Something You Should Know - Proven Ways to Extend Your Life & Here’s The Cure for Loneliness

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

People need physical touch and too many of us are not getting enough of it. The result is something called “touch starvation.” This episode begins by explaining what happens when people are deprived of skin-to-skin contact, why it is so prevalent and what we need to do about it. https://www.webmd.com/balance/touch-starvation Have you ever wondered how long you will live? Other than “living sensibly,” are there really things you can do that will prolong your lifespan significantly? Biologist and science writer Andrew Steele has been on a journey to uncover the very latest science on human longevity and the techniques that can help anyone live longer. Andrew is author of the book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (https://amzn.to/3pAtIxx) Listen as he explains what you can do now and research currently underway that may result in treatments in our lifetime so we can all live even longer. Loneliness is a horrible feeling – especially around the holidays. Yet so many people report being more isolated and lonelier than ever before. Chronic loneliness is not only unpleasant, it is also bad for your health. Here with some good news about loneliness and ways to banish it from your life is psychiatrist Dr. Edward Hallowell. He is a leading expert on the topic of loneliness and has an important message everyone needs to hear. Dr. Hallowell is author of the book Connect (https://amzn.to/3GxgwQw). If you have ever felt the pain of loneliness, you will want to hear what he has to say. When was the last time you checked your tires? Now that colder weather is here, you need to. Listen as I reveal how the outside temperature affects your tires and how you drive. https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/ideal-tire-pressure-cold-weather/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rank on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Today on Something You Should Know, are you getting touched enough?

I'll tell you why it's so important. Then, a lot of things can accelerate aging, and there are so many simple ways to fight back. I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. What we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia.

Also, why you need to check your tires now that the weather has turned colder. And loneliness, especially during the holidays, can be so hard to deal with. And it's bad for your health. In fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease, loneliness. And most people don't realize social isolation is as dangerous for early death as cigarette smoke. All this today on Something You Should Know.

It's winter and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats, but meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No, but moose head? Yes, Because that's alcohol, and we deliver that too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. And happy Thanksgiving if you're listening to this on the day this episode publishes, which is Thanksgiving Day 2024. But then again, that's the thing about podcasts. If

you're listening to this in the middle of the summer, well, that doesn't make any sense. So forget I said Happy Thanksgiving. We start today with touching. You know, I have this sense that people don't touch as much as they used to. Probably COVID had a lot to do with that. And maybe from that, this overall concern we have about germs and the spread of illness but it does seem that people don't hug or shake hands as much as they used to which can lead actually to something called touch starvation. It's a condition that happens when you don't get as much physical contact as you're used to, or you don't

get any at all. Human touch is a huge part of how humans interact with others. We shake hands, we high-five, we hug, we bond through physical touch. Your skin is the largest organ in the body, and it sends good and bad touch sensations to your brain. When you engage in pleasant touch like a hug, your brain releases a hormone called oxytocin. This makes you feel good and it firms up emotional and social bonds while lowering anxiety and fear.

So for all these reasons, and probably a lot more, we need to find more ways to touch again. And that is something you should know. I bet there have been times when you have been alone with your thoughts and you have wondered to yourself, I wonder how long I'll live. This happens often, I think, when someone close to you dies, especially a family member. I know some people believe that, hey, when your number's up, your number's up. And I guess to some extent that's true. But since as the saying goes, all we really have is time, what can we do to prolong our time and

live a happy and healthy life in the process? Well, as it turns out, there is a lot of really interesting research going on that I really think you want to hear about because it goes way beyond the, you know, exercise, eat right, see your doctor, and that's about the best you can do. Andrew Steele is a biologist. He is a science writer. He has his PhD in physics from Oxford, and he is author of a book called Ageless, in which he looks into the latest cutting-edge research on longevity.

And he has found some really interesting stuff that could actually affect how long you live, because this new research could lead to treatments in our lifetime to extend our lifetime, which is pretty cool. Hey, Andrew, welcome. Hello, which is pretty cool. Hey, Andrew, welcome. Hello, thanks for having me. So define what you mean by aging. And first of all, I've always had trouble with that term

because it implies that you can stop time almost and that people get old. I mean, that's what people do. My car gets old, the trees get old, everything gets old. So what are we talking about in your view when we talk about aging? I mean that's exactly right and I think one of the big challenges that I've overcome is to explode people's conventional wisdom about what aging is. But what I mean by aging

as a biologist, actually the simplest definition isn't a biological definition at all, it's a statistical one. And it's simply how fast your risk of death increases with time. As a human, our rate of ageing as a species is that our risk of death doubles about every 8 years. So let's try and put that into some kind of context. I'm 36 and that means my odds of death this year are about 1 in a thousand. And actually, you know, I quite like those odds. If that were to continue for the rest of my life, I'd live into my thousand and thirties on average. But of course that isn't what happens. My risk of death will carry on doubling every eight years. And so that means if there are no advances in medical science between now and me, you know, fingers crossed, making it into my nineties,

