Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Optimize This: If You Care About Mental And Physical Health, This May Be The Missing Piece | Kasley Killam

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Up until now, in our culture, we’ve generally talked about physical health and mental health–but there’s an emerging consensus that the missing piece is social health.But what can you actually do to improve your social health? Today we’re going deep with the scientist who has thought a lot about this, and has a ton of good advice.Kasley Killam, MPH, is a leading expert in social health and the award-winning author of The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier. As a graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health, sought-after advisor and keynote speaker, and founder of Social Health Labs, Killam has been improving global well-being through connection for over a decade. Her collaborations with organizations like Google, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Economic Forum contribute to building more socially healthy products, workplaces, and communities. Killam’s insights can be found in outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, NPR, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and The Washington Post.In this episode we talk about:Why social health is so important, and how it impacts our physical and mental healthHow to figure out what your social style isTips for strengthening your social musclesWhat you can do to boost your social health musclesHow much vulnerability is appropriate How to have a healthy relationship with yourselfHow legislation could help with social healthEmerging industries for social fitnessAnd lastly, how we can work towards creating a society that cultivates connectionRelated Episodes:Self-Compassion Ain’t Always Soft | Kristin NeffKryptonite for the Inner Critic | Kristin NeffRethinking Success | Mia BirdsongSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes:  https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/kasley-killam-839See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. how we doing? I, like many of you, have some pronounced optimizer tendencies. That means I can get pretty nerdy and obsessive about tracking my steps, my sleep, my workouts, etc. However, if you really care about being fit, focused, happy or successful, there's something

that I suspect many people are overlooking. In fact, as you're going to hear my guests today say, it's something the medical community is only now really catching on to. Up until now in our culture, I think we've generally talked about physical health and mental health, but there's an emerging consensus that the missing piece is social health. You've probably heard me bang on about this, how the data show that perhaps the most important variable when it comes to living a long and happy

and successful life is the quality of your relationships. But what can you actually do to improve your relationships, your social health? Today, we're gonna go deep with a scientist who's thought a lot about this and has a ton of good advice. Casley Killam is a Harvard-trained social scientist. She's the author of a new book

called The Art and Science of Connection, Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier. We talk about why social health is so important and how it impacts our physical and mental health, how to figure out what your social style is, what you can do to boost your social health muscles, what you can do if you're an introvert

and are worried about what this might mean for you. And finally, the fascinating question of how much vulnerability, in other words, how much sharing is too much. Casually Kill'em coming up. Before we get started, I wanna remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over at danharris.com. These days, you probably heard me announce that we've started a new community through Substack,

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We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join us. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year, or free for anybody who can't afford it, no questions asked. Just head over to danharris.com, we'll see you there. Meanwhile, I wanna give you an update on what's happening over on the Happier app. As you know, I used to be involved with that app, am not anymore, but I'm gonna continue

to update you on their doings. They are very excited to announce something very cool. They have teamed up with two of the world's most renowned meditation centers, the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock for an exclusive retreat giveaway. Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat, a $600 travel credit,

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My wife Bianca and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards. Keith, if you're listening, I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on the show. So audiobooks, yes, audible, yes, love it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30 day audible

trial and your first audiobook is free. the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger.

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Casley Killam, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dan. Excited to be here. Likewise. Foundational question for you. What is social health? Let's start off right there. Perfect. So social health is the dimension of your overall health and wellbeing that comes from connection. So if you think about it at the most basic level,

physical health is about your body, mental health is about your mind, and social health in contrast is about your relationships. So at this point, we have so much research over decades showing that connection is as important as things like exercise and eating healthy foods and getting a good night's sleep or meditating, going to therapy

for our overall health and longevity. But oftentimes connection gets lost in the conversation on mental health, right? We think that spending time with loved ones is something that improves our mood without necessarily recognizing that it does a lot more than that. It actually influences our risk for things like heart disease and dementia and diabetes.

And at the extreme end, it influences how long we live. And so thinking about social health separately from physical and mental health is a really useful way of understanding that we need to prioritize the actions that can help make us socially healthy, just like we prioritize behaviors to be physically and mentally healthy. All right, so I'm with you a million percent on this, and it's actually really one of the primary thrusts

of the next book I'm writing, which probably won't come out until the year 2055. But the... Couldn't you argue that you said something, can't remember the exact words, but you said social health is your connection, your relationships is as important as something like physical exercise.

But couldn't you argue that it's more important? I mean, if you look at the study for adult development at Harvard, that work over the course of 80, 90 years, following several generations of people in Boston and figuring out what are the variables that lead to the most healthy and happy and long life, they very clearly identify the number one variable as being the quality of people's relationships. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's a good point. I think you could argue that connection is more important than any of these other health behaviors. But I take a bit

more of a modest approach in trying to help people understand that we already know that it's important to be physically and mentally healthy. Social health is on par with those aspects of our overall well-being. And so that's perhaps a bit less of a stretch than for people to think, oh, it's more important that I spend time with loved ones and make new friends and invest in connection on a regular basis. Right? I think it's a bit easier for people to understand that it's on par. And certainly first, you need to meet your basic needs like eating food and drinking water, right?

We need to meet those basic needs. But longer term, the benefits of connection for our health and longevity are certainly at least on par, if not more beneficial. Why do you think it's been lost? One of the arguments that I'm increasingly making and I'm gonna be making this more and more as the book gets completed and published

is that we live in an era of optimization. People are like achieving ketosis and tracking their sleep and tracking their steps and wearing special rings and whatever, just doing everything to be healthy. And I'm like, you know, 80% on board with that. But nobody on Instagram is lecturing us or trying to sell us anything around what you could argue is either on par with all of that or even

more important than all that, which is the quality of our relationships. How has that gotten lost given that if you just consider how thunderously obvious it is that we are social animals, that this would therefore be an important thing to work on? How are we only getting around to this now? That's a great question. or be an important thing to work on, how are we only getting around to this now? That's a great question. I mean, if you look back over history, the way that we understand what it means to be healthy

and the things that we actually do to be healthy evolve over time, right? It wasn't that long ago, it was about a hundred years ago that people smoked cigarettes without knowing that they were causing lung cancer. That was something that we had to understand from the research and then raise awareness about, pass legislation around, et cetera,

to finally reduce smoking behaviors so that people could avoid getting lung cancer and other diseases, right? That's just one example. A similar analogy is that it's really only in the last decade or two that mental health has risen up in prominence for everyday people. It used to be something that psychologists talked about,

therapists talked about, but now it's a common dinner table conversation, right? Celebrities talk about their own experiences with mental health. As a millennial myself, my friends and I all talk about going to therapy and discuss what we talk about with our therapists even, right? There's just not the same stigma.

