September 6, 2022 • 32 mins
Loneliness is a far more common and far more serious problem than we think. It affects one in five Americans, and takes a toll on our bodies and minds. To thrive we need to several types of social interactions - both casual and more intimate.
With the help of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; Harvard Divinity School fellow Casper ter Kuile; and friendship expert Marisa Franco; Dr Laurie Santos looks at how loneliness might be affecting you or someone you know, and what science-back steps you can take to increase your circle of friends.
For further reading:
Vivek Murthy - Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.
Marisa Franco - Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends as an Adult.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It's Miami in the nineteen eighties, inside a local
elementary school, and one of the students, Vivek, is feeling
out of place. He's new to the city, new to
(00:36):
the country even and he's experiencing something that many of
us are at least a little familiar with. Vivek is
feeling lonely. Experiencing loneliness had very much to do with shyness,
and I was actually not deeply introverted. I wanted to
spend time with other people, but I was really shy,
and I had at our time making friends. Young Vivek
lived in the shadow of that loneliness. The schoolyard, his
(00:58):
home room, and lunch tables may have been bustling, but
no one seemed to stop to get to know the
shy young boy in their midst Going to school each
day was stressful, and I was always worried about cafeteria,
lunch time and sitting alone. I was worried about what
would happen in the playground when people were choosing teams,
and was worried that I might be chosen last, even
though I had good athletic ability, but I just didn't
have a lot of close friendships with people. The Vak's
(01:20):
feelings of sadness and isolation extended beyond the school day.
He went home to a supportive family, but he held
his loneliness closely. It was his secret, his biggest source
of shame. It was something he wasn't willing to share
with anyone. You know, I was embarrassed. I didn't want
it to seem like I was somehow deficient in some
way or unable to interact with people. Vivek's shame was
(01:41):
compounded by a sense of guilt. His parents had moved
several times and only a few short years, looking for
the best place to raise a young family. Despite his age,
Vivek could sense how difficult this was for his parents.
He didn't want to burden them further by revealing his unhappiness.
I didn't want them to think that somehow this was
their fault. You know, my parents had just come to
(02:01):
the United States. You're dealing with a lot of different
stresses and trying to figure out how to make sure
we were okay in school, and they were working really
hard at that, and I just didn't want to make
them feel like somehow they were falling short. And I
don't think they were falling short. I think they were
doing everything that a parent needs to do. If you've
listened to previous episodes, you've probably heard that our minds
are often unreliable, that we're prone to rationalizing or putting
(02:23):
a positive spin on our tough memories by editing or
forgetting them. But Vivek's early experiences of loneliness are still
seared into his brain. They've even given him a new
mission in his career today. Viveque to give his full
title is Vice Admiral Vague H. Murphy, MD. Two time
Surgeon General of the United States. Vegs tackled many public
(02:47):
health priorities while in office, but one of the issues
he wants is to take more seriously is loneliness. Loneliness
seems to be a near universal experience. Is far more
common than we think, and it's also much more consequential,
both for our health as well as for how we
show up in life, whether that's for our families, in
the workplace, we're in school. So that's what led me
on the path of focusing on loneliness. We sometimes tell
(03:08):
ourselves that loneliness affects only a sad minority of people.
The widowed, the withdrawn, the weird. We think that a
busy life in a bustling office, school, or workplace means
that we can't be lonely, that having kids or a
loving partner can satisfy all of our complex social needs.
And we usually assume that friendships just happen without our
(03:29):
having to put in the work needed to seek out
opportunities for connecting. But as you'll hear, our minds tend
to lie to us about how social connection really works.
And the truth is loneliness is much more pervasive than
we think. In fact, if the statistics are right, it's
even possible that you're feeling lonely right now. And if
(03:49):
you are, what can you do about it? How can
we fight our feelings of emotional isolation so that we
can get all the happiness benefits that come from other people.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong. What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away,
who will really make us happy? The good news is
(04:12):
that understanding the science of the mind can poin us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. If I want to
improve my physical health, there's plenty of reasonably specific, science
(04:34):
backed information out there. For example, the US Department of
Health website lists the top ten changes I should make
to my diet, things like limiting added sugar or eating
more whole grains. The same goes for exercise. The CDC
tells me I should do one hundred and fifty minutes
of modern intensity activity every week, like this elliptical machine
(04:56):
that I'm on right now. But to cite the impact
that loneliness has on our health and well being, we
don't have daily targets for social connection and the way
we do for nutrition and exercise. There's no checklist telling
you to say hello to five people in your neighborhood
(05:16):
or to spend one hundred and fifty minutes per week
having a real heart to heart with a person you trust.
But these types of interactions are required for our health
and happiness, and not getting a big enough dose could
be taking a larger toll than you think. When Vvakmurthy
first became Surgeon General, he assumed he'd carry on the
work of his predecessors, concentrating on health problems like obesity,
(05:39):
smoking and the opioid crisis. But loneliness, that feeling he
remembered so vividly from childhood, quickly became an important part
of his agenda. And that's because feeling lonely can have
a devastating effect on our health. It appears that loneliness
is strongly associated with an increased risk of heart disease
and dementia, and depression and anxiety. People who struggle with
(06:02):
loneliness also have fragmented sleep, so they may sleep for
the same number of hours as somebody else, but that
sleep is broken up and marked by something called microawakenings,
where they don't fully wake up, but they nearly wake up,
and that disturbed quality of sleep affects how RESTful your
sleep is. It diminishes the quality of your sleep. There's
also evidence that loneliness can be deadly. Take, for example,
(06:24):
a famous paper by Brigham Young University psychologist Julian Holt
lnstat She and her colleagues used a technique known as
a meta analysis, in which you mathematically pool the results
of all the existing studies on a topic to create
a sort of mega study with tons of statistical power.
Julian used this method and pulled more than a hundred
(06:44):
studies on longevity and social connection, and her results were striking.
People with strong social bonds were fifty percent less likely
to die over a given period of time than those
who had fewer social connections. And that scary finding maybe
even underestimating the true dangers of loneliness, since the studies
she pulled together tended not to weed out things like
(07:06):
bad marriages and toxic friendships from all those healthier social interactions.
For a newly elected surgeon general, such stark findings were
hard to ignore if you look at the degree of
life shortening. If you will, it appeared similar to the
mortality impact of smoking fifteen cigarettes today, and greater than
the mortality impact of obesity or sedentary living. But there's
(07:29):
another feature of loneliness that makes it as much of
a public health threat as so many other big challenges,
and that's its commonality. According to some surveys, nearly a
fifth of people in the United States today admit to
struggling with loneliness. And just put this in context, twenty
two percent of adults in the United States is more
than a percentage of adults who smokes cigarettes. It's more
(07:50):
than percentage of adults who have diabetes, so this is
exceedingly common. And if more than one in five adults
are impacted by loneliness, that means that you likely know
somebody who's struggling with loneliness that very will Maybe you
could be your spouse, and could be your friends, It
could be your family. But we tend not to realize
that people close to us are feeling lonely, often because
they're taking active steps to hide it. Vege found that
(08:11):
people were surprisingly willing to talk openly about their struggles
with things like obesity and addiction, but loneliness not so much.