my odds of death by then will be one in six per year. Life and death at the roll of a dice. And so, you know, as a biologist, you look at this and think there's this exponentially increasing risk of death with time. That is the problem that we call aging. I was surprised when you said that your chance of death at age 36 is one in a thousand. That actually seems high to me. So one out of every thousand 36 year olds will die this year? Yeah, I guess you got to look at that as 0.1 percent and actually most of that when you know when you're my age is still down to external things that we call them extrinsic forms of mortality biologically. So that's things like car accidents and unfortunately suicide is a really big cause of death for men at

my age as well. So it's not generally the sort of cancers and the heart disease and that sort of stuff that you associate with older age, it's the external causes of death. And then obviously as you get older, the risk of diseases increases and starts to swamp those external causes. And as you get older as you say your your risk of death goes up exponentially but at the end of the day I mean everything gets older my car gets older you know the trees outside get older and eventually my car breaks down one day the trees will die, one day I will die, everything gets older and goes away. Well this is the fascinating thing because obviously that happens to cars, it happens to machines, it happens to our pets, it happens to our farm animals,

you know you can easily imagine that aging is a universal process but actually this just isn't the case because we've got a huge advantage as biological organisms. We can repair ourselves. If we didn't have these incredibly intricate mechanisms of repair that are buzzing away inside of our cells every single hour of every single day all the time, correcting mistakes, disposing of rubbish, that kind of thing, we would die an awful lot sooner than we actually do. And in fact there are some animals that have got so good at repairing themselves that their risk of death doesn't change with time. That's a phenomenon that in biology we call negligible senescence. So negligible just meaning, you

know, not much, and senescence is just the biological term for growing old. So the reason there's a tortoise on the cover of my book is because that is a negligibly senescent animal. It's an animal whose risk of death stays constant when it becomes an adult, and that means that they can live an incredibly long time. But most importantly, it's not just their risk of death that stays constant. They also don't have any increase in frailty as they get older. They stay reproductively active no matter how old they are. That means that they grow older, but without growing old in the way that we humans do. And so I hope that by understanding the biology of aging, we can try and transfer some of that wisdom and some of those sort of biological techniques to keep us sprightly into our old age too. And the goal is what? Because one day your day will come.

I mean you can't put off death forever so is the goal just to put it off as long as possible, put it off as long as possible and be healthy? What is it that we're trying to accomplish with all of this? The goal is definitely health. And I think that you've got to think about what actually kills you. Although decades ago, it was permissible for doctors to write death by old age on an older person's death certificate.

Now we understand that you can't just die of old age. You die of heart disease. You die of cancer. You die of dementia. One of these diseases that are much more likely as you get older, and these diseases too get exponentially more likely as you increase in age, that's something that eventually becomes severe enough to take your life. And so, you know, it's very much the pain, the suffering, all of these things together that we want to try and get rid of. And actually, it's a really good way of thinking about

it is to think about a lot of modern medicine seeks to treat individual diseases. But even if we had, hypothetically, a complete success treating an individual disease, and let's take the example, imagine that we cured cancer tomorrow, that would only add about three years to human life expectancy. And that's because, if you avoid getting cancer, you've probably already got a bit of heart disease or diabetes or dementia waiting in the wings to kill you as you get older, and so that means that it doesn't make you healthier for much longer. Whereas by treating the aging process, the thing that causes all of these diseases, we can potentially defer those diseases,

maybe even prevent them entirely and create a lot more healthy years for people. And isn't the prescription for doing that just lead what we've been taught is a healthy lifestyle to eat well, sleep well, isn't that the prescription? These are all good ideas and they're definitely something that I would encourage people to do, but the fact is we can go beyond this with medicine. And I think the best way to explain this is with an example.

One of the biological processes behind ageing is the accumulation of aged senescent cells, and they build up in our bodies as we get older, and we know that they're responsible for a whole range of age-related diseases. And we've also got drugs that can kill those senescent cells while leaving the rest of the cells in the body intact. So we've done experiments using these drugs on mice, and we wait till the mice get to about 24 months old. Now mice obviously have a much shorter lifespan than humans, so that's something equivalent to about 70 in human years. So that means we give these old mice the drugs, it clears out those aged cells, and what we find is that the mice basically get biologically younger.

They live a bit longer, which is a good thing, but they're not just sort of stumbling along in ill health, unable to muster the energy even to die. They're healthier, they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. They're less frail, so they can run further and faster on the little mousy treadmills that they use in these experiments. They're more curious, so if you put a young mouse in a maze, it's often very exploratory. It wants to sort of look around its new environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious, maybe just a bit lazier because it's a bit more frail. And by giving mice these senolytic drugs that kill senescent cells, you restore some of that youthful curiosity.

