Unlonely with Dr. Jody Carrington - Loneliness is a signal for Connection: Dr. Jeremy Nobel

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Dr. Jeremy Nobel is a medical doctor and public health practitioner at Harvard University as well as a poet, author, and teacher. He is also the creator of Project UnLonely.In this episode, Dr. Jody has an incredible conversation with Dr. Nobel about the loneliness epidemic we are facing and what can help or hinder the loneliness in all of us.https://jeremynobel.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-nobel-2b72ba12/https://twitter.com/JeremyNobel1https://www.artandhealing.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Let's start here, where I think the answer begins for everything and everybody, in the place of acknowledgement. Indigenous peoples in this country have taught me the most about what acknowledgement truly means. So everything that I've created for you happened here on Treaty 7 land,

which is now known as the center part of the province of Alberta. It is home to the Blackfoot Confederacy, made up of the Siksika, the Kainai, the Pikani, the Tatina First Nation, the Stony Nakota First Nation, and the Métis Nation Region 3. It is always my honor, my privilege mostly, to raise my babies on this land where so much sacrifice was made. And to build a community, invite a community in, talk about hard things as we together learn and unlearn about the most important things, that we were never meant to do any of this alone. welcome in welcome back dr jody carrington here and and the Everyone Comes From Somewhere podcast. Today, I got to tell you, sometimes we get to meet people who have done the most incredible things on the planet. And this may be one of the finest humans I've ever got the pleasure of reading about.

And I've just met him and I can't wait for you to do that too. His name is Dr. Jeremy Nobel, and he is a primary care physician, public health practitioner, and award-winning poet with faculty appointments at the Harvard T.C. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School. He is the founder and president of the Foundation for Art and Healing, whose signature initiative, which I am so fascinated to learn a little bit more about, is Project Unlonely, addressing the personal and public health challenges of loneliness and social isolation. He has gained national visibility for his amazing work, and he is here with us today.

Sir, I cannot tell you. This is the Everyone Comes From Somewhere podcast, and I think that we are all way more alike than we are different. And the answer to sort of the prerequisite for empathy is context. And we've never been more disconnected in this moment, not knowing everybody's context, their story. And I want to know a little bit about yours. Where did you come from? Well, first, what a generous and wonderful introduction, Jodi, and I'm just delighted to be here. But I also always start these podcasts by saying there are many people

who may be listening for whom loneliness is not just a passing sensation, a little bit of a twinge, but a deep and very dark experience. And if you find yourself in that experience, I just want you to know you're not alone. There are things you can do about loneliness. There are ways to reach out and get help. And if that's the situation you're in, I urge you to do that. I love that. I mean, I speak about this all the time.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, talking about the loneliness epidemic in your country and ours, because you're in New York today. Is that right? I'm in New York today, but you asked where I come from. I love that question. I want to know a lot of places. I actually was born in New Jersey, but when I was seven years old, my father decided it's kind of a bold move in his generation. He would pursue higher education and get a PhD in chemistry, which led to his taking our then young family. I was the youngest of three. I was seven. I still have, fortunately, have two sisters, one two years older, one four years older. He bundled us all up. We moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where for a variety of reasons, even though I haven't actually lived there in almost 50 and really so intrigued that that's one of the themes of your podcast. Yeah. And it's a question that I ask everybody when we start.

And you know what is so interesting to me as a psychologist is every time I start with that question, everybody answers it so differently. You know, do I come from my community, from my parents? What is my, do we speak about the lineage? And so the youngest of three, the baby boy, how, tell me a little bit about that growing up story. I mean, I love that you say our context, our home, where we come from, it just defines us so much, doesn't it? It does define us. And in looking back at the home I was fortunate to grow up in, you know, it was just so filled, you know, not with, you know, kind of wealth in the conventional sense, but love, caring, curiosity. Both my parents were very curious. They both became scientists. They were chemists.

