The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Secret to Making Friends as an Adult

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Loneliness is a far more common and far more serious problem than we think. It affects one in five Americans, and takes a toll on our bodies and minds. To thrive we need to several types of social interactions - both casual and more intimate.   With the help of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; Harvard Divinity School fellow Casper ter Kuile; and friendship expert Marisa Franco; Dr Laurie Santos looks at how loneliness might be affecting you or someone you know, and what science-back steps you can take to increase your circle of friends.  For further reading:  Vivek Murthy - Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Marisa Franco - Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends as an Adult. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. It's Miami in the 1980s, inside a local elementary school. And one of the students, Vivek, is feeling out of place. He's new to the city, new to the country even, and he's experiencing something that many of us are at least a little familiar with. Vivek is feeling lonely. Experiencing loneliness had very much to do with shyness. I was actually not deeply introverted. I wanted to spend time with other people, but I was really shy and I had a hard time making friends. Young Vivek lived in the shadow of that loneliness. The schoolyard, his homeroom, and lunch tables may have been bustling, but no one seemed to stop to get to

know the shy young boy in their midst. Going to school each day was stressful. I was always worried about cafeteria at lunchtime and sitting alone. I was worried about what would happen in the playground when people were choosing teams and I was worried that I might be chosen last, even though I had good athletic ability, but I just didn't have a lot of close friendships with people. Vivek's feelings of sadness and isolation extended beyond the school day. He went home to a supportive family, but he held his loneliness closely. It was his secret, his biggest source of shame. It was something he wasn't willing to share with anyone. I was embarrassed. I didn't want it to seem like I was somehow deficient in some way or

unable to interact with people. Vivek's shame was compounded by a sense of guilt. His parents had moved several times in only a few short years, looking for the best place to raise a young family. Despite his age, Vivek could sense how difficult this was for his parents. He didn't want to burden them further by revealing his unhappiness. I didn't want them to think that somehow this was their fault. You know, my parents had just come to the United States. They were dealing with a lot of different stresses and trying to figure out how to make sure we were okay in school. And they were working really hard at that.

And I just didn't want to make them feel like somehow they were falling short. And I don't think they were falling short. I think they were doing everything that a parent needs to do. If you've listened to previous episodes, you've probably heard that our minds are often unreliable, that we're prone to rationalizing or putting a positive spin on our tough memories by editing or forgetting them.

But Vivek's early experiences of loneliness are still seared into his brain. They've even given him a new mission in his career. Today, Vivek, to give his full title, is Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, M.D., two-time Surgeon General of the United States. Vivek's tackled many public health priorities while in office, but one of the issues he wants us to take more seriously is loneliness. Loneliness seems to be a near universal experience. It's far more common than we think.

And it's also much more consequential, both for our health as well as for how we show up in life, whether that's for our families, in the workplace, or in school. So that's what led me on the path of focusing on loneliness. We sometimes tell ourselves that loneliness affects only a sad minority of people. The widowed, the withdrawn, the weird. We think that a busy life in a bustling office, school, or workplace means that we can't be lonely. That having kids or a loving partner

can satisfy all of our complex social needs. And we usually assume that friendships just happen without our having to put in the work needed to seek out opportunities for connecting. But as you'll hear, our minds tend to lie to us about how social connection really works. And the truth is, loneliness is much more pervasive than we think. In fact, if the statistics are right, it's even possible that you're feeling lonely right now. And if you are, what can you do about it?

How can we fight our feelings of emotional isolation so that we can get all the happiness benefits that come from other people? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction.

You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. If I want to improve my physical health, there's plenty of reasonably specific, science-backed information out there. For example, the US Department of Health website lists the top 10 changes I should make to my diet. Things like limiting added sugar, or eating more whole grains. The same goes for exercise.

The CDC tells me I should do 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity every week, like this elliptical machine that I'm on right now. But despite the impact that loneliness has on our health and well-being, we don't have daily targets for social connection in the way we do for nutrition and exercise. There's no checklist telling you to say hello to five people in your neighborhood, or to spend 150 minutes per week having a real heart-to-heart with a person you trust. But these types of interactions are required for our health and happiness. And not getting a big enough dose could be taking a larger toll than you think.