There was a stigma around loneliness that was also universal,
a sense that if you admitted you are lonely, that
somehow you were not likable or that you were deficient
in some way, and that kept a lot of people
from admitting their struggles. But in close conversations and in
(08:33):
private moments, people of all backgrounds and age groups would
share that they were struggling with loneliness. I'll be the
first to admit that there are definitely times when I've
felt lonely. I mean, I have a wonderfully supportive husband,
and I work with a great team of stimulating students
and colleagues. I get to interact with lots of great
people throughout my day, but those same times when work
keeps me really busy are also times when I have
(08:55):
little opportunity to see my friends. And this pattern is
something I have in common with Vic, especially when he
first started his new job. I think we can get
caught up in that narrative and convince ourselves in almost
a martyrsh sort of way, that we're doing something for
a cause greater than ourselves, and using that as justification
for letting our relationships slide. And what I came to
(09:16):
realize in retrospect is that the cost of that misprioritization
was greater than I could have imagined. Vic's new rolement
that he was interacting with dozens of interesting people every
single day, even President Obama, But quality time with the
commander in chief can't make up for missed opportunities to
connect with the people we care about most. I had
(09:37):
become distanced from good friends that I had strong relationships
for years. I had realized that even this time I
was spending with my family was not nearly as high
quality as it should have been. As I was often
distracted by emails and work and phone calls even during
family dinners and other family outings. The evidence suggests that
just like a balanced diet or proper exercise routine, we
(09:59):
also need a variety of social interactions to stay healthy
and avoid loneliness. Some of those can be shallow and fleeting,
others need to be lasting and more intimate. Vic Is
found there's no single quick fix if we're lonely. We
need to sometimes do more than just changing the number
of people we interact with. Putting ourselves in the middlevel
crowd or showing up at a party or going to
(10:21):
mixers are not necessarily always the solution to loneliness. In
his fantastic book Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection
in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vac explains just how complicated
loneliness can be. There are three types of loneliness, and
there's intimate loneliness, which is feeling that you lack a
close confid on somebody who you can deeply trust, which
(10:42):
just about everything, somebody who knows you deeply and who
you know deeply. And when you lack that kind of
relationship in your life, then people experience intimate loneliness. There's
also something called relational loneliness, when we experience the absence
of friendships where we would get together with somebody or
with a group of people on weekends or in evenings.
We may go on vacations, we may call them up
to go to a ballgame or to watch a movie together.
(11:04):
And finally, there's something called collective loneliness, which is what
we experience when we don't have the benefit of identity
with a common group. Now i identity may come from
a shared interest or affiliation. We may find, for example,
that we have a sense of community with the alumni
of our college or the people that we go to
work with. The truth is, we need all three of
(11:25):
these who feel deeply connected in the most comprehensive way
intimate friend connection, relational connection, and collective connection to fully
address the dangers that come with loneliness. We need to
make sure we're getting the right doses of each of
these three types of social connection. But how do we
do that. We'll answer that question when the Happiness Lab
(11:45):
returns in a moment. Back when I was a grad
student in the early two thousands, a new book came
out that prompted lots and lots of conversations among my friends.
Who was called bowling alone by the Harvard political scientist
Robert Putnam. The title of Putnam's book came from an
(12:08):
observation about over the last few decades. Back in the
nineteen fifties, Americans used to belong to bowling links. They
met weekly with a team to play competitively against other
local players. But by the late nineties, people's bowling behaviors
had changed. They seemed to just prefer bowling alone. Putnam
argued that the bowling example is part of a much
(12:29):
larger demographic change. He found that membership in all kinds
of organizations labored unions, veterans groups, rotary clubs, they were
in decline too. People just didn't seem to want to
belong to social groups anymore. Collective connection, the important feeling
of belonging that we get from sharing interests with a
community of like minded people, it had gotten scarcer and scarcer.
(12:52):
Putnam's thesis rang true with the people I knew in
grad school. None of us were really part of groups,
and this wasn't a time before smartphones, a time in
which most activities were irl in real life. Since bowling
alone was written, so much more of our lives has
migrated online and onto screens. I mean, the last time
(13:12):
I went bowling was inside my house using a wee controller.
This growing trend towards bowling alone or bowling virtually as
it were, has meant that collective loneliness is on the rise.
An entire generation has missed that important sense of community
that our parents and grandparents probably took for granted back
in the day. We should be careful about pointing to
(13:33):
the nineteen fifties as some sort of norm. This is
podcast host and Harvard Divinity School fellow Casper Turkeyle. A
lot of people were participating in these structures even though
they didn't necessarily really want to, but because if you didn't,
it meant being socially ostracized. But nonetheless, I think one
of the things that we're looking for suddenly in the
future is new structures of relationship that hold us together.
(13:55):
Casper studies how our culture is shaped by collective organizations
like religious groups and the happiness lessons we can learn
from them. You might remember Casper from a previous episode
about the power of rituals and the particular ritual Asper developed,
which involved watching the bad romcom movie. You've got Mail?
Bad Romcom, Laurie, Is it not a rom com? No,
(14:20):
it's good. I'm sorry. Just as Casper advocated making a
ceremonial ritual with that genre, defining romcom classic, he also
argues that we need to copy what religion does right
in order to improve our collective loneliness. There's lots of
evidence that individuals who engage in religious services are happier
(14:41):
than those who report not being so religious, But the
science suggests that this happiness boost doesn't stem from what
religious individuals believe. It's not due to a faith in
the afterlife or a specific set of spiritual tenets. Religious
individuals get a well being bump from social support and
that sense of belonging that comes from hanging out at
religious services. Religion seems to make us happier because it
(15:04):
reduces our collective loneliness. And that's why Casper's such a
huge fan of Religiou, which has always struck me as
a little odd because Casper also identifies as kind of
a hardened gay atheist. When Casper tried joining a church
congregation as a kid, he didn't immediately get the connection
that follows from a like minded community. Instead, he felt
(15:25):
isolated and alone, certainly feeling very like I was not
welcome in the little Christian lunchtime club where they had
free kit kats and mister Kennedy played the guitar and
was very handsome. So I went a couple of times
until I realized that was not for me. And as
I grew older, I started to realize that really the
traditions that have thought most about, the questions that mean
so much to me, are religious traditions. Right. They ask
(15:47):
questions like what do we owe one another? How should
we be together? What does a healthy community look like?