There's greater understanding and acceptance that it's equally as important to take care of our mental health as our physical health. And so I think what we're seeing right now is that first of all, we have enough evidence from studies like the Harvard one and many, many others, countless others, showing, proving that connection is vital to our health and wellbeing.

So there's that evidence base. And now we can move into growing the awareness, passing legislations, making the changes we need so that people understand that connection is similar to smoking, right? It's as important as not smoking. What we're seeing right now is this shift. We've understood that health is physical. Increasingly, we understand that

health is mental. And now we're moving into this next phase of our understanding of what it actually means to be healthy. More and more people are sounding the alarms. We have people like the U.S. Surgeon General, who's made loneliness a priority of his tenure. We have people like the US Surgeon General, who's made loneliness a priority of his tenure. We have things like the World Health Organization launching a commission on social connection. So increasingly there are these pushes to bring attention to connection as part of our health. In the years to come with the amount of momentum, the amount of research, the increasing efforts around advocacy, we're going to see greater awareness

that health is also social and that it's as important to take care of your social health. So I think it's less a reflection of this being ignored than it is, we're really now kind of dawning our understanding of this issue and moving into that next phase. That makes sense when you put it in the context of an evolution, it makes a lot of sense. You know, when I was on my soapbox, expounding your thesis in perhaps too sweaty of a way, just a few moments ago, I was talking about how we, you know, we're social animals and that kind of explains

why this is so important. But I would love to understand from you, not from me, how you describe to people why social health or I've also heard the term social fitness is so important, you know, even on a level of our biology. Sure, absolutely. And to pull on that thread, social fitness, if you think about physical fitness, it's exercising your physical muscles as a means to improve your social health. And so in that same way, social fitness is about exercising

your social muscles to improve your social health. So we can come back to that, but I think that's a helpful distinction. Definitely. There are many reasons as to why social health is so important. And to your point, it's a little bit strange to think about our interactions, right?

When you have coffee with a coworker, or you have a dinner with your family or you spend time with your kids, why did those interactions and those relationships that you're forming and maintaining over time actually get under your skin? There are a few theories in the research that have a lot of evidence for them. One is this idea of stress buffering. So like you said, we are social animals. It's in our DNA to rely on one another for survival. And so what happens when we're lacking that, right? When we feel isolated or lonely or disconnected from our community, is that that's a stressor to our bodies.

And so that actually over time can really cause increased cortisol, increased inflammation, and weaken our immune systems in the longterm, therefore making us more susceptible to diseases and potentially shortening our lifespans. Another theory is a little bit more practical. So if you have loved ones who can, for example, help drive you to a doctor's appointment

or let you know about a new vaccine that's available, that information and their influence on you is going to help you feel more supported and get you doing the behaviors that you need to do to be healthy. So those are a couple of examples. I think there's also a few studies that I really like that illustrate this in interesting ways.

So for example, in one study, researchers followed people for a couple of weeks. And during that time, they measured how supported people felt and also how many hugs they received. And they found at the end of the study, they actually exposed people to the cold virus. And they found that people who felt more supported and then also received more hugs were both less likely to catch the cold and if they did catch the cold they had fewer symptoms. So you're seeing that the body is actually internalizing that support, getting benefits from the physical touch of hugs and that's strengthening the immune system.

Another study that I love that I think illustrates this in the brain is one where researchers hook people up to brain scans and give them mild electric shocks. I'm not really sure who signs up for these studies, but I'm glad that they do because they're very illuminating. And in that instance, they compared people's brain scans if they were looking at photos of loved ones compared to if they were looking at photos of complete strangers. And if these people who received mild electric shocks were looking at photos of loved ones,

they actually reported feeling less fear and showed less brain activity in the regions associated with pain. So in other words, our brain can actually interpret pain and fear differently if we're doing something as simple as looking at a photo of a loved one compared to looking at a stranger. So these examples show us that truly connection, feeling supported and connected to our loved ones actually changes our brain activity and changes the way that our bodies are functioning. Those are fascinating.

I also love the story, I think, along those lines, perhaps apocryphal because we don't really know with complete certainty what exactly the Buddha did and said 2600 years ago because they weren't writing stuff down. But the story is that he invented loving kindness meditation or meta meditation, which is a practice where you envision various beings and send them good vibes that he invented this as an antidote to fear. And so the idea, and this is, you know, it's not unique to the Buddha. The idea that the opposite of fear is love or the antidote to fear is love is, you know, born out by that sadistic study with the people in the MRI getting electrocuted. Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of the origin of my interest in connection to actually traces

back to my own exploration of meditation. I spent a month in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal when I was maybe 19 or 20 years old. And I learned Metta meditation and many other practices. And I think that that's a beautiful practice actually for feeling connected to all living beings, right? As you know well, and feeling connected to oneself and to others and appreciating our interconnectedness. So I think actually meditation is a really beautiful

and indirect way of feeling connected. That's quite important. Getting back to social health, is it as important for an introvert as it is for somebody like me who's an extrovert? I'm so glad you asked this question. I am an introvert. So yes, I can say it from personal experience,

but also what the research shows us is that everyone needs connection, right? To some degree. And it's really a question of how much and in what ways. That's what varies person to person. But every single human on this planet has a fundamental, innate desire and need to feel like they matter, to feel like they belong, to feel cared for and loved, right, that's a yearning that I think every single person can relate to. What is different for introverts such as myself

is the amount of interaction and connection that we need on a day-to-day or weekly basis overall, right? And so this is really important because being socially healthy doesn't mean socializing all the time necessarily, unless that's fulfilling to you. Being socially healthy means having the right amount and type of connection for you. In the book, I described four different styles,

social health styles, that vary across the introvert-extrovert spectrum in terms of the quantity of connection that you need, but also that vary in terms of the type of interaction that you enjoy and gravitate toward. So if that's of interest, I can expand on those. But I think the key piece here is that being socially healthy doesn't mean connecting all the time, right? It's paying attention to what's fulfilling for you. As an introvert, I need to balance socializing with solitude to recharge my energy.

