Together Quotes

“Connection, not hatred, is the glue that makes us feel we all truly belong.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“The answer was that the most protective factors in childhood were largely social.18 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. Kids who were able to bond as babies with their parents or primary caregivers had one social advantage. Kids who formed close bonds with substitute parents within the family had another. These substitutes might be older siblings, aunts or uncles, or grandparents; a child only needed one. What mattered was that the surrogate be both nurturing and available and emotionally stable and mature.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Disrupting the vicious cycle between work addiction and loneliness has also had an unexpected and positive impact on his professional performance. “The paradox is that I became more productive and more effective, the more I slowed down and was aware and connected.” In a modern version of Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare, Bryan was proving that slow and steady really does win the race. But the final benefit for Bryan was completely personal. “I was happier and more fulfilled,” he says. “I’m busy, but I’m having fun. I don’t feel like work is looming over me and driving me. I’m driving”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Then the reactions begin. Those who’d like to help start turning away, leaving us feeling even more alone.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“lonely brains detect social threats twice as fast as non-lonely brains.18”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“a close confidante or intimate partner—someone with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust. Relational, or social, loneliness is the yearning for quality friendships and social companionship and support. Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests. These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high-quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive. The”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“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,”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Smart and Secure Children (SSC) parent leadership”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“The structure of operations also encourages connection. Any employee can attend meetings of any department, including Zingerman's board meeting. A truck driver can help plan a menu, and a chef can help strategize on the online marketing strategy. To Ari [Weinzweig], part of the benefit of this is disabusing people of the notion that leadership always knows what they are doing. It's okay to acknowledge that everyone is fallible even as they strive to make the company stronger.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“The fact is, [University of Michigan organizational behavior professor Dr.] Wayne [Baker] said, most people do want to help. But that's not always intuitive. "We've shown that engaging in the process of both asking for and receiving help, and building the network actually elevates people's emotional energy and decreases their negative energy."

When the active exchange of help is incorporated into an organization's culture and used over time, Wayne said, people start to build positive relationships that change their behavior at work and also their beliefs. "They see the importance of asking for what they need while they generously help other people. And they start to practice it more in their daily interactions.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“According to developmental psychologists, we need to be free of interruptions such as texts, emails, and news feed alerts, in order to access our deepest thoughts and feelings. Today such freedom does not come easily, but this makes it all the more important to intentionally reserve time for solitude on a regular basis.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Something that all people need,” he said, “is to reflect, to discuss, to flesh out ideas and concepts and struggles with other human beings. And sometimes we just don’t get that often enough.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Dunbar points out that any form of physical exercise will produce an endorphin kick, but having a partner and working out in sync will dramatically escalate the reward. This is true of jogging, biking, dancing—virtually any form of exercise.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“But detaching from technology is more difficult if we use it as an emotional escape, to avoid sadness, conflict, disappointment—and the hard, deep work of relationship. Instead of meeting in person to talk about misunderstandings or find shared solutions to real problems, we can just slip into cyberspace and spend hours among “friends” who won’t ask the hard questions. It is an easier path—but one that ultimately leads to more loneliness.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Research has found that humans are incapable of attending to multiple activities at once. What we’re actually doing when “multitasking” is switching back and forth very rapidly between tasks, attending to each one separately but briefly. As MIT neuroscientist Dr. Earl Miller explained in a 2008 interview on NPR,9 “Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Shifting social networks now often preempt family networks. We have robots that function as companions for our elderly, and virtual playmates that replace human friends. Games in cyberspace keep kids in rooms by themselves instead of engaging in face-to-face interactions with their peers. And this all has happened so fast that few of us even realize what these changes are doing to our social lives, skills, and spirits. In fact, we are being tossed like twigs in a stiff breeze, unable to get our bearings as we unwittingly lose sight of what matters and who matters to us. We still have the wiring for connection within us, but the more time and attention we lavish on racing to be current, the greater the risk we run that our innate social systems will falter and fail us due to neglect.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Whether we realize it or not, the pace of change has created the impression that we have only two choices: adapt quickly to stay marketable, employable, and desirable; or fall back and lose out. This sets up a state of competition between tradition and innovation, between old and young, between online and physical communities, and between transactional and human interactions”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“To be at home is to be known. It is to be loved for who you are. It is to share a sense of common ground, common interests, pursuits, and values with others who truly care about you. In community after community, I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“When our ancestors were separated from the safety of the group, they needed to react defensively even to marginal threats, since they might well turn out to be lethal. But in modern life that same hypervigilance causes us to misread harmless or even welcoming people and situations as threats. Fleeing into self-preservation mode, we’ll avoid people and distrust even those”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Hypervigilance also creates an intense preoccupation with our own needs and security, which can appear to others as self-involvement. These two elements—the threat perception shift and the increased focus on self—are key parts of the hypervigilance story that make it difficult to engage with others when we’re lonely.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“In the workplace when we violate human nature, we create a crisis that causes disengagement, depression, and loneliness. This comes in part from not honoring people’s humanity and not honoring their unique contribution as human beings.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“In community after community, I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“In 2018, one major poll found that 79 percent of American adults are concerned that the “negative tone and lack of civility in Washington will lead to violence or acts of terror.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“nature. Meditation, prayer, art, music, and time spent outdoors can all be sources of solitary comfort and joy. Help and be helped. Service is a form of human connection that reminds us of our value and purpose in life. Giving and receiving, both, strengthen our social bonds—checking on a neighbor, seeking advice, even just offering a smile to a stranger six feet away, all can make us stronger.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“strong emotional connections that are encouraged, where people talk to one another and share honestly and openly on a regular basis.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Her emotions were simply warning her that her life was out of balance, that she needed to tend to her social needs. Loneliness was signaling, not accusing her. It was trying to help by reminding her just how vitally she needed to reconnect”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“They also can feed off each other, as depression and anxiety make it harder to connect with other people, and this can deepen the pain of loneliness.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“loneliness overlaps with and is often inherited with anxiety disorders or depression.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“it’s the painfulness of the disconnection.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“we have a universal need to connect with one another.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness