Unlocking Us with Brené Brown - Dr. Vivek Murthy and Brené on loneliness and connection

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Have you ever struggled with feeling lonely — even when you’re surrounded by people you love? I have. It’s painful and confusing. In this episode, I talk to Dr. Vivek Murthy, a physician and the 19th surgeon general of the United States, about loneliness and the physical and emotional toll that social disconnection takes on us. We talk about his new book, Together, and what it takes for each of us to tilt the world toward love and connection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Macy's. Fall is in full swing, and it's the perfect time to refresh your home and wardrobe for the sweater weather with new finds from Macy's. From October 9th to October 16th, get amazing deals on shoes and boots, on sale at 30-40% off. And you can shop new styles during the Macy's Fab Fall Sale, from October 9th to October 14th. Shop oversized knits, warm jackets, and trendy charm necklaces and get 25% to 60% off on top brands when you do. Plus, get great deals on cozy home accessories from October 18th to October 27th. Shop in-store or online at macys.com. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic.

But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo. Hi, I'm Brene Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. Today, I'm going to talk to Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States from 2014 to 2017.

As America's doctor, he called the nation's attention to critical public health issues, including the opioid epidemic, e-cigarettes, emotional health, and well-being. As the Vice Admiral of the U.S. Public Service Commissioned Corps, he oversaw a uniform service of 6,600 officers dedicated to safeguarding the health of the nation. Dr. Murthy, or Vivek as I call him in our interview, has a new book out on loneliness. And God, it just hit me right and just pierced my heart a little bit. The book is called Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. And we're going to dig in today about what is loneliness, what isn't loneliness, and how we can be more connected to ourselves and to each other.

This is an important episode for me. I can really battle loneliness sometimes, even with people I love. And he helped me kind of dig in and understand. So I hope it resonates. I hope you get something out of it. This is such an important time to be talking not only about what loneliness is, but about what loneliness is not. And so can we just start at the very beginning? What is loneliness? Well, I'll answer that in two ways, Brene. I'll tell you what researchers and

scientists would say loneliness is, and then I'll tell you what people, real people in communities across the country told me loneliness was. Loneliness, as you'll see it defined in the literature, is a discrepancy, gap if you will between the connections that you need and the social connections that you have it's by definition a subjective term what that also means is it's different from objective terms like isolation which are more descriptors of the number of people you have around you so i can have many people around me and feel quite lonely, but I could also have just a few people around me and not be lonely at all. It's often about the quality of my connections both to myself and to the people around me. But there's what people, I think, describe as

loneliness and how they experience it in their own lives. When I was Surgeon General, I began my tenure visiting communities across the country, and I didn't ask people about loneliness. Actually, I asked them just a very open-ended question, which is, how can I help? And I tried to listen to what they had to say. But as they described many of the concerns they had, whether it was substance use disorders or violence or chronic diseases like obesity that they saw ramping up in their communities. What I heard were these stories of loneliness. And people wouldn't say, I'm lonely, but they would say things like, I feel like I'm carrying this entire load all by myself. I feel like if I disappear tomorrow, nobody would even care. I feel like I'm invisible. So that's what loneliness feels like

to many of us who are experiencing it in everyday life. and I've had very few people identify loneliness as the experience or emotion that they're feeling. But so many of them are just describe it to us. I'm thinking about some work that the Air Force is doing with our work. And there's a story that Dee Dee Halfhill, an officer in the Air Force tells tells where she's addressing troops. And she said, how are you doing? And they all said, tired, tired. We're really tired. And she started digging in and kind of peeling the onion.

And she said, how many of you are lonely? And people just couldn't even speak. They put their heads down and their hands up and said, I'm lonely. I'm really lonely. It just shows up so many different ways. What are some of the ways that loneliness shows up in our lives? Yeah. You know, that's such a powerful story you just mentioned. And my experience was almost identical to that, that while nobody came to me and said, I'm lonely, when I started to surface it more explicitly and ask how many people feel lonely or how many people are worried about loneliness in their lives and the lives of people that you love, I saw these visceral looks of recognition.

Over the time that I served, I had to talk about so many public health issues. And sometimes I could see that people weren't really connecting with them. Sometimes I could see they were connecting cerebrally. Zika actually was an example of that. When I was dealing with the Zika outbreak, that was a time when people would kind of put two and two together and say, okay, I understand these are the risks. These are the things I should do to prevent it. Okay, I got it. This makes sense. But there were some moments where people would connect really viscerally to a topic because it touched on a life experience they had had. And loneliness was one of those topics.

