97 - Lydia Denworth-The Profound Effects of Friendship on Our Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about people who've turned their emotional shit into fertilizer for success. It's about seeing our darkest moments as opportunities for growth and transformation.

Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and a sought after speaker. She is a contributing editor at Scientific American and the author of Friendship, The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond, which was named one of the best leadership books of 2020 by Adam Grant and called the best of science writing by Booklist. She has written two other books of popular science "I Can Hear You Whisper" and "Toxic Truth". Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

Welcome, Lydia Denworth to the Ruthless Compassion Podcast.

Hi. It's great to be here.

Well, I'm very interested in your topic. So just before we start, I thought you might want to introduce yourself to the listener, tell them who you are, what you do and kind of how you got there.

Sure. I am a science journalist and author. I have been a journalist for many, many years, but sort of morphed into doing science halfway through my career. And I am the author of what we're here to talk about today of Friendship, the evolution, biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond and so I both do magazine articles and write books. And I love to talk to people about why science matters to their life and in this case, about why friendship is something we should be taking even more seriously than we do.

How did you get into that topic? That's quite niche, right? How did that topic become your thing?

I don't know if it's niche because the thing about friendship is that everybody cares about it. But what I got interested in is my job as a science journalist is to go out and talk to scientists and listen to them when they talk. I especially like to listen in when they talk to each other and I don't know, six or seven years ago, I went to a neuroscience conference, believe it or not, a social neuroscience conference. So social neuroscience is a kind of sub-specialty within brain science.

And I was really intrigued by the idea that they were starting to focus more and more on the social parts of the brain and that turns out to be an enormous part of what's going on in our brains is that we are set up to communicate, to recognize other people and to understand social relationships and to be good at them. But what I didn't expect was that they'd be talking about friendship specifically at this meeting and I was really intrigued by that because we all think about our friends.

We think about friendship all the time. We think we know all about it. It's so familiar. But mostly we have assumed friendship is pretty cultural, right? It's a byproduct kind of human language and civilization and it turns out that while there are many cultural layers to friendship, there is a really important biological and evolutionary story to it as well and I thought that that was really interesting. It was not something I had understood before, and I figured if I didn't know it, then probably other people didn't either.

And if you're going to write a book about something, it's a good, especially the kinds of books that I write that involve years of research and reporting. It's a good idea to be interested in it yourself. You have to be able to sit with a topic for a couple of years. And I thought, Well, I can do that with friendship, because I care a lot about my friends, but maybe I have things to learn and I was right. So that is how I came to this.

That's really interesting. I didn't mean it's niche that it's unfamiliar, but it's very specific. I guess that's what I meant. It's a very specific topic friendship. And I've talked to a lot of people on this podcast, but you're the first person who I've actually spoken to who speaks very specifically about friendship. And I think that that's really cool, especially in the context of this pandemic that's been going on for the past year and a half plus. Right, because our friendships have been really tested this last little while.

They have. And yeah, it's interesting that you say that, though, because it is true that when I started out sort of circling this topic and thinking I wanted to get into telling the world about it. I did have in mind that I would write about and report about a much broader swath of relationships and then I came to feel that the friendship piece was the piece that was not out there and that it is the thing that is most universal. Not everybody has a spouse or children, but just about all of us have friends.

And I was really curious about that. And you're right. So in the pandemic, the interesting thing here for me, my book actually came out originally right before in January 2020, and I spent about six weeks doing book tour, all the usual stuff. And I thought my job was going to be to convince the world how important friendship was to them, and then pandemic hit. Everyone went into lockdown, and suddenly everybody got it. You don't always appreciate what you have until it's gone. And so then the book and my message took on a whole new life.

And it's been really interesting to be talking about this in this time and in this context. But what I hope it's done is that it really has helped us to appreciate what we have and then what a loss it is when we don't have it. And then I'm hoping that as we come out of this time that we refresh our friendships and that we really renew the energy that we put into them.

Absolutely. I feel the same way and, you know, it makes me wonder like, what did you learn about friendship in writing this book?