It doesn't mean that I don't love spending time with my family and friends and other people, but it means that it's really important to balance that. Yeah, I'm an extrovert married to an introvert and sometimes I go to parties by myself. And that's just the way it is. Perfect. I love that your wife prioritizes alone time. That's great. Maybe she just doesn't want to be with me. I don't know. That's an open question. You

mentioned the four categories of social health style, maybe now would be a good time to talk about those. Sure. So the first is one that we're all familiar with. It's this idea of being a social butterfly, right? So if you think about butterflies in nature, they flutter from flower to flower. And similarly, a butterfly in a social health context is someone who's extroverted. They enjoy a lot of interaction, but they gravitate toward more casual connection, right? They're comfortable making small talk and chit chatting at parties and help other people to feel of interaction, but they gravitate toward more casual connection, right? They're comfortable making small talk and chit-chatting at parties and help other people to feel at ease in those

contexts. So that's the idea of a butterfly, someone who likes a lot of casual interaction. The second style, again, is one that we're used to hearing about, which is the idea of a wallflower. Now, contrary to stereotypes, wallflowers, you know, there are many perks to of a wallflower. Now, contrary to stereotypes, wallflowers, there are many perks to being a wallflower. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And I should note that one of these styles is not better than the other, it's just different. But a wallflower is someone who gravitates

toward infrequent casual connection. So someone who's more introverted on that side of the spectrum, and perhaps a little shyer, right? More comfortable with people they know well, kind of slower to open up and to get to know others in a deeper way. So that's a wallflower. The third style is one that I identify with, which is a firefly. So I'm still introverted, which means I prefer

less interaction. I'm totally happy being by myself, but when I am connecting, it's deep connection, right? My friends and family, I love to skip straight past the small talk and into those deeper conversations. And that's similar to, if you think about fireflies in nature, right? They kind of glow brightly in synchrony with other fireflies, and then they disappear into the night sky. So kind of that idea of coming alive when they're engaging and then retreating to have that alone time. And then the final style, the fourth one is an evergreen.

So evergreen plants in nature are plants that are green and have foliage all year round. And in that same way, in a social health context, an evergreen is someone who enjoys a lot of deep connection. Someone who's more extroverted, but who is, you know, really going deeper and in constant communication with their close loved ones, has very supportive relationships, and so on. So those are the four styles. Again, I would reiterate one is not better than the other. It's just about different preferences and what we more

naturally gravitate toward. Yeah, I would put myself in evergreen and would say that I spent a long time not allowing that aspect of my personality to flourish because I was maniacally focused on my career. And that led to all sorts of complications and problems. I still am very focused on my career, but now that I have a more holistic understanding

of health, feeding the evergreen aspect of my personality, actually everything has gotten better. I'm healthier and happier and my career is better. That's really interesting. I think it also gets to something that I write about in the book, which is when we are really focused on our careers, and I'm this way too,

so I completely relate, Dan. It's so easy to deprioritize connection. And it sounds like that might've been a little bit of the journey that you went on where, you know, when we're so focused on our careers and passionate about it, right? I love my work. I'm so lit up doing the work that I do. It's something I truly care about, but that sometimes comes at the expense of prioritizing relationships. It can be so easy to let months go by where all of a sudden you realize you haven't talked to that friend who you really care about,

or you haven't seen your family member who lives 10 minutes away. And so what I see in my work is that busyness and our work habits can actually get in the way of being socially healthy, just as they can get in the way of being physically and mentally healthy. And so thinking about ways that we can focus on the work that we love and care about doing and what we need to do to pay our bills and get by, but also balancing that with prioritizing

connection is really key. There's a study that you quote in the book or cite in the book that I love. I'll briefly describe it and then I have a question for you on the backend, but it really goes to this issue of busyness or rushing, which has been a huge problem for me. The study was done at a seminary, so people practicing or studying to become priests. And I guess they put these guys in a room one by one

and gave them a talk about the Good Samaritan. So prime them to be in a helpful mode. And then some of them were told they have an appointment right now on the other side of campus. All of them left the room, and this was happening one by one, and they saw somebody who was part of the study, I guess the technical term for that is a confederate, which I like, who was pretending to be injured.

The folks who were told that they have an appointment that they're late for, almost all of them did not help. These are aspiring priests, did not help, who had just been talked to about the parable of the Good Samaritan. They did not help the person who was on crutches or whatever it was. And those who were not in a rush did. That is just so illuminating for me because when I'm rushing, which is not in frequent still, I'm just more of a dick and it's not cool.

And so I really have to work on that. And so my question for you, you know, you've spent your career studying this and you're very focused on your career. So how do you and what would you recommend to us balance getting shit done and being successful with making time for this stuff that matters? Yeah, I love this question. And I love that study as well. It's so fascinating. I mean, essentially it just shows that if you're busy, you're less likely to be kind.

You're less likely to be looking around you and seeing opportunities for connection and seeing opportunities to help other people. It's so illuminating. And you know, it's still a work in progress for me, Dan. I don't have all the answers on this one. It's something I'm continually experimenting with. But what I will say is that the research shows that we can weave connection into our life

in ways that are quick and small and yet meaningful. And so there are steps that we can take to integrate connection into our day-to-day that don't feel like we're overhauling our life, right? It doesn't mean quitting your job and moving to the Himalayas to just focus on practicing compassion every day. It doesn't have to look like that. Instead, there are simple things. So, for example, there was one study where the researchers had people send an email to someone they knew was going through a tough time. Someone you know is going through a difficult period

in their life, sending them an email to say, hey, I'm thinking about you. I know you're going through it right now. Just expressing compassion and care. And what the researchers found was that people sending those emails significantly underestimated how much it would mean to the recipient and how it would come across. It came across way more positively and was much more well received by that other person than

they realized. That's not something that takes a lot of time. That could be something you spend two minutes writing and sending. And so one of the recommendations for something really simple in our day-to-day that we can do is to set a reminder on your calendar, once a day or once a week, to send a note of gratitude to someone or to send a text message saying, hey, I'm thinking of you to someone who you haven't connected with recently. Multiple studies are showing that even simple outreach like that can make a difference in how connected you both feel and can mean a lot to that other person. So literally just putting it on your calendar

at 2 p.m. every day, send a text message or an email to someone saying, hey, I'm thinking about you or expressing gratitude for something they've done recently or something you appreciate about them. It can take no longer than five, and yet it can go a long way. And so I think reminders like that, for those of us who are busy, can actually be really helpful. And maybe it feels a little bit technical, but if it helps build that habit

and strengthen those social muscles and make it a ritual in your day-to-day, then why not use all the tools that are available to you? Yeah, you say sometimes we need to be deliberate about connection until it becomes effortless. That's a quote. You write that in the context of giving people some exercises for social fitness,

one of which you just talked about, but maybe now that we're on that tip, we should keep going with some of these exercises that make things pretty simple. Maybe this is the one you just covered, but one of your recommendations is next year to-do list, make a to-love list. Yes, exactly.

