In the spirit of love and friendship during this month of February, we will focus on connection with fellow human beings as a vital aspect of our health. We know from the medical literature that people with secure connections to others tend to be happier and live longer. Furthermore, in spite of our world becoming ever more “virtual” over the last two years, research and our own experience show us that phone calls, texts, and zoom cannot fully replace face-to-face human interactions. (1) Yet even before the global pandemic, public health experts had begun addressing the rates of human loneliness as an “epidemic” here and around the world. Scientists think that the deleterious effects of loneliness stem from chronic inflammation, similarly to how eating lots of sugar or failing to exercise negatively impact our physiology. One study, in fact, noted that loneliness is as harmful to our health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and increases our risk of premature death by thirty percent. (2)
Now if you read my column regularly, you know that I wouldn’t cite these incredibly dismal statistics if there wasn’t a solution and if I didn’t have a call to action for you. I lay out this problem so that you will begin considering connection as important to your health as your nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Furthermore, I need you to see loneliness as a problem that is not unique to you but that you are responsible for addressing. Just as you would take an antibiotic prescribed for an infection, you need to begin proactively seeking social connections if they are not occurring naturally in your daily life.
Somewhere along the line, we started to believe that feeling isolated reflects a deficit in ourselves — that we missed some basic memo on relationships. This perspective is both inaccurate and self-defeating. If we are honest with ourselves, there are times when we have had many natural connections and times when we needed to create them. I know that this has been the case in my own life, when working lots of hours in residency and moving across the country with a newborn are two times when I can recall feeling quite lonely. So what is the solution? As always, it is action. Call an old friend and put a coffee date on the calendar. Join that pickleball league that you have been considering for months. Sign up for a “new moms” group. Download an app to meet up with local people who have similar interests as you. Reach out to others as if your life depends on it, because it does. You will find that when you take that first step (i.e; you seek connection) the rest will be easier than you think!
1. Alan Teo, M.D., M.S. Does Mode of Contact with Different Types of Social Relationships Predict Depression Among Older Adults? Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, October 2015
2. Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Baker M, Harris T, Stephenson D. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2015 Mar;10(2):227-37. doi: 10.1177/1745691614568352. PMID: 25910392.