So, there are two big headlines. I think you could say one is that there are real evolutionary advantages to being good at making and maintaining friends. And it isn't just in humans. We see it across a lot of species, other species, which the significance of that is to tell us that there's a real deep seated reason why we do this and that it is a great strategy for succeeding in the world. And the other big headline is related to that is that friendship is as important as diet and exercise over the long haul for your health.

And we do not think about it that way. Even if you've seen the headlines about how loneliness is bad for you, you don't do the reverse and think about how good friendship is for you. And so if you think about friendship and loneliness, sort of two ends of the continuum that measures your level of social connectedness or integration, they are either for good or for ill. They affect your cardiovascular function, your immune system, your stress responses, your cognitive health, your mental health, your sleep quality, even the rate at which your cells aged.

So you biologically age faster if you are really lonely compared to if you are socially connected and happy with your social relationships. And then the biggest takeaway is that you are more likely to die sooner if you are lonelier. And that's really important to know. And we make our schedules all around, going to the gym and getting our run in, and we worry about what we eat and how we shop and all of that for food. And that's all important. We should do that. But we do not schedule in or think or prioritize relationships with friends in the same way as we do those other things.

And over the long haul, obviously not in, like, a month or something, but over the long haul that is going to have a really major effect on our health and our happiness.

That's a powerful statement for sure. I was thinking when you're talking about some of my patients, I was a psychotherapist for over 20 years. I still do a little bit of it. And I've had patients over the years who, because of their adverse childhood experiences, really struggle to make and keep friends. And some of them really have no friends or one acquaintance. And it's been like this for years for them. And we work and we work in trying to help them make friends, keep friends. And it's really a skill that they struggle with terribly.

And I wonder, is there any kind of special skills that human beings need to make and keep friends?

Well, this is one of the most I mean, that's sad and it's hard to hear because I know it's true. And I know that there are a lot of people who struggle with this, and you hit on the really critical point there is that ideally you learn these skills as a child and in adolescence, and that's a big part of what growing up is about and one of my important messages that I like to deliver is to tell parents that we spend a lot of time talking to our kids about achievement, academically and extracurricularly and all those things.

But we don't spend as much time talking about working on friendship and learning how to be a good friend. And valuing that and in the grand scheme of things, that is going to be this very, very important set of skills that we need. And so parents and teachers should know that this is a critical time when brains are changing and kids are learning how to be social. And so the things you need to do to be a good friend you need let's see how to sum this up.

One thing is that you need to be able to make yourself vulnerable to put yourself out there in the world. Actually, the easier way for me to talk about what I think the skills are that make you a good friend is first to talk about how the science of friendship has helped us to clarify what a really good friendship is and to define it better. And I see it as a bit of a template for all of our relationships. And so a really good friendship has three essential elements.

It's a stable, long lasting relationship. It's positive, so it makes the individuals involved feel good, and it's cooperative or reciprocal. So there's an equality there. There's a back and forth, a give and take, and a lopsided friendship is usually not going to be a healthy one, by which, I mean, if one person does all the talking and the other all the listening or one does all the organizing or emotionally is much more available. There has to be that reciprocity what that means in terms of how to be a good friend.

I feel there's real clear guidance there. It means being a steady, reliable presence in somebody's life. It means being kind and appreciating them and reaching out to take the time to tell people what you like about them or why you appreciate your friends. And it means being helpful and showing up and noticing when people might need you and being aware of that reciprocal back and forth. That cooperative aspect of these relationships and the skills that let us do those things do come from having a sense of yourself versus other people in the world and a way to read their social signals.

And I think that's one of the things I'd be curious actually, to hear what you found with your patients, but reading other people's social signals and responding appropriately to that in ways that make people feel comfortable is really important. But it's a skill that has to be practiced, just like you talked about. It's a skill we have to learn, and it's much better if you learn it when you're young. But I like to believe that it is always possible to get better at these things. Sometimes you don't always think about you, don't break down what's involved in being a good friend.

And once you start to do that, maybe you can use the little pieces to make progress. But I don't know, I'm curious what advice you gave your patients?