They met in a chemistry laboratory got married six weeks later it was right after world war ii my father had come back from world war ii my mother literally was rosie the riveter she had worked in a she worked for uh welding on tail hooks of hellcat hellcat fighter planes these were these short stubby little planes that would land on carriers, mostly in the Pacific. And if you didn't have that that tail hook welded on right and grab the cable, you were you were in the Pacific. And so she took that job very seriously. I bet she did. My goodness. Amazing. And I love that six week romance. I mean, I, you know, as I know, you sort of sink into with your patients, no doubt in the students that you

teach, really this idea of people always ask me, you know, does it always come back to your childhood? And I say this all the time. Yes, I'm sorry, but it does. It doesn't mean it defines you moving forward, but understanding that context allows you a little insight into how you see people, how they treat you, what sort of that story is about how you're going to be treated in this world. Is that sort of true?

And how does that play into loneliness, do you think? I think it is true, you know, and we are in many ways shaped by our early circumstances. There's increasing evidence of that. I do write in my book about something I'm sure you've heard of, maybe the readers also, so-called adverse childhood events, right? A very kind of... Vince Felitti sets the tone. Yes. Yeah, very abstract tone, but for people listening. So, you know, there are 20 of them, I think, that are recognized and some of them are relatively mild in a sense, unless it a substance abuse problem in the home. So all of this leads to a kind of fragility the child has as he or she or they develop and their sense of, can they rely on the world around them? And if you're not sure about that, then you're always walking on eggshells. And whether that, you know, kind of exactly the kind of impact that has on your developing psyche, your ability to attach to other people and trusting and sustainable

ways that shapes in many ways your ability to connect, have meaningful, sustainable relationships, or whether you find those hard, elusive or in the worst cases, terrifying and have a very lonely life. Yeah. And so when you think about it, and I like with children, kids these days, that's the title of my first book. It's called Kids These Days. When we really talk about their our understanding of learning, trust and relationship is is has a lot to do with proximity, has a lot to do with connection.

And I think, you know, I was reading some data not very long ago that, you know, our great grandparents, it's estimated that they spent 72% more of the time looking at their children than, than we look at our kids today. How does that play into this idea of, you know, developing that story of, of how big people navigate the world with us, how we reach out to people, the nuances of asking for help or connection. Is that what you see? I mean, in this book of yours, as we start to talk a lot about this process of loneliness. Yeah.

Sure. And let me be, you know, be clear to you in the audience. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't have that formal training as you and other others have or a psychiatrist. I'm a primary care physician, so I've had basic, you know, education about, you know, kind of, you know, mental processes, how the brain works and so on. But, you know, I've been doing this work now for almost 20 years, looking at ways to connect people through creative arts. We'll talk more about that.

And I'll have to say that much of what I've seen is stuff and it's things that when I explain it to people makes perfect sense because almost all of us, you know, from very early ages are eager to connect. Kids want to connect. Sometimes you run into barriers and obstacles. Sometimes they're functional kind of things or situational.

Sometimes they're emotional. And we navigate them as best we can. We develop styles and habits and areas where we have some talents and areas where we fall short. And all of this just is what we bring with us as we eager to have the human connections that are meaningful, authentic, and can be sustained. Oh, I love that. So when you leave your town, when you leave this community that you were raised in, how do we make the decision, you know, in your own story that caring for other people was going to be part of the script? How, I mean, you spent a lot of time with people who are lonely, no doubt. Yeah.

What is that? How did that come together for you? You know, it's all about story, right? And I share a very personal story in the book. You know, I was lucky to have a wonderful, warm, loving, caring family. But like other families, sometimes things happen. And one of those was in retrospect and even at the time, tragic, which was my father died at a young age. I discovered him dying of a heart attack as I was coming down stairs for school one morning.

He was in the living room and he didn't survive that day. And what I'll never forget was the feeling, the emotion I had. Now, it took me years to understand it, but I actually felt embarrassed. And I thought, why am I embarrassed? And I actually, as I put it together, I felt that I had let him down, that he died on my watch. I think it's sometimes the way kids feel if their parents divorce and they think it's their fault. Oh, so common, isn't it? Yeah. And so that, that feeling that, um, of, of guilt, shame, inadequacy, um, I think unconsciously shaped my decision ultimately to go into a field where I could help people. And, you know, I've had some, I'm pretty sure

