Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Life-Changing Power of Connecting With Others: Gabor Maté, Johann Hari, Dan Buettner & Friends #410

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Today’s episode is a life-affirming compilation on the theme of community and connection. I chose it because it’s a subject that comes up in one way or another in almost every podcast conversation I have. Researchers, thinkers, and experts alike are concluding that one of the most significant contributing factors to our mental, physical and emotional health is our interactions with other human beings. Our ancestors evolved as a collective – ancient humans thrived in tribes. From keeping safe at night to hunting for and sharing food, coming together as a community was essential for our survival. And it’s easy to forget we’re not that different today. Sure, the world has transformed. Travel and technology mean families often live far apart, and younger generations are more likely to communicate through screens than face to face. We can survive without community, but can we really thrive? Science has shown how loneliness affects more than mood, leaving a lasting imprint on our mental and physical health. Reaching out to others then, is one of the best things we can do to protect and improve our holistic health. And I don’t just mean asking for help. By giving to others, volunteering your time or lending an ear, your own wellbeing is boosted alongside the recipients’. Feeling part of a community is as much about making a contribution as being welcomed. Of course, it can be easier said than done. Maybe you don’t have family nearby, you work alone, or you find it hard to make friends. This podcast is here to help. I guarantee that by the end you’ll feel compelled to embrace community, convinced of the reasons it matters, and inspired by all the simple, actionable ideas this wonderful selection of guests share. You’ll hear voices including Dr Gabor Maté, Johann Hari, Dr Tommy Wood and Professors Laurie Santos, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. Together we cover the reasons connection is key, the health benefits it affords, and how to find your community. We hear from Dr Pippa Grange, Dr Dacher Keltner, Kelly McGonigal, The Happy Pear, and many more on how to cultivate friendships and intimacy, and why it's kindness that counts. My team and I really enjoyed compiling this episode for you and it’s served as a reminder to all of us, too, to prioritise the people in our lives a little bit more. Even if that’s something you already do, is there someone you could reach out to who might be struggling to do the same? Each clip in this podcast comes from a full-length episode, so if there are voices that particularly resonate with you, check the show notes for links to listen to their episodes in full. Together, these clips are a celebration of the power of community and friendships old and new – I hope this episode helps you to find yours. Find out more about my NEW Journal here https://drchatterjee.com/journal Thanks to our sponsors: https://boncharge.com/livemore https://exhalecoffee.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/410 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. So this is the time of year where many of us take a pause to spend time with our loved ones and think of others. So I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to celebrate the incredible power of community by putting together a very special episode. As humans, we evolved to be part of a tribe. We had to be part of a tribe in order to survive. But today, we're facing an epidemic of loneliness. Our busy, hectic modern lives have resulted in so many of us feeling stressed, burnt out, and isolated.

This is having a devastating effect on our physical health, our mental well-being, and our levels of happiness. So in this special end-of-year episode, we're going to celebrate the power of human connection. You're going to hear inspiring stories and wisdom from previous guests on my podcast, and you're going to learn, or perhaps relearn, what you already know deep down. That human beings are not wired to be isolated and lonely. If we want to be well, we simply have to put human connection and community at the heart of our lives. My first guest in this very special episode is the incredible Dr. Gabor Mate. In this clip from episode 37, Maté. In this clip from episode 37, he explains why we no longer live in a culture that meets our basic human needs and how loneliness and a lack of meaningful connection can have a devastating effect on our health.

You might liken modern society to a zoo where you take an animal from a natural habitat, and you put them in a completely artificial, restricted situation, and you expect them to stay as normal as they were out there in the wild. Essentially, that's what's happened to human beings, in that in a very short space of time, in the blink of an eye, from the perspective of evolution, space and time in the blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution. We've gone from the hunter-gatherer, small band, communal attachment-based group to a society which is alienated, disconnected, and that disconnection is accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world. Urbanization, it's taking people out of their villages and into the big cities where they're alone so what we're having in is societies that are less and less natural to the actual

makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances and uh johan harry who's written a book recently on depression called Lost Connections, is pointing exactly at what's happening in modern society so that these lost connections characterize the modern world. And as they do, you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before. So we think autoimmune disease is one of these,

or addictions for that matter. So if you look at the rate of addiction now in in countries like China and India, it's going up exponentially, precisely because of the and it's not question of idealizing the old way of life. Now, we can't go back. And of course, there's all kinds of benefits to to progress and industrialization. Trouble is that as we progress, we forget what we've lost.

So instead of combining progress, we're trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways. We just throw everything out and we think we can reinvent ourselves. And as we do, we're making ourselves sick. Yeah, you're right. And I think it's a really great point.

We're not saying we need to go back to hunter-gatherer tribes. We can't. Yeah, not only should we not, we can't. And there are so many great benefits of the modern world. And as you say, industrialization, I guess it's how do we learn from the past? How do we learn from our evolutionary heritage? And what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world?

Certainly, that's how I see it. And you mentioned Johan Hari's new book, and I write a huge quarter of my book on stress is about relationships and our lack of connection these days. We've been told that we're more connected than we've ever been before. And certainly in a digital sense, that may be the case. But when we talk about real human meaningful connection,

what I see around me with the public, but what I also see in my practice as a doctor, is I don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely. Well, we're more wired, but we're less connected, is how I would put it. Because genuine connection happens between people, not between pieces of technology. So as you and I are talking to each other, there's a real interaction. When you speak, I'm looking at you, I'm listening to the modulation of your voice. I may nod in agreement or shake my head in disagreement, vice versa. But the communication is taking place on many different levels.

That's a connection. If you're never having the same conversation online, it'd be a whole different ballgame. And I'd have no idea, actually who I'm talking to, they'll just be exchanging words. So we're wired together, but we're not actually connected, we actually disconnected in this world, because people are isolated modules, sending out messages via the ethernet or the internet. When it comes to addictions, it's that disconnection again

that leaves us so alone. So we're traumatized in the first place. We then develop behaviors that soothe our pain, but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and we furtively seek out our addictive pleasures. And that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation. That isolation furthers our pain and that pain further drives our addiction.

So we live in a society that actually generates addiction in many of its members. Yeah. For the past few decades, almost every year, levels of depression and anxiety have increased across the Western world. And as you heard in the last clip, Gabor and I both mentioned the great work of Johan Hari. Johan went on a 40,000 mile journey around the world to interview leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety and what solves them. In this next clip from episode 94, he explains that although we've been told a story that drugs are the solution, in many cases the cause is not in our biology, but in the way that we live. Everyone listening to your program knows they have natural physical needs, right? You need food, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those

things away from you, you'd be screwed really quickly, right? But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at all sorts of things. I had to go to the dentist the other day. Believe me, I'm glad to be alive in this year.

But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And people aren't crazy or broken or weak to feel the pain of that. We are the loneliest society there's ever been. We're just behind the Americans. There's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer is none. More people have nobody to turn to when things go wrong than any other

option, right? Half of all Americans ask how many people know you well, say nobody. And I spent a lot of time talking to an amazing man called Professor John Cassioppo, who was at the University of Chicago. He was an amazing guy and he was the leading expert in the world on loneliness, basically. And Professor Cassioppo showed a few really fascinating things. I remember him saying to me, you know, why are we alive? Why do we exist? One key reason why you, me and everyone listening to this podcast exist is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down. They weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time, but they were much better at banding together into tribes and cooperating, right? banding together into tribes and cooperating, right? Just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes. If you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if you were cut off from the tribe,

if you had no one to turn to, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason, right? You were in terrible danger. Those are still the instincts that we have. That's still how we feel. That's an appropriate response to the environment in which we were in. This to me is the single most important insight I learned from all these people. If you are depressed, if you are anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs your pain makes sense right what happens when we tell an exclusively or extremely heavily biological story as my doctor told me with the best of intentions is we say to people this pain you feel doesn't mean anything right it's like a glitch in a computer program but that's not true if you look at the evidence now there are biological

contributions to be sure i want to stress that again but when you look at the evidence, now there are biological contributions to be sure, I want to stress that again. But when you look at the evidence, actually the reasons why people are distressed in this culture, why it's rising year after year, make perfect sense. Yeah, I think you put it beautifully well. I think it's really important that people understand that actually loneliness causes physical changes in our body. The science shows that, some research suggests that being lonely may be as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. When I talk to people and say, are you surprised by that? They said, yeah, I'm surprised by that. But you explain, well, hold on a minute. If you think about evolution, you think about if we weren't part of that supportive tribe around us, as you say, if we were on the outside,

then, you know, we were vulnerable to attacks. So what happens? Your body responds, your, your stress response goes up, your immune system gets ranked up. You become inflamed because your body is preparing you for when you get attacked. Absolutely. And there's a really good line that the brilliant psychoanalyst and writer, Stephen Gross says, you know, if you touch your hand on a, to a burning stove and pull it away, right? That's very painful, but that's a useful pain signal right it's a necessary pain signal when people with leprosy don't have that they actually that's how they get so badly injured because they can't feel that they're for example burning their hands or trapping in a car door or whatever that's a necessary pain signal the way professor cassiopoe put it to me is loneliness is a necessary signal to push you back to the tribe

right but if you've created a culture where people have disbanded their tribes, where actually we've told ourselves, you should live alone, you should be alone, do it yourself. We tell these toxic messages all the time that the only person who can help you is you. Then what we've done is we've cut people off from understanding that deeper source of pain.

And one of the things that's, to me, so beautiful and so inspiring is how close to the surface the answers are once you understand the problem correctly. So one of the heroes in my book is an amazing man called Dr. Sam Everington. Sam is a GP in East London where I lived for a long time, a poor part of East London, although sadly Sam was never my doctor. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him like you do with just terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, like you, he thought there was some role for chemical antidepressants, but he could also see a couple of things. Firstly, the people coming to

him were depressed and anxious for perfectly good reasons like loneliness. And secondly, chemical antidepressants were taking the edge off for some people, but most of them did become depressed again. So while he thinks they have value, they weren't the ultimate solution. So Sam decided one day to pioneer a different approach. One day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who I got to know quite well later. And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling anxiety for seven years, just in terrible state, barely leaving the house. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also going to pioneer something else. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery called Dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like, right? Just

scrub land, basically. Sam said to Lisa, what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week. We're going to meet at Dog Shit Alley. I'm going to come too, because I've been anxious. We're going to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people. We're going to find something to do together, right? It was called social prescribing. The idea of the problem is loneliness. We're going to prescribe a group. The first time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety, right? She found it unbearable, but the group started to talk about, okay, what can we do together? They decided to learn gardening. These are inner city East London people like me don't know anything about gardening, right? They decided to, they started to look at YouTube. They started reading books.