When Vivek Murthy first became Surgeon General, he assumed he'd carry on the work of his predecessors, concentrating on health problems like obesity, smoking, and the opioid crisis. But loneliness, that feeling he remembered so vividly from childhood, quickly became an important part of his agenda. And that's because feeling lonely can have a devastating effect on our health. It appears that loneliness is strongly associated with an increased risk of heart disease and dementia and depression and anxiety. People who struggle with loneliness also have fragmented sleep. So they may sleep for the same number of hours as somebody else, but that sleep is broken up and marked by something called microawakenings,

where they don't fully wake up, but they nearly wake up. And that disturbed quality of sleep affects how restful your sleep is. It diminishes the quality of your sleep. There's also evidence that loneliness can be deadly. Take, for example, a famous paper by Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad. She and her colleagues used a technique known as a meta-analysis, in which you mathematically pool the results of all the existing studies on a topic to create a sort of mega-study with tons of statistical power. Julianne used this method and pooled more than a hundred studies on longevity and social connection. And her results were striking. People with strong social bonds were

50% less likely to die over a given period of time than those who had fewer social connections. And that scary finding may be even underestimating the true dangers of loneliness, since the studies she pulled together tended not to weed out things like bad marriages and toxic friendships from all those healthier social interactions. For a newly elected Surgeon General, such stark findings were hard to ignore. If you look at the degree of life-shortening, if you will, it appeared similar to the mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day

and greater than the mortality impact of obesity or sedentary living. But there's another feature of loneliness that makes it as much of a public health threat as so many other big challenges. And that's its commonality. According to some surveys, nearly a fifth of people in the United States today admit to struggling with loneliness. And just to put this in context, 22% of adults in the United States is more than the percentage of adults who smoke cigarettes. It's more than the percentage of adults who have diabetes. So this is exceedingly common.

who smokes cigarettes. It's more than a percentage of adults who have diabetes. So this is exceedingly common. And if more than one in five adults are impacted by loneliness, that means that you likely know somebody who's struggling with loneliness. That very well may be you. It could be your spouse. It could be your friends. It could be your family. But we tend not to realize that people close to us are feeling lonely, often because they're taking active steps to hide it. Vivek found that people were surprisingly willing to talk openly about their struggles with things like obesity and addiction, but loneliness, not so much. There was a stigma around loneliness that was also universal, a sense that if you admitted you were lonely, that somehow you were not likable or that you were deficient in some way.

And that kept a lot of people from admitting their struggles. But in closed conversations and in private moments, people of all backgrounds and age groups would share that they were struggling with loneliness. I'll be the first to admit that there are definitely times when I've felt lonely. I mean, I have a wonderfully supportive husband and I work with a great team of stimulating students and colleagues. I get to interact with lots of great people throughout my day. But those same times when work keeps me really busy are also times when I have little opportunity to see my friends. And this pattern is something I have in

common with Vivek, especially when he first started his new job. I think we can get caught up in that narrative and convince ourselves in almost a martyrish sort of way that we're doing something for a cause greater than ourselves and using that as justification for letting our relationships slide. And what I came to realize in retrospect is that the cost of that misprioritization was greater than I could have imagined. Vivek's new role meant that he was interacting with dozens of interesting people every single day, even President Obama. But quality time with the commander-in-chief can't make up for missed opportunities to connect with the people we care about most. I had become distanced from good friends that I had strong relationships for years. I had realized that even this time I was spending with my family was not

nearly as high quality as it should have been, you know, as I was often distracted by emails and work and phone calls, even during family dinners and other family outings. The evidence suggests that just like a balanced diet or proper exercise routine, we also need a variety of social interactions to stay healthy and avoid loneliness. Some of those can be shallow and fleeting. Others need to be lasting and more intimate. Vivek has found there's no single quick fix. If we're lonely, we need to sometimes do more than just changing the number of people we interact with. Putting ourselves in the middle of a crowd or showing up at a party or going to mixers are not necessarily always the solution to loneliness.