So if I ask an audience how many people have a to-do list, everyone raises their hand. And I know I live by my to-do list. It's constantly dictates what I do every day, how I prioritize my work. If we bring that same intention and consideration to our relationships as we do to our work, there's a lot of value there. This tip, which is to write a to-love list, is literally just writing down the names of perhaps three to ten people who are really important to you,

who you want to make sure that you're staying in touch with. You could write it on a sticky note and you can put it on your computer monitor or next to your coffee machine or one person I interviewed put it next to their toothbrush right in their bathroom cabinets. They would see it every day and it's just a simple list so that you can run through and be intentional about, hmm, who haven't I connected with recently? they would see it every day. And it's just a simple list so that you can run through and be intentional about, hmm, who haven't I connected with recently?

Who do I need to reach out to to make sure that I'm sustaining that relationship in the longterm? So just like you write a to-do list, write a to-love list of the people who matter most to you and who you wanna be really intentional about connecting with. Again, it's just a way of priming our minds

and helping strengthen and exercise that social muscle until it becomes something that you do more naturally. I just wanna say to anybody who's skeptical, basically I'm talking to the old version of me. You may have heard this riff from me before, but it just feels intuitively like it might bear repeating right now, which is that

some of the things Casely's talking about may seem by her own admission forced or cheesy. I guess the kids are now saying chuggy, which I just heard about on TikTok. Oh, that's new to me too. Corny, whatever derogatory term you want to throw at this. However, if you were an alien and you landed on this planet and went to a gym and saw people picking up and putting down heavy things systematically or running or biking in place for 45 minutes, that would look weird. But we all understand that repetitive motion is good for our hearts and for our muscles, and the same is true for our minds.

And that's why loving kindness meditation, or again, for me, it seemed impossibly trickly at the beginning, but it has been shown through many, many studies to be quite beneficial physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally. And I have a strong suspicion these tips that Casley's talking about will be too. Okay, I'm off of my soapbox. Let's keep going down your list.

Another recommendation for you is alongside career goals, set connection goals. Yeah. So Dan, this one should resonate with you, right? As someone who cares a lot about your work, is ambitious, is constantly busy working on things. We're so intentional about setting career goals. I think most people who have a job have something that they're working toward, whether it's a new product launch or getting a promotion or getting a pay raise or publishing a book, whatever it might be that you're working toward. And perhaps you have a roadmap for how you're going to accomplish that given goal.

Why not bring that same intentionality and that same rigor to our relationships? Clearly, so many people are struggling to prioritize connection and to find meaningful relationships in their day-to-day. There was a poll last year by Gallup that found that one in four people worldwide feel lonely on a regular basis, right? So clearly we're missing an opportunity here to be healthier, to be happier, to live longer lives. So set a connection goal. Think about a month from now or a year from now or five years from now.

What do you want your social health to look like, right? How often do you wanna be interacting with people? Do you want more friends? Do you wanna deepen the existing friendships that you have? Do you wanna be able to spend more time with people? Do you want more friends? Do you want to deepen the existing friendships that you have? Do you want to be able to spend more time with family? Perhaps you're looking for a romantic partner, right? Like what in your social life do you feel like you want to change? What's missing for you? And set that as a goal and then work toward that goal just like you would work to a career goal. Put that same intention and prioritization toward it.

Plus one. Here's another recommendation that I think, if I understand it correctly, I'm already doing, and I have found very helpful. Put your relationships on autopilot. Yes. So if you think about autopilot on airplanes, right? A pilot puts a plane on autopilot

or you can put your car on autopilot. It doesn't mean that you stop paying attention to flying the plane or to driving the car, right? It just means that some of the logistics of doing that are taken out of your hands so that you can focus on what truly matters. So in that same way, we can set our relationships on autopilot by putting them on the calendar.

Let's say you have a friend who you care about a lot, but who you don't actually talk to that often, and you wanna make sure that you're maintaining that relationship in the long term. So set a time together, monthly or quarterly or weekly, whatever cadence feels right for both of you, where it's on your calendar and at that time you give each other a call or you hop on a zoom or ideally you meet in person. So that it's consistent, right? So

much research shows us that consistency is key to relationship building and maintenance in the long term. That means that to be socially healthy we need to continually be connecting. It's not one and done. Just like you can't exercise one time and then you're physically healthy for the rest of your life. It's about building these rituals and habits. So set it on the calendar, put it on autopilot so that the logistics are out of the way. You know this time every month I'm going to be talking to this person. And then you can just focus on connecting and enjoying that time together, rather than worrying about scheduling. Yeah, I love this. I stumbled upon it organically on my own life, but I have standing lunches or dinners with four or five groups of people that just recur.

And often at the end of the meals, we set the date for the next one. Perfect. five groups of people that just recur. And often at the end of the meals, we set the date for the next one. Perfect. That automation just makes it so much easier. One of these lunch groups has been going since 2008. Wow. Yeah, and I have another dinner thing

that includes two former guests on this show, Dolly Chug and Madhupa Akanola and a third friend of ours, Corey. And you know, at the end of the meal, we just pull out our phones and figure out when we're going to do it again. It just makes it so much easier. And then, you know, you've got an IV drip of this. I'm happier when I see these things on my calendar. Absolutely. And it gives you something to look forward to. It means that you know you're going to continually have those touch points. And it's such a basic thing.

This isn't a life-changing idea, and yet the impact it can have is potentially life-changing, right? It's such a simple thing. And so I love tools like this where we can weave it into our busy lives, right? If you are someone who identifies as busy and focused on work,

these are simple ways that you can help make connection a priority day to day. Next on your list is multitask and microdose. So if you think about folding your laundry or commuting somewhere, maybe you're folding your laundry by yourself, maybe you're commuting driving in the car, listening to a podcast.

The idea here is that those are opportunities where you can multitask and weave connection in, in really small ways. So that idea of kind of micro dosing connection. So maybe you're folding laundry and you call a friend, you say, hey, I just have five minutes to chat, just wanted to see how you're doing. What's going on for you this week?

