name their top three priorities, that people would be at the top of that list. People might say it's my daughter or my son or my spouse or my mom or my dad. But if you look at how- They behave. Yeah, how where we put our time and energy and where, frankly, society nudges us to spend our time and energy. It's not usually with the people we love most. It's in investing it in places where we can acquire greater power, reputation, and wealth. The traditional marks of achievement in modern society. I'm not saying that those aren't important or those shouldn't be pursued. It's a question of where are they on the priority list?

Or what's your Facebook feed or Instagram.

Feed or your email or... Right, and with those feeds in particular, I think about our childhood and about the childhood that my kids will be experiencing. And in modern childhood, I think the messages, the cultural messages about what matters, are just coming at you a thousand times faster. And I meet so many young people who are feeling, because of this culture of comparison on social media, that they are not thin enough, that they're not good looking enough, that they're not popular enough or funny enough, but they're not enough. You know that ultimately that they're not enough. And that has actually a very powerful and insidious effect on our connection with other people. And this is one of the things I think that is not often well appreciated, which is that our connection to other people is ultimately built on having a strong connection to ourself. Now, what does it mean to have a strong connection to ourself? It means to know that we have a sense of worth and value. It means to recognize that we are human beings who have something meaningful to add to the world. And that requires a combination of self-knowledge, and self-compassion. Now, how do we develop self-knowledge? Well, we develop it partly by living life, but not only by living life, by having time to reflect and time to think. And much of that white space in our life that many people used to ponder and reflect on things on, that has disappeared. It's evaporated as now in the five minutes you have between events or when you're waiting at the bus stop, we just pull out our devices and look at the news or check our inbox. But ultimately, if we are not able to support, particularly among our kids, a healthy sense of self, if we're not able to convey to them and help them understand what it is that makes them worthy and valuable, and that it's not what they're wearing or how much money their parents have in their pockets or how popular they are and what parties they're getting invited to, then we are going to run into a situation where people feel less and less adequate, and then they will trust seek to be the people that they think other people want them to be. And when we do that, that's a recipe for loneliness. When we try to be something we're not, when we can't inhabit our own skin, people feel lonely.

What are the challenges some people have to actually doing this in their life? Because it sounds like everybody would wanna do this, but how do people get over those obstacles?

It's a great question. I think there are a few key obstacles that come up. Number one, sometimes people feel that focusing on connections in their own life is somehow self-indulgent, that they should be focusing on doing more at work, on getting that promotion, on building up their bank account, on taking their kids to activities. Busy parents, I think, are very interesting because I think a lot of them struggle with loneliness, especially in the early years, when their kids are one, two, three, four years old before they're in school. It can be very all-consuming as a parent. to really take care of your children and that can isolate you from others. But I think this feeling that somehow investing in our connections is a luxury that it's self-indulgent, I think is one of the reasons why people don't do it more. I think the second reason is that, again, there's a sense of shame that people have and even admitting to others that they need some more human contact, that they need some time with their friends. They don't want to seem desperate or needy or somehow again, not likable or an outcast in some way. So people have a hard time not just acknowledging to other people, even acknowledging it to themselves. And I think the last thing is there's a structural issue as well, which is that if you look at how our lives are designed with spending so many hours at work and many people have to commute many of those hours, there's a question of time that comes up, which is where am I going to find the time to go and interact with other people? And those questions feel really burdensome. I mean, they can feel really tiring when you think about it, oh my god, that's so hard. Let me just keep going with life. But this is where I think it's so powerful and important to recognize that the dividends that come from just a small amount of time spent in connection can last for hours, days, weeks, or even longer. And that's why the five or 10 minutes that you spend with someone that you love can be really powerful. So anyway, the point is that there are reasons to not connect. But once we realize the power of even a small amount of time spent connecting with others, once we realize that we don't need anything else to do that, we just need our intention and a willingness to show up, to listen, to be vulnerable and open with other people in our life, then we can start building that road toward living a truly connected life. And I think that is what holds the key to greater health and also greater fulfillment.

So true. Thank you for doing this, writing this book. I think it's those micro steps, whether it's five minutes a day, whether it's finding some old friends and reconnecting like you did, whether it's finding a place to be of service in your community. You don't have to have some big giant community that you're building overnight, but those micro steps make a huge difference and will help heal so much of the suffering in the world. So thank you, Vivek, for writing this book. I want everybody to get a copy. It's Together, the Healing Power of human connection in a sometimes only world. You can learn more about it. Go to his website, which is VivekMurthy.com, V-I-V-E-K-M-U-R-T-H-Y.com, forward slash together, dash book.

Even before COVID-19, we were facing an epidemic of loneliness. The pandemic has further shown light on the value that social connection has in our life and in our health. Taking steps to break out of the rut of loneliness or maintain meaningful connections to others is a vital part of any wellness plan. Prioritize spending five to ten minutes today intentionally connecting with others, even if it's over the phone. Volunteering, joining a class, and prioritizing time with loved ones are all ways you can strengthen your social bonds and support your health in the process. If you enjoyed this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy, please consider rating and reviewing us or leaving a comment below. Thanks for tuning in.