In his fantastic book, Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vivek explains just how complicated loneliness can be. There are three types of loneliness. There's intimate loneliness, which is feeling that you sometimes lonely world. Vivek explains just how complicated loneliness can be. There are three types of loneliness. There's intimate loneliness, which is feeling that you lack a close confidant, somebody who you can deeply trust with just about everything, somebody who knows you deeply and who you know deeply. And when you lack that kind of relationship in your life, then people experience intimate loneliness. There's also something called relational loneliness, when we experience the absence of friendships, where we would get together with somebody or with a group of people on weekends or on evenings. We may go on vacations. We may call them up, you know, to go to a ball

game or to watch a movie together. And finally, there's something called collective loneliness, which is what we experience when we don't have the benefit of identity with a common group. Now, identity may come from a shared interest or affiliation. We may find, for example, that we have a sense of community with the alumni of our college or the people that we go to work with. The truth is we need all three of these to feel deeply connected in the most comprehensive way. Intimate friend connection, relational connection, and collective connection. To fully address the dangers that come with loneliness, we need to make sure we're getting the right doses of each of these three types of social connection.

But how do we do that? We'll answer that question when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Back when I was a grad student in the early 2000s, a new book came out that prompted lots and lots of conversations among my friends. It was called Bowling Alone by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. The title of Putnam's book came from an observation about leisure over the last few decades. Back in the 1950s, Americans used to belong to bowling leagues. They met weekly with a team to play competitively against other local players.

But by the late 90s, people's bowling behaviors had changed. They seemed to just prefer bowling alone. Putnam argued that the bowling example is part of a much larger demographic change. He found that membership in all kinds of organizations, labor unions, veterans groups, rotary clubs, they were in decline too. People just didn't seem to want to belong to social groups anymore. Collective connection, that important feeling of belonging that we get from sharing interests with a community of like-minded people, it had gotten scarcer and scarcer. Putnam's thesis rang true with the people I knew in grad school.

None of us were really part of groups. And this was in a time before smartphones, a time in which most activities were IRL, in real life. Since Bowling Alone was written, so much more of our lives has migrated online and onto screens. I mean, the last time I went bowling was inside my house using a Wii controller. This growing trend towards bowling alone, or bowling virtually as it were, has meant that collective loneliness is on the rise. An entire generation has missed that important sense of community that our parents and grandparents probably took for granted back in the day. We should be careful, though, about pointing to the 1950s as some sort of norm. This is podcast host and Harvard Divinity School fellow, Caspar Turquayle.

A lot of people were participating in these structures, even though they didn't necessarily really want to. But because if you didn't, it meant being socially ostracized. But nonetheless, I think one of the things that we're looking for, certainly in the future, is new structures of relationship that hold us together. Casper studies how our culture is shaped by collective organizations like religious groups and the happiness lessons we can learn from them. You might remember Casper from a previous episode about the power of rituals and the particular ritual Casper developed, which involved watching the bad rom-com movie, You've Got Mail. Bad rom-com, Laurie.

I'm kidding. Is it not a rom-com? No, but it's good. I'm sorry to interrupt. Just as Casper advocated making a ceremonial ritual with that genre-defining rom-com classic, he also argues that we need to copy what religion does right in order to improve our collective loneliness. There's lots of evidence that individuals who engage in religious services

are happier than those who report not being so religious. But the science suggests that this happiness boost doesn't stem from what religious individuals believe. It's not due to a faith in the afterlife or a specific set of spiritual tenets. Religious individuals get a well-being bump from social support and that sense of belonging that comes from hanging out at religious services. Religion seems to make us happier because it reduces our collective loneliness.

And that's why Casper's such a huge fan of religion, which has always struck me as a little odd. Because Casper also identifies as kind of a hardened gay atheist. When Casper tried joining a church congregation as a kid, he didn't immediately get the connection that follows from a like-minded community. Instead, he felt isolated and alone.

Certainly feeling very like I was not welcome in the little Christian lunchtime club where they had free Kit Kats and Mr. Kennedy played the guitar and was very handsome. So I went a couple of times until I realized it was not welcome in the little Christian lunchtime club where they had free Kit Kats and Mr. Kennedy played the guitar and was very handsome. So I went a couple of times until I realized that was not for me. And as I grew older, I started to realize that really the traditions that have thought most about the questions that mean so much to me are religious traditions, right? They ask questions like, what do we owe one another?