They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful antidepressant. And even more importantly, I think they started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to look out for each other, right? One of them didn't turn up. They go looking for them. I'll give you an extreme example. One of the people in the group had been thrown out, I think by his girlfriend, he was sleeping on the night bus, right? Everyone else was like, well, of course you're going to be depressed if you're sleeping on a bus. They started pressuring Tower Hamlets Council, the local authority to get him a home. They succeeded. It was the first time they'd done something for someone else in years and it made them feel great. The way Lisa put it

to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a study in Norway, a small study, but it's part of a growing body of evidence, that found that this kind of thing, social prescribing, particularly with gardening, was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for an obvious reason, right? It's something I saw all over the world, from Sydney to Sao Paulo to San Francisco. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. It's the quality of our relationships that actually determine the quality of our lives. And my next guests are both passionate about spreading the crucial message

that relationships are one of the biggest predictors of happiness, health, and longevity. Professors Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz are co-authors of The Good Life, lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. They're the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an extraordinary research project that started all the way back in 1938 and is now in its 85th year. In the following clip from episode 364, they share why having high quality relationships may just be one of the most important things you can do for your mental and physical health. I think if you walk out on the street and you were to talk to people

about their, let's say their longevity, their health, both now and into the future, I think many people would immediately go to things like nutrition, physical activity, sleep, for example. Yet, you guys are making the case that sitting above them all, potentially the quality of our relationships. Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, I think we were surprised when we started to find how important relationships were for our physical health. And then when we started to look at other studies, and it's the loneliness research that's maybe the most compelling now, that you see these incredible links with the amount of time that people spend on the earth, the amount of time that they live. It's just extraordinary.

And that relationship is of a similar magnitude to the things that we commonly think about as serious health risks like smoking and obesity. So there's so many indications of how powerful relationships are. I think we take them for granted. And it's clear science is telling us that they're important. So you mentioned there relationships and physical health. And I think that's where some people have to make a leap into the dark. I get it. Good relationships feel good. okay? We enjoy ourselves when we're in the company of people that we like, who mean something to us. But how does that then impact our physical health? Well, that's the interesting research question. So we're always asking, if we see a connection between one thing and another, how does it work? What's the mechanism?

a connection between one thing and another. How does it work? What's the mechanism? And probably the best hypothesis that we have, for which we have the most evidence, is a hypothesis about stress, that good relationships help us regulate emotion, particularly negative emotion. So stress is there all day long. I mean, something upsetting happens to me and I can literally feel my body change, go into fight or flight mode. And what we know is that when we have someone we can talk to, when I can go home and complain to my wife about my day, I can literally feel my body calm down. and what we know is that loneliness and social isolation are stressors that we evolved to be social animals so if we are too alone what we think happens is that we stay in a low level fight or flight mode the body doesn't return to equilibrium and that means higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, higher levels of chronic inflammation. And those things can gradually break down multiple body systems, which is how you could get a connection between relationships and arthritis or between relationships and cardiovascular disease. Because the stress hypothesis posits that these connections are with

multiple body systems. So this is why there's a Ministry of Loneliness in the UK. This is why our Surgeon General, our top health person, talks a lot about loneliness. It's a recognition of the importance of relationships to our health. Everybody needs one or two, what we call securely attached relationships. At one point in our study, we asked our participants, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? And most people could list several people, but some people couldn't list anyone. And a few of those people were married and they couldn't list anyone. What we believe is that everybody, whether you're shy or extroverted,

everybody needs at least one or two of what we call securely attached relationships, where you feel like someone will be there for me if I'm really in trouble. Relationships are sometimes seen as the softer side of life. But as we've already heard, our social connections can have profound effects on our health. Next up is a clip from episode 67

with National Geographic explorer and author, Dan Buettner. Now Dan has led teams of researchers across the globe to discover the secrets of the Blue Zones, geographical areas where high percentages of the population live long and active lives. In this clip, he explains how human connection and a sense of community can benefit our health and longevity in ways we might not imagine.

About 1,500 kilometers south of Tokyo, the islands of Okinawa, there's 161 of these islands, you find the longest lived population in the history of the earth. And I thought, aha, now there's a good mystery. How do these islanders, you know, with no great technology, with no great access to top-of-the-line medicine, how are they living so long and avoiding disease? So the longest-lived women in the world live in Okinawa. The longest-lived men live in the highlands of Sardinia, an area called the Nuoro province, six villages, 40,000 people.

And you have about eight to 10 times more male centenarians there than you would expect to see in London, for example. And do we know why there's that difference between male longevity and female longevity? I can only hypothesize. Okay. So in Okinawa, for example, women have much stronger social networks than men do. Men tend to be solo and women form these and stick with these social constructs known as a moai. So they support each other, not only literally, but figuratively, they take care of each other. People who are rudderless in the world, they don't know why they wake up. They don't know how they fit in. They don't know why their lives

matter. It is very hard to navigate a world when you don't feel like you need it. In blue zones, they live in places where if you don't show up to the village festival, if you don't show up to church, temple, or mosque, somebody could be pounding on your door saying, where are you? The purpose comes with mother's milk. There's Ikigai in Okinawa, Plante Vida in the Nicoya Peninsula. People know their sense of purpose, live their sense of purpose, and they have a rudder to get through every single day. And that eliminates not only the existential stress of, do I matter? But it also makes day-to-day decisions really easy. I argue in the Blue Zone, the one most dependable thing you can do to add years to your life is to curate a circle of friends, four or five friends who, A, you can count on.

But that also means you have to be willing to be counted on on their bad days. People whose idea of recreation is walking or golfing or playing tennis. People who will keep your mind challenged. People in the blue zones are not only living long lives, they're living happy lives. They're rich, they're fulfilled, they're full of great social connection, they're full of meaning, they're full of the things that make life worth living. Social connection can also greatly benefit our brain health. In this next clip from episode 167, Dr. Tommy Wood describes the crucial role

that human connection plays in the health of our brains and the powerful idea that your brain needs a reason to be alive. Just how important is connecting with others for our brain health? When you really boil it down, social connection, again, is essentially the sort of foundational aspect of us as a species, right? We are a collectivist species. We benefit from being part of a social group, from having a place in that social group, from having

a purpose within that group, which gives us meaning. And having meaning is something that tells our body that it's worth being alive. Having meaning or not seems to have an effect on the immune system, has an effect on our physiology. And so without social connection, you're essentially not giving that input, which is that you have purpose, you have meaning, you belong. And that is one of the critical inputs for the brain to keep working. And one of the downstream or threads that comes out of this demand-driven theory of cognitive decline is the grandmother hypothesis. The grandmother hypothesis states that rather than when you've procreated, you are essentially just a useless sack of meat, which is what some people will tell

you about the evolutionary forces on our bodies, right? That you're just there to procreate. Once you've done that, there are no more evolutionary forces that are creating fitness, right? And so like most people will say that your genes are just there to make you live to 20 or 30 years old, procreate, and then what happens after that doesn't really matter. However, the grandmother hypothesis would state that if you are useful and healthy longer into life, then you are available to help support your progeny, their progeny, and to keep your tribe alive, right? So you are actually increasing the likelihood that your genes will be passed further into the future by being alive to be able to help the new parents or being able to look

after the grandchildren. So actually, there are evolutionary forces that exist to keep us healthy for as long as possible. However, you get to a point where you are no longer of use to the group, and then that's probably going to be a trigger for some kind of decline. Because as soon as you're no longer of benefit, if we think about this from an evolutionary perspective, we think about hunter-gatherers, early humans, as soon as you're no longer of benefit you are that you're a detriment to your tribe to your group you're going to take up resources people are going to have to care for you which is which they can't really afford to do so that could trigger this period of decline you know you think about uh wolves or dogs leaving the pack when they're old so they can go and die peacefully in the wilderness. And humans used to do that in some groups as well. So we are only giving ourselves

the input that says, you know, you're worth being here, you're worth having some kind of function because you're part of a group and because you have purpose. And without social connection, part of a group, and because you have purpose. And without social connection, it's almost impossible to have any kind of significant purpose because you don't know that you have purpose because you're not contributing to some kind of goal or group that's greater than yourself. So I think that we've kind of bounced back from the philosophical to the physiological, to the physiological, but at some level, for us to survive and be healthy and functional requires some kind of social input that says, you have meaning, you belong, you have purpose. And so that's going to be critical to physical health, mental health, cognitive function. And that requires social connection. It requires other people to help you see and learn that.

When a community comes together, incredible things can happen. In this clip from episode 94, Johan Hari shares the heartwarming story of how the residents of a small district in Berlin formed an unlikely community and the profound effects this had on everyone involved. When individuals see themselves as part of a kind of connected tapestry of wider meaning, right, which would have happened in the tribes in which humans evolved, they feel much better about their lives. They feel much more satisfied. Naturally, I learned so much from scientists, some of the leading scientists in the world and reading loads of studies. I think the place that taught me the most about depression and anxiety were not those people actually.

And I'll just tell you the story of what happened in this place, if that's okay, because it's something I think about every day. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one

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That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. In the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin, a German-Turkish woman called Nuria Cengiz climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window. She lived on the ground floor. The sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday. So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. Now this is a council estate. It's in a funny area. It's called Cotty. It's a poor part of what used to be West Berlin. And basically no one wanted to live there for years. It was a mixture of recent Muslim immigrants like Nuria, gay men and punk squatters, right? As you can imagine, these three groups didn't get on very well, but no one really knew anyone, right? No one knew who this woman was.

People are walking past her window and they're worried about her. And they're also pissed off because their rents are going up. Loads of people are being evicted. So they know they might be next. People start to knock on Nuria's door. They said, do you need any help? And at first Nuria said, fuck you. I don't want any help. Shut the door in their faces, right? They're like, we shouldn't just leave her. What should we do? And this was actually the summer of the revolution in Egypt. And one of them was watching it on the telly and they had an idea, right?

There's a big road that goes through Kotti into the centre of Berlin. And he said, you know, if we just blocked the road for a day, it goes right through this council estate. He said, if we just block the road for a day and, you know, we protest and we wheel Nouria out out there'll be a bit of a fuss the media will probably come they'll probably let us stay there might even be a little bit of pressure to keep our rents down right so they decide to do it they're like why not they block the road Nuri is like I'm going to kill myself anyway I may as well let them push me into the middle of the street and they sit there and they protest and the media does come it's a little bit of a kerfuffle that day in Berlin and then at the end of the day the police come and they say okay And the media does come. It's a little bit of a kerfuffle that day in Berlin.

And then at the end of the day, the police come and they say, okay, you've had your fun, take it all down. And the people there are like, well, hang on a minute. You haven't told Nuria she gets to stay. Actually, we want a rent freeze for this whole council estate. So when we've got that, then we'll take it down. But of course they knew the minute they left the barricades that they put up, the police would just tear it down anyway. So one of my favourite people at Cotty, Tanya Gartner, who's one of the punk squatters, she wears tiny little mini skirts even in Berlin winter. She's quite hardcore. Tanya had this idea.

