Dr. Edward Hallowell
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Lonely is a lot different from being alone. You can be alone and not lonely. You can be alone and reading a book, listening to music, entertaining your fantasies and favorite hopes for the future, and you're not lonely. But You can also be lonely, and that's the active presence of absence. It's like you're feeling what isn't there. It's a terrible feeling. You're feeling that here I am alone.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
No one's with me. No one likes me. No one cares about me. Or so-and-so died, or I miss my dog, or I wish I were back home. You feel what you're missing.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And it's a terrible feeling. It is really bad for you. In fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease, loneliness. And most people don't realize how bad it is for you. In fact, social isolation is as dangerous for early death as cigarette smoking. Most people have no idea about that.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
If you ask them to list risk factors, they'll say cigarette smoking, obesity, genetics, don't wear your seatbelt. Nobody puts down loneliness, but my gosh, it's right near the top of the list. And if people would make it a priority to connect, I call it the other vitamin C, vitamin connect. It is the most powerful force that most people don't make use of.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I urge people, you know, if you go to the supermarket, talk to the guy at the checkout counter. He needs it or she needs it as much as you do.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Well, all of the above. When you're feeling lonely, your immune system suffers and you are putting out stress hormones that are caustic. And then what you also said, you're inclined to try to fill in the emptiness
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
with things like online gambling or drinking or drug use or dangerous liaisons or dangerous business deals reckless going online connecting in chat rooms where you don't know who you're talking to and it's it's really just about people trying to find a meaningful ways of connecting and um i can't tell you how many patients i've prescribed a dog for I mean, dogs are the world's great.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I dedicated my last book to dogs. I said it's no accident that God spelled backwards as dog. You know, it's dogs are the world's best connectors. And, you know, so if you have a dog, chances are you're not going to feel lonely or nearly as lonely.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And in fact, I tell people, young people, what is the purpose of growing up? What is the goal of growing up? And the answers I get are like, get into the best school you can get into, lay the foundation for making a good living. And I say, no, no, the purpose, what you want to do while you're growing up is fall in love. You want to fall in love with a person, that's fine.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
But with a subject, an idea, an activity, an ant, the great... entomologist E.O. Wilson, who just died, fell in love with ants in a parking lot in Alabama because he was a lonely kid. So he went out to the field next door and started studying ants and became one of the great entomologists, professor at Harvard, author of many books.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
But it was born out of his feeling lonely as a kid in Alabama, and he found his companionship in ants.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
The reason people stick with loneliness is they're afraid. They're afraid of being rejected. They're afraid of being sued. They're afraid of saying the wrong thing. You know, in this age of PC, everyone's afraid to say the wrong thing. They're afraid of looking stupid. And so they hold back.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
They hold back on life out of fear and they create their own little bubble, their own little prison, which is toxic.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Well, it actually is a connection. You'll get a little drip of dopamine when you do that. You'll get a little affirmation. You can wave to a stranger all clear across the parking lot. If it's a snowy day or something, you say, snowy day, and he waves back. It takes a half a second. That is a connection. It's not a lifelong connection. You'll never see the person again, but don't take it lightly.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Small talk is very big talk. Small talk is the route into deeper relationships, for sure. But it all begins with small talk. You know, the strong, silent man is a lonely man on his way to a heart attack. You know, it's not a good recipe. So make the little chitchat. Don't take it lightly. It's very, very, very important.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
It is so true. It's wired into us. It's wired into our endocrine system. Even any of you listeners who've had children, the moment you give birth, either through the normal way or through adoption, the moment you become a parent for the first time, nature sees to it that you enter into a permanent state of psychosis. Your whole body changes. Your brain changes.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
You fall madly, insanely crazy in love. with this little peeing and pooping machine whom you don't even know. And yet you've almost instantly become not only willing, but eager to give away your time, your money, your sleep, your dignity. And, and, you know, you gotta be crazy to do it. And you say, this is so much fun. Let's do it again.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
My advice to you is maybe take that holiday as a chance to developing some kind of connection that can become meaningful. Maybe it's a time to get a dog, or maybe it's a time to go back to church or synagogue, or maybe it's a time to take up...