How do we look after each other? How can we
find joy together? And those are the questions I love
to think about. As a Divinity School fellow, Casper began
studying whether other secular public spaces could offer the community
building interactions that churches provided, and he found a great
(16:07):
example in Jim. You're there to lose weight, get a
hot body, be strong, whatever it is. But the reason
why people stay is because they're building relationships or they're
finding meaning in these experiences. Casper has found that some
gyms and fitness centers have perhaps unwittingly picked up on
our thirst for a community and have incorporated it into
their exercise programs. You're kind of forced into a bit
(16:30):
of a social interaction, even though it's a little awkward,
so you're high fiving people. The fact that the whole
design of the workout means that no one finishes until
everyone's finished. So I don't know if you've ever been
in this situation, Laurie, but I certainly have, and it
was very intense. I was the last one to finish
some horrific series of running and lifting and burpies, and
everyone stood around me, clapping like shouting my name, being
(16:51):
like you can do it. And of course in the moment,
I hated every single one of them, but afterwards I
really felt like I would not have done it if
they hadn't been there. That sense of I can do
something more because of this community being around me is
a really powerful motivated to keep pushing yourself. So they
allow for that kind of community support, but in a
way that's very invitational, and that's a really powerful thing.
(17:13):
But if you're suffering from collective loneliness and don't want
a solution that involves tight like Gretn Burpes, Casper also
has another suggestion sign up for a class. A kind
of communal learning environment is a great way to meet
people in a way that's not very intense. So it
might be singing in a choir, it might be calligraphy classes,
it might be learning how to code, whatever it is.
(17:34):
Put yourself in a communal learning environment where you get
to learn alongside other people, and the fastest relationships often
happen in that kind of context. Casper has argued there's
another way that many organized religions reduce collective loneliness. They
often use a shared text to bring people together, think
the Bible or the Torah. But could a similar sense
of belonging and shared values come from a non religious text.
(17:57):
Casper thought of a colleague who'd started a reading group
about mental health using only the novels of Charlotte Bronte.
I hadn't read J Mat and so I suggested, why
don't we do this with a book that lots of
people definitely love and for which there's a very active fandom,
which is, of course, the Harry Potter series. And so
we started a weekly class where we invited people to
come and read and talk about the books with us.
(18:18):
And it was wonderful because really, over nine months, we
build a little bit of a congregation. You know, people
visited each other in hospital, they became roommates, they fell
in and out of love, you know, all the things
that happen in a community. Casper's reading group also became
a podcast called Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. It
led fans all over the world to set up their
own in real life congregations. There's now hundreds of local
(18:40):
groups of people getting together to read and talk about
the books. What's been more amazing than anything else is
when COVID hit, the listeners self organized to create a
mutual aid fund of podcast listeners, so people were sending
money to each other to support one another through the pandemic.
That was really a moment when I was like, Okay,
this is a community, Like they're really doing things together.
If you'd have told me that I would have started
a community of tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans,
(19:03):
I would have been very surprised, because honestly, I didn't
create it. I just made the first invitation to a
few people, and so I really hope people know that
they can create community. Casper's work shows that we can
fight collective loneliness. We just need a way to actually
meet people who share our hobbies. If you like basketball,
go watch a game out in the world rather than
(19:23):
catching it in your living room. Don't just give money
to a good cause. Try volunteering that band you play
on repeat on Spotify, try catching their next concert in
person and meeting fellow fans. And Casper is quick to
point out that collective community doesn't need to involve a
huge crowd. All it takes is inviting one or two
people maybe over to share our meal. Maybe you're going
(19:43):
to go for a walk together, to just talk about
something that you love, and that so often these communities
organically will grow. So those are some strategies for fighting
collective loneliness, that first type of loneliness that be vague identified.
But how can we tackle the other two kinds of
loneliness that plague so many of us. How can we
find a new group of friends to connect with relationally,
(20:03):
or that one bestie with whom we can talk more intimately.
We'll talk about strategies for creating these deep relationships when
the Happiness Lab returns from the break. So I would
certainly be really nervous about moving to a new place
(20:24):
where I didn't really know anyone. Marissa Franco was experiencing
a challenge that many of us faced in the modern day,
relocating to a new city for work. She had just
moved to Atlanta, and in addition to finding a new
place to live and figuring out a new commute, she
also struggled with the need to completely rebuild her friendship
network from scratch. At first, I was like, really intentional
(20:45):
about trying to meet new people. You know, I went
to happy hours, I went to events, but it seemed
like nothing was really sticking. You know. I met a
couple of new people, but then it wouldn't really go anywhere.
Marissa as a fellow psychologist, so she decided to take
a scientific approach and to quantify her experience. She knew
about the famed UCLA Loneliness questionnaire, and I was like,
(21:05):
why didn't I take it? And when I took it,
I realized that I was lonely. I thought, I'm around
people all day, how could I be lonely? But I
think in that moment, I realized that loneliness is actually
about feeling comfortable around people, feeling like yourself, feeling authentic
around people, feeling seen around people. So I realized I
was lonely and I was struggling to make friends. But
(21:28):
Marissa knew what steps to take next because she's not
just a psychologist, she's also an expert on the science
of friendship, an author of Platonic How the Science of
Attachment can help you make and keep friends as an adult.
If anyone should understand the importance of having a squad,
it's Marissa. I mean friendships. There's some research that finds
that it brings us joy more than our other relationships.
(21:50):
And I think part of that is because friends aren't
encumbered with the same responsibility and weight. There's just not
the same level of obligation. I don't have to talk
to my friends about doing our taxes together. I don't
have to talk to them about planning for groceries. So
there's this way that friendship just ends up being this
relationship of sort of pleasure. And they also think that
because there's no pressure to have friends like there is
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to be in a romantic relationship, that we end up
choosing friends that are truly sort of compatible with us.
Relocating to Atlanta made it difficult for Marissa to keep
in contact with our old friends. But the science shows
it's not just a cross country move that can upset
the fragility of our friendship circles. Every seven years, we'd
lose about half our friends. Friendship networks have been shrinking
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for the last thirty years. I think we're in a
time of great crisis around friends. There's other research that
finds that the average person hasn't made a new friend
in the last five years, even though about half of
people report that they would like to make a new
friend if they only knew how. The problem is that
our minds lie to us about how friendships work. We
assume they just kind of happen, And to be fair,
(22:57):
this assumption fits with how many of our friendships did
develop when we were younger. Making friends back then was
often as simple as going through some shared experiences at
camp or in school or college. But Morris has found
that's not how it works later in adulthood. I think
one of the biggest misconceptions that I hear when it
comes to making friends is I want it to happen organically.
(23:17):
I want these friends to kind of fall into my life.
And there's a study that kind of tested these beliefs
and how they'd affect us over time, and it found
that people that thought friendship was something that happened based
on luck were actually lonelier years later, whereas those people
that saw it as happening based on effort were less
likely to be lonely years later. So it really does
take initiative intentionality to go out there and make friends,
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which raises a question, why aren't we putting ourselves out
there more often in order to make friends and fight
our relational loneliness. The first issue for many of us,
including me, is time. Studies suggests we feel busier than
ever and time famine is a recipe for engaging less
with other people. But an even bigger issue is that
many of us are kind of anxious when it comes
(24:01):
to making new friends, which stems at least in part
from yet another way our minds lie to us, a
common cognitive bias known as the liking gap. These researchers
they had strangers interacts across a number of settings, and
they found that in general, people underestimated the degree to
which the person they interacted with like them. And so
I think what this research suggests is that people like
(24:24):
us more than we think they do. And one of
my biggest pieces of advice for people to help them
get into the mindset to make friends is start assuming
that people like you. It's a mindset that even Marissa
has had to use for herself when making new friends.