Well, it's advice given over periods of years. But I've noticed when you talk about those three skills, I've noticed that some of the things that my patients do that really undermine their ability to make and keep friends are they do what I call people pleasing, which is they try too hard to gain the other person's approval. So instead of being authentic and just being who they are, they give. They do for, they help, they caretake, they rescue, they pick up the pieces. They act like a mother, almost right.

They act like a Superman. They just go overboard doing for these people, and they don't say no. They don't express displeasure about things. They don't express anger. So the other person really doesn't know who they are because they just have this pleasing object on the other side. They don't really know what this person wants, thinks feels what makes them upset, because my patients are just giving and giving, and they're never expressing any negativity. So that's one of the issues that I see, which really undermines their ability to have real lasting relationships, positive ones.

And the other thing they do is that they project the negative figures from their past onto their present relationship. So they imagine their current friends as rejecting or abusive in the way that their parent figures were when they were growing up. So if they had trauma and they had bad experiences, they imagine that the people in their present day life are going to treat them in the same way. So they come into these relationships with almost like a paranoia or fear or an expectation of harm.

And then they imagine these people in their lives as going to disappoint them or abuse them or reject them or betray them or undermine them or control them or misuse them. And then they react to the things that these people do, as though that's what was happening. So those are the two things that I have seen over the years over the decades, which makes me feel sad for my patients in terms of how they go about trying to have relationships, have friendships.

Yeah, that's so interesting. And it really does. I feel like I see those things. I mean, the first thing you said about being too much overdoing, it speaks exactly to this issue of reciprocity and cooperation. And there being a give and take. And if something is too lopsided, it's just not healthy. And then the other piece of it is that there has to be that something needs to make you feel good. But the problem is what you're talking about there is that that doesn't only depend on what the other person in the friendship does.

It depends on all the baggage that you bring to your relationships in general. Right. But what I hope people can do is try to think about each relationship in the moment and try to take a step back and look at what people really do. Maybe I'm getting out of my tier. I'm a science journalist, not a psychotherapist. But fortunately, we have you here. So don't let me overstep. But I do think that I mentioned at the beginning of this that making yourself vulnerable and trusting is part of what goes into this.

You have to be able to do that to make a real friend, a deep friend. And people often list trust as one of the things they think of as an essential part of friendship. And there's a lot of other things that come up loyalty and companionship and fun and things like that. And I would argue that all of those fit into the buckets that I listed of like a stable, long-lasting relationship, a positive one and a cooperative and reciprocal one. But the trust and the vulnerability is important, and it's really hard for people who've been hurt in the past.

Right? The other thing, too, is as adults, we forget how much time needs to go into building a really strong relationship so you can like someone from the minute you meet. But you do need to spend hours together to develop a bond. And kids in high school and college, you have it easier because you spend so many hours with all these people your same age. You have all these potential friends, and you live together. You eat together. You study together. You go out party together on the weekends, and then, of course, when we're adults, we have jobs and maybe we have families, and it becomes harder to put in that kind of time.

And yet I think we often expect some of the same kinds of relationships to develop without the time. In fact, somebody counted this up, and it takes about 50 hours of time together with another person to have them go from being an acquaintance to a friend for people to consider that change, and then about 80 to 90 hours to be a good friend and 200 hours together to consider someone your best friend. That's a lot of time for an adult. It's not so much time for a college student, but it's definitely a lot of time for an adult.

So that kind of patience and understanding of the long haul here is also important if it goes back to what you're talking about.

How we prioritize getting our 10,000 steps in. But we don't prioritize spending those hours with a friend, and we don't see the value. We're very much utilitarian. We see the value of the 10,000 steps or eating our broccoli. We don't get a sense of the actual value to our well-being of just hanging out with a friend and having a conversation.

That's exactly right and this is what I say all the time is I hope that what I'm doing is giving people permission to go, hang out with their friends and call it a jog. It's like you've exercised in a way. And it's not an obvious thought that a relationship that exists entirely outside the body could get under the skin, as biologists say, and affect our health in the way as profoundly as it does. You get that with what you eat, you're putting it into your body. So you understand that.

