Loneliness: The silent killer, and how to beat it

Loneliness is the sense that I am less connected to other people than I want to be

We're wired to want to be social creatures and to be friends, but that might be harder for us to do so in certain circumstances

where the opportunities to cultivate friendship are not there. When we hold back from other people

it often brings harm to our personal health and well-being. It can feel really isolating

But when you make yourself vulnerable or when you place your trust in another person, this is the stuff of intimate relationships

And revealing these kinds of things is how we become known. It's not just our closest relationships that make us feel connected

It's all kinds of relationships. It's the person who delivers the mail

It's the cashier who checks us out at the grocery store. All of these ways of making it a little bit more personal do a lot to make other people feel like they belong and they make us feel more like we belong

Loneliness is a complex emotion that can weigh heavily on our mental health, leading to anxiety, depression, and a sense of disconnection from the world around us

In those moments, seeking professional help can be incredibly valuable. A therapist can provide a nonjudgmental space to process feelings and develop coping strategies

But starting therapy can be challenging. Luckily, BetterHelp is here to make it easier

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All right, now back to the video. My name is Michael Slapian

I'm a professor at Columbia and I study the psychology of secrecy. My book is called The Secret Life of Secrets

how our inner world shape wellbeing, relationships and who we are. Secrets are all around us

You're probably keeping a secret right now. When we keep a secret, we're often trying to protect something

Maybe we're trying to protect ourselves and our reputation or what other people think of us

or maybe we're trying to protect someone we care about. But when we hold back from other people

it's not always protecting the thing that we're hoping to protect, and it often brings harm to our personal health and well-being

It can feel really isolating and it can feel like it's something you should be ashamed of

And feelings of shame are one of the most toxic emotions that we can have for our health

When we feel ashamed, we feel like we're a bad person and that there's nothing we can do to change that

Also, that secret is going to be on your mind quite frequently and your mind is going to return to that secret time and time again

We're living with those secrets alone in our thoughts, and when we choose to be alone with something, we often don't develop the healthiest way of thinking about that thing

Once you better understand how your secrets are hurting you, you can have a better sense of how you can cope with them

Not all secrets are bad. Sometimes secrets are good, and sometimes we feel good about the secrets we're keeping

surprise parties, announcing a pregnancy, proposing marriage to someone, or maybe it's a sense of status that comes from having a workplace secret

What makes something a secret is when you intend to hold back this particular information

from one or more people, and we can distinguish secrecy from privacy. Privacy is not a specific

intent to hold information back, but it's just needing to be comfortable enough in the moment

to reveal something sensitive. And our secrets can range from totally trivial to troubling

When I first started this research, one of the most important questions to understand is

what do people keep secret? We didn't even have a good understanding of that

And so I asked a couple thousand people, what's the secret you're currently keeping

And we found 38 different categories. And we know that these 38 categories of secrets

are really comprehensive because when I asked someone open-ended, What is the secret you're currently keeping? 92% of the time, it fits one of the 38 categories from

the list. And 97% of people say they have at least one of the secrets from the list right now

And the average person has 13 of those secrets at any given moment in time

The top five most common secrets are about lies we've told, romantic desire

are finances and money, sexual behavior, and what I call extra-relational thoughts

where you're in a romantic relationship with someone and you're having some romantic thought

about another person. Other common secrets are family secrets, secret ambitions, secret beliefs

secret discontents whether at work social life romantic life or a physical appearance I forgot what my last item was Oh yeah cheating A secret can harm you unfortunately so many ways in that even if you not hiding the secret in a

given moment, it still could be burdensome to you. It could still be harming your well-being

and that's because people frequently feel ashamed of their secrets, isolated with their secrets

inauthentic for keeping those secrets. And when the secret deals with something that is an ongoing

struggle or something we're trying to figure out, when we're alone with something, we tend to not

figure it out. We're more likely to ruminate on that thing. And rumination is not just repetitive

thinking, it's repetitive negative thinking. So it's all too easy to find the worst way to think

about a secret when we're alone with it. Psychologist John Cassioppo said something

once to the effect of loneliness is so harmful to your health that it's equivalent to smoking a pack

of cigarettes a day. And it just goes to show you that social relationships are such a huge part of

life and feeling satisfied with that life. And when we choose to keep a secret in a very small

way or sometimes big way, we're choosing loneliness. We're choosing to be alone with something

But we don't have to be. It's all too easy to forget about the other side of secrecy, which is that sharing a secret with

another person is a profound act of intimacy. If it takes courage to reveal something to someone

they'll recognize that. When you make yourself vulnerable or when you place your trust in another

person, this is the stuff of intimate relationships. And revealing these kinds of things is how we

become known. Mutual disclosure with others is one of the strongest predictors of relationship

strength. It can feel really good to reveal a secret to someone. It can feel really good to

have that weight lifted from your shoulders. But it turns out that's not what is helpful about

revealing a secret. It's not that moment of catharsis. It's what happens after that, because

the average person responds in a helpful way. The prototypical experience people have with

confiding a secret is a helpful one. And that might be in part because we've chosen our confidants

carefully, but it's also because there's so much that other people can offer that are really hard

to find on our own. Someone can validate your experience or express sympathy and say

that must be so hard, or I'm here for you, or give guidance, advice, or emotional support