Really simple. Or when you're driving in the car, instead of putting on that podcast, calling a family member and saying, Hey, I've got 10 minutes until I get to my destination. How's it going? Just wanted to check in. So these are simple ways that we can, again, just weave these rituals into our day to day. And one thing that I want to underscore here is that these may or may not resonate with you or feel easy to you depending on your social health style. So if you're more extroverted, if you're a wallflower or an evergreen,

that's gonna feel a lot easier and more appetizing to you than if you're a wallflower or a firefly, someone who's more introverted, right? Because perhaps that isn't actually ideal to someone who's more introverted, right? Because perhaps that isn't actually ideal to someone who's more introverted. And so again, it's about, okay, here's what the research says, here's what this could mean for you

and how to actually apply this in your life. And then you need to really experiment with that and play with it and see, does that feel nourishing or is that draining to you? What are the ways that feel good for you to prioritize your social health? Yeah, that makes complete sense. Podcast listeners might be annoyed

because I just say the same shit over and over, but like the Buddha explicitly said to his followers, don't take what I'm saying at face value, test it out for yourself. And I hear a lot of that spirit in what you're saying. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, all of my career and certainly with this book, it's about saying, okay, here's what the science is telling us about relationships, right? Here's what we

know from the research. Here's the insights that we can learn. And then how do we actually put that to use, right? What does that mean for you? Here's what the science is. What does that mean for you in your life and the science says. What does that mean for you in your life and for us collectively as a society? If connection is as important as exercise for our health and wellbeing, how do we make that a priority in the fabric of our culture?

What legislations can we pass? What can we integrate into our healthcare system, into our education system and so on, so that social health becomes easier for all of us. So really that's the goal here is saying, okay, here's what we know from the data. Now let's ask and apply that in your own life. Coming up, Casley Killam talks about some more tips for boosting your social health muscles and expanding your social network.

We also talk about the power of vulnerability, how to have a healthy relationship with yourself, and how to set boundaries. Hello, Matt and Alice here, the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal. Our latest series, Peru 2, begins on the sandy shores of Ibiza. Michaela McCollum should have been having the summer of her dreams, but it all went

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Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat along with a $600 travel credit. To check it out, go to happierapp.com forward slash retreat giveaway. I wanna come back to legislation, but let me just stay stay with because throughout the book, there are all these suggestions. So I just want to tick through a lot of these because I feel like if we give people a large enough menu, they'll find something that's appetizing to them. There's another section in the book called tips to strengthen your social muscles and you list hobbies, volunteering and conversation. So I thought maybe we could tick through these under hobbies.

Your basic advice is do what you love with other people. you list hobbies, volunteering, and conversation. So I thought maybe we could tick through these. Under hobbies, your basic advice is do what you love with other people. Can you say more about that? Sure. So what I hear time and time again from the audiences that I speak to, the communities and organizations that I work with

is adults struggle to make new friends. Most people past university or high school want to make new friends and there are times in your life when you need to make new friends if you've moved to a new city or had a job change or whatever the case may be but people don't necessarily know how to do that. We're not taught these skills in schools yet although we should be and so one of the ways that the research shows and lived experience shows is a really helpful way to actually make new friends and what I call stretching your social muscles, which

means expanding your social network, is to do what you love with others. So if there's a hobby that you really enjoy, maybe it's reading a book or hiking. To find a way to do that with other people. So join a book club at your local library, find a hiking club on Meetup or Eventbrite or a community bulletin board that you can join and go do that activity with other people because that takes off the pressure of needing to connect. You know, if you have a friend date with someone one-on-one, there's a lot of pressure for that conversation to go really well.

But if you're doing a shared activity, you already know that you have that in common, conversation and friendship can more naturally arise. And again, this is actually really obvious, and yet setting that intention and knowing that that's a place that you can start can be really helpful. Yeah. You ever seen that SNL skit about women bringing their husbands and boyfriends to a dog park

to meet other men? No, I haven't, but that sounds perfect. Because I think, and maybe this is a gross or incorrect overgeneralization, but I think it's often harder for men. And so there's this SNL skit where women are like bringing awkward dudes to a dog park to meet other awkward dudes. And it reminds me actually one of my recurring dinners is some dads from the community in which I live.

And this group was started because one of the guys' wives was concerned that her husband wasn't making any friends and bullied us into making a dinner, which has really caught on. We meet up every month. I love that. Am I right about how men tend to struggle with this more? Yeah, and the research has really shown that

in recent decades, it's actually been called a friendship recession, particularly for men, where it seems like there's something going on that men are having a harder time cultivating friendships in kind of midlife and later life. And I actually think the dog park is a great example of doing what you love with others, right? It's you have a dog that you love,

you can easily bond with other people who have dogs. And so I think that's actually a perfect example of a way that you can make friends that feels more natural. Yeah, this dog park wasn't even for dogs. It was a dog park just for dudes to meet each other. Oh, for dudes. It was a dude park. Yes, exactly. I love it.

The other thing you mentioned is volunteering, and I've heard the Surgeon General talk about this, that volunteering can be a great antidote to loneliness. Is that what you're driving at as well? Yeah, absolutely. So many studies have shown that people who volunteer feel less lonely. And if you think about it, this makes sense, right? Let's say you're volunteering with a local organization of some kind, perhaps a pet rescue

or a school or something like that. It's a way to meet new people at the most basic level, which is of course important for social health. It's also a way to feel connected to your community and to feel a sense of purpose alongside other people. And that's a really vital piece. Something that I write about and distinguish in the book is that social health comes from your individual relationships, right? The ones that you cultivate with your family and your close friends and so on. But social health also comes from feeling a sense of community, feeling like you belong to something that's

bigger than you. And that's where volunteering can play a really vital role. We see that people who feel lonely tend to lose a sense of purpose, tend to lose a sense of meaning, and loneliness in and of itself can be a very kind of self-focused experience, right? There's a lot of difficult emotions that are inward-facing. Volunteering is a way to turn your attention outward, to think about what other people are needing and how you might help them. outward to think about what other people are needing and how you might help them. And that pivot, that kind of mental shift is really powerful. And so we see time and time again in the research that helping other people can actually end up helping you. And it might sound counter intuitive, but that's one of my favorite recommendations because there's so much literature

behind this. And if you actually try it, and I know some of your skeptical audience members are going to say, oh yeah, okay, right. Like roll their eyes to your volunteering. If you actually try it, you'd be amazed at how good it feels to go out and engage in that way and to feel a sense of purpose alongside other people in your community. I totally agree. It reminds me of one of my stupid little catch phrases, which is the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. And that is true. It really is. Yes, it is. Absolutely. Another strengthening exercise is conversation. You talk about asking better questions. Can you teach us a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. So we're used to in our society kind of saying, hey, how are you? And, oh, I'm fine. And talking about, you know, what did you do on the weekend? Or how's the weather where you live? Things like this, right? This casual chit chat, which can actually be beneficial because it kind of bonds us.

These are rituals that we're used to in our society. But what the data shows is that people around the world, when you ask people in different cultures, what is meaningful connection to you, both online and offline? What does it look like for you? People commonly say things like, it's going past small talk.