How should we be together? What does a healthy community look like? How do we look after each other? How can we find joy together? And those are the questions I love to think about. As a Divinity School fellow, Casper began studying whether other secular public spaces could offer the community-building interactions

that churches provided. And he found a great example in gyms. You're there to lose weight, get a hot body, be strong, whatever it is. But the reason why people stay is because they're building relationships or they're finding meaning in these experiences. Kasper has found that some gyms and fitness centers have, perhaps unwittingly, picked up on our thirst for community

and have incorporated it into their exercise programs. You're kind of forced into a bit of a social interaction, even though it's a little awkward, so you're high-fiving people. The fact that the whole design of the workout means that no one finishes until everyone's finished. So I don't know if you've ever been in this situation, Laurie, but I certainly have. And it was very intense. I was the last one to finish some horrific series of running and lifting and burpees.

And everyone stood around me clapping, like shouting my name, being like, you can do it. And of course, in the moment, I hated every single one of them. But afterwards, I really felt like I would not have done it if they hadn't been there. That sense of I can do something more because of this community being around me is a really powerful motivator to keep pushing yourself. So they allow for that kind of community support, but in a way that's very invitational. And that's a really powerful thing. But if you're suffering from collective loneliness and don't want a solution that

involves tight lycra and burpees, Casper also has another suggestion. Sign up for a class. A kind of communal learning environment is a great way to meet people in a way that's not very intense. So it might be singing in a choir. It might be calligraphy classes. It might be learning how to code. Whatever it is, put yourself in a communal learning environment where you get to learn alongside other people, and the fastest relationships often happen in that kind of context. Casper has argued there's another way that many organized religions reduce collective loneliness. They often use a shared text to bring people together. Think the Bible or the Torah. But

could a similar sense of belonging and shared values come from a non-religious text? Casper thought of a colleague who'd started a reading group about mental health using only the novels of Charlotte Bronte. I hadn't read J. Mayer, and so I suggested, why don't we do this with a book that lots of people definitely love and for which there's a very active fandom, which is, of course, the Harry Potter series. And so we started a weekly class where we invited people to come and read and talk about the books with us. And it was wonderful because really over nine months, we built a little bit of a congregation. You know, people visited each other in hospital. They became roommates. They fell in and out of love. You know, all the things that happen in a community.

Casper's reading group also became a podcast called Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. It led fans all over the world to set up their own in real life congregations. There's now hundreds of local groups of people getting together to read and talk about the books. What's been more amazing than anything else is when COVID hit,

the listeners self-organized to create a mutual aid fund of podcast listeners. So people were sending money to each other to support one another through the pandemic. That was really a moment when I was like, okay, this is a community. They're really doing things together. If you'd have told me that I would have started a community of tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans, I would have been very surprised. Because honestly, I didn't create it.

I just made the first invitation to a few people. And so I really hope people know that they can create community. Casper's work shows that we can fight collective loneliness. We just need a way to actually meet people who share our hobbies. If you like basketball, go watch a game out in the world, rather than catching it in your living room. Don't just give money to a good cause. Try volunteering.

That band you play on repeat on Spotify? Try catching their next concert in person and meeting fellow fans. And Casper is quick to point out that collective community doesn't need to involve a huge crowd. All it takes is inviting one or two people, maybe over to share a meal, maybe you're going to go for a walk together to just talk about something that you love. And that's so often these communities organically will grow. So those are some strategies for fighting collective loneliness, that first type of loneliness that Vivek identified. But how can we tackle the other two kinds of loneliness that plague so many of us?

How can we find a new group of friends to connect with relationally? Or that one bestie with whom we can talk more intimately? We'll talk about strategies for creating these deeper relationships when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. So I was certainly really nervous about moving to a new place where I didn't really know anyone. Marissa Franco was experiencing a challenge that many of us face in the modern day, relocating to a new city for work. She had just moved to Atlanta, and in addition to finding a new place to live and figuring out a new commute, she also struggled with the need to completely rebuild her friendship network from scratch.

