How many years does the speaker claim loneliness can take off your life?

Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

How Loneliness Is Taking YEARS Off Your Life

15 Nov 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:37

A YouTube video by Joy Kong, MD discussing how social connections affect longevity. The speaker highlights Japanese Okinawa as an example—cultural practices like ikigai and lifelong small social groups that meet weekly—and asserts that loneliness can substantially shorten lifespan, with a conversational claim that loneliness may take around 10 years off your life and could be worse than smoking.

Questions this video answers

Around 10 years (speaker says "taking 10 years off your life or some crazy number like that").

Chapters

There's a ton of people where you get the wonderful story from. These cultures have these wonderful things in common, like, especially in Japanese Okinawa, which has been lauded as one of the greatest longevity pockets. They have a great social fabric, and they have ikigai, this purpose for living. And they have these small groups of social connections that they last their entire life. They get together once a week and they talk and they visit. And they have this richness of the social fabric, which is believed to be a huge longevity factor. And loneliness is believed to be worse than smoking, taking 10 years off your life or some crazy number like that. Yeah.