You know, I actually go into this place where I
remind myself people are going to accept me. That's sort
of my new internal dialogue. But overcoming the liking gap
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and changing your mindset is only the first step to
reducing our anxiety when it comes to connecting with new people.
We also have to commit to accepting the small bouts
of anxiety that come from actually engaging with the people
we meet. It's a discomfort, I know well myself. I'll
be at a house party and I'll start feeling weird
about chatting with strangers, so I'll spend the entire time
(25:06):
looking at my phone or hanging out with the host's cap.
Or I'll go to a new yoga studio in order
to meet new people, but then I'll sprint off as
soon as class ends without chatting with anybody. Something that
I've talked about is the idea of covert or overt avoidance.
So overt avoidance is, you know, we're kind of nervous
about meeting new people, so we don't put ourselves out there.
But then covert avoidance is that we do put ourselves
(25:28):
out there. We do show up at the event, but
when we do, we don't engage with people. While we're there.
We're watching the game, we're playing with the dog. And
I think to make friends we have to really overcome
both of these forms of avoidance. We need to show up,
and then when we get there, we need to start
introducing ourselves, saying hello. Overcoming this hurdle of covert avoidance
is especially important for people who suffer from social anxiety.
(25:50):
So they'll, for example, they won't talk too much, you know,
when the conversation gets quiet, they'll start disengaging and playing
on their phone. And all of these are behaviors for
their own self protection. But it turns out that when
they're engaging in these behaviors, they make rejection more likely.
So when the researchers told the people with social anxiety
stop using those safety behaviors, they were more open, they
were more engaged, and actually their interaction partner like them more. So,
(26:14):
I think when it comes to making friends, there's all
these things that we might do to protect ourselves from rejection,
like not seeming too interested, not seeming too enthusiastic, and
in fact, the other person is afraid of rejection too,
so when we do those behaviors, the other person is like, oh,
that person is rejecting me. Overcoming our relational loneliness requires
remembering that other people are feeling the exact same anxieties
(26:35):
we are. The science shows that taking the first step
and making them feel more comfortable will often lead to
more connection than we expect, but Marissa admits doing this
isn't easy, even for a friendship expert like her. When
she first moved into a new apartment block, she made
little progress befriending her neighbors. We pass it in the hallway,
(26:56):
and you know, I say a quick high, but don't
really interact with them. Marissa's partner witnessed this and immediately
called her out. Marissa, you need to take your own advice.
Go over there and introduce yourself. And so we sort
of pushes me out the door. And so then I
go to them and I say, you know, hey, my
names Marissa. I just moved into the department building. It's
so nice to meet you. We start talking, we exchange
phone numbers, we end up forming a WhatsApp group, and
(27:20):
then every week during the pandemic we've done a socially
distanced gathering in the garden. And I look back and
I'm like, it would have been so easy for that
to not happen, right. I think sometimes we think, you know,
it won't make a difference if I reach out to people, like,
you know, the social world that we live in is
outside of our control. But I think that really showed
me that our social worlds are very much within our control,
and there are intentional actions we can take that can
(27:43):
really change the trajectory of our friendships. Can we use
similar kinds of intentional actions to move from mere relational
closeness to the more intimate kinds of friendships that third
category of social connection that the vague Murphy mentioned earlier?
Are there steps we can take to turn a regular
relational friend into a ride or die bestie. Ultimately, when
(28:03):
it comes to making friends, people think the people that
are good at making friends are really cool, or really smart,
or really accomplished. But in fact, what I find from
the research is that the people that are really good
at making friends are really good at making other people
feel like they matter. They're good at affirming other people,
and surprisingly, one of the best ways to affirm another person,
to make them feel valued and special, is to get
(28:25):
really vulnerable in front of them, voluntarily sharing a problem
and asking for help, intentionally admitting that you're struggling and
not sure what to do, even shedding and embarrassing tier.
We assume that such overt displays of our own weaknesses
would make potential besties avoid us like the plague, But
this is yet another spot where our minds lie to us.
It's a bias that German psychologists on A. Brook and
(28:47):
her colleagues have christened the beautiful mess effect, which is
basically the idea that when we're vulnerable, people actually perceive
us a lot more positively than we think they do.
People actually like it when we're vulnerable. It makes them
feel special to hear our intimate struggles, and it allows
them the opportunity to share more intimately with us. Our
messiness is far more beautiful to potential friends. Then. We
(29:09):
think a lot of the things that we think burden
people bring us closer to one another. So, for example,
showing vulnerability in general, the more we disclose intimately to others,
the more they like us. And it's so interesting because
we tend to think, you know, we're going to push
other people away, they're going to think we're too much,
But in fact, that vulnerability conveys that we are authentic,
(29:31):
that we are honest, that we trust them, and all
of these things bring people closer to us. Just as
initiating the contact needed to build up our relational connections
involves a bit of courage, so too to cementing more
intimate friendships. But if we value fighting loneliness, it's critical
to take this scary step. We need to open up,
reveal our inner selves, and share things we often keep hidden.
(29:53):
But mrs Is scene firsthand that following the scientific advice
really can reduce loneliness. I feel like I'm living proof.
I mean, since I've started studying friendship, I have become
so much better at taking initiative. I realize that I
don't necessarily have to be an amazing, magnificent person to
be an attractive friend. That all I have to do
(30:14):
is make other people feel loved and valued. And so
that's my bigger priority now around my friendship. It's not
being special, or being funny, or being particularly insightful. It's
making sure that I treat my friends in ways that
align with how much I love them. The research shows
that lots and lots of us have something in common
with Young Vivic back in that nineteen eighties school yard.
Many of us are surrounded by people all the time,
(30:36):
but we're still not enjoying the full range of human
interactions we need to be happy. We might not feel
like we're part of a community, or a crew of friends,
or a close relationship like Young Vivic. We might be
saddened and ashamed by our loneliness. We might curse all
our imagined shortcomings and whish there was something we could
do to feel more connected. But I hope this episode
(30:57):
has shown you that finding friends doesn't require luck or
the perfect personality. Like most of the good things we
talk about in this podcast, connecting better requires understanding some
of the mind's lies and then putting in some time
and work. But the science shows that with a little initiative,
we can begin building the foundations of nourishing relationships, whether
(31:18):
they're casual and breezy and based on the love we
have for our favorite book or intimate and personal based
on revealing our inner world to the people we meet.