It's deep talk, right? It's having deeper conversations. It's feeling understood. It's some exchange of value there beyond just general chit chat. This recommendation is really about toning your social muscles. So in the book, I distinguish between four kind of strategies, stretch, rest, tone, and flex your social muscles. The tone strategy is about deepening your existing relationships, right? Just like you tone your physical muscles to become stronger, you can tone your social

muscles by actually getting closer to the people and the groups in your life. And asking better questions is one way to do this. I'm a big proponent, I probably annoy my friends and family, of these card decks that you can get. There are so many different versions where they have conversation prompts on them. I keep these on my dining room table, on my coffee table, in my living room. It's a way to just spark different conversation

than you would otherwise have. This is something that we can all integrate into our conversations with other people. It could be as simple as expressing curiosity in a deeper way. So if someone shares something with you, saying, tell me more about that, right? Asking follow-up questions, showing that you're engaged and curious about the other person. That can help you go deeper.

And then it can also be more structured questions. One that I love is, what's your rose, thorn, and bud this week? A rose is something that's going really well. A thorn is something that you're like a challenge you're facing or something you're struggling with. And then a bud is something you're looking forward to. That's a great way to kick off meetings, for example. So integrating these questions

and really it comes down to curiosity. You wanna get to know the other person better and you wanna share something about yourself as well. And asking these questions can help you get there. It kind of leads to another thing you talk about in the book, which is, and this is a big theme for Brene Brown, of whom I'm a great admirer, vulnerability. Like when to divulge, when not to, how to do it in a way that is winning as opposed to oversharing. What are your thoughts on that?

So a lot of data shows that one of the best ways to deepen a relationship is to do what's called self-disclosure. It's this idea of sharing something with another person about you that's personal, a challenge that you've gone through, something you're struggling with right now, an ambition that you dream about,

things like this that go beyond the surface level. The research shows that people like us more when we share things like that, when we confide in them. And we actually like the people we confide in more as well, which is kind of interesting. So this beautiful thing happens when you share something personal, which is it engenders trust in that conversation.

It brings you and that other person closer together. Now, when I first read this data, I did not like it because this has been hard for me. This is something that I've had to learn over time. When I was in high school, for example, my parents were going through a difficult divorce, and I didn't talk about it with any of my friends. I just didn't divulge what I was going through and the emotional experience and the stress of that. I didn't talk about it. And interestingly, it was actually meditation that helped me pivot and learn to do this in new ways. I remember the first time I did a self-compassion meditation, a guided one from Kristin Neff, a researcher who studies that topic.

I turned the compassion inward and started to practice this idea of acceptance and love toward myself. And as I did that, it actually ironically made it easier for me to open up to other people. And so what I found was that by loving and accepting myself, I could then more easily share the parts of myself that felt vulnerable, that made me a little bit nervous to open up to others. And so that's a journey that I've had to go through personally to understand what do you share? When do you share it with other people and the value of that?

It's scary. It's daunting. Connection isn't easy. That's why I wrote this book and that's why one in four people around the world say that they're lonely. It's this is something we have to learn and experiment with. And yet what I found time and time again in my own life, but also in the research is that when you do dare to go a little bit deeper and to share parts of yourself, chances are it's going to bring you closer to that other person and help bring a new level of meaning to our interactions. SELF DISCLOSURE IS A WINNING STRATEGY AND IT CAN GO TOO FAR. HOW DO WE KNOW HOW TO DRAW

THE LINE BETWEEN DOING IT IN A WAY THAT ENGENDRES TRUST AND DOING IT IN A WAY THAT REVOLTS PEOPLE? RIGHT. YEAH. I SAY IN THE BOOK, YOU, it's about divulging selectively. It's not burying your heart and soul to every random person. It's about confiding in people who you trust, first of all, and also in a context that's appropriate. Maybe it's not appropriate when you're having a work meeting and you have an agenda that you need to get through to suddenly open up about a struggle that you're going through, for example. So it's about being intentional. Who are the people in your life who you can go a little bit deeper with?

And maybe trying in small ways to start. Maybe sharing something that's, again, not your deepest, darkest secret, but something that feels a little bit vulnerable for you. And then seeing how they respond and doing that in context, maybe over a glass of wine versus when you're at a party surrounded by other people. and then seeing how they respond and doing that in context, maybe over a glass of wine versus when you're at a party surrounded by other people. So just being thoughtful about when and with whom you share. Let me go back to self-compassion. You referenced Kristin Neff. I'm a huge fan of hers. She's a frequent flyer on this show. One way to describe self-compassion

for people who haven't heard of it is that default mode for many of us is to talk to ourselves like a drill sergeant, pretty harsh on ourselves, many of us, and we talk to ourselves in ways we would, I think most of us not talk to a friend or a mentee or a kid, hopefully. And yet Kristen's research has demonstrated, and I think she's like a world changer really, that if we learn how to talk to ourselves like a friend, even though this too might feel forced or weird at first, it has been shown to make us more effective.

We are better at establishing habits, reaching our goals, we're more resilient. It's like the difference between a drill sergeant and a coach. A good coach doesn't fail to point out when you made a mistake, they're just not an asshole about it, hopefully. So one of my theories going into, I'm just gonna point out that this is a self-indulgent question. One of my theories in my book is that we have this thriving field of research

around social health and social fitness. You're at the forefront of that. And we also have a thriving field of research around self-compassion, but too often they're kind of sold independently. Now you make a reference to it in your book and you just made a reference now, but I kind of see it all as part of the same package.

It's about the quality of your relationships to everyone, including yourself. And I know you use this word love, and I like that word too. The tentative title for my book is Me, a Love Story. It's really about the skill of love, which is an omnidirectional force. And my worry is we're too often talking about loving yourself and loving other people as separate buckets when in fact they are inextricably interwoven. Your relationship with yourself will dictate how you treat other people.

This is me now stepping off my soapbox. What do you think of where I'm heading in my head? Yeah, I actually think that was very well put. I think they go hand in hand. In the book I write that one of the hallmarks of being socially healthy is having a strong relationship with yourself to begin with, because that primes you to be better able to connect with others. That doesn't mean you have to have a perfect relationship with yourself and have it all figured out. Of course, none of us do. We're continually learning

and continually adopting new ways of relating to ourselves. It's definitely a work in progress for me, right? I continue to be self-critical despite practicing what Kristin Neff endorses, but at the same time, putting intention into our relationships with ourselves, it goes hand in hand with connecting with other people. Like I went through, if you have love and compassion toward yourself, you can more easily

have it toward others and vice versa. So I completely agree. I think self-compassion is one tool for being socially healthy and that being socially healthy means connecting with yourself and connecting with others. Yes, yes. And I think about it as like a virtuous spiral that as your relationship to yourself improves, your relationship to other people improves, that has a huge impact on your sense of wellbeing.