At first, I was like really intentional about trying to meet new people. You know, I went to happy hours, I went to events, but it seemed like nothing was really sticking. You know, I met a couple of new people, but then it wouldn't really go anywhere. Marissa is a fellow psychologist, so she decided to take a scientific approach and to quantify her experience. She knew about the famed UCLA loneliness questionnaire. And I was like, why don't I take it? And when I took it, I realized that I was lonely. I thought I'm around people all day. How could I be lonely? But I think in that moment, I realized that loneliness is actually about feeling comfortable around people, feeling like yourself,

feeling authentic around people, feeling seen around people. So I realized I was lonely and I was struggling to make friends. But Marissa knew what steps to take next. Because she's not just a psychologist. She's also an expert on the science of friendship, an author of Platonic, how the science of attachment can help you make and keep

friends as an adult. If anyone should understand the importance of having a squad, it's Marissa. I mean, friendships, there's some research that finds that it brings us joy more than our other relationships. And I think part of that is because friends aren't encumbered with the same responsibility and weight. There's just not the same level of obligation. I don't have to talk to my friends about doing our taxes together. I don't have to talk to them about planning for groceries. So there's this way that friendship just ends up being this relationship of sort of pleasure. And I also think that because there's no pressure to have friends like there is to be in a romantic relationship, that we end up choosing friends that are truly sort of compatible with us. Relocating to Atlanta made it difficult for Marissa to keep in contact with her old friends.

But the science shows it's not just a cross-country move that can upset the fragility of our friendship circles. Every seven years, we lose about half our friends. Friendship networks have been shrinking for the last 30 years. I think we're in a time of like great crisis around friends. There's other research that finds that the average person hasn't made a new friend in the last five years, even though about half of people report that they would like to make a new friend if they only knew how.

The problem is that our minds lie to us about how friendships work. We assume they just kind of happen. And to be fair, this assumption fits with how many of our friendships did develop when we were younger. Making friends back then was often as simple as going through some shared experiences at camp or in school or college. But Marissa's found that's not how it works later in adulthood. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that I hear when it comes to making friends is I want it to happen organically. I want these friends to kind of fall into my life. And there's a study that kind of tested these beliefs and how they'd affect us over time. And it found that people that thought friendship was something that happened based on luck were actually lonelier years later, whereas those people that saw it as happening

based on effort were less likely to be lonely years later. So it really does take initiative, intentionality to go out there and make friends. Which raises a question. Why aren't we putting ourselves out there more often in order to make friends and fight our relational loneliness? The first issue for many of us, including me, is time. Studies suggest we feel busier than ever, and time famine is a recipe for engaging less with other people. But an even bigger issue is that many of us are kind of anxious when it comes to making new friends, which stems at least in part from yet another way our minds lie to us, a common cognitive bias known as the liking gap. These researchers, they had

strangers interact across a number of settings, and they found that in general, people underestimated the degree to which the person they interacted with liked them. And so I think what this research suggests is that people like us more than we think they do. And one of my biggest pieces of advice for people to help them get into the mindset to make friends is start assuming that people like you. It's a mindset that even Marissa has had to use for herself when making new friends. You know, I actually go into this place where I remind myself, people are going to accept me. That's sort of my new internal dialogue. But overcoming the liking gap and changing your mindset is only the first step to reducing our

anxiety when it comes to connecting with new people. We also have to commit to accepting the small bouts of anxiety that come from actually engaging with the people we meet. It's a discomfort I know well myself. Like, I'll be at a house party and I'll start feeling weird about chatting with strangers, so I'll spend the entire time looking at my phone. Or hanging out with the host's cat. Or I'll go to a new yoga studio in order to meet new people, but then I'll sprint off as soon as class ends without chatting with anybody. Something that I've talked about is the idea of covert or overt avoidance. So overt avoidance is, you know, we're kind of nervous about meeting new people.

So we don't put ourselves out there. But then covert avoidance is that we do put ourselves out there. We do show up at the event. But when we do, we don't engage with people while we're there. We're watching the game. We're playing with the dog. And I think to make friends, we have to really overcome both of these forms of avoidance. We need to show up. And then when we get there, we need to start introducing ourselves, saying hello. Overcoming this hurdle of covert avoidance is especially important for people who suffer from social anxiety. So they'll, for example,

they won't talk too much. You know, when the conversation gets quiet, they'll start disengaging and playing on their phone. And all of these are behaviors for their own self-protection. But it turns out that when they're engaging in these behaviors, they make rejection more likely. So when the researchers told the people with social anxiety, stop using those safety behaviors, they were more open, they were more engaged, and actually their interaction partner liked them more. So I think when it comes to making friends, there's all these things that we might do to protect ourselves from rejection, like not seeming too interested, not seeming too enthusiastic. And in fact, the other person is afraid of rejection too. So when we do those behaviors, the other person is like, oh, that person is rejecting me. Overcoming our relational loneliness