It is a lot of work, even for the experts,
but a less lonely life is possible and the benefits
are huge for your health and your happiness. The Happiness
(31:45):
Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily
Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed
by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by
Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle heather Thing, John Snars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
(32:05):
Nicole Morano, Royston Preserved, Jacob Weisberg and my Age, and
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and Nate Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Pushkin. It's Miami in the nineteen eighties, inside a local
elementary school, and one of the students, Vivek, is feeling
out of place. He's new to the city, new to
(00:36):
the country even and he's experiencing something that many of
us are at least a little familiar with. Vivek is
feeling lonely. Experiencing loneliness had very much to do with shyness,
and I was actually not deeply introverted. I wanted to
spend time with other people, but I was really shy,
and I had at our time making friends. Young Vivek
lived in the shadow of that loneliness. The schoolyard, his
(00:58):
home room, and lunch tables may have been bustling, but
no one seemed to stop to get to know the
shy young boy in their midst Going to school each
day was stressful, and I was always worried about cafeteria,
lunch time and sitting alone. I was worried about what
would happen in the playground when people were choosing teams,
and was worried that I might be chosen last, even
though I had good athletic ability, but I just didn't
have a lot of close friendships with people. The Vak's
(01:20):
feelings of sadness and isolation extended beyond the school day.
He went home to a supportive family, but he held
his loneliness closely. It was his secret, his biggest source
of shame. It was something he wasn't willing to share
with anyone. You know, I was embarrassed. I didn't want
it to seem like I was somehow deficient in some
way or unable to interact with people. Vivek's shame was
(01:41):
compounded by a sense of guilt. His parents had moved
several times and only a few short years, looking for
the best place to raise a young family. Despite his age,
Vivek could sense how difficult this was for his parents.
He didn't want to burden them further by revealing his unhappiness.
I didn't want them to think that somehow this was
their fault. You know, my parents had just come to
(02:01):
the United States. You're dealing with a lot of different
stresses and trying to figure out how to make sure
we were okay in school, and they were working really
hard at that, and I just didn't want to make
them feel like somehow they were falling short. And I
don't think they were falling short. I think they were
doing everything that a parent needs to do. If you've
listened to previous episodes, you've probably heard that our minds
are often unreliable, that we're prone to rationalizing or putting
(02:23):
a positive spin on our tough memories by editing or
forgetting them. But Vivek's early experiences of loneliness are still
seared into his brain. They've even given him a new
mission in his career today. Viveque to give his full
title is Vice Admiral Vague H. Murphy, MD. Two time
Surgeon General of the United States. Vegs tackled many public
(02:47):
health priorities while in office, but one of the issues
he wants is to take more seriously is loneliness. Loneliness
seems to be a near universal experience. Is far more
common than we think, and it's also much more consequential,
both for our health as well as for how we
show up in life, whether that's for our families, in
the workplace, we're in school. So that's what led me
on the path of focusing on loneliness. We sometimes tell
(03:08):
ourselves that loneliness affects only a sad minority of people.
The widowed, the withdrawn, the weird. We think that a
busy life in a bustling office, school, or workplace means
that we can't be lonely, that having kids or a
loving partner can satisfy all of our complex social needs.
And we usually assume that friendships just happen without our
(03:29):
having to put in the work needed to seek out
opportunities for connecting. But as you'll hear, our minds tend
to lie to us about how social connection really works.
And the truth is loneliness is much more pervasive than
we think. In fact, if the statistics are right, it's
even possible that you're feeling lonely right now. And if
(03:49):
you are, what can you do about it? How can
we fight our feelings of emotional isolation so that we
can get all the happiness benefits that come from other people.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong. What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away,
who will really make us happy? The good news is
(04:12):
that understanding the science of the mind can poin us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. If I want to
improve my physical health, there's plenty of reasonably specific, science
(04:34):
backed information out there. For example, the US Department of
Health website lists the top ten changes I should make
to my diet, things like limiting added sugar or eating
more whole grains. The same goes for exercise. The CDC
tells me I should do one hundred and fifty minutes
of modern intensity activity every week, like this elliptical machine
(04:56):
that I'm on right now. But to cite the impact
that loneliness has on our health and well being, we
don't have daily targets for social connection and the way
we do for nutrition and exercise. There's no checklist telling
you to say hello to five people in your neighborhood
(05:16):
or to spend one hundred and fifty minutes per week
having a real heart to heart with a person you trust.
But these types of interactions are required for our health
and happiness, and not getting a big enough dose could
be taking a larger toll than you think. When Vvakmurthy
first became Surgeon General, he assumed he'd carry on the
work of his predecessors, concentrating on health problems like obesity,
(05:39):
smoking and the opioid crisis. But loneliness, that feeling he
remembered so vividly from childhood, quickly became an important part
of his agenda. And that's because feeling lonely can have
a devastating effect on our health. It appears that loneliness
is strongly associated with an increased risk of heart disease
and dementia, and depression and anxiety. People who struggle with
(06:02):
loneliness also have fragmented sleep, so they may sleep for
the same number of hours as somebody else, but that
sleep is broken up and marked by something called microawakenings,
where they don't fully wake up, but they nearly wake up,
and that disturbed quality of sleep affects how RESTful your
sleep is. It diminishes the quality of your sleep. There's
also evidence that loneliness can be deadly. Take, for example,
(06:24):
a famous paper by Brigham Young University psychologist Julian Holt
lnstat She and her colleagues used a technique known as
a meta analysis, in which you mathematically pool the results
of all the existing studies on a topic to create
a sort of mega study with tons of statistical power.
Julian used this method and pulled more than a hundred
(06:44):
studies on longevity and social connection, and her results were striking.
People with strong social bonds were fifty percent less likely
to die over a given period of time than those
who had fewer social connections. And that scary finding maybe
even underestimating the true dangers of loneliness, since the studies
she pulled together tended not to weed out things like
(07:06):
bad marriages and toxic friendships from all those healthier social interactions.
For a newly elected surgeon general, such stark findings were
hard to ignore if you look at the degree of
life shortening. If you will, it appeared similar to the
mortality impact of smoking fifteen cigarettes today, and greater than
the mortality impact of obesity or sedentary living. But there's
(07:29):
another feature of loneliness that makes it as much of
a public health threat as so many other big challenges,
and that's its commonality. According to some surveys, nearly a
fifth of people in the United States today admit to
struggling with loneliness. And just put this in context, twenty
two percent of adults in the United States is more
than a percentage of adults who smokes cigarettes. It's more
(07:50):
than percentage of adults who have diabetes, so this is
exceedingly common. And if more than one in five adults
are impacted by loneliness, that means that you likely know
somebody who's struggling with loneliness that very will Maybe you
could be your spouse, and could be your friends, It
could be your family. But we tend not to realize
that people close to us are feeling lonely, often because
they're taking active steps to hide it. Vege found that
(08:11):
people were surprisingly willing to talk openly about their struggles
with things like obesity and addiction, but loneliness not so much.
