Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

by Vivek H. Murthy

While loneliness engenders despair and ever more isolation, togetherness raises optimism and creativity. When people feel they belong to one another, their lives are stronger, richer, and more joyful.

So many of the problems we face as a society—from addiction and violence to disengagement among workers and students to political

polarization—are worsened by loneliness and disconnection. Building a more connected world holds the key to solving these and many more of the personal and societal problems confronting us today.

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.

Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests.

What often matters is not the quantity or frequency of social contact but the quality of our connections and how we feel about them.

On the other hand, we can feel lonely and emotionally alone even when we’re surrounded by other people. What defines loneliness is our internal comfort level.

Solitude, by contrast, is a state of peaceful aloneness or voluntary isolation.

Developing comfort with solitude, then, is an essential part of strengthening our connection to ourselves and by extension enabling our connection with others. Solitude, paradoxically, protects against loneliness.

Shame and fear thus conspire to turn loneliness into a self-perpetuating condition, triggering self-doubt, which in turn lowers self-esteem and discourages us from reaching out for help. Over time, this vicious cycle may convince us we don’t matter to anyone and that we’re unworthy of love, driving us ever inward and away from the very relationships we need most.

When you’re chronically lonely—as a child or an adult—it seeps deeply into your state of mind. It colors how you think about nearly everything, especially your own character. You imagine that you’re a misfit. You worry that you’ll feel lonely even when you’re with people. And most destructive of all, you question your self-worth, thinking that there might be something truly wrong with you that’s causing this pain.

By the age of three months, however, research has found that babies start to favor faces of their family’s race and ethnicity. A process that researchers call perceptual narrowing begins to blur faces that are different from those within the infant’s small, trusted circle. As a result, babies start to view members of other races as indistinguishable from one another, even as they become more

closely attuned to the nuances and subtle signals from the people who are closest and most familiar to them—the people the child most depends on.13

Humans are born with the potential to adopt any language on earth, but with time, they lose facility with all but the languages they hear in their tribe—the languages they must master in order to communicate with the people they trust to keep them safe. This is why it becomes increasingly difficult for most people to learn foreign languages as we age.

Loneliness only occurs when you want to connect and be accepted, but can’t, in this case because life has trained you to be afraid of being exploited or hurt by other people. That, Cole says, creates the “classic paradox of loneliness in a room full of people.”

Loneliness, Ami told me, occurs when our social experience fails to meet our social expectations.

“ubuntu,” meaning to live through others.

“The problem is we’re focusing so much on time spent on screens but not focusing enough on the content, type of technology, or motivation to use it,” she said.

This increasingly common phenomenon of people snubbing each other in favor of their phone even has a term: phubbing.

network algorithms and autoplay ads. Solitude allows us to get comfortable being with ourselves, which makes it easier to be ourselves in interactions with others. That authenticity helps build strong connections.

“You find your community first, then you get persuaded.”

experience.” In other words, only by sharing our individual stories can we connect and begin to heal our divided society.

“When you create a safe space where people can tell their stories, people break out of their social isolation.”

“You shouldn’t collapse yourself into the family imagery. You have the opportunity to be a bridge between private and public life.”

“There are two basic human yearnings,” Palmer said. “To feel at home in one’s own skin and to feel at home

this wonderful earth.

Severely lonely people feel

so threatened that they are preoccupied with their own emotional safety and have little energy for empathy or concern for others.

So our brains reward us neurobiologically when we join forces to accomplish something positive. In other words, doing good makes us feel good.

Thus, aloneness seems to be the antidote against the threat of hurt, although it imprisons us.”

The spouses of people who are addicted to work understandably will complain that they feel lonely and neglected. What’s broken is the reciprocity of true connection.

They may desperately want to connect and be accepted, but can’t, because life has trained them to be afraid of being

exploited or hurt by other people.

emotional scars often comes a higher sensitivity to threat and rejection.

Genetics definitely helped, in that children who were born with calm and agreeable dispositions naturally attracted care and support, but it was the social support that made the difference.

Our social media feeds would have us all believe that our social lives depend on having hundreds of friends and followers online and a constant schedule of dates, trips, and parties. This pressure can make us feel out of step

Once we lose our internal compass, our emotional sense of grounding and

identity can begin to slip.

On a rational level, we may know we have worth, that we have light to bring to the lives of others, yet it’s hard to ignore the messaging that i...

Self-compassion is what shields us from—or at least softens the blow of—the judgment and ridicule of people who don’t understand us.

It allows us to grow through our pain instead of being dragged down by it. It also helps us to see our light, however

But diastole—the relaxation phase—is where the coronary blood vessels fill and supply life sustaining oxygen to the heart

To see the smiles creep out of people’s hearts on their faces when you acknowledge their name!

Friends who share and sincerely listen to each other have a stronger sense of connection than do those for whom the interactions focus only in one direction. This is one reason why therapy, however valuable, cannot replace truly mutual friendships.

Dunbar believes that’s because core friendships will wither without the direct face-to-face communication that allows us to be fully present and available to one another.

However, technology can also weaken friendship by draining the available time for meaningful connection.

But the richness of relationships is in their texture—in the sound of someone’s voice, in their smile and their body language, in the unexpected moments of honesty that tend to occur during unplanned conversation.

On the other hand, workers whose brief encounters are socially aloof, demanding, hostile, or disdainful drain one another of energy and result in less cooperation.

Our youngest generations are growing up amid a barrage of cultural messages that prioritize fame, wealth, and status at the expense of kindness, honesty, and character.