But I think the reason that we don't hear about it, and we ourselves may not even recognize it's in our own lives, I think have to do with a few things. I think number one, there's this deep stigma around loneliness, the shame that comes with loneliness. It makes us think that if we are lonely, that we're not likable, that we're broken in some way. And that prevents us not just from admitting it to other people, but even from admitting it to ourselves. And I think the second reason though, we don't always see it is because it doesn't look like the person at a party sitting alone in the corner loneliness in fact can manifest

in different ways as social withdrawal it can manifest as anger it can manifest as irritability it can show up in different ways and it can also lead to different types of illnesses I came to realize in the work that I did during my time in government and afterward, that loneliness was often one of the root contributors to substance use disorders and addiction, that it was a key part of what was driving violence in so many people's lives and in their communities. And so if we look around us, I think we will see the manifestations of loneliness, but it looks very different from the stereotype that we often have in our heads.

It flies underneath the radar there at a really deep level, affecting us in profound ways, but just beyond our vision. And hence we don't address it and we don't talk about it nearly as often as I think we need to. You know, it's hard because I think about my own experiences of loneliness, which I believe we all have experiences of loneliness, right? We all have. And when I think back on my life and the bouts of loneliness that I've had and the experiences of loneliness, I have never been more lonely in my life than when I was surrounded by people I knew and even loved. And some of the most fulfilling connected times I've had, I've been alone.

And so I didn't know what to call it when I was growing up, but I would be surrounded maybe by family or I'd be at school and there would be 10 people around me, but I would be so deeply lonely. Like I thought something was wrong with me. I didn't know if I was having like a panic attack. We for sure didn't know what that was back then. But one of the things that you write in this book is, I'm going to read it to you and let's talk about it. Is that okay?

Yeah. Okay. Researchers have identified three dimensions of loneliness to reflect the particular type of relationships that are missing. Intimate or emotional loneliness is the longing for a close confidant or intimate partner, someone with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust. Relational or social loneliness is the yearning for quality friendships and social companionship and support. Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your

sense of purpose and interests. These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive. The lack of relationships in any of these dimensions can make us feel lonely, which helps to explain why we may have a supportive marriage yet still feel lonely for friends and community. Tell me about those experiences that I had. I can still have them when I'm surrounded by people I love and who love me, but I feel deeply lonely. Am I the only one? Absolutely not. In fact, there are many of us who have those experiences, myself included.

When I was a child, I felt that same way. I had parents and a sister who deeply loved me, and those would constitute the intimate connections, those relationships where we feel like we can truly be ourselves with another person where we can show up as who we are and where we don't have to hold back and we know that we're loved so i had that but what i didn't have bernie is i didn't have those relational connections that second category i didn't have the friendships where i could hang out with somebody in PE or in between classes or sit next to them. I'll tell you the scariest time for me in the school day was

lunchtime, going into that cafeteria and wondering who am I going to sit next to, or will there be anybody who will want me to sit next to them? And this wasn't because I didn't like being with people or I was an extreme introvert. It was that I was actually quite shy. And so lacking those relational connections left me quite lonely, even though I had those deeper intimate connections in my life. The reason I think this is so important to understand is that if you're in a deeply fulfilling marriage, but you feel lonely because you don't have those relational connections or you're experiencing collective loneliness, the lack of a community, if we don't understand that there are different types of relationships that we need, it could lead your spouse to think that they're failing

you in some way. To think, well, if you're feeling lonely, that must mean that this marriage isn't as good as I thought. But that's not the case. We can have deeply fulfilling marriages and best friends and family that we know loves us, but still feel lonely in other dimensions of our life. And it doesn't mean that our intimate connections are deficient in any way. We need all three dimensions to feel socially connected in the way that feeds us, right? That's right. What about in situations where I kept thinking as I was reading your book about, I was with people who loved me and people I loved, but not people that I could really be myself with. I was the good girl, the performer, the pleaser. Do you think those behaviors, the perfectionism and the pleasing can drive loneliness because we're not allowing ourselves to truly be seen? Absolutely. One of the things I

learned in the writing of this book was that the foundation for connecting with other people is connecting with ourself. And to be connected to yourself means one that you understand your worth that you understand your value and that gives you the power to be yourself in different settings and to not try to be somebody that you're not because you feel you're not enough but the other piece of this of being connected to your oneself has to do with being grounded and And we live in a world, and especially now at a time, when the world around us is often chaotic. And being able to let that noise settle and center ourselves and be in a place of peace is so powerful because when we approach other people from that place of groundedness, and when we approach other people knowing our true sense

of worth and believing in ourselves, the kind of interaction we have is very different. We approach people with a willingness to listen and an ability to more be ourselves as opposed to trying to get something from them, which is a sense of validation as we try to be somebody that they think we should be. And so I do think that- Wow, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You got to stop and say that again. Approaching people for genuine connection versus approaching people for validation.