There was a stigma around loneliness that was also universal,
a sense that if you admitted you are lonely, that
somehow you were not likable or that you were deficient
in some way, and that kept a lot of people
from admitting their struggles. But in close conversations and in
(08:33):
private moments, people of all backgrounds and age groups would
share that they were struggling with loneliness. I'll be the
first to admit that there are definitely times when I've
felt lonely. I mean, I have a wonderfully supportive husband,
and I work with a great team of stimulating students
and colleagues. I get to interact with lots of great
people throughout my day, but those same times when work
keeps me really busy are also times when I have
(08:55):
little opportunity to see my friends. And this pattern is
something I have in common with Vic, especially when he
first started his new job. I think we can get
caught up in that narrative and convince ourselves in almost
a martyrsh sort of way, that we're doing something for
a cause greater than ourselves, and using that as justification
for letting our relationships slide. And what I came to
(09:16):
realize in retrospect is that the cost of that misprioritization
was greater than I could have imagined. Vic's new rolement
that he was interacting with dozens of interesting people every
single day, even President Obama, But quality time with the
commander in chief can't make up for missed opportunities to
connect with the people we care about most. I had
(09:37):
become distanced from good friends that I had strong relationships
for years. I had realized that even this time I
was spending with my family was not nearly as high
quality as it should have been. As I was often
distracted by emails and work and phone calls even during
family dinners and other family outings. The evidence suggests that
just like a balanced diet or proper exercise routine, we
(09:59):
also need a variety of social interactions to stay healthy
and avoid loneliness. Some of those can be shallow and fleeting,
others need to be lasting and more intimate. Vic Is
found there's no single quick fix if we're lonely. We
need to sometimes do more than just changing the number
of people we interact with. Putting ourselves in the middlevel
crowd or showing up at a party or going to
(10:21):
mixers are not necessarily always the solution to loneliness. In
his fantastic book Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection
in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vac explains just how complicated
loneliness can be. There are three types of loneliness, and
there's intimate loneliness, which is feeling that you lack a
close confid on somebody who you can deeply trust, which
(10:42):
just about everything, somebody who knows you deeply and who
you know deeply. And when you lack that kind of
relationship in your life, then people experience intimate loneliness. There's
also something called relational loneliness, when we experience the absence
of friendships where we would get together with somebody or
with a group of people on weekends or in evenings.
We may go on vacations, we may call them up
to go to a ballgame or to watch a movie together.
(11:04):
And finally, there's something called collective loneliness, which is what
we experience when we don't have the benefit of identity
with a common group. Now i identity may come from
a shared interest or affiliation. We may find, for example,
that we have a sense of community with the alumni
of our college or the people that we go to
work with. The truth is, we need all three of
(11:25):
these who feel deeply connected in the most comprehensive way
intimate friend connection, relational connection, and collective connection to fully
address the dangers that come with loneliness. We need to
make sure we're getting the right doses of each of
these three types of social connection. But how do we
do that. We'll answer that question when the Happiness Lab
(11:45):
returns in a moment. Back when I was a grad
student in the early two thousands, a new book came
out that prompted lots and lots of conversations among my friends.
Who was called bowling alone by the Harvard political scientist
Robert Putnam. The title of Putnam's book came from an
(12:08):
observation about over the last few decades. Back in the
nineteen fifties, Americans used to belong to bowling links. They
met weekly with a team to play competitively against other
local players. But by the late nineties, people's bowling behaviors
had changed. They seemed to just prefer bowling alone. Putnam
argued that the bowling example is part of a much
(12:29):
larger demographic change. He found that membership in all kinds
of organizations labored unions, veterans groups, rotary clubs, they were
in decline too. People just didn't seem to want to
belong to social groups anymore. Collective connection, the important feeling
of belonging that we get from sharing interests with a
community of like minded people, it had gotten scarcer and scarcer.
(12:52):
Putnam's thesis rang true with the people I knew in
grad school. None of us were really part of groups,
and this wasn't a time before smartphones, a time in
which most activities were irl in real life. Since bowling
alone was written, so much more of our lives has
migrated online and onto screens. I mean, the last time
(13:12):
I went bowling was inside my house using a wee controller.
This growing trend towards bowling alone or bowling virtually as
it were, has meant that collective loneliness is on the rise.
An entire generation has missed that important sense of community
that our parents and grandparents probably took for granted back
in the day. We should be careful about pointing to
(13:33):
the nineteen fifties as some sort of norm. This is
podcast host and Harvard Divinity School fellow Casper Turkeyle. A
lot of people were participating in these structures even though
they didn't necessarily really want to, but because if you didn't,
it meant being socially ostracized. But nonetheless, I think one
of the things that we're looking for suddenly in the
future is new structures of relationship that hold us together.
(13:55):
Casper studies how our culture is shaped by collective organizations
like religious groups and the happiness lessons we can learn
from them. You might remember Casper from a previous episode
about the power of rituals and the particular ritual Asper developed,
which involved watching the bad romcom movie. You've got Mail?
Bad Romcom, Laurie, Is it not a rom com? No,
(14:20):
it's good. I'm sorry. Just as Casper advocated making a
ceremonial ritual with that genre, defining romcom classic, he also
argues that we need to copy what religion does right
in order to improve our collective loneliness. There's lots of
evidence that individuals who engage in religious services are happier
(14:41):
than those who report not being so religious, But the
science suggests that this happiness boost doesn't stem from what
religious individuals believe. It's not due to a faith in
the afterlife or a specific set of spiritual tenets. Religious
individuals get a well being bump from social support and
that sense of belonging that comes from hanging out at
religious services. Religion seems to make us happier because it
(15:04):
reduces our collective loneliness. And that's why Casper's such a
huge fan of Religiou, which has always struck me as
a little odd because Casper also identifies as kind of
a hardened gay atheist. When Casper tried joining a church
congregation as a kid, he didn't immediately get the connection
that follows from a like minded community. Instead, he felt
(15:25):
isolated and alone, certainly feeling very like I was not
welcome in the little Christian lunchtime club where they had
free kit kats and mister Kennedy played the guitar and
was very handsome. So I went a couple of times
until I realized that was not for me. And as
I grew older, I started to realize that really the
traditions that have thought most about, the questions that mean
so much to me, are religious traditions. Right. They ask
(15:47):
questions like what do we owe one another? How should
we be together? What does a healthy community look like?
How do we look after each other? How can we
find joy together? And those are the questions I love
to think about. As a Divinity School fellow, Casper began
studying whether other secular public spaces could offer the community
building interactions that churches provided, and he found a great
(16:07):
example in Jim. You're there to lose weight, get a
hot body, be strong, whatever it is. But the reason
why people stay is because they're building relationships or they're
finding meaning in these experiences. Casper has found that some
gyms and fitness centers have perhaps unwittingly picked up on
our thirst for a community and have incorporated it into
their exercise programs. You're kind of forced into a bit
(16:30):
of a social interaction, even though it's a little awkward,
so you're high fiving people. The fact that the whole
design of the workout means that no one finishes until
everyone's finished. So I don't know if you've ever been
in this situation, Laurie, but I certainly have, and it
was very intense. I was the last one to finish
some horrific series of running and lifting and burpies, and
everyone stood around me, clapping like shouting my name, being
(16:51):
like you can do it. And of course in the moment,
I hated every single one of them, but afterwards I
really felt like I would not have done it if
they hadn't been there. That sense of I can do
something more because of this community being around me is
a really powerful motivated to keep pushing yourself. So they
allow for that kind of community support, but in a
way that's very invitational, and that's a really powerful thing.