And finally, these animals, they just look great. You know, I was a computational biologist, so I never dealt with mice in the lab. And if you look at a picture of one of these mice that's had these drugs, they've got better fur, they've got thicker, plumper skin, they just look fantastic. And so the point is, you know, you can't diet and exercise and live a good life to a healthy, guaranteed healthy hundred years old.

Whereas by using some of these drugs that could potentially slow down, maybe even reverse the aging process, we can allow ourselves to live longer and healthier than any current lifestyle intervention would allow. And so that would mean what to me? What would I be doing? Where do I go get these drugs? Well we're going to have to wait for some of the clinical trials to happen, so I'm very

excited that these things are going to be here in time for all of us, because they're already in human clinical trials. But at the moment, you know, mostly we're looking at results in mice and we've got the first tentative results starting to come out in humans. So hopefully in the next five or so years we're going to have some of those answers. Do these drugs work in humans as well as they do in mice? And we can start thinking about taking them. What is the connection between how you look, how young you look, how healthy you look, and how you age internally? Is there any

connection or are those those two separate topics? It actually is, yeah. There's a fascinating study that was done a few years ago where people were asked to rate the photographs of other people to guess how old they thought they were. And what they found was that people who looked older tended to have a greater risk of dying in the near future and a greater risk of contracting certain diseases. And actually what this really tells us is that there is a sort of fundamental collection of underlying processes that are responsible not just for your internal aging, but for your external aging as well. And so someone who is wrinkly or someone whose hair is a bit greyer, they probably have older insides. The same processes are giving them

an increased risk of cancer, an increased risk of heart disease. And so actually, although I very much hope we don't initially go after these cosmetic things, they're obviously less important. One researcher I spoke to said, you know, I'd far rather have improved, you know, strength and resilience in my arteries than in my skin. So, you know, they're not so worried about wrinkly skin, but wrinkly arteries effectively. I actually think we're going to solve quite a few of these cosmetic problems almost by accident, because we'll go after the causes of these particular diseases. And then what will happen is those same processes are responsible for the wrinkles, the gray hair, that all the external stuff. And so we might find that those things improve

at the same time. What do we know about the things that people do in their life that are the worst? That, you know, whether it's drinking or stress or what are the things that are killing us slowly? The absolute top of my list, and this isn't gonna come as a surprise to anybody listening, is smoking. It's so, so bad for your health. But what you actually find when you dig into health advice

is something that's really, really encouraged me actually to make sure I am doing every single thing I possibly can to be that little bit healthier. And that's because all these different things that were advised about trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, most of them actually slow down the aging process itself. And I think a really good example of this is exercise, because you know when you're sweating away, you know, on a run or something, it's really obvious. Your lungs are going, you can feel your heart beating in your chest, you know, your muscles

are obviously doing an awful lot of exercise. You can see how that exercise is benefiting your muscles, it's strengthening them, it's benefiting your cardiovascular system. But actually, this process seems to slow down the aging process as a whole, so it's not just the heart disease that you're deferring by doing exercise, it also defers quite a lot of kinds of cancer. There's even quite good evidence that can reduce the risk of getting dementia, you know, neurodegeneration and you know you just wouldn't necessarily think that working out on the treadmill or going for a bike ride or lifting weights is going to improve your cognitive health as

you get older. But because these processes are also interconnected, you know, it just means that doing all of these bits of health advice can improve your health in so, so many different ways, not just the obvious ones. We're talking about longevity, what we can all do to live longer and healthier. And my guest is Andrew Steele, author of the book Ageless. And my guest is Andrew Steele, author of the book, Ageless. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money.

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So Andrew, besides smoking being the obvious bad thing for your longevity and exercise being good for your longevity, what else is there? So some of the things are surprisingly obvious, making sure you don't eat too much smoking, exercise, that kind of thing, not drinking too much, getting enough sleep. But actually the other thing that can happen is that by understanding the aging biology, you can uncover some slightly less conventional bits of health advice that are nonetheless really important. I think my favourite of these is to brush your teeth. So we've begun

to understand that a lot of the aging process is driven by a process called chronic inflammation. So let's unpack what that means. Inflammation is the process by which your immune system goes and fights off various threats. So it can fight off an infection or it could rush to the site of an injury to try and start the healing process. And when you're youthful, that process is often acute, i.e. it turns on very rapidly when it's needed and it turns off again once the immune system has done its job. But as we get older, this process can become sort of chronic. It can just be turned on a little tiny bit all the time, kind of a paranoia in your immune system.