That's right. And I see this from personal experience, having spent many years of my life not being in a good place of connection with myself, feeling insecure about who I was, trying to be somebody else and bringing that to my interactions with other people. And it didn't feel good. As human beings, we are extraordinary creatures. We have evolved these systems over thousands of years and these instincts that guide us toward deeper connection with other people. And we often may not know when something is off in an interaction, what exactly is off, but we often know something is off. There are times when for all of us, where we may go into a conversation, you know,

and we're nervous and we're trying to be again, who we think the other person wants to be. And we sort of feel okay in the moment. Hopefully this is going well. I think that they like me, et cetera. And then you turn away from that conversation and you just feel emotionally drained. Because the thing about having to live in a persona that's not you or trying to strive to be somebody who's not you is it has a massive emotional tax. And it drains us of our energy. And that means we have less to give to other people. And it also means that we don't feel as

good. And I spent a lot of time in my life feeling that way. And so I think, yes, when we think about the power of social connection and how to address loneliness, we not only have to think about how we engage with other people, we have to think about that connection we have to ourselves and recognize it's a lot of times the problem begins there and it's not actually on the outside. It's so interesting to me because I get this question a lot around different constructs, but it's like, I'm going to pose it to you. It's unanswerable for me. This question comes up all the time. It's a chicken egg question. Social connection and reciprocal relationships really drive a sense of self-worth. And we need a sense of self-worth to enter into reciprocal, meaningful relationships. That's hard, right? Is it just a slow stacking of those

things or is there a temporal relationship between those variables? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think if we don't find a way to think about how these things work together, it can be paralyzing. Yeah. Right. When I'm not ready to go out and interact with other people because I'm not fully connected to myself yet. Right. But I actually think these things do work off of each other. And they're simply the recognition that our connection with ourselves is important and that it influences how we connect with other people, simply that can be powerful because it gives us the ability to observe our interactions with others and to understand more deeply why we may feel good or not so good after an interaction.

But these things build. So one of the things that I've tried to do in my own life and i say this is somebody who has spent many years of his life trying to build a more connected life but has by no means always been successful at that and still struggles you know with this every day but one of the things that i've tried to do is to make sure that i'm keeping tabs and checking in on how i'm feeling during my interactions and if if I'm not feeling good, then I actually try to pull myself out and say, Hey, am I just not in a good place? And if I'm not in a good place, then I need to spend a little time getting in a better place before I try to keep pushing and pushing and building a connection with people or finding more friends or connecting with more people at a party. And, you know, I say this because, say this because I feel like I spent so much of my life

in a culture that was telling me that the way we advance in our lives, the way we solve problems, the way we succeed is through action. And what I've come to realize is that being and doing are two parts of who we are, but the doing part is guided by the being. Meaning if we can be in a good place, then we can often do better. But if we don't focus on how we feel, on how grounded we are, if we're not focused enough on the being, then we're just spinning our wheels so often in action, trying to work so hard to push a boulder uphill. Whereas we can get so much more leverage in our life if we

can be in the right place, a place of centeredness, a space of peace, a place where we value and love ourselves. And so that's where I think it's really important to recognize that there is this interplay. And it also means that if I interact with somebody who makes me feel good, then I also try to think about that too. What was it about that? Was it that I had a breakthrough moment where I let my guard down, allowed myself to be vulnerable and was real with the other person? If so, then I want to do more of that. Is it that they did that with me?

And by being vulnerable, they actually empowered me to be the same with them. And that's such a gift. In this way, I think we don't have to seclude ourselves till we get to a point where we are maximally connected with ourselves and then venture out into the world. We can do these two things at the same time. And in fact, I think we need to because they do play off of each other. Yeah. That's how we learn, right? God, I really prefer doing to being sometimes, but it's just easier.

Okay. Me too. It's easier. It's easier. So let's talk about the consequences of loneliness for a second. So am I saying this right? Julianne Hold-Lunstad? Yes.

Yes. Her research. So reading again from your book together, Julianne's study showed that people with strong social relationships are 50% less likely to die prematurely than people with weak social relationships. Even more striking, she found that the impact of lacking social connection on reducing lifespan is equal to the risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's greater than the risk associated with obesity, excess alcohol consumption, and a lack of exercise. You write, simply put, Julianne had found that weak social connections can be a significant danger to our

health. Five years later, Julianne published another massive analysis of data. I think these were meta-analyses, right? These were meta-analyses. So for y'all listening, this is where you look at a lot of different research from different researchers that's valid and reliable data and combine to see what the trends are across the research. So another study, meta-analysis, confirming the higher risk of early death among the lonely. So by that point, you write, a growing number of research papers were reporting that loneliness was associated with a greater risk of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Studies were also suggesting that lonely people were more likely to have lower quality sleep, more immune system dysfunction, and more impulsive behavior and impaired judgment. Like this is no joke. You're right. And this was one of the things that