So therefore your sense of how you are with yourself improves even further and up you go. It seems to be from the research that you can start from either side of the spiral. You can start working on your relationship to yourself or you can start by volunteering. You know, it's not necessarily true that you have to love yourself before you can love other people. I think we all know very generous people who are pretty mean to themselves. You can work on either side as a way to getting to the other. You agree or disagree with everything I just said there?

I completely agree. And I think an interesting analogy to pull here is thinking about exercise. So when you exercise regularly, that is obviously beneficial for your physical health, but it's also beneficial for your mental health. You have a better mood when you are in good shape physically. It also gives you more confidence to go into social interaction, so it might actually also improve your social health. And so just like we see this interconnectedness between physical, mental, and social health, there's also this interconnectedness between connection with

yourself and connection with others. These go hand in hand, they're mutually reinforcing. An analogy that I like to use with social health is that if you think about your overall health and wellbeing as a Greek temple, it's a triangle at the top, it's got different pillars that are lifting up this structure. If you think about that as your overall health

and wellbeing, each pillar, there's a pillar for physical health, there's a pillar for mental health, there's a pillar for social health. Each of those support the overall structure of your health and well-being and they're mutually reinforcing. If you took a sledgehammer and knocked down your social health or your mental health or your physical health, it would have detrimental effects for all the others and for your health and wellbeing overall. Whereas if you invest in your social health, that's going to bolster your physical and mental health too. And so I use this analogy because I think that it's also

true for connection with yourself and others. Helping one is going to help the other and being detrimental toward one is going to be detrimental toward the other. So they absolutely go hand in hand. And just to reinforce something you said earlier, because I can imagine people hearing this Greek temple thing and being like, I can't even hold up a pup tent,

too busy. But your point is that all of this stuff can be integrated into your life in a way that doesn't take it over and is in fact additive will boost all the things you say you care about. Yes, exactly. I've been talking about the health benefits of connection, but the research also shows that, for example, if you're more meaningfully connected at work, you're more productive. You produce better quality work. You are more efficient. You're more likely to stay in that job. In contrast, lonely employees are less effective.

They are more likely to take sick days or to quit their job or to be seeking a new one, which actually takes a large toll on the economy. So there are productivity benefits as well to cultivating these positive relationships. So absolutely, it's beneficial across the board. Let me go back to interpersonal relations. You've been talking a lot about how we should boost our connection quotient, etc, etc. That said, as you know, there are many obnoxious people in the world. So I would imagine part of social fitness is learning, and this is intertwined with self compassion in some ways, taking care

of yourself, learning to impose boundaries when they're called for. Yeah, this is so important. Not all connection is good connection. There are people who you are not going to get along with, who you will have conflict with, who are mean or rude or disrespectful, right, who don't treat you in the way that you deserve. That's not healthy.

That actually does a lot of harm. And we know that that does harm for our mental health, but it also does harm for our physical and social health. And so this is something I emphasize a lot in the book, that being socially healthy also means having boundaries, expecting to be treated with respect and kindness and treating others with that with respect and kindness and treating others with that same respect and kindness. And sometimes at the extreme level if

there's someone in your life who's abusive for example or who continually those interactions are more negative than they are positive, sometimes the socially healthy thing to do is to let that person go and to move on and to focus on the relationships that do bring you joy and meaning. It's difficult here because inevitably there's conflict in all of our relationships. Sometimes we clash with a co-worker and we disagree on something. Sometimes we fight with our partner and get mad at them about things. Conflict and friction is actually a normal part of a healthy relationship too.

But it's when that negativity crosses a line and really begins taking a toll that it's worth asking yourself, is this someone who should be in your life or is it better to focus on the people who are loving and respectful? Well said. Coming up, Casley talks about how to create a society that actually cultivates connection

and whether there's even possibly a role for legislation here. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery that pulls back the curtain on royal families, past and present, from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. Like the true stories behind the six wives of Henry VIII, whose lives were so much more than just divorced, beheaded, died,

divorced, beheaded, survived. Or Esther of Burundi, a princess who fled her home country to become France's first black supermodel. There's also Queen Christina of Sweden, an icon who traded in dresses for pants, had an affair with her lady-in-waiting, and eventually gave up her crown because she refused to get married.

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What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki and my podcast is back with a new season and let me tell you it's too good and I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest. Okay. Every episode I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends. I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

So follow, watch, and listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You did talk earlier about legislation. I'm interested to hear how you think legislation would help because all of the things we've been talking about seem like very individual decisions that we wouldn't want to force on anyone. Absolutely. I come from a public health background.

And what that means is that I have a deep kind of understanding and appreciation for the fact that what you can do as an individual and how socially healthy you are as one person is influenced by the culture and the context around you. So you are embedded in a neighborhood that has certain attributes. Maybe it's walkable, maybe it's not. Maybe there's good transportation, maybe there's not. You interact with the healthcare system and an education system and technology tools that are available in your culture that could be socially healthy or not. There's the broader context of the policy and the country that we live in and the culture and the social norms around us.

All of these different things in our environments are influencing our physical, mental and social health. And so thinking from a public health perspective and zooming out, I know that we need to empower individuals with the tools that you can apply in your life today to be more socially healthy. And at the same time, we need to be thinking about that broader context and how we can make it more conducive to social health.

How do we set up our society in a way where it's easier to be socially healthy and physically and mentally healthy? And so you bring up legislation and that's one lens through which we can think about this, right? Legislation affects all of our lives in ways that we don't necessarily recognize or see on a day-to-day basis and yet it's impacting it. Some countries have taken really interesting steps forward

in social health specifically. So for example, the UK and Japan both have appointed ministers for loneliness, so actually national positions to focus on this issue and to identify national strategies and steps forward to help address loneliness. I would argue that we instead should have ministers for social health because not everyone is lonely and yet everyone can benefit from investing in their social health because not everyone is lonely, and yet everyone can benefit from investing in their social health, right?

Just like not everyone is obese, and yet there are still ways that they can be more physically healthy. And so I think there's value in a strategy at the national level of saying, how do we think about this, right? What policies can we put in place? What funding can we provide to cities

or to community organizations to do the hard work of community building and changing the fabric of our social lives at the local level? So there are different opportunities there to think about dedicated legislation for social health, but also to consider social health as a lens in all the policy that we pass. So another example is thinking about parental leave. If you have three months to bond with your baby and take care of them, that's going to influence your physical, mental, and social health in different ways than a country like Germany, where people can take parental leave for up to three years, right? That's a different kind of context for how you can be socially healthy.