What's going on if you have poor oral health? Well, you've got bacteria in your mouth, they're infecting your gums, they might be decaying your teeth, and the reason that the dentist has such a sort of comparatively primitive set of tools, they can yank out teeth, they can drill holes in them, is because your immune system never quite wins this battle. So there's this constant process of inflammation going on in your mouth. And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia. So again, it just seems like the whole body is this incredibly interconnected

thing and keeping one part of it healthy can have huge effects on the Whole aging process of every single part of it I think people believe and probably because we see evidence of it that there is a bit of dice rolling in all of this that You know people Get cancer very early for no apparent reason or then there are other people who lead a rather unhealthy life and live to 105 and that perhaps genetics plays a big part in this. And actually the genetic contribution to longevity is surprisingly small for people who live a normal length of time. So if your parents live to 70 or 80 you really shouldn't see that as a ceiling on your own lifespan. We think that genetics only

contributes maybe somewhere between five and twenty percent of how long you can go on to live. But the one exception to this is the people who do live in exceptionally long time, so people who make it into their hundreds, centenarians. There seems to be a huge genetic component to this. In fact, if your parents are centenarians, or if you have a centenarian parent, or if you have a sibling who makes it into their hundreds, you've got a ten times greater chance of doing so yourself. And it really seems that the way in which these centenarians make it to these advanced ages is they've just got protection from age-related disease. They really do just age slower than the rest of us. So if you look at studies of centenarians, they don't tend to be much healthier than the general population. They're still a little

bit overweight, they often smoke, they often drink just as much as regular people do. But the fact is that they've got the genetics that keeps them effectively impervious to these bad lifestyle habits and allows them to live long enough anyway so for most of us the best advice is to carry on with this stuff because unfortunately we haven't got those you know centenarian genes that are going to allow us to power through anyway there is a ceiling though as i've understood it when i've read about this is you know people are getting older on average, but the oldest of the oldest don't get a lot older. It's a really fascinating subject. And so the record for longevity is 122 years held

by a French woman called Jeanne Calment. And she set that record in 1997, I think, which is really quite incredible. I think the fact is that people who make it to these exceptionally old ages, they're just so rare that it's very very hard for that record to be pushed back and back. But also I think you are right that you know with the current state of, no matter how well you live, no matter what medical care you have access to, it's very very unlikely with the current state of medicine that you're going to be able to live longer than that. The only way that you can stop your body falling apart on that schedule is to intervene in the aging process itself. Because as I sort of alluded to earlier, you know, say you're 110 and you get cancer and we cure that cancer, there are still loads of other things wrong with your body that are going to probably take you out in the next few years. Whereas if we could actually slow down aging, that would mean you could make it to 110 in

a much healthier state and that would completely change the game in terms of the limit on human longevity. But no matter how hard you try, I mean, the parts of the human body can't last forever. Eventually they're just going to wear out. I mean, I think the best counter to that is just to look at these negligibly senescent animals. I already mentioned tortoises have this property, but it's not just tortoises. There are actually loads of animals out there. So there are various kinds of fish are negligibly senescent.

There's a salamander. There's a tiny little water creature called a hydra. There's a bit closer to us on the evolutionary tree, something called a naked mole rat, which is a rodent, a bit like a rat or a mouse, but whereas mice live maybe two or three years in the lab, naked mole rats live to 30. They seem to be almost immune to cancer, they're almost immune to neurodegeneration, but most importantly their risk of death is basically constant throughout their adult lives and then they suddenly basically fall off a cliff when they get ill toward the very end of their lives. And so this isn't a biological impossibility. The fact is that we aren't cars. We've got these incredible self-repairing capacities inside ourselves and if we can just learn

how to augment those with medicine there's no reason why we couldn't keep ourselves going healthier for longer. But do you think that there's a lot of dice rolling going on here and that, well, you know, the saying when your numbers up your numbers up and that so that people kind of throw caution to the wind and say, I'm just going to live my life because, you know, I could go to the gym. But then, you know, how many years am I spending at the gym to add, you know, how many years to my life and that so what I guess what I'm wondering is Are people doing themselves a disservice by believing in this when your numbers up your numbers up? I think there is like a frustrating degree of randomness to this because the fact is that you know in order to get cancer You have to get something like an average of 10 mutations and those mutations have to be in one particular cell So say you've got nine mutations in one of your cells right now

then you know it could just basically be luck whether you get that tenth one and whether that becomes a cancer. And then whether that cancer is spotted by your immune system is partly down to luck. And whether that cancer then goes on to accumulate further mutations that allow it to spread throughout the body and cause serious disease that might go on to kill you. Again all of these things are, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle but at the end of the day some people do die of cancer in their 30s. The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle, but at the end of the day, some people do die of cancer in their 30s. The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, it's like we were discussing earlier, the odds of death for someone in their