In her flat, she had a klaxon, you know, those things that make a loud noise at football matches. So she went and got it. She came down and she said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day until we've got what we want, until Nuri gets told she can stay and until we get a rent freeze. And if the police come to take the barricade down, let off the klaxon, we'll all come down from our flats and stop them. So people start signing up to man this barricade, people who

would never have met, right? So this very unlikely pairing. So Nuria, who's very religious Muslim in a full hijab, was paired with Tanya in a tiny little mini skirt, right? And I can't remember what night shift they got. It might be Tuesday nights. So they're sitting there, Tuesday nights, super awkward. They're like, what have we got in common? We've got nothing to talk about. they started talking and Tanya and Nuria realised there's something really profound in common. Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 16 from her village in Turkey. She had two young children and her job was to raise enough money to send back for her husband to come and join her. Sitting there in the cold in Cottey, she told Tanya something she never told anyone in Germany. After she'd been in Berlin for 18 months, she got word from home that her husband was dead. She'd always told people that he'd died of a heart attack. He'd actually died of tuberculosis, which was seen as a kind of shameful disease of poverty.

That's when Tanya told Nuria something she never talked about. She'd come to Cotty when she was even younger, when she was 15. She'd been thrown out by a middle class family. She'd made her way. She lived in this punk squat. And she got pregnant not long after she arrived. So they both realized that they had been children with children of their own in this frightening place they didn't understand. They realised they had loads in common.

There were loads of these pairings happening over Kosi. There was a young lad who kept being a Turkish-German lad who kept being nearly thrown out of school. They said he had ADHD. He got paired with a very grumpy old white German guy called Dieter who said he didn't believe in direct action because he loved Stalin, but in this case he'd make an exception, who started helping him with his homework. He started doing much better at school. Directly opposite this council estate,

there's a gay club called Zudblock. It's run by a man I love called Rick Hardstein, who, to give you a sense of what he's like, the previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal. Okay, this is a pretty hardcore gay club, right? And when they opened it, about is a pretty hardcore gay club, right? And when they opened it, about two years before the protest began, you know, there's a lot of religious Muslims there. Some of them had smashed the windows. People were really pissed off.

And when the protest began, Zudblock, the gay club, gave all their furniture to the protest. And after a while, they said, you know, you guys could have all your meetings in our club. You could, you know, we'll give you drinks, we'll give you free food. And even the lefties at Kotti were like, look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters for things so obscene, I won't describe them on your podcast, right? It's not going to happen. But actually it did start to happen. As one of the Turkish German women put it to me, we all realised we had to take these small steps to understand each other. After the protest had been going on for about a year, one day a guy turned up at the protest called Tung Kai, who

was in his early 50s. And Tung Kai, when you meet him, it's obvious he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties and he'd been living homeless, but he has an amazing energy about him. He started asking if he could help out. Everyone liked him. And by this time, they'd actually, the barricade had turned into a physical structure with a roof, right? A lot are construction workers so they started saying to Tung Kai you know you should come and live in this thing we've built right it's quite nice we don't want you to be homeless he started living there became a much-loved part of the protest camp and after he'd been there for nine months one day the police came they would come every now and then to inspect and Tung Kai doesn't like it when people argue so he went to hug one of the police

officers but they thought he was attacking them so So they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tungkay had been shut away for 20 years in a psychiatric hospital, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, lived on the streets for a couple of months and made his way to Cottey, at which point the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital. So this entire Cottey protest turned itself into a free Tungkay movement, right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin. And these psychiatrists are like, what is this? They've got, you know, had this person shut away for 20 years and suddenly they've got all these women in hijabs, these punks and these very camp gay men demanding his release. They're like, oh, they don't understand it. And

I remember Uli Hartmann, one of the protesters said to them, yeah, but you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. And many things happened at Cottey. I guess the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the entire city. They got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. They got Tungkay back. He lives there still. But the last time I saw Nuria, I remember her saying to me, you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood. That's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along and I would never have known. And so many of the people there, these insights would just blow the surface.

I remember Neriman Tanker, who's another one of the Turkish German women there, saying to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home. And I learned when I came to live in the Western world that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began and I learned when I came to live in the Western world that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began and I started to call all these people my home, right? And she said she realised in some sense in this culture, we are homeless, right? There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you're not there. By that standard, lots of us are homeless. And it was so clear to me in Cotty think about how

unhappy these people were right um Nuria was about to kill herself uh Tunkai was shut away in a padded cell loads of them were depressed and anxious in the main these people did not need to be drugged they needed to be together they needed to be seen they needed to be loved and valued they needed to have a sense that they were part of a tribe that they had purpose and meaning in their lives and I remember sitting with Tanya one time outside Zublock and her saying to me, you know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight and we realised we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. And to me, this is the most important thing I learned, right? I love these people in Cotty, as I'm sure you can tell, but in one sense, they are not exceptional. They were entirely randomly selected people, right? Ordinary people

have changed the world time and time again. They don't do it by sitting at home alone. They do it by joining up with other people. This hunger for reconnection and for rediscovery of meaning and other people and meaningful values is just beneath the surface for all of us, right? And arguably, it's the most important thing

as a society we should be trying to promote. That is profound. I can't stop thinking about it. At home is when someone notices when you are not there. Yeah. My next guest is Dr. Julian Abel,

a retired consultant in palliative care. Julian was one of the leaders of a project which aimed to end loneliness and improve health in the English town of Froome. In this clip from episode 138, he describes the incredible results and explains why social relationships, compassion and a sense of community are so important for our quality of life, our health and our well-being. What happened in Froome is remarkable. Maybe you could paint

the picture for us. What was going on in Froome before? What did you and colleagues introduce? And what was the profound impact that you saw? Froome is a market town. It's always had something of an independent streak about it going back through the years. And there's an incredibly good-natured, sensible, clear-thinking GP called Dr. Helen Kingston. And she understood that so much of what we do as doctors is not related to drug treatment and wanted people to feel supported by their community. So what she did is that she employed Jenny Hartnell, who's got a background in community development.

And Jenny started a community development program from within the medical center. It was really about bringing the community together and making use of the incredible wealth of resources that are present in every community. And then if people are feeling lonely or isolated, which is very, very common and is worse in illness, in fact, then there's a way of connecting that community resource to what happens inside the medical practice. There's a lady called Kathy who was a businesswoman who got a very severe form of acute rheumatoid arthritis and she didn't really know the people around her that well. And the rheumatoid arthritis actually put her in a wheelchair within the space of three weeks and her whole life was devastated.

So she went to the doctor and said, look, I need a sense of hope that this isn't my life from now on. And so the doctor said, OK, look, I'm going to get you to see a health connector. And so Rose, a health connector, went to see Kathy and Kathy said, I need to meet some other people who are going through this because I need to know that I'm not stuck. And then she's connected to this incredible wealth of people of all the stuff that's going on in the community, whether it's talking cafes or whether it's a knitting group or an art group or a healthy walking group or whatever it is. And Cathy makes this journey from being somebody who was relatively

isolated and focused to being somebody who is deeply engaged in the community. And she describes the outcome of it about how she has got friends for life and she knows that they are there for her and she is there for them and and her life is transformed not only does she regain her health she regains her happiness and that the the combination of the the medical treatment of her disease with this wealth of support transforms her life. When you say she regains her health, right? So she gets tapped into that when she's been diagnosed, and I think you said she's in a wheelchair. So when you say she's regained her health, what happens? Her pain and her mobility improve. And obviously some of that is related to treatment of her disease. But her well-being improves, her sense of social connectedness, her sense of who's around her, who her friends are, her joy in life, her reason for living. Everything is transformed.

Everything is transformed. So it's a personal journey of increasing health and well-being and transformation. The outcomes of Froome were totally unexpected. We saw emergency admissions drop by 30% at a time where they were increasing everywhere else. And there are no interventions ever which have reduced population emergency admissions. What's interesting, Julian, for me, as you described her improvements there, is that we started off talking about pain and mobility. And of course, the medical treatment may have helped that. But I also have seen enough to know that actually, it could also be a lot of the other stuff as well.

The feeling of connectedness can absolutely reduce pain in my experience. But you said at the end, her joy in living, her love for life, all that sort of stuff, the kind of softer stuff that often in medicine we don't measure. But in many ways, that's the most important part of being alive. The most important part of being a human being on planet Earth is how much fulfillment, how much joy do we get day to day? If you start to deal with what matters most in life, and what matters most is so often the people we know and love in the places we know and love, you know, that if you start to work with all of that, then a similar kind of transformation that happened to Kathy can take place. And of course, if people are feeling loved and secure, then their anxiety

goes down, their pain levels go down. And actually, you know, then you start producing all the things that we naturally produce as human beings, including oxytocin and endorphins, which are the morphine-type compounds that we naturally produce inside us. I can't get that out of my head that your biochemistry, your biology, your physiology changes when you have close social connections, when you're compassionate to someone else or they're compassionate to you, it matters so much. Those moments where we feel that the love and compassion, we all recognize them. And there might be deeply profound moments like the moment we first see our child or we kiss the person we love or we hold our child's hand, any of those moments, they're more than just an emotion. You can feel physically different. But they happen on a small scale as

well. Like when you go to the shops and you chat to somebody and when you have that conversation, you feel like, well, this is good. This is a, I enjoyed that and I appreciate it. And all of those things, although they are an emotion, they also have got a physical, a biochemical and hormonal components to them. But I guess the essence is that we all know that it's the right thing. It's heartwarming. Those moments, even those light moments where you have a gentle chat with someone, they're heartwarming. We feel it and it sustains us.

When communities come together, as Cormac Russell of Nurture Development says, it's about what's strong, not what's wrong, that we build relationships and we recognize the strengths in all of us. And we start to create the warmth of the environment where we can start to solve the problems that we face. And it doesn't matter whether those problems are financial or environmental or whatever comes to the surface, communities acting together through the warmth of human relationships is how we get the transformation. And it goes back to what you were saying, this is not so much the individual, but it's people together, it's communities. And the reason why that's so powerful is because that's how we evolved. We evolved in communities.