requires remembering that other people are feeling the exact same anxieties we are. The science shows that taking the first step and making them feel more comfortable will often lead to more connection than we expect. But Marissa admits doing this isn't easy, even for a friendship expert like her. When she first moved into a new apartment block, she made little progress befriending her neighbors. We pass it in the hallway and, you know, I say a quick hi, but don't really interact with them. Marissa's partner witnessed this and immediately called her out. Marissa, you need to take your own advice. Go over there and introduce yourself. And so he sort of pushes me out the door. And so then I go over to them and I say, you know,

hey, my name is Marissa. I just moved into this apartment building. It's so nice to meet you. We start talking. We exchange phone numbers. We end up forming a WhatsApp group. And then every week during the pandemic, we've done a socially distanced gathering in the garden. And I look back and I'm like, it would have been so easy for that to not happen, right? I think sometimes we think, you know, it won't make a difference if I reach out to people. Like, you know, the social world that we live in is outside of our control. But I think sometimes we think, you know, it won't make a difference if I reach out to people like, you know, the social world that we live in is outside of our control. But I think that really showed me that our social worlds are very much within our control. And there are intentional actions we can take that can really change the trajectory of our friendships. relational closeness to the more intimate kinds of friendships, that third category of social connection that Vivek Murthy mentioned earlier? Are there steps we can take to turn a regular relational friend into a ride-or-die bestie? Ultimately, when it comes to making friends, people think the people that are good at making friends are really cool or really smart or really

accomplished. But in fact, what I find from the research is that the people that are really good at making friends are really good at making other people feel like they matter. They're good at affirming other people. And surprisingly, one of the best ways to affirm another person, to make them feel valued and special, is to get really vulnerable in front of them. Voluntarily sharing a problem and asking for help. Intentionally admitting that you're struggling and not sure what to do. Even shedding an embarrassing tear. We assume that such overt displays of our own weaknesses would make potential besties avoid us like the plague. But this is yet another spot where our

minds lie to us. It's a bias that German psychologist Anna Brooke and her colleagues have christened the beautiful mess effect. Which is basically the idea that when we're vulnerable, people actually perceive us a lot more positively than we think they do. People actually like it when we're vulnerable. It makes them feel special to hear our intimate struggles, and it allows them the opportunity to share more intimately with us. Our messiness is far more beautiful to potential friends than we think. A lot of the things that we think burden people bring us closer to one another. So for example, showing vulnerability in general, the more we disclose intimately to others,

the more they like us. And it's so interesting because we tend to think, you know, we're going to push other people away. They're going to think we're too much. But in fact, that vulnerability conveys that we are authentic, that we are honest, that we trust them. And all of these things bring people closer to us. Just as initiating the contact needed to build up our relational connections involves a bit of courage, so too does cementing more intimate friendships. But if we value fighting loneliness, it's critical to take this scary step. We need to open up, reveal our inner selves, and share things we often keep hidden. But Marissa's seen firsthand that following the scientific advice really can reduce loneliness. I feel like I'm living proof. I mean, since I've started studying friendship, I have become so much better at taking

initiative. I realized that I don't necessarily have to be an amazing, magnificent person to be an attractive friend, that all I have to do is make other magnificent person to be an attractive friend. All I have to do is make other people feel loved and valued. And so that's my bigger priority now around my friendship. It's not being special or being funny or being particularly insightful. It's making sure that I treat my friends in ways that align with how much I love them. The research shows that lots and lots of us have something in common with young Vivek back in that 1980s schoolyard. Many of us are surrounded by people all the time, but we're still not enjoying the full range of human interactions we need to be happy. We might not feel like we're part of a community,

or a crew of friends, or a close relationship. Like young Vivek, we might be saddened and ashamed by our loneliness. We might curse all our imagined shortcomings and wish there was something we could do to feel more connected. But I hope this episode has shown you that finding friends doesn't require luck or the perfect personality. Like most of the good things we talk about in this podcast, connecting better requires understanding some of the mind's lies and then putting in some time and work. But the science shows that with a little initiative, we can begin building the foundations of nourishing relationships, whether they're casual and breezy and based on

the love we have for our favorite book, or intimate and personal based on revealing our inner world to the people we meet. It is a lot of work, even for the experts, but a less lonely life is possible. And the benefits are huge for your health and your happiness. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano,

Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.