30s are about one in a thousand a year, which is incredibly low. So if we can just get a little bit closer to that, then people could live much longer, healthier lives. And the reason that I'm particularly excited about trying to follow all this lifestyle advice now is because it means that if I can live a little bit longer, that gives scientists longer to perfect some of these treatments. And then by living longer with those treatments, that gives scientists longer still. So, say for example, I can keep myself good and healthy into my 60s, 70s, 80s. I'll be healthy enough to benefit from that first generation of senolytic drugs that can remove those aged cells and increase my lifespan. I'll be able to benefit from other new treatments that are developed

over the next few decades and if that gives me more years of healthy life still I can develop, sorry, I can benefit from whatever treatments are developed after that as well. So I think we're just living at this pivotal time where the longer you live the more medical technology is going to be available. So I think yeah to sort of neglect your own health at a time like this is doing yourself a huge disservice. Anything else about the way we're living or the things we're doing, anything else that really affects our longevity

that maybe people don't realize? I think something that's been illustrated perhaps a bit more to us over the last year, but still hasn't necessarily entered the consciousness is the importance of the prevention of infectious disease. And there's actually some quite good evidence that children who grew up in environments of lower infection, and obviously this really started to transform

in the first part of the 20th century with vaccines and antibiotics and improvements in hygiene, kids started to be able to grow up without this huge spectrum of childhood diseases. And what they found is that by looking back at this, they seem to age better as well. So it seems as though having less of that inflammation caused by disease throughout your life can improve your health in the longer term. And we also know there are certain cancers that are specifically caused by particular viruses, particular bacteria. So I think avoiding infectious disease, quite apart from avoiding the immediate misery of being ill, is a really good thing to do to try and extend your lifespan overall.

One of the complaints people have about this whole idea of longevity and increasing is you get the extra years, but you get them in your 90s and in your hundreds. It would have been so much better to get them in my 30s or my 20s when I was young and could enjoy them more. And that's exactly what really excites me about this actual anti-aging medicine, a real anti-aging medicine, because the fact is that if we did cure cancer, unfortunately, we tend to treat these diseases in silos. So you find a lump, you might go to your general practitioner, your general practitioner refers you to an oncologist, that oncologist will give you

chemotherapy, maybe operate on your tumour, etc. etc. All of this is really focused on getting rid of that cancer, that single problem. But actually, you might have a host of other problems by the age that you're traditionally diagnosed with cancer. You might have diabetes, you might have a heart condition that's sort of nascent and not necessarily quite as advanced as the cancer, yet you've got all these other problems brewing. But the point is that by treating the ageing process, because we know that it's your risk of disease goes up exponentially with age, if we can sort of flatten that curve, we can reduce that exponential increase of disease, that can hit all of those diseases at the same time. It can reduce our

risk of cancer, reduce our risk of heart disease, reduce our risk of dementia. And it's also really important to say that it's not just the diseases, it's the frailties, the cognitive decline, it's the incontinence, all of these things aren't necessarily going to actually take your life but dramatically reduce the quality of it. All of these things are caused by the same biological processes. And so by intervening in these biological processes, we effectively will give you extra years, you know, perhaps not in your 30s, depending on when you start taking the drugs. But if we can stretch out your 60s, so they last 15 years in comparatively good health, then that's going to be a massive improvement over the situation we have today.

Yeah, well, but then the situation we have today is a whole lot better than it was 100 to 300 years ago. We're living longer and living healthier. So it just keeps getting better. Andrew Steele has been my guest and the name of his book is Ageless, the new science of getting older without getting old. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you very much. Cheers. This episode is brought to you by Miller Lite. Miller Lite is all about celebrating friendships, Thank you very much. Cheers. where you can get their face on a billboard. Yep, a real billboard. Just go to LastPlacements.com to find out how. Miller Lite. Tastes like Miller time. This NFL season, get in on all the hard hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything

from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling Palm, call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Loneliness is a feeling I suspect everyone has felt, and everyone knows it doesn't feel very good.

Feeling lonely around the holidays is perhaps the worst. And since this episode is publishing on Thanksgiving, I figured it would be a good time to tackle the topic of loneliness, and most importantly, things we can all do to get rid of that feeling and keep it away. There is no one better to discuss the topic of loneliness than Dr. Edward Halliwell. Ned is a psychiatrist who wrote a great book some years ago called Connect, in which he really explored the topic of loneliness and the need for connection. He also has written several other books about distraction and ADHD. His latest is a bestseller called ADHD 2.0. Hey Ned, thanks for being here.