It's a really important part of human evolution. So why do we often not prioritize human connection in our lives? Well, my next guest is Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. And in this clip from episode 151, she explains why our instincts about what will truly make us happy often lead us in the wrong direction. It'd just be nice if our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really going to make us happy, if we went after the stuff that we were really going to like. But the data suggests that that's just not the case. There are all these domains where we think, if I could only get X, then I would be happy. But then we get that X, and it just doesn't work. Many of us think, oh, if I could just get that beach house or that new car,

or even just at a local level, I'm just going to buy these new shoes, it'll make me happy. The data suggests that, yeah, it makes you happy for like, you know, a split second. It doesn't kind of give you lasting happiness. It doesn't even give you happiness that lasts for as long as we think. And so there's all these ways where we think that changing our circumstances is going to boost happiness. But in fact, it just doesn't work. The flip side, though, is there's all these different interventions we can do to boost

our happiness. One of the biggest behaviors that works super well for improving well-being is social connection. One of the most famous papers in positive psychology by the psychologists Marty Seligman and Ed Diener say that social connection and feeling socially connected is a necessary condition for very high happiness. You just simply don't find highly happy people who don't also feel socially connected. But we also know from the intervention work that improving your social connection, making new social connections, even talking to strangers on your commute, can actually boost up your well-being in ways we really, really don't expect. And these types of

effects hold across personality variables. So you get the same sorts of boosts of happiness for social connection for introverts and for extroverts it seems to work in ways we don't expect what does the research say about talking to strangers and talking to people we don't know because i think there's some quite nice research there isn't there showing us just how impactful those interactions are yeah and just how wrong we are about those interactions you know this is another domain where at least my intuition is that yeah maybe it'll make'll make me feel OK. But like, you know, it's not a major force in our happiness. In fact, if you, you know, plop me on a train, you know, going to work in the morning, you know, maybe I'd talk to somebody. But usually I'd put my headphones on and listen to a podcast or, you know, get some work done or try to get through some email. And it turns out that this is a mistake when it comes to maximizing your happiness. There's some lovely work by the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley, who did direct studies on this, where he found some subjects who are about to do their daily commute on a train. What he tells subjects is

either, for the rest of the train ride, don't talk to anybody. Please try to enjoy your solitude. Or for the rest of the train ride, just do what you normally do. It's kind of the control condition. Or for the rest of the train ride, I want you to try to make a meaningful social connection with somebody. Like talk to someone and don't just talk about the weather. Like really try to get to know them. What do people predict? Because he has one group of subjects predict ahead of time, which is going to make people feel happy.

And people predict that the enjoy your solitude condition is going to feel awesome, right? They predict that that's going to maximize their happiness. And they don't just predict that the social connection condition is going to feel neutral. They predict that it's going to actively suck. That it's going to take them down from baseline. And what Nick finds is just the opposite. It's that solitude condition that feels yucky. The social connection condition makes you feel great. And I think this is a problem, right? This is another domain where we have these bad intuitions about what makes us happy. And what's worse is it doesn't just affect our behavior. It changes the structures that we create. You know, I'm sure, you know, in the UK, they have, you know, quiet cars

on trains and things like that. You know, Nick's evidence suggests that that's not necessarily a way to maximize passenger experience, right? We would maybe be better off with like a chatty car where you go in the car and everyone's like talking and interacting and getting to know one another. But, you know, those are not the systems we build in because we have these incorrect theories about what's going to make us feel good. The next clip comes from Stephen and David Flynn, otherwise known as the Happy Pair. They have a mission to create a healthier, happier world, and have built a community around their cafe of the same name in their hometown in Ireland. All the way back on episode 38, they spoke to me about how fundamental community is

to our health and happiness and why connecting with others can bring us joy. Loneliness is something that is endemic in society these days and when people talk about loneliness they often imagine elderly people you know living by themselves but I could tell you that as a, I'm seeing a lot of young guys, particularly between the age of 30 and 40, who are lonely in the sense that, sure, they've got jobs, they're seeing people, but they're not actually making time to see their friends. They're too busy. We're learning more and more that being lonely is as harmful on your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day which is just it's just profound for people listening to this who don't live

in a very tightly knit community like you guys do is there stuff that they can learn about how they can create communities to help them lead happier and healthier lives. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first National UK Theatre Tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of

your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can

help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice

of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Brilliant, love it. I think the first one I totally validate with everything which you're

saying. I know now one of the leading causes of disease nowadays is not cancer, it's not heart disease, it's isolation, loneliness and depression. And that's what you're saying is the root of so many of these diseases, as you're saying. And interestingly enough, when we were here, we were on our way over traveling this morning, we were reading stuff about the blue zones. And what the blue zones say is what's number one in terms of longevity, health, and happiness. It's not kale, it's not yoga, it's not swimming in the sea. It's the tribe, it's the tribe of people you surround yourselves. It's the community that's number one in terms of longevity in the, in the communities that live the longest and kind of most wholesome kind of lives. You know, I remember a friend was telling me, it was Sarah, after we were swimming in the sea, we were back having breakfast in the happy pair. And she was

telling me about an interesting guy who, you know, lived in just a normal housing estate. And he decided, I wonder what happens if I pulled down the wall in my garden and put a swing and a bench in it. And he happened to live on a corner of the road. And he found it was amazing. Strangers would come and sit down at his bench, he'd come out of his house and suddenly he talked to them. And they went from being a stranger to someone he knew. And then from getting to know them more, he was hanging out with them, they became dear friends. So I think it's in modern day society, it's just connecting with another human to be more intimate, to show our vulnerability.

And I think that's ultimately it. And I think anyone who's listening to this, it's simply like, I know we're on our way down to London later and London can feel so lonely because everyone's in such a rush. They're so busy. But it's amazing when we're,

I guess, approaching London as a foreigner in for two days, you're really excited. You're chatting away to anyone on the tube. And like initially say you're on the tube and you pull out you know a little maybe it'll be like a tub of berries and you offer the person next they're like they think it's nearly like poisoned yeah but but slowly if you offer another person another person and four people reject but one person said yes and then you go back to the others and they'll all take one and then suddenly

you're talking and it's amazing just it's great that you guys persevere with that and make you know all it takes is one person. Great conversations in the tube. Like I've been surprised that I quickly can get to something deep and significant. And I think that's the challenge of society nowadays. Like there's never been a time where there's more kind of stimulation, more demands on us, more kind of we're busier than we've ever been. But ultimately, this is a challenge which we personally both find is that you've it's constantly to catch yourself and go, OK, now this is where it's at. This is life. This is everything. It's to to breathe, to take it easy.

And when we were discussing earlier, when I talked about it's often you meet people that are terminally ill or who've kind of had a near death experience or something where they really they really appreciate the moment where they're living life differently. They're not going around on autopilot like I often am, you often are. I'm sure all of us kind of in some form, we go in this robotic, quick, quick, more, more, more, where it's only when you can really catch yourself and kind of go, okay, life is now. It's about connection. Life can be busy and it's so easy to forget to make time to catch up with friends. But spending time with our friends is so important. Coming up, we'll hear again from professors Robert Wardinger and Mark Schultz, as they share the benefits that friendships can bring to our lives. But first, it's my good friend and fellow podcast host,

Drew Purohit. In this clip from episode 80, he explains why we need deep connections to others in order to truly thrive. It doesn't see, we're not isolated. We're not in the woods somewhere living in a cabin by ourself, not seeing anybody. So most people don't even recognize that there's a challenge when it comes to deep, meaningful, connected friendships in their life and the impact that it has on everything else that they care about. Friendships, connections, deep, meaningful relationships, they impact every aspect of our life from our health to our happiness. Every area of our life is touched by friendships, but just like stress, because it's not always obvious, it goes overlooked. If you wanted to, a human being, especially in a major city in the Western part of the world, could go an entire few weeks without seeing another human being interacting

with somebody that they need to know. They can order food on their phone through an app and have it delivered to them. They could watch Netflix. They could do all their job and computer work by themselves. We're not relying on other people for our daily survival. But I actually would argue that if you want to thrive in life, if you have big dreams and goals that you want to give attention to, if you want to feel love and deeply connected to the people in your world, if you're going through a challenging time in your life, maybe you're a new parent for the first time, if you're starting a business and you want to create something incredible, the bigger your goals and dreams are, the more you actually need deep, meaningful friendships around you to support you in that process. So we went from this time

period in history where we were relying on each other for survival. Now we actually don't really need each other for survival necessarily. People that we know, intimately know, friendships, but in a way, people are a little confused. They're confused because, hey, I'm living. I'm doing my job. I'm driving to work. I'm getting through the day. And you can almost forget that you're missing out on something. What's the value of sitting down in the morning,

going to coffee with a friend and saying, you know what, I've had a really tough week. And this is what's on my mind. And even if that friend doesn saying, you know what? I've had a really tough week and this is what's on my mind. And even if that friend doesn't give you advice, just them listening profoundly lets your nervous system know that you are not alone. And that's why I'm raising the alarm when it comes to having us check in and saying, just because you're surviving doesn't mean necessarily that you're thriving in your life. Yeah. I mean, so powerful. And I guess for most of our evolution, having a tight knit community, having really good friends was essential. It was critical. You wouldn't be able to thrive. You wouldn't be able to survive

without it. So it's gone from being critical to now being optional. But if we don't start having a conversation about why it's important and how to start integrating these deep connections and friendships and community into our life, we will start to suffer from the results of missing out. When you see firsthand the impact that having deep connections makes in your life, you start to realize that it's important to prioritize. No different than some of your listeners who are prioritizing their sleep or their mindfulness or their mindset or their diet. You make it a priority because you see the value of when it's there

and you see the value when it's not there. And again, for anybody who maybe hasn't seen that, it's usually shows up when we're going through challenges in our life. When we fall down, when we go through a tough time in our life, a breakup, transitioning jobs or careers, a business idea not working out, a challenge that we're having with our kids or our spouse, it's usually then when we look up and say, do I have people around me that can lift me up when I'm down? And if you don't feel that you have that, that's step one is recognizing that maybe I have a friendship, community, and tribe problem, a challenge, right? So once you've recognized that there's value for it, just like

integrating a morning routine that you talk about in your book, it doesn't actually take that much time in our actual life. It's not about running around and having the most amount of friends. I love human connection and I really get fueled by people. Not everybody's like that. I have an amazing sister, my younger sister, who has a smaller group of friends, doesn't like being around a bunch of new people all the time. And yet the one thing that she does is she makes these regular occurrences in her calendar to check in on connection and say, how can I strengthen the couple, the few deep, meaningful bonds that I have. And it can be as simple as a coffee date that you do with individuals. It could be as simple as scheduling a phone call to chat with your best friend from college who you still consider your best friend, but they don't live

in the same town as you. It's not about quantity. It's about that quality. But you will never make it a priority if you don't firsthand see the difference that it makes in improving your life. When I have something that I've gone through in my week that's challenging and I can go to a friend and talk about it, that's when I make the connection

that I'm so thankful for the friendships in my life. Let's say you do have friends and you're not seeing them in your area, which is very common. You're not making time for them. The question that I ask you is that what rituals do you have on your calendar? Do you have something that I call and is one of my number one tips when it comes to this, do you have an opt-out event?? An opt out event is something that regularly happens on your calendar with a group of friends. Maybe it's even once every two months. Once every two months, we're going to get together on a weekend and we're going to go to this thing. And it's a reoccurring event in the calendar. And you only have to let the group know if you can't make it.

I have one of these events in my life. Every Thursday morning, there's a group of my guy friends. We have an opt-out event and that event is we go on a hike together. It's one hour. We get up really early on Thursday. Some of the guys in the group have kids. Everybody's busy. They have businesses and it's the bond and it's the community of walking and talking and just feeling like you're with another group of individuals that understand you. And the most interesting of topics come up. People open up about challenges they're facing in their marriage. They open up about things that are not going great in work. Whatever it is, they know that once a week, and I'm not saying that everybody out there has to do this. I'm just giving an example.