And so I think it's important that we consider the importance of social health in our legislation, but also in other areas of our lives, in the technology, in the tools that we're building, in our social media, in education, right? Thinking about teaching social health from a young age. It's very normal to take gym class to help kids learn to take care of their bodies. What about social health class to help them learn how to be good friends and how to resolve

conflict and how to develop meaningful relationships in the long term? Thinking about it in healthcare, increasingly there's a push for doctors to actually prescribe connection for people who might be at risk for feeling isolated or lonely. So you can see through these different examples that there are ways that we can set up our lives and start to change the fabric of our culture so that it's easier for each of us to be socially healthy.

Let's double click on schools for a second. I don't know much about the education system. I had heard of something called social and emotional learning, which I thought was maybe at least tangentially related to social health and fitness, but maybe you could educate me on what we are and are not doing with our kids in this regard. Social and emotional learning is one approach that could be helpful for social health.

And I haven't gone too deep in that specific type of curriculum, so I can't comment too much on it. I know that it is a little bit controversial, depending on political beliefs. Some people are very against it. Some people are very pro. But what I'm really getting at is that if we have gym class, why wouldn't we teach social skills as well? It's so imperative for us just to function as human beings to be able to get along, to

be able to navigate relational challenges. And so what I would advocate for is classes or workshops or opportunities where children and youth can really start to understand that social health is as important as their physical and mental health and start to develop those tools from a young age. There's really startling data showing that, for example, one experience of feeling rejected or bullied at a young age can actually have cascading effects across the lifespan in terms of people's ability to form strong relationships later on. And so it's really important that we're teaching these skills from a young age and helping kids understand the impact of connection on their lives.

So I think there's a real opportunity there. And there are some nonprofits who are doing this outside of the umbrella of social and emotional learning. So, for example, Only 7 Seconds is a nonprofit that I serve on the Scientific Advisory Board for. They have curriculum around loneliness and around thinking about your social health and the relationships that are important to you to again just help make it a part of a normal practice for kids. Similar to how meditation is increasingly being taught in schools as a way to strengthen mental health. These are tools that are available to us to live good,

healthy, enjoyable, long lives. Why not teach them from a young age? You also in the book talk about what you believe is the coming social wellness industry. I do. So there is a lot of innovation in this space. And to draw a parallel, if you look at mental health as that kind of idea and acceptance around mental health has become more and more common, so too, there has been a booming industry that has formed around it. access a therapist in many different ways, online or in person. If you want an app to help with your mental health, there are many tools around that and so on

and so forth, right? There's a whole huge booming industry around mental health and what we're going to see going forward is an emerging industry around social health and social wellness, right? And we're starting to see this already. There's already a lot of interesting innovation in this space. So one of the examples that I highlight is around social fitness gyms. So the idea of dedicated physical spaces

where you can go to exercise your social muscles, just like you would go to a gym to exercise your physical muscles, there are starting to be pop-up spaces where you can go to practice empathy, practice listening, practice conversation skills, the kind of tools that we need to be socially healthy. Another example is connection coaching. So increasingly there are people who offer dedicated services to help you be more socially healthy. Just like you can go to a personal trainer if you want to get more physically healthy, you can now turn to connection coaches for the same kind of thing.

So we're increasingly going to see more and more innovation in the space, a lot of investment. I didn't even mention the technology applications that are popping up, but there's a lot of investment. I didn't even mention the technology applications that are popping up, but there's a lot of innovation in the technology sector, again, to create tools that help you be more socially healthy. And so I think that's something to keep an eye on in the years to come. One last question for me, then I'll ask actually the two closing questions I always ask,

but one last question before that. You talk about the value of thinking like a scientist in this regard, what do you mean by that? Sometimes connection is hard, right? We all struggle with it at times. And so what I encourage people to do in the book is to adopt a mindset of experimentation. A good scientist is someone who's curious.

They're someone who is persistent, continually trying new experiments to get at the results that they're hoping for. It's someone who is objective. They're looking at things as data and information, pointing them in the direction that their work needs to go in. And so in that same way, we can think about our social lives. Be a scientist and experiment with connection in your life. I offer ideas for actually literally setting up an experiment and trying one thing every week, for example,

to stretch your social muscles and get you experimenting. But also it's just a mindset of being curious about connection, paying attention, reflecting on the interactions that you're having and how they leave you feeling. Being persistent, right? If you're in a place in your life right now where you do feel more disconnected or maybe you have close friends but you're struggling to feel connected to your local community or to your co-workers, right? Being persistent and continually

testing and experimenting and playing with it can just be a helpful mindset to weather those inevitable ups and downs. Just like physical and mental health ebb and flow over your life, so too does social health. And so if you have a more kind of resilient approach that means taking in stride that highs on the lows and having fun with it. Connection is beautiful.

Social health is something that enriches your life and the lives of the people around you. That's a beautiful thing to play with and experiment with and explore. It's beautiful and hard, as you said, and another one of my profane little expressions is that we need other people and other people can be a Titanic painting in the ass.

And both things are true at the same time. They absolutely can. Yep. Yep. Yep. Anything that you were hoping to talk about that we haven't gotten to yet? I don't think so. I think you asked wonderful questions.

I think my kind of parting message for people is to really recognize that your social health is as important as your physical and mental health. And to recognize that whether you're introverted or extroverted, if you feel really busy, no matter your age, there are simple steps that you can take to improve your social health. And through doing that, help the social health of the people around you and actually help strengthen your community.

So I hope that the book and this conversation are empowering for people, right? You have agency, there's a lot that you can do, while leaders in our countries and in our cities are also taking steps to create the conditions for better social health. Finally, can you please engage in a bonanza of self-promotion and tell us the name of your book and website and social media handles or anything else you want us to know about? Absolutely. So my book is called The Art and Science of Connection, Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier.

It's available anywhere books are sold. If you're interested in this topic, I have a newsletter on Substack. You can go to my website, casleykillam.com. There's links to the newsletter, to the book there. You can also follow me on social media at Casley Killam. And I'd love to connect with you and hear about your exploration of the space. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Dan. Thanks again to Casley Killam, great to talk to her. I want to remind you that if you liked what you heard today and you want to get a cheat sheet which summarizes all of the highlights and gives you a full transcript, you can get that by signing up at danharris.com. While there you'll also be able to chat with me and other listeners and you'll get access to monthly Ask Me Anything sessions that I'll be doing live and on camera. A lot going on over there. Would love your support and your feedback. Finally, I want to thank everybody who works so hard on

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