Hello, Mike. Nice to be with you. So what is loneliness? How do you define it? How do you look at it? Lonely is a lot different from being alone. You can be alone and not lonely. You can be alone and reading a book, listening to music, entertaining your fantasies and favorite hopes for the future, and you're not lonely. But you can also be lonely and

that's the active presence of absence. It's like you're feeling what isn't there. It's a terrible feeling. You're feeling that here I am alone, no one's with me, no one likes me, no one cares about me, or so-and-so died, or I miss my dog, or I wish I were back home. You feel what you're missing. I love that definition, that you're feeling what isn't there. Because as soon as you said that, I could feel it. I mean, that's exactly what it is. It's that absence of something that you want, or need,

or miss, or something. And it's a terrible feeling. You know, it is really bad for you. You know, in fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease, loneliness. And most people don't realize how bad it is for you. In fact, social isolation is as dangerous

for early death as cigarette smoking. Most people have no idea about that. If you ask them to list risk factors, they'll say cigarette smoking, obesity, genetics, don't wear your seatbelt. Nobody puts down loneliness, but my gosh, it's right near the top of the list. And if people would make it a priority to connect,

I call it the other vitamin C, vitamin connect. It is the most powerful force that most people don't make use of. I urge people, you know, if you go to the supermarket, talk to the guy at the checkout counter. He needs it or she needs it as much as you do. So help me understand why, what it is about loneliness that makes it so dangerous? Is it the loneliness itself or when you are lonely, you tend to do bad things like drink more, smoke more, eat more, or is there something inherent about loneliness that is harmful?

Well, all of the above. When you're feeling lonely, your immune system suffers and you are putting out stress hormones that are caustic. And then what you also said, you're inclined to try to fill in the emptiness with things like online gambling or drinking or drug use or dangerous liaisons or dangerous business deals, reckless going online, connecting in chat rooms where you don't know who you're talking to. And it's really just about people trying to find meaningful ways of connecting. And I can't tell you how many patients I've prescribed a dog for. I mean,

dogs are the world's greatest. I dedicated my last book to dogs. I said it's no accident that God spelled backwards as dog, you know. It's dogs are the world's best connectors. And, you know, so if you have a dog, chances are you're not going to feel lonely or nearly as lonely. Yeah. And anybody who's ever had a dog knows that that relationship is very fulfilling, but it's still a human dog relationship. It isn't the same as connecting with people. And in fact, I tell people, young people, what is the purpose of growing up? What is the goal of growing up? And the answers I get are like, get into the best school you

can get into, lay the foundation for making a good living. And I say, no, no, the purpose, what you want to do while you're growing up is fall in love. You want to fall in love with a person, that's fine. But with a subject, an idea, an activity, an aunt, the great entomologist E.O. Wilson, who just died, fell in love with ants in a parking lot in Alabama because he was a lonely kid.

So he went out to the field next door and started studying ants and became one of the great entomologists, professor at Harvard, author of many books. But it was born out of his feeling lonely as a kid in Alabama and he found his companionship in ants. But what is the reason, do you think, that people have such trouble connecting with people? Because there's a lot of people. There's billions of them.

So you would think that connecting with people would be easier than it apparently is. Why do some people find themselves lonely? The reason people stick with loneliness is they're afraid. They're afraid of being rejected. They're afraid of being sued. They're afraid of saying the wrong thing. You know, in this age of PC, everyone's afraid to say the wrong thing.

They're afraid of looking stupid. And so they hold back. They hold back on life out of fear and they create their own little bubble, their own little prison, which is toxic. And so you said a few moments ago that you need to connect and that one thing you could do is talk to the cashier at the store or wave to the person next to you.

That's not really a connection. That's just a kind of a polite hi, how are you? See you later. So how does that help? Well, it actually is a connection. You'll get a little drip of dopamine when you do that. You'll get a little affirmation. You can wave to a stranger all clear across the parking lot.

If it's a snowy day or something, you say, snowy day and he waves back. It takes a half a second. That is a connection. It's not a lifelong connection. You'll never see the person again, but don't take it lightly. Small talk is very big talk. Small talk is the route into deeper relationships for sure, but it all begins with small talk. You know, the strong, silent man is a lonely man on his way to a heart attack. You know, it's not a good recipe. So make the little chit chat, make the don't take it lightly.

It's very, very, very important. I remember hearing, and maybe it was from you when we've talked in the past, that that intense pain that loneliness causes is evolutionary. That we're not meant to be that way. We can't survive if we're not meant to be that way. We can't survive if we're all alone. And that that's a motivation, a push

to get rid of that feeling. And the only way to get rid of it is to go connect with people. It is so true. It's wired into us. It's wired into our endocrine system. Even any of you listeners who've had children, the moment you give birth, either through, you know, the normal way or through adoption, the moment you become a parent for the

first time, nature sees to it that you enter into a permanent state of psychosis. Your whole body changes, your brain changes, you fall madly, insanely crazy in love with this little peeing and pooping machine whom you don't even know. And yet you've almost instantly become not only willing but eager to give away your time, your money, your sleep, your dignity, and you know, you gotta be crazy to do it. And you say, this is so much fun, let's do it again.