struck me. And in fact, it smacked me in the face when I was Surgeon General, because I didn't know this before. I didn't learn that in medical school. I didn't learn it in residency training. Why not? Well, I think there are a few reasons. I think one, just traditionally in medicine, we have focused so much on the physical body and so

little on the mental and emotional dimensions of health. And I think the other reason is that I would say doctors, nurses, and are just like any other human being in this respect in that they tend to focus on what they know. You know, there's this old parable I remember hearing growing up about the man who's looking under a street lamp. And then the passerby comes by and says, hey, can I help you? What are you looking for? And he says, I lost my keys. I'm trying to find them.

And he said, okay, let me help you. And they keep looking together. And after a while, the gentleman who walked up to help said, you know, I really can't find anything. Are you sure you lost them here? He said, no, I lost them in the bush over there. But the light's over here. That's why I'm looking here. It's an almost ridiculous story, but it illuminates something about human nature, which is that we tend to look where it's easy to look.

And in medicine too, we tend to look and examine and focus on where our expertise is. So this becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less we understand about emotional well-being, the more we keep focusing on physical well-being and don't look at what's happening. But I'll tell you that from the very earliest days that I stepped into the hospital as a third-year medical student, I remember being struck by how many patients would come into the hospital with serious illnesses but would be all alone. And sometimes when big decisions had to be made about do we pursue this new course of treatment that may have serious side effects, I would go to the patient and say, do you want me to call

somebody so that we can bring them in and you can make this decision together? This is a really tough thing to decide entirely on your own. And it would break my heart, Rene, that so often they would say, no, there's nobody to call. There's no one else. I'll just have to figure it out myself. And even at the time of death, there were so many occasions I can remember where it was just me and my colleagues who were the final witnesses to so many people's last moments on earth. And that always made me deeply sad. So loneliness was around us so often in medicine, but I didn't know how to address it. I was observing it. I was feeling powerless in the face of it. And it was only when I started delving into research like Julianne Holt-Lunstead's, and I started doing that when I was Surgeon General motivated by the

stories of people that I was meeting across the country. It was only then that I started to realize loneliness is so much more than a bad feeling, but it has profound consequences for our health. About a year ago, two twin brothers in Wisconsin discovered kind of by accident that mini golf might be the perfect spectator sport for the TikTok era. Meanwhile, a YouTuber in Brooklyn found himself less interested in tech YouTube and more interested in making coffee. This month on The Verge Cast, we're telling stories about these people who tried to find new ways to make content,

new ways to build businesses around that content, and new ways to make content about those businesses. Our series is called How to Make It in the Future, and it's all this month on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that I read and together that really kind of took my breath away

was how loneliness... Let me read what you write again. One more change stoking the current trends of loneliness is the politicized climate of distrust and division that hangs over much of the world. While many factors play into this polarization, social disconnection is an important root cause. How does that work? What is the relationship between loneliness and social disconnection and this highly charged, polarized world? It's a great question. When I realized this connection, it really stuck with me. I'd been spending so many years during my time in government working at the heart of polarization in America, which was Washington, D.C., and feeling terribly about it and wishing

there was some way around it and, but not really understanding what was driving it. Here's how social connection fits in. When we are deeply connected to other people, one of the great things that happens is that we're more able to listen to them. We're more able to give them the benefit of the doubt. And that makes a dialogue possible. If you think about Thanksgiving or holidays, when you have relatives who come over and, or, or good friends and people who you may have really different political views with, or differ on some other philosophical basis, you may still have a deep well of love for them because they're a family or they're good friends. And so even though they might irritate you a little bit with their points of view, and

you might get annoyed at them, if they still needed help, you would respond. If you were in distress, they'd probably respond too. And you're likely much more able to listen to their point of view than to somebody with whom you had no connection. So it turns out that relationship is the foundation of dialogue. The reason this is really important- Wow, wait, I got to stop you again. This is huge. Relationship is the foundation of dialogue. That's right. Jeez, we're not having dialogue because we're not in relationship.

That's exactly right. When people say, well, if we want to get people together on reproductive health rights, if we want to get people together on issues related to gun violence, we should just put people with different points of view in the same room and have them duke it out and share their points of view and understand where they're coming from. That doesn't often work because you're not building that dialogue on anything substantive. You know, as human beings, we are relational entities. We seek each other out to connect. And that's how we are assessing other people often. Like, oh, is that person like me? Would I want to hang out with that person? Like, this is how our social brain thinks. And we do that just instinctively.