That's what you do, right? It's what we do. And we do it. We make it a priority because we've seen how much of an impact it's had for us. We've been doing this now for four years. And their wives, their wives come to them and say, you got to go to MMT. We call it Man Morning Thursday, right? You got to go because you're a completely different human being when you come back.

It makes you a better father, a better husband, a better partner, has you show up more in different areas of your life. That's just one example of something that I do that anybody who's listening can do. And it doesn't have to be with a big group or a hike or take an hour. It's just simply having reoccurring event on your calendar to connect with your friends. When I went through the hardest challenges in my life and I had a tribe around me that said, hey, how can we help you? I'm so thankful for having these individuals in my life. That's when I look back and reflect that I'm so glad I put all this time and effort and

energy into friendships. I don't want to just say that we rely on our friendships during these macro stresses as you talk about. How about just fun and enjoyment? My week is more fun when I take a few moments. I'm lucky that I am in an office building with one of my friends that is a few offices down for his company. Even if it's five minutes, I pop in and I say, hey, what's up, man? How's your day? Amazing. But I may not see him for the rest of the week. That actually leaves me with a little boost of energy that I come back to my daily life with. in our primary attachment, our primary relationship and intimate partnership. And that's a lot to invest in one person, all the things that we can get out of relationships. So you talked about, you know, the ways in which ourself in connection with others, we learn about who we are, the kinds of support that we need from other people,

the kinds of fun that we can have with our mates, that there are so many things that relationships give us that it makes sense that distributing that among not just one person, but a collection of people might have some benefits for us as well. There's a romantic ideal in the culture now that didn't used to be there. The romantic ideal is if my primary relationship is good, I don't need anybody else. That's a fiction, a complete fiction. Actually, Eli Finkel, one of our colleagues, has written a book called The All or Nothing Marriage, where he talks about this and about the idea that we imagine that the relationship isn't good if we need to go elsewhere for some of our fun, for some of our confiding, for whatever else we need. And when in fact, the truth is that we get many different things from different kinds of relationships and we want that to be the case, ideally.

And there's a, if we think about what we know, just basic ideas about a secure attachment and a connection to other people that when we look at infants, infants on the playground or toddlers on the playground, they'll social reference, we call it. They'll see kids out there. They're a little nervous. So they look back at their parent and is it okay, right? And a parent nods that an adult relationship can provide that same kind of support, right? So for, you know, a strong relationship, it could be a primary relationship or it could be a friendship that we have. Bob says, you know, you can do this, right? That's encouragement like the kid on the playground, you know, go out and do this. It would be good for you to do that. So good relationships are in some ways outward facing, right? They allow us to have new experiences. They're the basis that

kind of support basis that gives us the confidence to try new things. Bob, you want to write a book? Let's write a book together. You know, that's what a relationship is about. You know, that's what a relationship is about. You know, and a hallmark of a securely attached relationship is where you feel the freedom to take risks because the other person will support it. Yeah. Friendships are particularly prone to distancing, that we sort of let our friendships wither. We figure that they're going to work and we don't have to sort of lean in and put energy into them. So we talk in the book about this idea about social fitness and social fitness applies to all of your relationships, but we need to kind of exercise those relationship muscles to really

connect with people, to spend time, to allot time that we can, you know, be together with the people that are important to us. And friends are particularly vulnerable, I think, because of this idea that there are folks that we choose. And oftentimes we make friends through the activities that we're doing in life. So they might be schoolmates from university that we're no longer doing the same activities. So we have to figure out ways to keep those relationships going. Whereas relatives, I think we often feel that connection around holiday times or family events, that there are ways in which they keep going. But I think the kind of bigger issue here

is that there's so many distractions today for our time that all of us spend a lot of time on screens these days, sometimes doing work, sometimes being distracted. It could be by social media or traditional media. But we have to really kind of harvest our time for the things that are most important for us. And it's harder and harder to do that with these devices that pull us away from those things that are critical for us.

Doing this research, I've realized that I have to start taking my own medicine. And so, you know, I realized that particularly once my kids were grown and out of the house and they weren't like pulling me away and saying, dad, do this or drive me here, that I could just work all the time. And so what I've had to do is be much more intentional about scheduling walks with people, scheduling dinners out. Mark and I have a call every Friday noon and we talk. Yes, we talk about our writing and our research, but we also just talk about our lives. And I find that if I'm not active, really active every week in doing things with people who I want to keep current with, it'll, it'll wither away. And so

I'm doing more of that now than I ever did when I was younger. And there are definitely points during the life, one time as middle-aged when, you know, And so I'm doing more of that now than I ever did when I was younger. And there are definitely points during the life, one time as middle-aged, when we get pulled away from those connections more, that we have responsibilities, family responsibilities, our kids are also calling for our attention and they need us. Late life is another moment when folks are in retirement and changing their lives in important ways. So any transition is a point where friendships that have been important are threatened in some ways. We really need to lean in and take care of them. I would say think of someone you've let go or someone you miss and would like to connect with again and simply take out your phone and send them a little text or an email or use the phone to use your

voice to call them and simply say, hi, I was just thinking of you and wanted to connect. And you will be amazed at how often people will be thrilled to hear from you. Yeah. So I think another critical idea is it's never too late that those who feel like they just have, you know, had a hard lot in life, that they don't feel connected to others, that they wish their friendships could be better than they are. It's never too late. There are things that we can do starting now that can really have an impact on our lives. Technology can have such a pervasive impact in all areas of our life, from our health and happiness to the quality of our relationships.

Coming up, we'll hear again from Professor Laurie Santos as she describes some fascinating research that shows how even the presence of a phone can affect the way we connect with others. But next, it's Dr. Anders Hansen, a Swedish psychiatrist, a globally renowned speaker and best-selling author, with his own TV series exploring the human brain. In this clip from episode 381, we discuss how overusing technology can get in the way of meaningful social connections. of meaningful social connections. The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention.

And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard. And that's because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product. Every second that we spent on our screens is money for them. And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that.

And as a consequence, we spend more and more and more time on our screens. And today for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours. For teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours. These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast. And what's the consequence of that? Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much, we don't move as much,

and we don't meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep, and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions. So in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online.

that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online. I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch up with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear that these things are having, for all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem. Yet, despite us talking about it, despite them hearing about it, a lot of people just aren't able to change what they do.

Because it's so difficult. Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok, for instance. Every time you turn TikTok on, you have a $10 billion artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out what should I show Drangham so that he doesn't turn off? Because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive

in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies, especially directed to children and teenagers without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty because we constantly return to our phones. I do that as well. And I've just realized that it's not just about characters. These are very powerful stimuli. And the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time because they will be too attractive. This modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful because anything good in life comes from presence. Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work, me and you interacting now with no phones here, just me and you sitting

across the table, me chatting to my wife about something important, me chatting to my children, me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh. All those things require attention and presence if you're going to get the true value of them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, when we cannot maintain our attention. So I guess what I'm trying to get to, Anders, is how do we change things? What do we do if we look at the addiction with smartphones? If I look at what's happening with children now, you can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity. You think, well, actually, where does this go in five years, in 10 years? Where do we end up in 20

years? There's a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which is brilliant. I love it. And this whole idea that we're losing the art of conversation, this is one of the things that makes us human. And many kids and teenagers, apparently, according to Sherry in her research, prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I've never forgot that since I read it, where you can edit a text message, you can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, me and you, we have the risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled, right? Maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through. That's the risk that we are running by having this real-time conversation.

But it's also something that is part of humanity. It's part of who we are. We're not wired for these perfectly edited communications, are we? Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's boring. But historically, loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food. That's why we have so

strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We read one another, we're very good at that, and we try to create bonds, social bonds, and we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now, those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years where we met physically. And now all of a sudden we meet like this. And we can replace some of that with a screen, but we can't replace all of it. It's not just your face expression on the screen. but we can't replace all of it. It's not just your face expression on the screen. It's so many more signals that we are constantly registering.

And we all felt that during COVID, when we spent so much time on our screens, that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. But most of us felt very lonely and isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredible strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this, the brain thinks that we're lonely. And if we're lonely, well, then we will die. That's the mortal danger. And then we feel crappy, of course.

That's mortal danger. And then we feel crappy, of course. We have to intentionally create some rules for ourselves. Because if we don't, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus. Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between. And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject. And on half of these tables, there is a notebook, paper and pen. And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. And they don't pick up

the phone. But it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table they find their the discussion less interesting they even find the person they're talking to less reliable and that's probably because they have to think i'm not going to pick up my phone i'm not going to pick up my phone i'm not going to pick up my phone so it's it's steal some of your mental bandwidth just by being around. And that's why we have to create distance to it. And we feel guilty for this. We feel, you know, I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time.

But we shouldn't because these are incredibly powerful stimuli. And again, someone is making money from that. Again, someone is making money from that. My colleague Liz Dunn, who's a professor at UBC and studies the impact that technology has on happiness. And she kind of has this wonderful metaphor. She says, imagine if instead of like, you know, to a restaurant at dinner, instead of bringing my cell phone, I brought this big wheelbarrow. And in the wheelbarrow, I had a printout of every email I've ever had since 1997, you know, like photo albums on top of photo albums of me and my vacations, my husband and like stuff I've eaten. You know, I had videos like all these DVDs of like cats and porn and a printout of every

tweet that every, you know, US president has sent in the last couple weeks, piles and piles of newspapers that go back many, many years. If I brought a wheelbarrow filled with like DVDs and printouts and photos and all that stuff, it'd be really hard to sit at dinner and just have a normal conversation with my husband at that restaurant because I'd want to be peeking through like, oh, let's look at this cat video, honey. You know, like, oh, porn, like that seems interesting, right? Like it'd be really hard to ignore that. And the idea is that like your brain knows that on the other side of your phone is all that stuff. Like, your brain's not stupid. It recognizes where there's rewarding stuff. And it means that every kind of normal conversation we want to have in real life is in some sense competing with those other stimuli. We have that wheelbarrow, and it's in our pocket all the time. It's in our kids' pockets all the time as they go to school, as they try to have dinner with us and so on. And I think we haven't, even when we're not using our phones, we don't necessarily recognize the hit that they're taking on our attention and on our motivation. And that's the kind of thing that Liz Dunn studies. She looks not necessarily

at how much you're not paying attention when you're using your phone, but also the mere act of having your phone around. What does that do to your attention and your social connection? She does this lovely study where she has people sitting in a waiting room and they can either have their phones out with them or not, right? Their phones are away in another room. And what she finds is that people smile 30% less when they just have their phones present. And I think, you know, this makes sense, right? Like if you've got your phone there, you're just going to be tempted to look at it. It's kind of drawing your attention. You're just naturally less inclined to look at the people around you. And if you multiply that 30% effect by say walking around on the tube in London or just like walking around any major city and everyone

has these phones, you know, what is that doing to our social connection? I think we simply don't understand the magnitude that we're kind of getting our attention stolen by these devices. Yeah, it's insidious. And I think it's an experiment that I don't think any one of us has consciously signed up for. You know, I feel sometimes when I talk about these things that you're going up in the face of the direction that society is going. And I think that makes it really challenging. I know you talk about when the phone's not there. Some of my happiest moments recently are when I've lost my phone or it's been in my car. I left it at my mum's house

and I thought, oh, screw it. I'll get it tomorrow. And just, there's this lightness around because... Yeah. You're noticing, you're like trees, like the sun, you know, gorgeous people, smiley people. No, it's really profound. I think, you know, one of the ways to deal with it, because it's not going away, right? You know, this stuff is going to stick around. We just need better strategies to engage with our technology in more intentional ways. And one of my favorite piece of advice comes from the journalist, Catherine Price. She has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she doesn't really advise you to break up your phone, but just to develop a more mindful relationship with it. And she has this acronym that she uses called WWW.