You know, this episode is publishing on Thanksgiving Day 2024 and holidays, especially the winter holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the holiday season, can somehow make loneliness even more acute because you're remembering maybe people who have died or people who have left your life. And if you don't have replacements for that, something to, yeah, replacements for that, it can be really hard this time of year. My advice to you is maybe take that holiday as a chance to developing some kind of connection

that can become meaningful. Maybe it's a time to get a dog, or maybe it's a time to go back to church or synagogue, or maybe it's a time to take up some hobby that you've wanted to take up, even something as simple as crocheting or cooking, or starting a little garden inside your house. There are things you can take up

that will serve as points of connection. And then you can find other people who are interested in that, you know, and, you know, one of my favorite lines, I use it all the time, it really, it's a line to live by, never worry alone. So when you're feeling upset, worried, concerned, reach out somehow. It doesn't have to be in person. It doesn't have to be, you know, against your grain, but don't worry alone. That's

when bad things happen. That's when you do self-destructive stuff. That's when you feel intense despair. That's when people commit suicide, you know, when you're worrying alone. So, never worry alone is a really good watchword. And another thing you can do is when you're feeling these bleak black moments where you're sort of ruminating, we know from brain science, there's a certain network in the brain that takes over. It's called the default mode network, the DMN, which I call the demon. What you want to do is don't feed the demon. And what do you feed it with? Your attention. Well, do something else. Fry an egg, dig a hole, do a crossword, do something else. Shut off the DMN's oxygen supply, which is your attention. And by the way, the reason that we feed it is contentment is too bland. And by the way, the reason that we feed it is contentment is too bland.

You don't say he or she was riveted in contentment, but you do say he or she was riveted in despair, loneliness, misery, foreboding. It's riveting. And that's why you keep feeding it with your attention. You got to be ruthless and shut it off, redirect your attention onto something else. And it literally can save your life if you do that. But try to keep those two phrases in mind. Never worry alone and don't feed the demon. That is some really great advice because everyone who has ever,

and I assume it is everyone, has ever worried alone, knows that when you bring somebody else in on your worry, it somehow lightens up. It's magical. has ever worried alone, knows that when you bring somebody else in on your worry, it somehow lightens up. It's magical. It's magical. And it really is, suddenly the worry turns into problem solving.

It is magical. It's like my thought experience. Imagine you're standing in a big dark warehouse by yourself. You feel terrified, paranoid. If you're there with someone, you laugh. There's something about the presence of another person that instantly, as you put it, lightens the load and the next thing you know you're problem solving. How do we get out of here? I've heard it described as a paradox really that we are with social media and the internet we are

more connected than ever and yet a lot of those social media kind of connections aren't real connections and exacerbate the problem of loneliness because you're connected but not in the way that people used to be connected what do you think about social media connections is it it that? Is it exacerbating the problem? I take issue with that point. It's all a matter of how you use it. My family, for example, uses social media to great advantage. We have a, you know, I don't know what the word for it is, but we're all on the same little platform and we send each other messages and it facilitates, deepens human connection. Now, the danger is when it replaces human connection.

That's the danger. So it's all a matter of how you use it. It would seem that because loneliness is so painful, and a lot of people suffer that pain in silence, it must be because, at least in part, that it's just so difficult to get up and go try to connect with people. It's just really hard for them to do. So what's your advice for those people who would love to connect,

but just don't even know where to begin? I'll tell you a quick story. Do we have time for a quick story? Sure, of course. Oh, great. Okay. Well, so I consulted some 20 years ago to the Harvard chemistry department because they had their most gifted graduate student committed suicide and left a note explicitly blaming Harvard. As we looked into it, the chair of the department, Jim Anderson, a wonderful man,

basically put his research career on hold to figure out what was going on. And we discovered it was one of many suicides in that department in the previous decade. And the reason for it was the community was horribly disconnected. It was like a dungeon. It was just, there was no connection. And it was, everyone was paranoid. There were two coping styles, work harder or get drunk. And most people did both every day. So you had an entire department of, with five Nobel Prize winners in it,

and some thousand brilliant little genius post-docs and graduate students, miserable because they were so disconnected. So we had to figure out a way to connect them. Now with, you know, that group of people, really smart, often middle European, barely English speaking, very high IQ folks, if you said let's have a mixer, nobody would show up because it's not in their comfort zone. And so we had to figure out how do you bait the trap? How do you bring people out of hiding? Because they were hiding, they were paranoid. Well, you know,