And so when we have relationship, and it doesn't have to mean that you can only listen to a dialogue with your best friends, not at all. This is the fascinating and powerful thing about human connection is it can often be established in a relatively short period of time. If you spend five minutes talking to your neighbor in a really open way and you understand some of their shared experiences and you understand, Hey're also struggling to to care for their toddler and figure out how to telework at the same time that gives you a shared experience it gives you an insight maybe a little bit into their values into who they are and it makes it much easier to have a conversation about a difficult

issue versus just walking in cold the reason that online dialogue is so challenged, the reason so many people say that reading comments on social media or on articles just drives them crazy, is because there's no relational context for those exchanges. There's also no visual cues. As human beings, we evolve not just to listen to the content of somebody's speech, but to process their body language, and their expressions, and the tone of their voice. When you're devoid of somebody's speech, but to process their body language and their expressions and the tone of their voice. And when you're devoid of all of that, you add that to the lack of relationship and you have what can be often toxic exchanges between people. And so this is

why relationships and connection are so important for the future of society, because we do have big problems that we have to address, whether that's healthcare, whether that's the next pandemic, whether that's issues like climate change. And the only way we can address them because they're too big for one person to do alone is if we're able to talk to each other. And that doesn't happen without relationship. It's so interesting because what I have found, especially when I was doing the research for Braving the Wilderness about how true belonging can't happen with other people unless you belong to yourself first. I mean, very much aligned with what I'm reading in Together.

But one of the things that's interesting is most of us, I would say, I'd probably venture to say all of us, but we'll play it safe and I'll say most. Most of us love someone and are in important relationships with people whose political or cultural beliefs we find incomprehensible. But what we tend to do is we tend to consider them the exception to the group that they belong to that we hate. And you write about this. This was a mind blower for me. Let me read what you wrote. Today's technology creates the illusion that we do know our enemies, that we see them, we hear them in our own homes every day, at any hour we choose to look. The versions that we know, in quotation marks, are often deceptive and unidimensional. Yet we believe what we see and

hear even when the videos are completely fabricated. As a result, the people we learn to fear seem both closer and even scarier than they ever used to. Whether we're talking about Republican versus Democrat animosity or conflicts in the Middle East, a sense of imminent threat makes our world feel less safe and hospitable. It erodes our sense that we all belong here. I do feel like I know these people because I see their craziness on social media. I see their crazy avatars. I see the crap they write. I feel like I know them. Therefore, I engage in personal combative stuff with them, like I would never do in real life. What's happening here? First, I don't think you're alone,

Bernie. I think all of us have that instinct. I stopped watching the news a long time ago and I'll watch it periodically here and there for a specific purpose. But partly I stopped watching it because I was having that same reaction too. I was seeing these people on TV saying things that I thought were just utterly reprehensible. And I had seen them saying similar things over weeks and months. And I was like, I feel like I know where they're coming from and I don't like it. And I feel angry. And that just made me feel worse and worse and worse. And the truth is I didn't really know who they were. One of the things I used to do when I was younger,

when I would have conflict with people, and this is something that my parents taught me, is I would step back sometimes from the conflict and I would just try to think that this person has a mother who loved them. And I know that's not always true, but conceptually what I was trying to remind myself of is that as crazy or unlikable as people can seem at times, there are parts of us that are lovable to others. And there was something about just reminding myself of that that would soften some of that anger and just make me sort of take a deep breath?

Yeah. And I think that I try to think about that in an expanded context, too. I try to also think that this person, whoever it is, has something that they're scared about. And that might be they're worried about their children. It could be that they're worried about their own health. It could be that they've got an elderly relative who's sick and can't access healthcare and they're worried about that. We don't know what's going on in people's lives, but it's safe to say that most people, if not everyone, has something in them that's lovable and they have something that they're scared about. And that makes it deeply human.

It's interesting because I would say I have found the exact same thing in our research that mutual vulnerability is the thickening agent that takes thin transactional context-based only relationships and adds the good stuff. And mutual vulnerability is emotion and experience. It's not knowledge. I know you because I read your CV. That's so true. This is related to this, and this was like, wow, this was fascinating. What I want to talk about is motive attribution asymmetry. Okay. I didn't know what that was, but I have it. Okay. So it's a cognitive bias, again, known as motive attribution asymmetry. It tells us that our beliefs are grounded in love while our opponent's beliefs are based on hatred. Studies found that this bias applies to Israelis who believe they are fighting out of love for their people while

Palestinians are driven by hatred and vice versa. The same bias infects both Democrats and Republicans in America who believe that their own fervor is driven by love of country while wondering why the other party hates us, quote unquote. The contempt, and we'll talk about the word contempt, that's a serious word. The contempt that results from this type of bias is visceral and righteous, feeding not just, I'm laughing because I'm like, I see myself, feeding not just intolerance, but also the same emotional stew that makes loneliness so toxic. If you must deal with people who you believe are driven by hatred, you're bound to feel rejected and frustrated. The contempt that results from this type of bias is visceral and righteous, feeding not just intolerance, but also the same emotional stew that makes loneliness so toxic.