(17:13):
But if you're suffering from collective loneliness and don't want
a solution that involves tight like Gretn Burpes, Casper also
has another suggestion sign up for a class. A kind
of communal learning environment is a great way to meet
people in a way that's not very intense. So it
might be singing in a choir, it might be calligraphy classes,
it might be learning how to code, whatever it is.
(17:34):
Put yourself in a communal learning environment where you get
to learn alongside other people, and the fastest relationships often
happen in that kind of context. Casper has argued there's
another way that many organized religions reduce collective loneliness. They
often use a shared text to bring people together, think
the Bible or the Torah. But could a similar sense
of belonging and shared values come from a non religious text.
(17:57):
Casper thought of a colleague who'd started a reading group
about mental health using only the novels of Charlotte Bronte.
I hadn't read J Mat and so I suggested, why
don't we do this with a book that lots of
people definitely love and for which there's a very active fandom,
which is, of course, the Harry Potter series. And so
we started a weekly class where we invited people to
come and read and talk about the books with us.
(18:18):
And it was wonderful because really, over nine months, we
build a little bit of a congregation. You know, people
visited each other in hospital, they became roommates, they fell
in and out of love, you know, all the things
that happen in a community. Casper's reading group also became
a podcast called Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. It
led fans all over the world to set up their
own in real life congregations. There's now hundreds of local
(18:40):
groups of people getting together to read and talk about
the books. What's been more amazing than anything else is
when COVID hit, the listeners self organized to create a
mutual aid fund of podcast listeners, so people were sending
money to each other to support one another through the pandemic.
That was really a moment when I was like, Okay,
this is a community, Like they're really doing things together.
If you'd have told me that I would have started
a community of tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans,
(19:03):
I would have been very surprised, because honestly, I didn't
create it. I just made the first invitation to a
few people, and so I really hope people know that
they can create community. Casper's work shows that we can
fight collective loneliness. We just need a way to actually
meet people who share our hobbies. If you like basketball,
go watch a game out in the world rather than
(19:23):
catching it in your living room. Don't just give money
to a good cause. Try volunteering that band you play
on repeat on Spotify, try catching their next concert in
person and meeting fellow fans. And Casper is quick to
point out that collective community doesn't need to involve a
huge crowd. All it takes is inviting one or two
people maybe over to share our meal. Maybe you're going
(19:43):
to go for a walk together, to just talk about
something that you love, and that so often these communities
organically will grow. So those are some strategies for fighting
collective loneliness, that first type of loneliness that be vague identified.
But how can we tackle the other two kinds of
loneliness that plague so many of us. How can we
find a new group of friends to connect with relationally,
(20:03):
or that one bestie with whom we can talk more intimately.
We'll talk about strategies for creating these deep relationships when
the Happiness Lab returns from the break. So I would
certainly be really nervous about moving to a new place
(20:24):
where I didn't really know anyone. Marissa Franco was experiencing
a challenge that many of us faced in the modern day,
relocating to a new city for work. She had just
moved to Atlanta, and in addition to finding a new
place to live and figuring out a new commute, she
also struggled with the need to completely rebuild her friendship
network from scratch. At first, I was like, really intentional
(20:45):
about trying to meet new people. You know, I went
to happy hours, I went to events, but it seemed
like nothing was really sticking. You know. I met a
couple of new people, but then it wouldn't really go anywhere.
Marissa as a fellow psychologist, so she decided to take
a scientific approach and to quantify her experience. She knew
about the famed UCLA Loneliness questionnaire, and I was like,
(21:05):
why didn't I take it? And when I took it,
I realized that I was lonely. I thought, I'm around
people all day, how could I be lonely? But I
think in that moment, I realized that loneliness is actually
about feeling comfortable around people, feeling like yourself, feeling authentic
around people, feeling seen around people. So I realized I
was lonely and I was struggling to make friends. But
(21:28):
Marissa knew what steps to take next because she's not
just a psychologist, she's also an expert on the science
of friendship, an author of Platonic How the Science of
Attachment can help you make and keep friends as an adult.
If anyone should understand the importance of having a squad,
it's Marissa. I mean friendships. There's some research that finds
that it brings us joy more than our other relationships.
(21:50):
And I think part of that is because friends aren't
encumbered with the same responsibility and weight. There's just not
the same level of obligation. I don't have to talk
to my friends about doing our taxes together. I don't
have to talk to them about planning for groceries. So
there's this way that friendship just ends up being this
relationship of sort of pleasure. And they also think that
because there's no pressure to have friends like there is
(22:12):
to be in a romantic relationship, that we end up
choosing friends that are truly sort of compatible with us.
Relocating to Atlanta made it difficult for Marissa to keep
in contact with our old friends. But the science shows
it's not just a cross country move that can upset
the fragility of our friendship circles. Every seven years, we'd
lose about half our friends. Friendship networks have been shrinking
(22:35):
for the last thirty years. I think we're in a
time of great crisis around friends. There's other research that
finds that the average person hasn't made a new friend
in the last five years, even though about half of
people report that they would like to make a new
friend if they only knew how. The problem is that
our minds lie to us about how friendships work. We
assume they just kind of happen, And to be fair,
(22:57):
this assumption fits with how many of our friendships did
develop when we were younger. Making friends back then was
often as simple as going through some shared experiences at
camp or in school or college. But Morris has found
that's not how it works later in adulthood. I think
one of the biggest misconceptions that I hear when it
comes to making friends is I want it to happen organically.
(23:17):
I want these friends to kind of fall into my life.
And there's a study that kind of tested these beliefs
and how they'd affect us over time, and it found
that people that thought friendship was something that happened based
on luck were actually lonelier years later, whereas those people
that saw it as happening based on effort were less
likely to be lonely years later. So it really does
take initiative intentionality to go out there and make friends,
(23:40):
which raises a question, why aren't we putting ourselves out
there more often in order to make friends and fight
our relational loneliness. The first issue for many of us,
including me, is time. Studies suggests we feel busier than
ever and time famine is a recipe for engaging less
with other people. But an even bigger issue is that
many of us are kind of anxious when it comes
(24:01):
to making new friends, which stems at least in part
from yet another way our minds lie to us, a
common cognitive bias known as the liking gap. These researchers
they had strangers interacts across a number of settings, and
they found that in general, people underestimated the degree to
which the person they interacted with like them. And so
I think what this research suggests is that people like
(24:24):
us more than we think they do. And one of
my biggest pieces of advice for people to help them
get into the mindset to make friends is start assuming
that people like you. It's a mindset that even Marissa
has had to use for herself when making new friends.
