Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World
Author: Vivek H. Murthy, MD
10 Key Insights:
Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you’re lacking the social connections you need. It can feel like being stranded, abandoned, or cut off from the people with whom you belong—even if you’re surrounded by other people. What’s missing when you’re lonely is the feeling of closeness, trust, and the affection of genuine friends, loved ones, and community. We can feel lonely and emotionally alone even when we’re surrounded by other people. What defines loneliness is our internal comfort level. Loneliness is the body's natural way of warning us that our life is out of balance, that we need to tend to our social needs.
Solitude is a state of peaceful aloneness or voluntary isolation. It is an opportunity for self-reflection and a chance to connect with ourselves without distraction or disturbance. It enhances our personal growth, creativity, and emotional well-being, allowing us to reflect, restore, and replenish.
What happens when we’re just kicking back and doing nothing? What’s our default network? Whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking the network for social thinking comes back on like a reflex—almost instantly. In other words: Evolution has placed a bet that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready to see the world socially. . . . We are built to be social creatures.
When we become chronically lonely, most of us are inclined to withdraw, whether we mean to or not. John Cacioppo determined that our threat perception changes when we’re lonely, so we push people away and see risk and threat in benign social opportunities. John’s widow, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, a neuroscientist who was his close collaborator and has taken on the role of continuing and expanding his work on loneliness at the University of Chicago, found that lonely brains detect social threats twice as fast as non-lonely brains.
In South Africa there’s a special phrase in Zulu—“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” which means “I am because you are, and you are because we are.” This ideal is distilled in the term “ubuntu,” meaning to live through others. In contrast to individualist cultures, ubuntu stresses one’s connection to the group first, and harmony foremost.
Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, has spent years identifying the areas of the world known as “blue zones,” which have the statistically highest life expectancy or rate of people who live to the age of one hundred. And while he believes that most of their longevity is a function of an environment that nudges them into eating plant-based foods and moving naturally all day long, Dan has found that they also enjoy an unusually high degree of social connection.
In 2016, Dr. Naomi Eisenberger and fellow researchers reported that the experience of helping others lowers activity in the brain’s stress and threat centers, including the amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula. At the same time, increased activity is seen in the parts of our brain associated with caregiving and rewards (our ventral striatum and septal area). This indicates that helping others reduces our stress even as it increases our sense of well-being, making it an important antidote to the pain of loneliness and disconnection.
It’s important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction. These two terms describe the opposing ends of a wide spectrum. While there are relatively few extreme introverts or extroverts, most of us lean in one direction or the other:
If you’re very extroverted, you’ll prefer larger crowds and lots of social engagement. You probably love meeting new people, and when no one else is around, you may feel driven to actively seek out companionship. From stadium concerts to group outings, fun for you looks like one big social event.
For strong introverts, fun looks more like a deep conversation with one good friend in the corner of a library. Or it might look like a solitary browse through the library stacks. If you’re very introverted, you prefer to spend much of your time alone, and when you do connect, you’d rather get together with one or two close friends than face a crowd. Introverts like solitude.
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