These are things that are so hard to find on our own, but are really easy for someone

to provide to us. And so often that's what makes revealing a secret beneficial

If you ask a young child to tell you what a secret is, they might tell you that it's something you

would only share with your best friend. They understand secrets are meant to be shared. This

is how we get close to people. This is how we become known. This is how we get help. And when

you choose to keep a secret, you're foregoing all those benefits. You don't have to share it with

the person you're keeping it from, but talking about it with someone else often is so profoundly

helpful. It deepens that relationship and gets you the help that you need

I'm Robert Waldinger. I am a psychiatrist and I'm professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

I direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital

Loneliness is absolutely an epidemic in our society, but it's been growing for decades

Loneliness is the sense that I am less connected to other people than I want to be

It's a very subjective experience. And that makes it different too from isolation

So I can deliberately isolate myself and feel great about that. But only you can tell if you're lonely

And the fact is you can be lonely in a crowd. You can be lonely in a marriage

you can also be very content and not lonely alone on a mountaintop. Starting in the 1950s

and going all the way through to today, we know that people have been less and less invested in

other people. In some studies, as many as 60% of people will say that they feel lonely much of the

time. And the lowest estimates are 30 to 40% of people say they feel lonely. Young adults age 16

to 24 are the loneliest age group. And then again, among older adults, there is an increase in

loneliness, particularly as people lose friends, lose partners. But loneliness is pervasive across

the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics. There are so many factors

that are responsible for this loneliness epidemic. They did not just begin with the digital revolution

Loneliness was on the rise, as we know, at least from the 1950s. In part because of social

dislocation, we've become a much more mobile society where the networks of family and friends

get disrupted as people move for jobs and other kinds of opportunities like education All of that is good on the one hand but that it tears us away from the fabric of belonging that many of us are born into and spend much of our lives

creating. Then there is the world of screens. So when television came into the American home

there was a decline in investing in our communities. People went out less. They joined

clubs less often. They went to houses of worship less often. They invited people over less often

All of that seems to contribute to our increasing disconnection and our increasing levels of

loneliness. That was made worse as the digital revolution gave us more and more screens to look

at and software that was designed specifically to grab our attention, hold our attention

and therefore keep it away from the people we care about. We know that people with strong social bonds are much less likely to die in any given year

than people without strong social bonds. There's good work by Julianne Holmstedt, who is a researcher who studies loneliness

And what she finds is that loneliness is as dangerous to our health as smoking half a

pack of cigarettes a day. We think that stress is one of the main causes of physical health breakdown that comes from

loneliness, but there are probably other causes as well. And in addition, the research shows that people who are lonely in late life have more rapid

brain decline. So we know that this same process of increased stress or decreased stress affects

how our brains age. And many other studies show that the single choice we can make that's most

likely to keep us on a good path of well-being is to invest in our relationships with other people

It's not just our closest relationships that make us feel connected, It's all kinds of relationships

It's the person who delivers the mail. It's the cashier who checks us out at the grocery store

It's all these casual encounters. All of these ways of making it a little bit more personal do a lot to make other people

feel like they belong, and they make us feel more like we belong. Many people who are lonely feel that others don't want to be with them

and what we know is that lonely people can sometimes give off the message that they don't

want to be approached because they're afraid of others they're afraid of the world and so it may

be that lonely people can learn more about making gestures and giving off signals that say

i would like to connect even when they're a little bit afraid to do so and so they've actually

developed forms of cognitive behavior therapy where people are taught these social skills and

taught how to revise their assumptions about not being wanted by other people. My recommendation

if you're feeling lonely and a little bit afraid, is find a setting, find an activity around other

people where you are comfortable and see what develops. You belong, you matter, you're connected

I'm Richard Reeves, and my latest book is Of Boys and Men

Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why That Matters, and What to Do About It

There are some studies that suggest, for example, that being without a close friend

being lonely, is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day

It's quite hard to measure friendships. What's the quality of that friendship

What's the quantity? When people say they have a certain number of friends, what does that mean

Does it mean how many friends they have on Facebook? It is difficult to get at this quantitatively

And also people, I think, are a bit reluctant to admit sometimes to not having friends

Loneliness is in some ways quite a stigmatized condition. And so actually getting people to admit to loneliness

is something that social scientists really struggle with. I think a big question now is whether we're facing

a friendship recession. That's the term that Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American Enterprise