You know, I actually go into this place where I
remind myself people are going to accept me. That's sort
of my new internal dialogue. But overcoming the liking gap
(24:45):
and changing your mindset is only the first step to
reducing our anxiety when it comes to connecting with new people.
We also have to commit to accepting the small bouts
of anxiety that come from actually engaging with the people
we meet. It's a discomfort, I know well myself. I'll
be at a house party and I'll start feeling weird
about chatting with strangers, so I'll spend the entire time
(25:06):
looking at my phone or hanging out with the host's cap.
Or I'll go to a new yoga studio in order
to meet new people, but then I'll sprint off as
soon as class ends without chatting with anybody. Something that
I've talked about is the idea of covert or overt avoidance.
So overt avoidance is, you know, we're kind of nervous
about meeting new people, so we don't put ourselves out there.
But then covert avoidance is that we do put ourselves
(25:28):
out there. We do show up at the event, but
when we do, we don't engage with people. While we're there.
We're watching the game, we're playing with the dog. And
I think to make friends we have to really overcome
both of these forms of avoidance. We need to show up,
and then when we get there, we need to start
introducing ourselves, saying hello. Overcoming this hurdle of covert avoidance
is especially important for people who suffer from social anxiety.
(25:50):
So they'll, for example, they won't talk too much, you know,
when the conversation gets quiet, they'll start disengaging and playing
on their phone. And all of these are behaviors for
their own self protection. But it turns out that when
they're engaging in these behaviors, they make rejection more likely.
So when the researchers told the people with social anxiety
stop using those safety behaviors, they were more open, they
were more engaged, and actually their interaction partner like them more. So,
(26:14):
I think when it comes to making friends, there's all
these things that we might do to protect ourselves from rejection,
like not seeming too interested, not seeming too enthusiastic, and
in fact, the other person is afraid of rejection too,
so when we do those behaviors, the other person is like, oh,
that person is rejecting me. Overcoming our relational loneliness requires
remembering that other people are feeling the exact same anxieties
(26:35):
we are. The science shows that taking the first step
and making them feel more comfortable will often lead to
more connection than we expect, but Marissa admits doing this
isn't easy, even for a friendship expert like her. When
she first moved into a new apartment block, she made
little progress befriending her neighbors. We pass it in the hallway,
(26:56):
and you know, I say a quick high, but don't
really interact with them. Marissa's partner witnessed this and immediately
called her out. Marissa, you need to take your own advice.
Go over there and introduce yourself. And so we sort
of pushes me out the door. And so then I
go to them and I say, you know, hey, my
names Marissa. I just moved into the department building. It's
so nice to meet you. We start talking, we exchange
phone numbers, we end up forming a WhatsApp group, and
(27:20):
then every week during the pandemic we've done a socially
distanced gathering in the garden. And I look back and
I'm like, it would have been so easy for that
to not happen, right. I think sometimes we think, you know,
it won't make a difference if I reach out to people, like,
you know, the social world that we live in is
outside of our control. But I think that really showed
me that our social worlds are very much within our control,
and there are intentional actions we can take that can
(27:43):
really change the trajectory of our friendships. Can we use
similar kinds of intentional actions to move from mere relational
closeness to the more intimate kinds of friendships that third
category of social connection that the vague Murphy mentioned earlier?
Are there steps we can take to turn a regular
relational friend into a ride or die bestie. Ultimately, when
(28:03):
it comes to making friends, people think the people that
are good at making friends are really cool, or really smart,
or really accomplished. But in fact, what I find from
the research is that the people that are really good
at making friends are really good at making other people
feel like they matter. They're good at affirming other people,
and surprisingly, one of the best ways to affirm another person,
to make them feel valued and special, is to get
(28:25):
really vulnerable in front of them, voluntarily sharing a problem
and asking for help, intentionally admitting that you're struggling and
not sure what to do, even shedding and embarrassing tier.
We assume that such overt displays of our own weaknesses
would make potential besties avoid us like the plague, But
this is yet another spot where our minds lie to us.
It's a bias that German psychologists on A. Brook and
(28:47):
her colleagues have christened the beautiful mess effect, which is
basically the idea that when we're vulnerable, people actually perceive
us a lot more positively than we think they do.
People actually like it when we're vulnerable. It makes them
feel special to hear our intimate struggles, and it allows
them the opportunity to share more intimately with us. Our
messiness is far more beautiful to potential friends. Then. We
(29:09):
think a lot of the things that we think burden
people bring us closer to one another. So, for example,
showing vulnerability in general, the more we disclose intimately to others,
the more they like us. And it's so interesting because
we tend to think, you know, we're going to push
other people away, they're going to think we're too much,
But in fact, that vulnerability conveys that we are authentic,
(29:31):
that we are honest, that we trust them, and all
of these things bring people closer to us. Just as
initiating the contact needed to build up our relational connections
involves a bit of courage, so too to cementing more
intimate friendships. But if we value fighting loneliness, it's critical
to take this scary step. We need to open up,
reveal our inner selves, and share things we often keep hidden.
(29:53):
But mrs Is scene firsthand that following the scientific advice
really can reduce loneliness. I feel like I'm living proof.
I mean, since I've started studying friendship, I have become
so much better at taking initiative. I realize that I
don't necessarily have to be an amazing, magnificent person to
be an attractive friend. That all I have to do
(30:14):
is make other people feel loved and valued. And so
that's my bigger priority now around my friendship. It's not
being special, or being funny, or being particularly insightful. It's
making sure that I treat my friends in ways that
align with how much I love them. The research shows
that lots and lots of us have something in common
with Young Vivic back in that nineteen eighties school yard.
Many of us are surrounded by people all the time,
(30:36):
but we're still not enjoying the full range of human
interactions we need to be happy. We might not feel
like we're part of a community, or a crew of friends,
or a close relationship like Young Vivic. We might be
saddened and ashamed by our loneliness. We might curse all
our imagined shortcomings and whish there was something we could
do to feel more connected. But I hope this episode
(30:57):
has shown you that finding friends doesn't require luck or
the perfect personality. Like most of the good things we
talk about in this podcast, connecting better requires understanding some
of the mind's lies and then putting in some time
and work. But the science shows that with a little initiative,
we can begin building the foundations of nourishing relationships, whether
(31:18):
they're casual and breezy and based on the love we
have for our favorite book or intimate and personal based
on revealing our inner world to the people we meet.
It is a lot of work, even for the experts,
but a less lonely life is possible and the benefits
are huge for your health and your happiness. The Happiness
(31:45):
Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily
Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed
by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by
Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle heather Thing, John Snars,
Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
(32:05):
Nicole Morano, Royston Preserved, Jacob Weisberg and my Age, and
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and Nate Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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