And when you go for a run and your heart gets pounding and your muscles, you feel that that is going to affect your health. But this idea that these relationships can do the same thing is really a novel one and something that it takes people a little while to get their head around. But like I said, I listed all kinds of ways that that is true and that they do affect us so profoundly. So, yes, make time, organize your life in a way that allows for some time.

And I know that there are phases in life when that's less possible, but it's never entirely impossible. I mean, it really is about the choices that we make about what we prioritize. Don't just ditch your friends. If you fall in love with someone and don't have your friends always be the thing that falls off the schedule when you're busy with work and family.

Now that we have this pandemic and people have been so distant from each other, a lot of friendships have kind of fallen off, right? Because people just couldn't. How do you rebuild a friendship that has kind of gotten a little bit tenuous over the last 18-19 months?

The pandemic has been really interesting in that there was a bit of a sorting that happened. We had to pod up into these smaller circles, and, well, there's a couple of things that happen, but most for the most part, you spend a lot of time with the same handful of people, if that. And that's okay, because what friends are really for is to be there for each other in the hard times. And of course, that was what was so hard about the pandemic was here was this terrible thing.

And the one thing we always do in a crisis is turn to our friends and family. And in this case, we kind of couldn't. Right. So that's why we felt that loss so much. But that core group, it's most essential that you have just even a handful of close people. I mean, the difference in your health between having zero friends and one is the biggest step change. So let's start there and say it is okay if there was just one person or there's just a handful of people.

But then the ones the relationships that were harder to maintain were the ones a little further out in the circles that surround us. And that where it would have been weird to invite them to a Zoom or something unless you had some group reason to get together. There's people that you just suddenly stopped seeing. I don't know about you, but the first time I went to one of my kids was graduating from high school in the middle of the pandemic, and so it had been a year just this is last May, and I finally went to an event with other mothers from the class and other parents who I'd known for 15 years and I couldn't remember anybody's kids names.

I was so out of practice I felt like really a jerk. I was embarrassed by how socially awkward and inept I was. So there's that process that we just have to get used to socializing with people again. And this is a different way, and we've forgotten some of it. But the other thing that happened during the pandemic is that you had to have trust and honesty in your relationships because people had different tolerances for risk. They had different personal situations, and that was hard to navigate.

And a lot of people either saw things the same way and were able to hang out and others that sort of fell off because they would argue about that. But I think that the way to rebuild is to kind of take that definition I gave of what a really good friendship is and start there. Look to the best quality relationships that you have, and in that too. It's not just about how other people treat you, but are you being a good friend? Are you a steady, reliable presence?

Are you positive? Are you helpful and reciprocal in your relationship and then start with a core of those, but then work your way out. And the really good, strong relationships are the ones worth keeping. And if things got rocky during the panremic or you just plain didn't see each other and you didn't really miss each other. I'm someone who says not all relationships have to be forever and that we have limited time to give and that we should devote the bulk of it to the people that sustain us the best.

Yes, I agree with that. Now. Obviously, during the pandemic, a lot of friendships took place online through FaceTime through Zoom through phone. Is that as good as in person, or do you really need to be in the same physical space for all those health benefits of friendship?

It is better than nothing, and in some cases it might be as good as I'm not sure that's the way to think of it, we get something really special from being in person with people we care about and one of the reasons neuroscience is really interesting in telling us why sometimes we find Zoom so exhausting or hard. You can't actually make eye contact over a video chat because of where the cameras are and the screens are, you know, all those things. Sometimes, there's a temporal change. So like a time lag that your brain.

Not only do you get annoyed by it, but your brain processes it as unnatural, right? And so things like that get in the way and we miss touch. We even miss people's smell. I mean, somebody said to me, what if I have my sister's favorite perfume nearby while I have her on Zoom? Will that increase my sense of closeness? It probably does. We use all of our senses and our relationships in ways we are not aware of. And we had to cut out a bunch of those.

So there are limits to what technology can do for us. The best thing about technology is if it's just one way in which we communicate with our friends. And this is pre-pandemic. The friendships that were the strongest were the ones that existed across many channels where we saw someone in person but also talked to them on the phone. And we're friends with them on social media. And the more ways we connected, the stronger the relationship would often be. And by the way, the idea sometimes the word friend has become kind of devalued currency that people think of Facebook friends.