I have this. I have mode of attribution asymmetry. Well, we all do because we're human beings. I don't like it. Neither do I. And I think this is why if you bring two people together around a table who have these deeply opposing views and you ask them to dig into that conflict, this is why it's so hard to have a real conversation. Because people don't trust each other's motives. They think the other person is motivated by something bad while they're motivated by something good. And the only way we really get to dispel that

is when we build true, authentic relationship with each other. And that can only happen when we're willing to open up and be vulnerable and be ourselves, even if it's for a brief moment. But what I worry about, Renee, is that I think in the world in which we live, there are so many signals coming at people telling them who they need to be, telling them that the definition of success and worth is often driven by your ability to acquire wealth, reputation, or power. Those three things have become the gods

at whose altars we worship as a society. But I don't think they serve us well because I think the reality is that the true definition of worth is much more intrinsic. It has to do with our ability to give and to receive love. And that does not require wealth or power or reputation. It requires courage, the courage to be vulnerable. It requires the ability to recognize that we have deep value intrinsically within us. But because society often tells us to chase those false gods, I think many people end up feeling that they're just not good enough. And I worry in particular about young people who are growing up today, members of Gen Z, but also millennials. When I was younger, these influences were there too. It's not like they cropped up overnight. But the number of

messages that I was bombarded with was so many fewer than what people are bombarded with today because there just weren't as many channels. And so if I did something dumb in middle school, like 10 people knew about it in my class, this did happen often. But you do something today and people worry that it's going to be all over YouTube, you know, within an hour. To me, when I think about my children, when I think about our collective children, I think about what I worry about for the next generation. It's actually this, it's my worry that we're not setting our children up to believe in themselves, to recognize their true source of power and self-worth, and that we're instead telling them that your value is conditional. It's based on your ability to acquire a bunch of extrinsic things.

It's based on circumstances. And if you can't reach those, if you can't quote unquote succeed, then that means you're less valued. And that starts a downward spiral when it comes to loneliness because the less secure we feel in our worth, the less likely we are to believe that other people want to hang out with us, the more we start to retreat into our shell. And this is very interesting, Brene, and unfortunate because this downward spiral of loneliness actually is evolutionary in nature. So thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, being separated from our tribe,

being lonely, if you will, that was a really, really important moment because that meant that our likelihood of survival just went down because we were more likely to get attacked by a predator, to not have a stable food supply. And so what happened in that moment is that our threat level shifts up, but our attention also focuses inward as we are worried about our own safety. In the modern context, that can be extraordinarily difficult. When you're trying to interact and have a conversation with somebody who has an elevated threat level, and they're worried that maybe something you say is different from what you're intending it to be and they're just on edge when they're excessively focused on themselves, that makes it harder to connect with them.

But the insidious thing about loneliness that lasts for a long time is it also chips away at our self-esteem. And you come to believe that maybe the reason you're lonely is that you're not likable or you're not lovable. And so that downward spiral is really, really powerful. And that's what I worry about for our children and for future generations is that unless we make a conscious decision to shift something in our culture that tells us what self-worth is defined by, then we will continue to lead people to a place where they don't feel they're enough.

And that unfortunately is a recipe for loneliness. I have so many thoughts. Everything I've found in 20 years of research completely supports what you're saying. And it's what I was reminded of when you were talking about kind of threat level, when your threat level is up and you're self-focused, it reminds me of the relationship that we know that exists between shame and empathy. So shame and empathy are not compatible affects or emotions. So when we're in shame, we're very self-focused. We're worried about not being enough. We're not other focused at all. It is really hard to build meaningful relationship from a place of shame because shame corrodes our capacity for empathy with others because it's so self-focused. One of the things I thought was really hopeful, you write about Emmy Warner's landmark study.

It's a long-term study of childhood resilience. And here's what she writes that I think is so helpful. Today, it's widely understood that one of the most important factors in preventing and addressing toxic stress in children is healthy social connection. While a traumatic past may increase our risk of bad things happening, we are not destined to crash and burn. Adversity doesn't mean that we're destroyed. Warner's research in the work of others tells us that we can rescue one another. It is in our relationships with one another that we can all find healing and a better path forward.