one of the universal answers to that question is food. So we'd reach out to the best restaurants in Cambridge, and we'd cater weekly buffets, where, you know, there'd be wonderful good food, there'd be some beer and wine, and these introverted, shy grad students would come out of hiding for food. And the next thing you know, they get talking to one another in spite of themselves. And the next thing you know, there's a softball team, there's a symphony club,

they started putting wax boards next to the elevators. So instead of making small talk at the elevator, they could draw equations and tell each other what they were working on. You meet them where they are, and lo and behold, over the course of the year, we really changed the culture of that department. So it's a grim statistic, but it's very significant. There have been no suicides since. The proudest award I ever got was the chemistry department gave me the department medal. I'm the first non-chemist who has ever received that. But yeah, thank you. But it really drove home to me, number one, how lethal disconnection is. I

mean, literally people dying, but how plantable it is, how startable it is, because it's in every, even the most introverted reclusive person wants to connect. Loneliness hurts everybody. So you just have to find the right way. And like in our case, food was the catalyst. Food was what got the ball rolling. Then people jump in and take over. And the next thing, the town can go from being isolated and separated and paranoid, as so many places are

these days, to connecting. Maybe you have a block party. Maybe you have a yard sale. Maybe you have let's root for the local team movement or something that people can join in and connect with each other without making them self-conscious about it. That's the key. Most people don't want to sit down and talk about their feelings. They're afraid of that. It makes them feel very awkward. But if you give them some task to do, some project to jump into and some food to eat and even better, some wine to drink. You got a connection thing going. And it's so great to see it happen because it's what people need. And you just see them brighten up like a Christmas tree. I mean, it's just,

it's a wonderful thing. And it can be, you can start it truly anywhere. You know, I like to think, I know it's not a two-way connection, but I like to think that people listening to us right now, learning about this, is kind of a connection, and it can help ease that pain of loneliness. I mean, you are doing a tremendous service. You have a big following. That's a huge service. It's, people don't realize, but you have regular listeners, and that's a big deal.

They don't understand, by listening to you, by tuning in regularly, they literally are extending their life. I mean, that is a proven fact. Reducing social isolation extends life, and what you're doing with your podcast is a wonderful way of reducing social isolation. So yes, it is ironic that we have unintentionally conspired to create circumstances where one of the things we need absolutely most is really hard to get, but it is not impossible to get. And that's why I'm saying use your imagination, but reach out, you know, another, you know, reach out to someone you're on the on the outs with. Forgiveness is a wonderful tool for connecting. And, you know, forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself. Well, anyone who knows that feeling, and I assume it's everyone who has had that feeling, that deep sense of loneliness

knows how horrible it is and I think this is such an important conversation to have. Edward Halliwell has been my guest. The name of his book is Connect, which he wrote several years ago and I promised him I would mention his new book, which is about ADHD, called ADHD 2.0. And you can find a link to those books in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Ned, and talking about this. It was good to hear, and it was a lot of really good information.

Thank you. Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate your having me on. You're a terrific, terrific host. Now that cooler weather is here, more and more of us are actually driving around on under-inflated tires. That's because when the temperature drops outside, the air pressure goes down. So it's really worth stopping into the gas station for a quick air refill.

Driving on under-inflated tires is less fuel efficient and it can even be dangerous. When your tires are low, there's much more wear and tear on the tread and you're more prone to blowouts because there's more friction between the tire and the road surface. And that is something you should know. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Something You Should Know. A reminder please to tell someone you know, tell a couple of people you know about Something You Should Know. Maybe it'll come up in conversation if you share something you learned in today's episode. But invite them to listen. I would

appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Buffet brawlers, glory holes gone wrong, cannibalistic castration cabins, public poopers. These are just a few of the crazy topics you'll hear covered on, excuse me, that's illegal. The pettiest podcast around. Whether you need a break from all that murdery true crime stuff or just enjoy hearing hilarious stories told in a unique way. I got what you need. I'm Leroy Luna, your fearless host slash chauffeur. So come hop in my minivan and let's go for a ride. I promise you probably won't be disappointed. Excuse Me That's Illegal

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Only one in the room is for anyone who has ever felt alone in a room full of people. I bet you've had that feeling. Listen and you'll hear guests like Hilary Phelps, sister of Olympian Michael Phelps, sharing her story of her secret addiction. Former Fox News reporter Christine O'Donnell, who was fired after one of her social media posts was taken out of context. Only One in the Room was named a top podcast by Reader's Digest, The Manual, and Bustle magazines. Every week, Laura and her co-host Scott Slaughter invite you to join them for an hour and lose yourself in someone's only one story. Check out Only One in the Room, wherever you get your podcasts.