Whenever you pick up your phone, think WWW, which stands for what for, why now and what else. Right. What did I pick this up for? Was I going to do something with I was going to check my email or I was going to look at, you know, look at the weather or was I just like bored or anxious? What was happening, right? And then why now? What was the emotion that caused you to do it? Was it just rote and you're just kind of anxiously picking it up? Or was it really like to do something at that moment, you know, or is there something else you could be doing at that moment? And that gets to the sort of what else, which is like, what's the opportunity cost? You know, even if you're devices that they're using to connect are actually leading them to not form connections in real life. And so I think this

is something that we really need to understand better, right? And it's hard to do great science on this because all of us have technology, right? It's hard to get a control condition with somebody who's never like had a smartphone or social media because they might not be neurotypical in the way you would want a control group to be. But I think it's important to recognize that part of the problem of technology isn't the thing we normally think. Right. When we have these worries about technology, we instantly point to social media like social media is the bad guy. But actually, it's just the technology and its excitement in and of itself that might be a problem. it's just the technology and its excitement in and of itself that might be a problem. One of the most striking things for me kind of taking this job where I'm a head of college on campus was sort of seeing how students interact with each other in their kind of natural environment. You know, the one I think about the most is like the dining hall, right? Like when I went to college, I remember the dining hall as being like the loudest place on the planet, you know, because everybody's eating and talking and as in stories being shared and laughter and things.

What was striking when I took on this new role is if you go to a college dining hall right now, I mean, there's some talking and things, but it's much quieter than I remember it. And it's much quieter than I remember it because everyone's sitting around the dining hall with these, you know, headphones that you and I are wearing to talk to each other around with a screen out, either their phone and so on. And the students think they're being social, you know, they're probably scrolling through their Instagram feed or using one of these weird new social media apps to kind of talk to one another. But they're not physically talking to one another in the way that primates are used to. And I think it's in part because, you know, the technology is easier. You know, I remember what it was like to be a new college student and to walk to the dining

hall for the first time with your tray and you have to like talk to somebody. There's like an awkward startup cost with that. And I think technology just gives us an easy way to kind of do something else, right? You know, not going to avoid that anxiety, but it means because we don't ever get over the startup costs, we never develop these, you know, kind of weak ties with people where we just chat and get that little enjoyment. It means my college students are less likely to make these close friendships. And it's one of the reasons that nationally in the U.S. right now, 60% of college students report being very lonely most of the time. And I think it's in part because the easiest thing to do is to flop on your headphones and not talk to someone. But that means you're missing out on all these good moments where you can experience joy through social connection.

My next guest is the psychologist Dr. Pippa Grange. In this clip from episode 126, she shares how we are better able to cultivate closer connections when we have the courage to be ourselves. You talk about relationships and how relationships are really fundamental to, I guess, our overall well-being. Why do you think relationships are so important? Why have relationships sort of become fragmented in the way we live these days? And what can we do about it? I think relationships are the point. and what can we do about it? I think relationships are the point. You know, they're not just important, they're the point. You know, we've talked ourselves into this idea that we're all separately, as if we're walking next to each other, but we're all

separately on this, you know, big journey to achievement and outcomes collectively, you know, if it's convenient. Um, and sometimes we might even link arms, but we've forgotten that the point, the joy, the very, um, raison d'etre, the, the, the, the thing that we're here for is each other is to connect. That's where all the joy is. You know, if, if you, um, win the world cup and there's nobody in the stadium, how does that feel? or nobody's tuned in you know it's the shared joy of our journeys that is the point yeah i think it's really interesting that we we have almost like confined our ideas about intimacy to our one relationship you know

or to our you know um to the sexual realm rather than it be like, for me, intimacy is about, can I just show up as me and be real and be close to you? Can I connect? Right. That's intimacy. This is an intimate conversation because we're talking in real terms about who we are and what we care about and we're exposed. Right. But that is the juice of life that is where the richness and zest is when we can actually connect like that because you can't be intimate and performative let me just sit with that you can't be intimate and perform so yeah you can't you can't perform who you are and be real enough to be intimate they're almost kind of opposites right yeah so you know for me the more we can actually say about who we are and what we care about the more we can sort of just expose

okay this this is it yeah how do people listen to this who go okay i want a bit more intimacy in my life how do they start going about getting it when you want to move to be more intimate this isn't something that you just start you just you know there's no technique involved it's a journey so i don't want people to feel like i'm not getting it i'm not doing it properly you know it's a journey it might take you years and that's okay it's a brilliant journey but you know start by eye contact yeah so you know when you speak to somebody, can you hold their gaze? Do you revert to your phone pretty quickly when you get into an elevator or you get in the back of an Uber or something? You know, can you connect? And it's different to introversion, right? I make this point in the book. People who are introverted tend to have stronger personal boundaries and

prefer privacy and a richer inner world. And there's no judgment on that whatsoever because they can still have really deep intimate relationships. It's more about how are you connecting and showing up as you without guarding all of you. When you can do that and just show up, the opportunity for that energy exchange between you is so strong. When we apologise for who we are all the time or for what we do, it gets in the way of intimacy. Just be, you know, rather than just neatening everything off. You can't do that when you're intimate. No. You know, you don't need to do that when you're intimate because you're allowed to be human. So what can we do to incorporate more social connection into our lives?

Well, in episode 340, I had a wonderful conversation with the author and professor of psychology, Dr. Daka Keltner. But Daka has spent decades studying the science of happiness. And in this next clip, he shares how experiencing awe can transform our physical and mental well-being. And why one of the ways we can access this is through something called collective effervescence. Every time I teach a large group of people about happiness, I'll have a mom come to me, especially post-pandemic. And they're like, you know, my 17 my 17 year old son is in real deep distress and what do i do and i turn to the science of happiness and i say man find some social connections get them outdoors you know get give them a way to find meaning or reflect on life

and now awe you know awe helps your immune system reducing inflammation, helps your cardiovascular system, activates vagal tone, reduces activation in the amygdala, a threat-related region in the brain, helps you think more clearly and more creatively, makes you feel like you have less stress in life. For 75 years old and older, it makes you feel less physical pain, right? I could go on.

I mean, these are all studies where five minutes of awe, five minutes gives you that suite of benefits that I think are comparable to anything you can do. No kidding. And we didn't know that. And now it's starting to spread, right? Just to be thinking about where are those five minutes of awe? Yeah. Something that emerged in our studies, very hard to study scientifically, collective effervescence, but it emerged as just a surprising way to find awe. That is a term that the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim coined,

when he was trying to figure out, like William James did and others, like what is the core subjective feeling of religion? And he called it collective effervescence. And it's when you start moving in unison, or you're synchronizing your movements, think of a ritual in a church, clapping, cheering at a football game, dancing together, doing rituals before a basketball game, collective movement. Then you start to realize collective movement makes you have a shared consciousness. So you're all thinking about the same thing. The religious figure leading the ritual, the football players on the pitch,

the movements at a concert, the band singing and you're all cheering, a political speech, right? And then emotion starts taking over where people are like, I got this rush of chills. I was crying. I was almost ecstatic. I was feeling like I was one with everybody around me. And that's collective effervescence, which is movement, attention, shared attention, and then this electric feeling that moves over you that makes you feel like you're united. One of the amazing things about thinking about these as contexts of awe, which they are, is this allows us to find the deeper meaning in these wonderful venues. There are are studies that suggest like, you know, your football team

is almost on par with a church. It gives you that much meaning and sense of community and sense of history, right? Following music and going to musical venues. I love the work on sort of spontaneous forms of collective effervescence that, you know, people observe

like pedestrians moving through streets and being at festivals or farmer's markets. You know, I was just with my daughter, Natalie, at a farmer's market and it felt there was collective effervescence. We were all moving together, getting the street Indian food, sharing it in a park, right? That was awesome. And so this framework of awe starts to allow us to see the richness of these common venues of awe that we can enjoy it's interesting a lot of the informal help your body movements like yoga 20 million people practice yoga in the united states and a lot of its

collective effervescence you're doing motions together your attention is shared and you start to feel this joy. Yeah. I really appreciate you sharing that. One of the things that I've been, I guess, concerned with a little bit for a while. You know, a lot of people are struggling to find that sense of community. And one of the things I said literally a few days ago at one of my talks was, look, what do you like doing? Okay. Someone said yoga. I said, okay, you like yoga. One of the big problems over the last years is that because of some of the restrictions, a lot of this stuff has gone online. So let's take yoga as an example. For many people, a phenomenal practice that helps them physically, mentally, emotionally. phenomenal practice that helps them physically, mentally, emotionally. And a lot of people now in our bid to save time and be more efficient, we go on the Zoom class. We do a 10, 50 minute

YouTube video. And again, that can have a role, but I say, listen, if that's you, sign up for a class as well. Do 10 minutes a day on YouTube. Sure. That's great. But make sure once a week you sign up and you go to the class because, you know, that's one of the tips I give people that are struggling with loneliness is, you know, what hobby do you have? What passion do you like? Is there a local class? Go there. You'll meet other people like you. Right. So it's a very clear message throughout your book that one of the powerful qualities of awe is that it takes us outside of ourselves to something much bigger and greater. And if you're depressed, that's what you need. You're stuck inside yourself thinking, again, I say that with compassion, we need to help people get outside themselves.

Yeah. Wow. What a profound observation. And you've just spoken to a very important empirical question. Does solitary activity on Zoom compare to collective activity of the same thing? We know in the education world, it does not. And Zoom classrooms for most people are a disaster. You need the collective mind and so forth. Yeah. I love your recommendation, Rangan. Jane Goodall, awe, she thought in chimpanzees,

it is the beginning of our sense of spirit because it allows us to be amazed at things outside of ourself. And the central challenge of the mental health crises of today is too much self-focus. And we're not going to find awe with Zoom and smartphones where we're, you know, we got to get with other people. You know, I was with a minister a couple of weeks ago, Malcolm Clemens Young, a remarkable mind. And he said, you know, and I suspect this is true of a lot of the domains that you refer to, you can pray by yourself, but there's something about praying

with people who are praying with you together. He said, and there's a lot of spiritual traditions around that, meditating together, you know, playing ping pong with other groups of people, doing dance together, doing yoga together. There is no substitute. And the answer for that is awe, that it makes you realize your collective, like Jane Goodall said and you said, I'm amazed at things outside of myself. My next guest is Kelly McGonigal, a U.S. research psychologist,

lecturer at Stanford University, and best-selling author. In this next clip from episode 109, Kelly describes the incredible things that happen when we move together with other people. The rewards that we get from playing an active role in our lives, literally active, being engaged, exerting ourselves, pursuing meaningful goals, and the rewards that we get from connecting with other people and being part of a community, they are so connected that it's one of the reasons why people who are physically active are less lonely. They have better relationships with other people. There's something about being sedentary that makes it more difficult to be that version of ourselves that thrives in community.