Yeah, thank you for reading that because it just reminds me of how inspired I was when I came across Emmy winner's work. Because the story of loneliness is actually a hopeful story. It's a story that doesn't just end with sadness and an increased risk for illness, but it reveals the power of human connection in our life and the extraordinary power that connection has to heal deep trauma and to heal wounds that may have been there for years and years and years. We're learning more and more that trauma, especially when it occurs in childhood, has an extraordinary impact on the trajectory

of our life, not just on our physical health, but on our job prospects, on whether or not we run into trouble with the law. So much of our life is impacted by these early experiences. And if all we know is the science of childhood trauma that tells us how bad the consequences are, that can be a very disheartening story. But to me, what is so extraordinary about the power of human connection is it's something that feels so simple that we take for granted has this ability to heal in extraordinary ways because it is through our relationships that I believe we channel love and love allows people to accept themselves and to put down that veil of shame that so often covers us and constrains us.

And then I think about this often, Brene, as a doctor who has written prescriptions for so many medicines over the years, like antibiotics, medicines for blood pressure, for diabetes. And I believe that medicines can help. But there is nothing more powerful, Brene, than love in terms of its ability to heal. There's nothing that I have written a prescription for that eclipses what love can do in the face of extraordinary injury and trauma and pain. And the most clear way that we feel love is in the context of relationships, authentic, open relationships. You know, when I left government, it was a tough time for me. I was feeling pretty lost. I was feeling burned out. I was actually feeling this deep sense of shame, which I spent many months trying to make sense of. I still haven't 100% made sense of it. But that shame was really holding me back and it was making me turn further

inward. And I felt really, really lonely during that time. And one of the things that I came to realize during that time was that building community was so essential for me because the pain that I had endured some pains which were very public many of which were not I needed to find a source of healing and that as much as I had a wife who I loved dearly and who loved me my wife Alice as much as I was blessed with parents and a sister and a brother-in-law who loved me and some very close friends, I realized that what I really needed to do was to work through some of my own demons and start to love myself and accept myself and throw off that coat of shame that was really weighing me down.

And it was really hard to do, and I couldn't do it alone. I had to do it through relationship by the hard work of actually opening up to close friends and saying, Hey, I've actually been struggling. This is like what I'm going through. And the reason I decided to focus on the whole topic of loneliness and social connection in my work thereafter is that when I looked back at all of the issues that I was dealing with as Surgeon General, whether it was addiction or whether it was violence or whether it was obesity or whether it was depression and anxiety, I realized that the root of so many of these was loneliness. And part of the solution for so much of it was actually human connection.

It struck me as almost obvious, and I felt silly for not realizing this earlier, that something that we need so desperately to heal what ails us today has been right there under our noses for millennia. It's what we're drawn to naturally. It's how we're born. Children, when they're born, they're born to be relational creatures. Yeah. They're themselves. They don't feel ashamed of things. They say what they think.

They're who we want to be. And I feel actually really blessed to have a three-year-old and a two-year-old right now. Because they remind me of how all of us were and how I was too. And I realize that what's happened is not that I have somehow become broken or that any of us have. It's just that we've allowed things to layer on top of us, other people's expectations, societal beliefs, shame about experiences that we had

that perhaps didn't go the way we wanted. And that's all constrained us for being who we were. So my mission, my hope is that I can do something small, and God willing, maybe even something bigger than small, to help move us as a society toward a world where we value connection, where we put people at the center of our lives, and where we build not only people-centered lives, but a people-centered society. Because what that looks like is that looks like a world where we make people in our relationships

the focus of our time and attention. It looks like a world where we design our schools and even our workplaces to strengthen and support connection. Like a world where we think even about policy and not just about the financial impact of policy, but the impact it's going to have on our ability to connect and build relationship with each other. And a society where we prioritize people is also one where we bring that to our public dialogue and to even how we vote at the ballot box. Because this isn't about politics, you know, in the toxic sense.

This is about making politics what it can be in its best moments, which is an opportunity for people to lead from a place of their deepest values, to inspire other people with that leadership, to build structures and institutions that can serve all of us and lift us all up. And so when we build a society, when we build lives that are centered around people, that's what is possible. That's what we can achieve for ourselves. It's also the world that we can leave for our children. And that to me feels like a cause worth working on.

Amen. I mean, amen. That may be all I have to say. I think the biggest barrier to everything you're talking about when you're talking about your two-year-old and three-year-old, I think the biggest barrier we have to building the world you're describing, building a world where we're socially connected, is the weird, not natural, but passed down and taught shame for needing each other.