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
some hobby that you've wanted to take up, even something as simple as crocheting or cooking or, you know, starting a little garden inside your house or, you know, there are things you can take up that will serve as points of connection. And then you can find other people who are interested in that, you know, and, you know, one of my favorite lines, I use it all the time.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
It really, it's a line to live by, never worry alone. So when you're feeling upset, worried, concerned, reach out somehow. It doesn't have to be in person. It doesn't have to be, you know, against your grain, but don't worry alone. That's when bad things happen. That's when you do self-destructive stuff. That's when you feel intense despair.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
That's when people commit suicide, you know, when you're worrying alone. So never worry alone is a really good watchword. And another reason thing you can do is when you're feeling these bleak black moments where you're sort of ruminating, we know from brain science, there's a certain network in the brain that takes over. It's called the default mode network, the DMN, which I call the demon.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
What you want to do is don't feed the demon. And what do you feed it with? Your attention. Well, do something else. Fry an egg, dig a hole, do a crossword, do something else. Shut off the DMN's oxygen supply, which is your attention. And by the way, the reason that we feed it is contentment is too bland.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
You don't say he or she was riveted in contentment, but you do say he or she was riveted in despair, loneliness, misery, foreboding. It's riveting, and that's why you keep feeding it with your attention. You got to be ruthless and shut it off, redirect your attention onto something else. And it literally can save your life if you do that.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
But try to keep those two phrases in mind, never worry alone and don't feed the demon.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
It's magical. It's magical. And it really is. Suddenly the worry turns into problem solving. It is magical. It's like my thought experience. Imagine you're standing in a big, dark warehouse by yourself. You feel terrified, paranoid. If you're there with someone, you laugh. There's something about the presence of another person that instantly, as you put it, lightens the load.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And the next thing you know, you're problem solving. How do we get out of here?
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I take issue with that point. It's all a matter of how you use it. My family, for example, uses social media to great advantage. We have a, you know, I don't know what the word for it is, but we're all on the same little platform and we send each other messages and it facilitates, deepens human connection. Now the danger is when it replaces human connection. That's the danger.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
So it's all a matter of how you use it.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I'll tell you a quick story. Do we have time for a quick story?
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Oh, great. Okay. Well, so I consulted some 20 years ago to the Harvard Chemistry Department because they had their most gifted graduate student committed suicide and left a note explicitly blaming Harvard. As we looked into it, the chair of the department, Jim Anderson, a wonderful man, basically put his research career on hold to figure out what was going on.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And we discovered it was one of many suicides in that department in the previous decade. And the reason for it was the community was horribly disconnected. It was like a dungeon. It was just, there was no connection. Everyone was paranoid. There were two coping styles, work harder or get drunk. And most people did both every day.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
So you had an entire department with five Nobel Prize winners in it and some thousand brilliant little genius postdocs and graduate students miserable because they were so disconnected. So we had to figure out a way to connect them.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Now, with that group of people, really smart, often Middle European, barely English-speaking, very high IQ folks, if you said, let's have a mixer, nobody would show up because it's not in their comfort zone. And so we had to figure out how do you bait the trap? How do you bring people out of hiding? Because they were hiding. They were paranoid.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Well, you know, one of the universal answers to that question is food. So we'd reach out to the best restaurants in Cambridge and we'd cater weekly buffets where, you know, there'd be wonderful good food. There'd be some beer and wine. And these introverted, shy grad students would come out of hiding for food. And the next thing you know, they get talking to one another in spite of themselves.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And the next thing you know, there's a softball team. There's a symphony club. They started putting wax boards next to the elevators. So instead of making small talk at the elevator, they could draw equations and tell each other what they were working on. You meet them where they are. And lo and behold, over the course of the year, we really changed the culture of that department.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
So it's a grim statistic, but it's very significant. There have been no suicides since. The proudest award I ever got was the chemistry department gave me the department medal. I'm the first non-chemist who has ever received that. Well done. Yeah, thank you. But it really drove home to me. Number one, how lethal disconnection is.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I mean, literally people dying, but how plantable it is, how startable it is, because it's in every, even the most introverted reclusive person wants to connect. Loneliness hurts everybody. So if you just have to find the right way,
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
and like in in our case food was was the was the catalyst food was what got the ball rolling then then people jump in and take over and the next thing you know the the town can go from being isolated and separated and paranoid as so many places are these days to connecting maybe you have a block party maybe you have a yard sale maybe you have a
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
you know, let's root for the local team movement or something that people can join in and connect with each other without making them self-conscious about it. That's the key. Most people don't want to sit down and talk about their feelings. They're afraid of that. It makes them feel very awkward.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
But if you give them some task to do, some project to jump into, and some food to eat, and even better, some wine to drink, You've got a connection thing going, and it's so great to see it happen because it's what people need, and you just see them brighten up like a Christmas tree. I mean, it's a wonderful thing, and you can start it truly anywhere.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
I mean, you are doing a tremendous service. You have a big following. That's a huge service. People don't realize, I mean, you have regular listeners, and that's a big deal. And they don't understand. By listening to you, by tuning in regularly, they literally are extending their life. I mean, that is a proven fact. Reducing social isolation extends life.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
And what you're doing with your podcast is a wonderful way of reducing social isolation, you know? So yes, it is ironic that we have unintentionally conspired to create circumstances where one of the things we need absolutely most is really hard to get, but it is not impossible to get. And that's what I'm saying. Use your imagination, but reach out, you know, another, another, you know,
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
reach out to someone you're on the outs with. Forgiveness is a wonderful tool for connecting. And forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate your having me on. You're a terrific, terrific host.
Something You Should Know
Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness
In fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease, loneliness. And most people don't realize social isolation is as dangerous for early death as cigarette smoke.