And I don't mean, that sounds, I don't want to shame anyone who doesn't exercise or feels like they can't for physical or mental health reasons. And yet at the same time, I feel like it's really important to express this message that to whatever degree you can move your body, it makes you a different version of yourself that it's not even just better for other people. It allows you to experience that core human joy of interdependence. You know, there's so many important dimensions of social community. They're your close relationships, your partnerships in life, your family. But it's so important to have social relationships that are a little bit casual, but where you

know you can show up and belong, where people are happy to see you. And when you're having a bad day, they give you just that level of support where it's okay to be who you are and there are people who care. And it's amazing how much movement facilitates that level of connection where you're sort of allowed to be who you are. When things are difficult, people support you in this kind of easy way that we sometimes don't find in our close relationships where, you know, things get very complicated. One of the reasons why movement and things like park run or things like my dance classes help people experience that is movement often asks us to be the best version of ourselves and also good friends to other human beings. So you go for a run and it's just so natural to

cheer other people on. If you finish first to support other people in finishing, it's so natural to receive that support. It's like an easier place to allow yourself to be congratulated and supported. We get to practice these kinds of rituals of just like easy human interdependence and things like runs and ninja warrior training and all these other places where people experiencing connection. It's because like you're asked to do things that are a little bit hard. And then when you do it, people congratulate you and see your strength and you get to do that for others. And there's this kind of bigger than self effort and bigger than self joy that people experience. That is, some psychologists call it a sense of we agency. You get together and you're doing something and you

experience a sense of self that literally transcends the borders of your skin and your body. You feel connected to almost like a community is like an organism in itself. I mean, it's such, like we could get into the neuroscience of this, but literally if you're running in a pack or you're in a dance class and you're moving in sync with other people, your brain starts to expand its sense of awareness so that you literally can, like the people you see running in stride with you or the people you see moving in a dance class with you, your brain is like, that's happening at the same time that my brain is saying run or stretch your arm. And it just starts to assume I'm part of something bigger, an organism that's all moving as one and it creates this amazing sense of

self-transcendence. Next we'll hear again from the happy pair. Part of their daily routine involves walking down to their local beach at sunrise and jumping in for a swim. They explain how it all started and why a community of like-minded people now join them to start the day together in this incredible way. Dave was down walking Elsie, his first child, to sleep, as you do at 5am in the morning. Yeah, seven years ago. And the sun rose and Dave took a picture and put it up on social media and people really connected with it because it was a symbol of hope, new dawn, beauty, nature. You know, it was very simple. There was a purity to it. So we got in the habit of going down to see sunrise

because we used to get up at half four to go into the fruit market. So we enjoyed those early hours of the day. And we were down there and I remember it was a rainy day and it was, it was September and it was kind of cold. And I was down taking a picture of the sunrise and there was a fella there and he said, do you want to get in there lads? And I'll mind your, your gear. And it was like, and if anything happens, I'll get in and save you. And I was like, I don't really want to do this, but here's a man challenged me. It's like, of course I'll do it. And in I got, and I came out and we got chatting and he said, his name was Neil. And he said, I'll see you here tomorrow. At the same time, I was like, okay. So I went down the next day and then there was Caroline, another friend, Caroline Barrington. She was

in the beach and she came and joined us. And we swam together at sunrise and then we got out and then afterwards, see you again tomorrow. So we did that for a September and then it was like, I wonder if we're going to keep this going. And then Hugo joined us and then Fran joined us. And then we'd go on the 1st of October and we'd end up jokingly going, oh, we've paid our membership for October. We've got to keep going. And we've certainly done it for about two and a half years. And we...

Every morning? Every morning when we're at home. And we'd put things up on social media. And I started using Snapchat about two or three years ago. And it's very of the moment, like as in, I'm going to have lunch now. Does anyone want to come? And someone actually shows up in a physical form. So you're taking this digital platform and it's actually connecting in the physical realm.

So I remember we used to get hundreds of messages from people going, I'd love to come and join you. But they didn't realize sunrise was at 4, you had to get at 4.30 a.m. There was a wind that would have skinned you. The water was two degrees and the air temperature was zero. So it was quite a bracing experience, albeit phenomenal and very invigorating. So I remember it was summer and I remember going, this was a Tuesday morning. I put it up on Snapchat, right? Enough of these messages.

We're having a public swim rise. Everyone's invited. We're meeting at the Happy Pair at 4.30am because Sunrise was at 4.50. And this was the big hook. There's going to be free porridge and we're going to bring tea. So I met Dave that Thursday morning at 4am to prepare the porridge and I wasn't sure, you know,

I thought there might be five people. There might be Raj, Mark, maybe a few others, maybe the usual crew and we couldn't find a small pot so we ended up cooking a big pot and we walk out at 4.30am and there's about 150 people.

We walked in the middle of the road down to the sea, the sun rises. It was a beautiful experience. And subsequently we've probably had 500, 700 people do it, like big ones. And now that's for these kind of big public swim rise events, which we've done really just to celebrate community and the simple act of kind of, you know, the sunrise, it's such a symbol of hope and dawn and a new beginning. And like, it's a great opportunity to come along, meet like-minded people and enjoy in this basic, simple thing of swimming at sunrise. And nowadays, pretty much every day of the week, we'll get people from all over the world come and

join us. You know, like there, there was a guy from Alaska stopped over a week. There was a guy from Boston came over. Because it's a thing and people know it's going to be happening. And when you guys were in town, you will be there at the ocean in the morning. Yeah, down at sunrise. And there's a lot of cross demographics. There could be Linda and Detty. I think Detty just turned 69. Linda's 70. There could be Neil, who's like 45.

There's a great cross section of people who come and do it. And like, although you swim in the sea, it's cold. So it brings you back to the present moment. It's quite bracing. You forget what you're stressing about. You come out and then you share tea with people. You have great chats, great friendship, great joy that is, that although in winter it might seem like quite a stoic pursuers or kind of crazy activity on the way down

your it's raining, it's miserable. You're going, am I crazy? Like this is ridiculous. And then you come back on, Oh my God, that was amazing. Cause you're just, do your kids ever come with you? Yeah. Yeah. Kids do. Kids do come with us. But I was going to say two things on that is like, we often call it Dr. C because it's just the best medicine there is of all. We'll often go down and you'll kind of say, like, I don't always like the person getting into the sea, but I love the person coming out because it's such a, like it brings you back to the present moment like nothing else.

And there's lots of medical studies now backing this up and cold water therapy in terms of invigorating your immune system your your whole kind of body and your mental health primarily really yeah there's quite a bit of work going on about how it could be a treatment for depression as well potentially and it's just incredible you have created a community where not only yourselves but many other people also go into the ocean every morning in Ireland, even in the winter, which is just incredible in itself. But I'm interested on an individual level, you know, what benefits have you felt in your own life from having that sort of morning ritual? I think it's one of the highlights of our days, honestly. And I can say me personally,

like sometimes you'll go, oh, geez, it's so early. I don't feel like it. And it can be challenging. And then you'll walk down to your meetup. There might be a couple of people at the shop and we'll make tea. We usually make a four liter flask of tea and we'll bring some little snacks because it's as much the community and the chats after as important as the sea. And we'll walk down and you'll kind of go, geez, are we crazy? And then you'll suddenly turn around the corner to the beach and you'll see the light. You'll see the dawn. You're like, you're suddenly, my spirits are lift. We'll get down to the beach. There'll be, it's this sense of overcoming this obstacle. We're getting in this cold water together. And you'll meet people on the beach and in we go. One of the most powerful things we can do is to give to others.

Be that our money, our time, our friendship, or our compassion. In this next clip, we'll hear again from Professor Laurie Santos as she reveals why helping others is what will truly make us happy. Happy people are disproportionately other-oriented. They, like, matched for a salary level, give more of their money to charities than people who are not so happy. They give more of their time, they volunteer, right? They just tend to be more focused on helping other people than in kind of doing selfish pursuits. And the research shows that then if you go and do an intervention where you force people to do nice stuff for others, um, that will actually improve people's wellbeing more than they think. This is actually a study by Liz Dunn, who we mentioned earlier. She goes up to people on the street and hands them some money and says, okay, you just got this money. Here's how you have to spend it. One group is told you have to spend this on yourself. Do something nice, treat yourself. Um, another group is told, well, the way I want you to spend this money is to do something nice for someone else, right? Then she has subjects agree that they can be called later

in the day or later that week. And what she finds is that the subjects who spend the money on other people tend to be significantly happier than those who spend the money on themselves. Now, this is not, again, what we think, right? But it's what the data show. And again, you know, I teach this class, but I get this intuition wrong. If I'm having a crappy day, you know, be like, I'm going to go out and get myself a latte or I'm going to get a manicure. Right. I don't think like I'm going to go buy my coworker a latte right now or I'm going to like get a little gift card for my friend to get a manicure. Like I think me, me, me. But the data suggests that like just sort of switching gears, spending our money and our time on other people is a way to bump up our happiness. years, spending our money and our time on other people is a way to bump up our happiness. When you're kind to someone, it's not just that person who benefits. Kindness also makes you happier. It's good for your heart. It helps support your immune system. It slows down aging

and it improves our relationships. Back in episode 104, I spoke to the wonderful pharmacist turned author, Dr. David Hamilton. And in this next clip, he shares some wonderful research which shows why kindness, compassion and connection are so beneficial for our happiness and our health. This is becoming clearer and clearer to me this for me is the missing link

in health care it's definitely changing people are far more aware of it or of the way in which even the way you talk to someone how that can make them feel in fact there was a study on on doctor visits over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu. And they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition

was 50% higher than everyone else. And it just came down to empathy. How it made them feel. And what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system. And I think that's the key, isn't it? That it's not just in your head. It's changing things biologically physiologically

that deep connection has tremendous physical effects in fact one of the side effects i suppose of feel that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the mother theresa effect i think it was a study i think it was was at Yale or one of the other big American universities. They got over 100 people to watch a 50 minute video of Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta demonstrating care and compassion to homeless people. And at the end of the study, their levels of a little immune antibody in the saliva called SIGA went up by about 50% for no reason other than just watching the video. And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards. And that's because for the hour or two afterwards, they were still talking about,

remember that part when Mother Teresa, she sat down beside that elderly gent and they didn't say a word. She just sat beside him. She took his hand and laid her head against his shoulder just so that he wouldn't feel alone at that time and just that emotional bonding experience of watching them on that video spiked the immune system it just lifted that little antibody level so it's not just the person who received that, it's also if you're watching that.