And they say, well, that was not my real friends, but actually, most of us are a whole lot smarter than that. And we know and when they've tested this, people know that their Facebook friend is different from your close friends. And they say only maybe 30 or 40% of their Facebook friends are real friends, meaning people you see in your regular life in a meaningful way. And so technology is a tool, and it's going to be about how we use it during the pandemic. It was the only thing we had.

So we had to get creative. And some of us did. Some of us hated it. But by the way, things like old fashioned telephone calls, the volume of those skyrocketed here in the US. Apparently, I thought this was an amazing statistic that Mother's Day is usually the busiest time of year, the busiest day of the year for telephone conversations. And that whole first couple of months of the pandemic lockdown was like Mother's Day every day. People were on the phone and they were talking to people.

And for a lot of people, that was the most satisfying way to interact. So the important thing was to figure out what worked for you and what made you feel connected and to use that. But the question you're asking about what value we get from different ways of interacting. That isn't something that people who study social media and technology use had really been able to ask before the pandemic. This is a relatively new field, right. And it was kind of a blunt instrument. I mean, often it was measuring the amount of time we spent online, but there's a real difference in the ways we are online.

We could be talking, Skyping with our grandmother, or we could be playing a violent game or watching porn or something. And hopefully those things are not the same and what they do for your psychological wellbeing. So time isn't really the right question to be asking about technology use it's about the context and the content of what you're doing when you're doing it. I mean, imagine what the pandemic would have been like if we hadn't had Zoom and texting and all these things. They were really important, but they do not substitute for what we get when we are in person.

And it is important that people get back to that. And I hope when and where it's safe. I hope people have been. I certainly have been going back and hugging my friends, and now that we're all vaccinated and that's so special. I mean, the first time you were able to hug a friend again after a year, it was so special and let's not lose sight of what that is.

Yes, that's really important. And when you were talking about how on the surface, people have difficulty understanding how friendship can affect us physiologically. But being in the presence of other people releases all sorts of neurotransmitters and neurochemicals in our brains and floods our body with all sorts of wonderful chemicals that bring about happiness and wellbeing. So as a doctor, I am aware of all the benefit of being in the presence of other people in a positive way. I'm also aware of the stress hormones that get released when we're in the presence of people who are making us unhappy.

So there's definitely a physiological response for the good or the bad being around there is.

Right. All of those neurotransmitters and things are part of what then set up the chain of events in our bodies that lead to all of the things that I mentioned, like changes in your cardiovascular functioning in your immune system, and they start there. But it is actually, I always think, though, that what's interesting our brains are set up to be rewarded, right. And sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes it's not so good. That's part of where drug addiction comes from and things. But we are very rewarded. Like the dopamine is just flooding our brain when we're really enjoying a friend.

But part of that process is what sets us up to makes us want to come back for more and build on a relationship and spend more time with that person. And all of that is designed for us to then have that bond when we need it. Right. Like friends are really there to help you and be there for you in times of difficulty and crisis. But the dopamine and the fun part, I think, is actually nature's way of designing us so that we're going to want to build those relationships and be motivated to do that for sure.

If it feels good, we're going to do more of it.

That's right.

Well, I want to kind of take a little detour and talk to you about animals and having pets because people are constantly disagreeing about the value of having pets. Some people say that having pets is really good for your wellbeing, some people say that doesn't really make a difference. Have you looked at the science of having a pet or having pets plural?

Yes. This comes up a lot. And I didn't really look at the science intensely. There's not a whole lot I can say about it except to say that it is real that people feel a connection with their pets and that it can give them a lot of that happiness and satisfaction. There is a limit to how far that can go, the kind of connection you can have with animals versus other people. I mean, you can't have a conversation in the same way with an animal that you can have with another person.

There are limits to what animals can do for you. But I think it can be a profound relationship. So I don't dismiss that at all. I think it's very important where I would draw the line is to say that someone who says they have their pets so they don't need any human friends, that would be wrong, in my view.

