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

by Vivek H. Murthy

By learning to recognize and address the signals early, we can intervene to forge connections when loneliness strikes, instead of allowing it to become a constant in our daily lives. A first step is to acknowledge the vital need that all humans have for social connection. Quite simply, human relationship is as essential to our well-being as food and water. Just as hunger and thirst are our body’s ways of telling us we need to eat and drink, loneliness is the natural signal that reminds us when we need to connect with other people. There’s no cause for shame in that. Yet hunger and thirst feel much more acceptable to acknowledge and talk about than loneliness. To combat this silencing effect, then, we need to more deeply appreciate the relationship between loneliness, social connection, and physical and emotional health. In so doing, we can lift the burden of shame, blame, and criticism that fuels the stigma around loneliness. We’ve seen this approach work with conditions like depression.