Absolutely. It's watching it as well, because it comes down to how it makes you feel. If you can feel a sense of connection from being the person who, in this case, is delivering kindness or compassion, being on the receiving end or watching someone else, whether it's live or even on a video, it has more or less the same effect. And I guess, you know, that could be why, you know, if you watch a really good film that really moves you and connects you and you feel like crying or you feel like you've really connected with it. I don't know if that's been studied, but I wouldn't be...

It has actually. Has it? There was a clip of Oprah Winfrey during the time of the Oprah show and she was really changing people's lives. And it was something to do with a school teacher in a class and what people watching it were moved to tears and felt so uplifted and it produced high levels

of what I call the kindness hormone, oxytocin. It's also called the bonding hormone, the cuddle chemical, but it produced high levels of that simply by feeling moved and inspired by watching like a five minute clip from what used to be the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah. I mean, it's really incredible the sort of things you're talking about, human touch, connection, all these kind of, I guess what we

would call the softer components of health. You're saying alongside physical exercise, physical activity is the most important thing for your cardiovascular health. I don't think many people would be familiar with that as an idea. Yeah, just warmth and connection because they produce oxytocin. So you can create that sense through generosity and kindness, compassion, empathy, anything that generates that sense of warmth and connection, we know produces oxytocin but what's interesting is all the research showing the physiological effects of i call it the kindness hormone really to distinguish between stress hormones because physiologically in many ways

kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel i mean if you ask anyone what's the opposite of stress most people say oh it's peace or it's calm but that's not technically the opposite of stress that's the absence of stress? Most people say, oh, it's peace or it's calm. But that's not technically the opposite of stress. That's the absence of stress. Physiologically speaking, if you look at the physical effects of stress and you look at the physical effects of the feeling that you get through kindness, which is warmth and connection, then they're physiologically opposite. Even psychologically, there's some studies showing that, you know,

emotionally we get the opposite effects. Because many of the physical effects of stress are not because of a situation but because of how you feel when you're in that situation because two people could be stuck in traffic and one person's feeling stressed and they're producing adrenaline and cortisol the other person's feeling relaxed they're not producing much at all so it's not necessarily the traffic it's how you feel so the feelings of stress generate stress hormones, but when you be kind and those feelings you get of warmth and connection, they generate oxytocin. I call this, I call it a kindness hormone to make that distinction that

it's a physical, it's a hormone that gets produced because of how you're feeling in that moment, which you initiate through empathy, compassion, touch, emotional warmth, any of these soft behaviors. And understanding this explains a large body of research that we knew the trend in the past, but we didn't know why it worked that way. For example, why people with better quality of relationships have better cardiovascular systems, why things like hostility and aggression is correlated with higher levels of hardening of the arteries we didn't know why that is but now the evidence seems to suggest that you know aggression and hostility for example reduce

levels of the kinase hormone oxytocin and therefore we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin is now called a cardio protective hormone, meaning it protects the cardiovascular system. One of the ways it does it is to reduce blood pressure. So I love explaining it in that sense that it's physically the opposite of stress because of how it makes you feel. So you can feel that way through being the giver, being the receiver or being the person who's watching a nice moment taking place yeah david my mind is blown this is um yeah this is so fascinating you know i i often suggest to people that make kindness a practice practice thinking kind thoughts about people you know if you find yourself about to say something about someone stop for a minute

and even just make an attempt. You know, I'm not going to do it all the time, but some of the times make an attempt to think, I wonder if that person's struggling in their life right now. I know I'm talking about their behavior yesterday, but I wonder if they're struggling right now. You never know.

I wonder if that man or woman is a good parent. I wonder what their relationship was with their parents and just change the dialogue. And what that does, it introduces empathy and introduces a different way of thinking. And not always successful, but oftentimes it will make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person i think if we develop little practices then kindness becomes a habit so that it's the go-to it's the first thought is the compassionate thought the kind thought and then the way that which you speak to people the way in which you interact with people becomes gent more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit and that i think becomes your way and i'm speaking from experience here because i i have completely changed as a person during the time that I've been really working on the mind-body connection,

but particularly when I've been focused on kindness. I wasn't meaning as a horrible person, but relative, I have made large gains, I guess, in the quality of person that I've become. And I've become gentler, more compassionate more compassionate more kind I cry a lot more I don't know if that's related to it but I'm much softer than I was maybe 10 years ago and it's a consequence of my awareness of what kindness and compassion is and what it does for us. By the age of 18 John McAvoy was one of the UK's most notorious armed robbers, and he spent 10 years in maximum security prisons. During that time, he transformed his life, and he's now a man

on a mission to make amends. Coming up is a clip from episode 91, when we spoke about the role that we can all play in society to ensure the health and happiness of our communities. But first, we'll hear again from Pippa Grange, as she explains the concept of One Health. One of the things I'm loving at the moment that I'm reading about is One Health. So the idea of, you know, instead of health being a phenomena within your body, within the package of you as one human being, it is an intersection between you, animal species and the planet, you know, which we're kind of seeing right now with COVID, right? So I think it's a much more humble, but much more rational actually position to step back and say,

well, of course my health can't be just within my own body it's ours it's an us thing including the planet and other species so you know that gets categorized as woo-woo that gets into the alternate and i think well that's just because we haven't evolved our thinking enough yet this this zeitgeist we're in was alternate at one point yeah i mean pepper i'm i'm sure that this is why i feel it's funny like i'll share this i feel a real deep connection to you even though i never met you until about an hour ago because as i read that book there was so much in it that made me feel something deeply and what you just said about one health now i haven't thought about it in the term of One Health, but something I've been

sitting with for a few months is this idea that health has been a very individualistic pursuit, like many things in society. And can we truly be, you know, in inverted commas, healthy, truly be, you know, in inverted commas, healthy if the planet around us is sick or the people in our community are struggling? We're not separate, but culturally we see ourselves as separate. Health-wise, we see ourselves as separate. We have to move away from I to we. We have to move away from single ideas to multiple possibilities. And I think that's just where we're right at the cusp of now. And for me, some of the reasons we don't step into that curiosity or creativity of fear. Yeah. I was genuinely surprised by the further along the journey I've gone since I've been released from prison, the social difference in this country is,

and how so few have so much and so many have so little, to the degree where children, a headmaster once phoned me up when it was snowing. I remember when I was at school, snow day, I was loving it. Didn't have school. I didn't have school. You'd be at school for three or four days. I was loving it.

And headmaster phoned me up in Essex and I developed a really close relationship with him. And he said, we've had to close the school. And I said, I bet the kids love it. And he said, he said, John, he said, I feel so bad because I know today for the next two or three days probably that probably about 70% of my school

will not eat a meal for breakfast or lunch because they're solely reliant on the school providing those meals because the kids aren't eating when they're home because they haven't they haven't the mum's dad's haven't got the money or they haven't got the food to eat I mean this sort of inequality is it's staggering and it's not something we I typically talk a lot about on this podcast but i think it's an important topic and as i try and talk to more and more varied people about different things about you know it's all ultimately how to live better how we can all live better lives and i think we live better lives not only when we feel better individually but when society

is happier and healthier around us it's very hard to be happy when yes you're individually doing well but people around you are struggling yes but we are all on the same rock you're all on this earth at the same moment in time in history like we're all here together and we're all going to end up in the same six foot hole at the end of it so again my belief is the fact we should work together and we should help other people and that's what life should be about. It shouldn't be about profit constantly, like selling you stuff constantly. It should be about working together and helping you, helping your fellow man. Because like you said, society, community becomes so much better

by living that sort of existence. And finally, to conclude this week's special compilation episode, we'll hear some powerful closing thoughts from Dr. Julian Abel. Somewhere along the line, this capitalist society where we've been encouraged to buy more, get more things, get more stuff, you know, get these houses, insulate ourselves off from people around us, we've kind of lost it somewhere, haven't we? That actually, it's who we are as humans. I think that's right, that we have been led to believe that acquisition is the way of happiness, that if we have beauty, if we have lots of goods, that's how we're going to become happy. In my work as a palliative care physician, you know, I talked to literally thousands of

people about dying and about what was important in their lives. And often through the course of the illness, people felt a diminished sense of self because they couldn't do the things that they recognized as being important to them. But with the people around them, they appreciated the people around them for their love and their care and their friendship. And so we tend to have this kind of dual standard of thinking about acquisition as being meaningful for ourselves, but we appreciate the people around us for the quality of the character they have. It sounds like you're saying that we judge other people differently from the way we judge ourselves. Precisely. I mean, it was a conversation I had with nearly

every one of my patients. I would say, look, have a think about the people who you really appreciate the most and why you appreciate them. And people would say it's about their love, about their kindness. And I would say, has the love and the kindness diminished in you even though you're not able to do the things that you usually do? And of course, the love and the kindness is still there. And I would say we don't need to be terminally ill to appreciate that. That's something that we can do now in our lives. If you like the people around you for the qualities of their character, it's kind of at the heart of it all is in like well you can you can develop those qualities

yourself you don't have to become a saint you can just do a little bit and become a slightly kinder a more compassionate person the people who used to impress me the most were the people who came to the end of their lives and and they weren't great businessmen or didn't have massive achievement, but they approached death with a sense of peace. And when I asked them about that, they said, well, I've had a good life. I've had good people around me. I've had great children. I love my husband and my wife, and I feel satisfied with the way that life went. And to be so open and face death in this peaceful way, to me, was really inspirational and impressive. And then I remember one gentleman who I treated who was a great international business leader. And he was talking about this subject and his wife was are and why he loved his wife and all of that. And then his wife popped up and said, people loved you for who you are, not because you were a great business leader.

And she encapsulated that so perfectly, just the way that she said it. And of course, he understood about the powerful impact of the kindness and quite a lot of the physical and emotional suffering that he had got better quite quickly. And he was able to die peacefully with that. quite quickly. And he was able to die peacefully with that. And I think that it absolutely gives you a sense of what's important in life and what's not quite so important. Yeah. I think many of us, myself included, need that reminder about what truly is important. I think we get so caught up in small things, don't we? Actually, when it's all said and done, it comes down to connection and relationships. That's what we value the most. Really hope you enjoyed today's special compilation

episode. Of course, all the clips you heard were from previous conversations on my podcast. So do consider going back to the original episodes if you want to hear more from some of your favorite guests. And as always, what is the one thing you can take away and apply into your own life? Not only that, what is the one thing from this compilation episode that you can teach to somebody else? Remember when you teach someone else and not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness.

In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something

you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. And at this time of year, if you are looking for gifts for your friends, your family, your work colleagues, might I suggest you check out some of my own books. I have written five books over the past few years that have been bestsellers of my own books? I have written five books over the past few years that have been bestsellers all over the world. I've written about all kinds of topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change, movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you

can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.