Yeah. I agree with that. They can't give you good advice about your love life, for example.

No, they can't. It's actually funny. So early on when people were doing this research starting to make this connection between our social relationships and our health, they thought in humans that this is sort of mostly in the 80s and late 70s and 80s, it was starting and it was epidemiologists looking at thousands of people over time. Right. And seeing that the people who reported being more socially connected seemed to live longer, it just was a correlation, right. They didn't know for sure if one thing was causing the other.

And the theory was that maybe if you were more socially connected, that kept you healthy because other people in your life were a good influence. They might try to get you to stop smoking or go out for a walk, and they would be there to drive you to the hospital should you need to go. Right. And that's a real thing. I mean, people who live alone are more at risk of dying earlier, in part because should God forbid they have a heart attack and fall on the floor?

There isn't necessarily anybody there to notice. Right. And take them to the hospital. So that was the theory. But then when evolutionary biologist and primatologist started recognizing friendship or something like it in monkeys and apes that they were watching, their science is kind of what led us to understand that there's this more universal thing going on here with friendship and with these social bonds. And what they found is that baboons, for instance, who have more strong social bonds within their troops, also live longer and are more likely to have more and healthier babies, which in evolutionary terms, is what you want, right?

It's the whole goal there. And baboons do not drive each other to the hospital. They can't. And so clearly there was something else going on, right? It isn't only that. And this is part of what I would say about pets. I mean, the reason I'm circling back to it is that pets can't drive you to the hospital, but they also can't talk about things. And there's something we're getting from the interactions with our own species that is really deep seated and important. But also we do sometimes need people to drive us to the hospital and so across species but there's some things we need from each other.

Yes, I agree. I love my pets, but they can't commiserate with you. If you're having a bad day, you can't talk to them about a problem that you have and get their point of view.

But it is true that your blood pressure lessons when you pet your dog. There are some things they provide. They do provide that unconditional love and joy. I mean, I feel like when you have a dog in the house, there's just this happy energy that comes with that that's hard to replace.

I think about my patients who struggle with friendships, and a few of them have pets, and they get a lot out of having their pets because really, they're the only relationships they're really capable of having, at least at this point in their life. And I feel like it's better to have pets if they're not able to have friendships, at least they have pets.

I would agree 100%.

I think there is something about human contact that we can't replace with anything else.

That is really true. And there's a reason why, as long as there have been human beings, they've almost never been by themselves. They live in groups, and they always have. And then those groups got bigger and more complicated, and our brains had to expand to manage all those relationships. But that is exactly what we've done. And for the same reason, that what baboons get out of having these closed bonds is that they get somebody who's there to help protect them, literally from the lions that come and prey on them, and also to help you find food and things like that.

But they spend a huge part of their days grooming each other, and the grooming serves all kinds of purposes. That is kind of like gold in baboon world, and it makes them feel good and all those hormones and neurotransmitters you were talking, they get oxytocin and dopamine and things like that when they're groomed. But there's a strategy about those relationships. It's not that everybody grooms everybody else. But okay, people are not baboons, and it's not all exactly the same. But clearly they are spending a whole lot of their time devoted to building relationships.

And because there's a reason for it, it serves them well. And so the same is true for people. We do much better in the world when we do have those relationships, people we can count on when we have friends. And so putting in the time and the effort is a really critical thing.

Well, sometimes I think it comes down to something as simple as feeling that we're loved and that we are giving love, and both of those things feel very good knowing that we have loved to give and it's been received well and that somebody is loving us and we're able to receive it. Well, that is, I think, gold for humans.

Yes, it is. And actually an interesting thing I mentioned earlier about how critical the early years of our lives are for this. And one of the big things that happens is in the very first few years of life, your social brain is getting primed mainly through your relationship with your parents. And hopefully that's a positive one. And they're giving you that love and that feedback. But what happens when children go to school or when they are maybe around five and six and they start to get into elementary school, and then they start to socialize with larger groups of peers.