Institute, has used to describe this rise in the number of people who lack a certain number of

close friends, who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis. You need a shoulder to cry on

or at least someone to have a conversation with. That's less and less likely to be a friend now

And as society changes in all kinds of ways, technologically, economically, then I think it's important we pay attention to what is very often an underappreciated human relationship

which is the friendship. Friendships come in all shapes and sizes and are also formed in very different ways and in very different places

One way we form friends is just by being at the same school as somebody, by growing up in the same place

Another way is through the situations you find yourself in, through work. There are also friends that you form through activities that are chosen

So through a voluntary activity or a sport, athletics. The fourth is online friendships

Those are friendships that are formed through a screen or over the internet in one kind or another without necessarily ever physically meeting that person

Across human history there always been a tribal size I think to friendship groups which is somewhere in the teens say between 12 and 15 perhaps is a reasonable number to think about and then there are close friends Some people of course have no close friends but most people have at least a close

friend and most people would say that the ideal number of close friends to have is somewhere

around the three or four number. Friendship was something that the ancient philosophers used to

take very seriously if you go back to Aristotle for example in some ways seen as the ideal

relationship and one of the reasons why friendship is i think so important and so idealized is because

it's a relationship of genuine and radical equality and one in which you're not in the

friendship in order to get something out of it for yourself there's no sense of dependency there's

no sense of exchange it's not a transactional relationship in any way and in most other

occasions relationships do contain some kind of transaction some kind of what's in this for me

but the definition of a friendship is a relationship where there is nothing in it for you

other than the relationship? We've seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions

including the family, people marrying later if they do marry, obviously in areas like religion, in some cases the labor market

And so what that means is there's more of a need for people to have social relationships, connections outside of those institutions

That's where friends are hugely important. But during the same period, we've seen a real decline

in the number of people who say that they have a number of close friends. There are a number of factors that could be getting in the way of forming friendships

particularly in 21st century US. Number one is geographical mobility, people moving away from their homes

moving to big cities or career opportunities, which necessarily stretches their friendship network

Parents are spending quite a bit more time on parenting, on looking after their kids, which squeezes out the time

that they might have had for friendships before. There's also a lot of emphasis on work and careers, what some scholars call workism

which is a sense that your identity is so wrapped up in your work that you don't have as much energy and time left over for friends

And then lastly, I'd point to the breakdown of relationships. As marriages break up or couples separate, that can be really fracturing of friendship groups that have been formed as a couple

Once they break up, the friendship groups very often get shattered as well. There are a few downsides to being without friends

One is lack of access to opportunities. It turns out that many people get a lot of jobs and opportunities and chances to go and

do things through their friends. So friends do act as a communications information channel

But there are some quite profound effects on health too, mental health and even physical health

It's not exactly clear what the causal relationships are, what's going on, but it is clear that

having friends is protective of your health in various ways. And so it's not just that being without friends can make you isolated in a sort of economic or a social sense

but it can also make you sad. And being sad, it turns out, is also bad in terms of your physical as well as emotional health

Today, 15% of young men say that they don't have a close friend

That was just 3% back in the 1990s. And so we're seeing a five-fold increase in the number of men who have no close friends

Back in 1990, almost half of young men, 45%, said that if they had to turn to someone in a time of trouble, it would be to a close friend

But now that's dropped to about 22%. And in fact, there are more men, about 36%, who say that they would go to their parents

So that's quite a radical transformation in the social networks that we've seen, particularly of young men

the pandemic has been a sort of stress test for our friendship networks interestingly there we

see that it's women who've been most affected with more than half of women saying they've

lost touch with at least some of their friends i think that's because female friendships are more

based on physical relationships on face-to-face time whereas male friendships tend to be more

mediated perhaps through activities or technology. We don't know for sure, but that gender gap is

suggestive of the fact that women's friendships are more in need of more regular physical contact

than male friendships are, which is maybe why women's friendships have borne the brunt

of the impact of COVID on those friendship networks. There's obviously a dystopian version of how these trends could continue, which is

a world of essentially atomized individuals without friends, isolated, sad, lonely, perhaps in ill health. I think that's why we have to pay real attention to these trends and to

recognize that friendship is incredibly important for human flourishing and that people want to make

friends. We're wired to want to be social creatures and to be friends, but that it might be harder for

us to do so in certain circumstances, circumstances where we're under too much pressure, where we're

too segregated, where the opportunities to cultivate friendship are not there. A key lesson

that we learn is that friendships don't form themselves. Friendship is not a flower that just

blooms all on its own. It's more like a woodworking project that you have to carve out

and continue to work on. One of the necessary steps to making a friend is to admitting that

you want to make a friend, to being open to that. That requires a certain vulnerability

It requires you in some ways to reveal a need, a desire. And I think as we get older

there's sometimes a sense of shame that comes along with not having enough friends. And actually saying I need a friend is maybe one of the hardest sentences any human being can utter