I would bet a lot that your two and three-year-old have no shame about dependence and need. That's right. You know, yeah. And my kids are the same. But somehow we grow up believing that if we need each other, we're less than. And, you know, I always say we don't have to do this alone. We were never meant to from the way neurobiology works in our lives, from mirror neurons down. And it's not going to work alone, right? It's not going to work if we do this by ourselves. Yeah. So grateful for the book. What you just said there, I think is so important

because that piece around the need to be independent and to be able to go it alone and accomplish it by ourselves. So deeply ingrained in modern culture. It's not just American culture. It's become the culture in many other countries in the world, which are quote unquote modernizing. I think it's dangerous because it's not true to who we are. It's not reflective of our real nature. But I find myself even still today in moments where I feel ashamed to ask for help because I feel like I should be able to figure this out all on my own.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. And I get upset with myself sometimes in those moments. I want to fight back against things. I'm like, no, that's not how this is supposed to be. That's not how we were built as human beings. I think that we came to recognize that behind all of the complicated decisions that are being made, and this has become a touch point for me now, is I came to realize that people are being primarily driven by just one of two emotions primarily, by love or fear. And the love can manifest in different ways, as generosity, as kindness, as empathy. The fear also has a lot of manifestations,

as insecurity, as anger, as indifference. And whether you're at the highest levels of elected office or whether you're on the front lines of a hospital or whether you're at the highest levels of elected office, or whether you're on the front lines of a hospital, or whether you're a teacher in a school, or a student in a classroom, we're all subject to these two forces. And all I could think of in those months that followed while we were waiting for our son to arrive was, what can we do to tip the world toward love in terms of what drives us? Because right now, it feels like the world is locked in this deep struggle between love and fear. And it's affecting all of us. It's affecting our countries. It's affecting how we function and how we are as a human race. But that to me has become the central question of our time. How do we move the world away from fear and toward love?

How do we do that in our own lives by what we choose to speak up for on the public square, by the issues we choose to support, by the way we raise our children? This is a deeper question that I worry about, that I think about. But it also gives me hope because I do think that our true nature, Brene, is that of love. When we're living in fear, I don't think that's really who we are or who we were meant to be. And the most clear way that we feel that love is in the form of relationships, which is

why human connection is such a deeply important part of the healing that needs to take place in the world. I'm going to make that my new prayer or mantra, tipping the world toward love. I love that. I'm just trying to tip the world a little bit toward love. You have, just a small tribute to you, you have done so much of that in your work. I'm one of many people who has been inspired by the writings that you've done and by the speeches that you've given.

I didn't tell you this in the beginning, but when I was Surgeon General, you were something of a celebrity in our office. People read your books. They would always tell me, hey, we got to do something with Brene Brown. We've got to make this required reading in the office. You've managed to inspire just so many people through your extraordinarily beautiful, honest, and vulnerable conversations. And of course, through the great research that you've done. So I just want to thank you for that contribution that you've made to humanity because it's helping make the world better for me and for my kids. So bottom of my heart, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I want to close by reading something from Together, your new book. It speaks to tipping the world toward love. You write, creating a connected life begins with the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives. Do we choose to make time for people? Do we show up as our true selves? Do we seek out others with kindness, recognizing the power of service to bring us together? This work isn't always easy. It requires courage, the courage to be vulnerable, to take a chance on others, to believe in

ourselves. But as we build connected lives, we make it possible to build a connected world. That will be our final word. Beautiful. Thank you, Vivek. Thank you for showing us that science and kindness and love are not mutually exclusive. And that love and connection matter. And I wouldn't want a world without medicine and science and data and everything else. But I think sometimes we think we can hotwire connection and cures that take less work than leaning into each other.

But how do we give up on people because we're all we have, right? That's right. That's absolutely right. And these things do go together. And to me, this story of loneliness and connection is a deeply inspiring, empowering one because, well, one thing I've learned through this experience is that

all of us have the power to be healers because all of us have the power to be healers because all of us have the power to love, to build a relationship, to see each other, give each other the benefit of the doubt, but to show up as ourselves. We don't need anything from the outside to be able to do that.

We were born with those abilities. And so as I imagine a world with healers, I see endless possibilities of what we can build, what we can fix, and ultimately what we can all be together. My money's on us. Yeah, it is. I believe it. And I think we'll get through this pandemic. I think we'll learn. I think we'll learn to lean into each other. And if nothing else, we'll have a huge reminder of our inextricable connection. Thank you so much for joining us today on Unlocking Us. It's been really powerful. Thank you so much, Brené. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Me too. I really appreciate you listening to Unlocking Us. I hope this episode brought you some information, some ideas for connecting, at least really helped you understand the importance of it. And I also want to let you know, if you want to find out more information about Together, Vivek's new book, you can go to the show notes page at reneebrown.com. I know that it feels long. I know we feel disconnected. I know we wanted to get back to normal. We want an end date. We want to know what's going to happen next. I'm with you. I don't know when that's coming. I do know it's going to come at some point. And I just, I wish you love.

I hope you help tilt this world toward love and stay awkward, brave, and kind. Thanks, y'all. Unlocking Us is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Keri Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself.

The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees? And it takes forever to build a campaign?

Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.