One of the critical skills that they learn evolutionarily. There's a switch in the kinds of skills that kids can learn in that situation. And one of them is exactly what you just mentioned. It's that suddenly they see what it is to give, to support in a relationship in a way that they can't with their parents because of the hierarchy of parents and young kids. Right. The reciprocity starts to come in. There's collaboration and there's not just receiving support, but giving support. And there's learning how to operate within a group.

And so they're starting in first grade, second grade, things like that. And that is one of the most satisfying things that we get is that back and forth. That's where that reciprocity really starts.

When I think about my patients who struggle with friendships, another thing that they really have a hard time doing is receiving because they don't trust what's coming toward them. They feel that their strings attached or that it's tainted somehow. So they reject what's offered. And then the person who is trying to give them love feels hurt and confused and goes away.

Yeah. People are only going to give it a try for so long before they think it's too hard or it's not worth it.

Another thing I was thinking about lately is a lot of people I've been speaking to have been saying the young people of today, the 18 to 24 year olds are the loneliest group of all, and many of us would have thought that it would be the older people widowed, single alone. But no, it's the youth. So, what's going on with our young people that they're lonelier than ever?

Well, I'm a little bit of I don't know of an iconoclast on this front. It is true that young people that there are rising levels of mental health issues, of depression and loneliness in some, although it's always been true that young people are also lonely, and it isn't just older people. And I think we sort of set up a little bit of a myth in our society that it's the older people who are living alone that are the big problem. And, of course, that can be an issue.

But since time immemorial, young people have been lonely or go through periods of loneliness. There's been research out there blaming social media and things like that. But the more recent research and the more rigorous research says that that link is more nuanced than it has been made to appear, and that if you take a whole lot of kids over research, looking at 350,000 kids and looking at all of the different factors in their life, and then looking at their psychological wellbeing found that technology and social media use explained only a very, very small, less than half a percent of the variation in people's well-being and the kids well-being.

It's things like wearing glasses and being bullied and not getting enough sleep or eating breakfast had a bigger impact. So the answer is not as simple as people like to think. And we have a history as humans have always sort of fearing technology. And this is the latest iteration, and there are good reasons, and it is not all good. And it is true that there are kids whose mental health and loneliness are exacerbated by social media. But what is usually true is that those kids are unhappy offline as well, or that the arrow goes in both directions.

And so what that tells us is it helps us figure out who's lonely and why. And if we can try to unpack what's going on there and the ways in which social media can make it worse, then that's where we need to be on this. So I don't really have the answer yet as to what it is that's going on with kids. If it isn't just social media, I think there are a lot of competing pressures in our world right now. We put an enormous amount of pressure on young people, certainly in high school.

And I have done some work and some research on adolescent brain development and on looking at depression in teenagers and depression. And loneliness is not necessarily the same thing, but I think it's related, right? And so it's a complicated question, and I don't have all the answers. I wish I had a clearer answer for you, but I don't think that it is as simple as saying that it is too much social media. That's not proving to be true.

I'm going to throw something out and see what you think of it. Okay. I was thinking that if some children are being what we call over parented with parents who are overly invested in their children's success. So, they interfere with the children's teachers. And even with the principals at school. They bring their lunch to the workplace when their kids are 20 years old. They cushion every fall. They reward every little gesture. They don't give them any responsibilities. They overprotect. They do so much that these children grow up not confident, no real skills and really feeling quite emotionally crippled.

And then I'm wondering if that also extends to their ability to form healthy attachments with other people. I'm wondering if this epidemic of over-parenting with the greatest of intentions, right? With the greatest of intentions to care for their children. But going overboard like we were talking about with people, please. But this is with the children. I'm wondering if this is making children grow up into young adults who struggle as well with their relationships with their friendships.

I can only speculate, but I would guess that you're on to something there. I mean, I said earlier that I think most parents don't do enough thinking about how to help their kids develop social skills. And those social skills are related to other skills, right? And you have to go out in the world and practice all of it and you have to get it wrong. Sometimes you will get it wrong. Sometimes often when parents get engaged in their kids social lives, it's because they think there's a problem or their kid's social life doesn't look like the way they want it to look or think it should look.

But the overparenting usually has to do with all the other things and less about the social skills. But if parents really understand that this is a lifelong endeavor, we're setting them up for and we have to give them the skills all of them. Early on, those kids are going to be much better off. Maybe you're familiar with the book The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahi. But this is all about that, right, that we need to let kids mess up. And I would argue that we need to let them do that somewhat socially as well as in everything else, because that is how they learn.

But we need to be there to help, then guide them towards the right thing, like explaining to them. It takes time to make friends and to learn and talk to them about, model for them in our own lives, the importance of friendship and talk about what a good friend is to you and what isn't such a good friend and things like that. And we don't know that that many parents are thinking about that and doing that and helping their kids in that way.

No, you're right. When I think of it, they're thinking about what university their kids are going to get into or what nursery school our kids are going to get into. They're thinking about what job they're going to have when they grow up. They're thinking about where they're going to live. They're thinking about who their friends are in terms of bad influences. But they're not thinking about who their friends are in terms of the benefits of having friends.

And this is my major message. That's exactly what we do when we think about loneliness and we think about the negative side of things. But we rarely work to amplify the positive in our social relationships. And I can give you one statistic that I think really helps to drive this fact home is that there's a famous study from Harvard. I think it was called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. You're probably familiar with it, where they tracked more than 700 men through the whole of their lives.

They were all men. They were Harvard students. And then there were some teenagers from Boston as well. So there was a socioeconomic mix, and they collected all kinds of data on these men. And so what they found was the ones that made it to 80 and into their 80s. The best predictor of how healthy and happy they were as 80 year olds was not their cholesterol levels when they were younger or their professional success or their wealth or any of that. It was their satisfaction with relationships back when they were 50.

That was the best predictor. Right. And to me, the big takeaway there is this is a lifelong endeavor, and it actually starts. You can just wind that clock back and say the strength of their relationships at 50 probably depended on what happened when they were teenagers and young people learning how to be a friend and make friends and maintain friends. And so it tells us we have to pay attention from the start, but also that we can't plead that we're too busy to focus on friends in the middle of our lives, and that all of it leads to the end of our life, how healthy and happy and satisfied we will be.

Well, that's a wonderful note to end on. That's a real Amen.

Exactly.

Well, listen, it's wonderful talking to you about this stuff. Is there any other projects that you've been working on lately that the listener might be interested in hearing about?

I've just finished co-writing a book called Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential and Fulfilling Society's Promise, and it will be out in the end of April 2022. And it's with Dana Suskind. And so I'm the co-author on this. But if you're interested, this again, it's not just directed at parents. It's really about both the critical things that need to happen in kid's brains in the very first years of life and then the way to make that happen. But how society can help that or how we have been hindering it and that it isn't all on parents to get it right.

This is a special issue in the United States where we don't have paid leave and things like that. But anyway, it's all about rethinking how we approach the early years of life. And I think it's a great book and it'll be out next spring.

Well, thank you. That's a good thing for us to keep an eye out for and where can people find you if they're interested in following you and checking out all your projects?

I am all over the place, but the best place is my website is lydiadenworth. com. I'm a contributing editor at Scientific American. I write for The Atlantic, The New York Times, but through my website, I'm there and my projects and articles are there and all of my social media. I'm on Twitter and Instagram and all those things at Lydia Denworth, and you can find me. But start at the website and there's a newsletter there people can sign up for if they're interested.

That's great. And to sum up after our lovely conversation about friendship, what kind of call to action could you give the listener on this topic?

I already said it, so I guess I gave a spoiler for my own, but it really simply is hang out with your friends and prioritize your friends. And I guess coming out of the pandemic, let's use this as an opportunity to really focus because friendship is an essential bond in our human lives and it will make us happier and healthier.

Well, I feel happier and healthier just chatting with you today.

That's great.

Thank you so much for coming on the Ruthless Compassion Podcast, lydia. It's really been a pleasure.

Thank you for having me. It's been great.

That was the delightful Lydia Denworth and I'm Doctor Marcia Sirota. If you like this podcast, please review it wherever you listen, and you can sign-up for my free Biweekly Wellness newsletter at marciasirotamd.com, where you'll also learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series.