that was at least one of, one of the things, but I mean, we all have our personal stories. I mean, in some ways, what I just shared with you might sound dramatic and it certainly shaped my life, but we all have these stories. It's not it's not only where do we come from? It's like what happens to us on the on the journey. Oh, isn't that true? And I I love that. I mean, it is all of these experiences that shape us that that becomes so profound. And I love the insight into that, you know, what that little boy must have felt like not being able to save his dad in that moment and what that did in terms of, OK, this is now maybe what I can do to help other people is so often, you know, that I love about speaking to patients about, OK, so help me understand how you made sense of that in that moment, right? How you, because then as you grow up, you of course think about things very different, but that little boy still thinks about the things in that way. Yeah. Well, I think that's, that's right. I mean, we, we, in our minds, we still are all the people we've ever been. Oh, I love that. Right. Where could they go? They're in there. They're at home. Exactly.

Oh, that's so. Okay. So tell me a little bit about this then. As you sort of step in to your medical training, was primary care always where you wanted to be? Interestingly, both my parents, as I mentioned, were scientists and I really wasn't sure what I was going to do. And so I kind of thought I would end up in science. And I was always very curious about science. I, I kind of thought I would end up in science and I was always very curious about science. I mean, I also tell the story in the book, I was seven years old and I got this little, um, kind of electric toy circuitry kit. Yeah. And I just got so interested

in it that even while the battery was running down, I was like trying to like say, okay, well, you know, if I wire it up this way, the two light bulbs are the same intensity, brightness. And if I wire it up differently, they're only half that intensity. What's going on? And so as the battery ran down, I said, oh, I got to go someplace dark. So I ended up going into my closet. I remember this and kind of doing this experiment over and over as a seven-year-old. And I think this curiosity, I was very lucky to not only have a habit, but to have that nurtured. And that took me towards science. It still drives me today. I actually think it can be a wonderful resource for all of us if we listen to what our curiosity takes. But so I originally started in medical

school thinking I would go in the MD-PhD program in immunology, that I would be, you know, a scientist and discover that. But on the path to that, I started having clinical rotations and decided that the experience and kind of excitement and challenge of illness diagnosis and treatment was more compelling. And so I moved in that direction and studied internal medicine. And it's interesting, you know, in practice for about 10 years, but I also then became interested in the bigger kind of challenge of not just an individual disease, but then how do you understand the source and cause of disease? How do you prevent it? And how do you make sure once people has it, once

a person has a need that they get what they need to have that address? So that took me, I didn't know it at the time, but that took me towards public health. And so I've had a kind of one foot in the public health world, one foot in the medical world, I think, you know, for a long time now. And I see they're both fantastically interesting careers, very rewarding, very challenging. But I think that Harvard track? Because, I mean, up here in Canada, you say the word Harvard and all of us are like, you are amazing, clearly. Well, I was very fortunate. There's wonderful teachers, mentors. And then, of course, you learn the most, I think, in many ways from your fellow students. And I didn't go to medical school at Harvard. I went to the University of

Pennsylvania, also an excellent school. But then what you do in internal medicine is you go train, it's called training, internship, residency, and so on at a health system that's often associated with a major academic center. And so I did my internal medicine training at one of the Harvard teaching hospitals and then continued to work there. And then when I decided I wanted public health training, I actually just went across the street to the Harvard School of Public Health to get additional training in public health. Oh, so cool. All right. And then how do we, at the same time as you're doing all this training, then what's, what's happening? Do you, are you settling down now in this community? Do you, you know, what's your family story?

Yeah. So, you know, I love Boston. I still live in Boston. And so, you know, I began to kind of navigate, you know, kind of the world of relationships and so on. And, you know, I met, you know, a very wonderful woman. We, you know, we lived together, but then it didn't quite work out. And so, um, you know, we parted ways. Um, and, but then, you know, I really, and I think this really comes down in, in ways to my own loneliness. I wasn't really ready to deal with some of the challenges of intimacy. I wanted it. I thought about it. But for a variety of reasons,

it was kind of beyond my reach, really. Now, the one nice thing in a way, at least in her culture, is workaholism, which is what I did to distract myself from loneliness, is always available to us. Yes, isn't it? It's so lovely. Yeah. It's always available to us. Yes, isn't it? It's so lovely. Yeah. So and I love what I do. I, you know, and I certainly did then and still do. But I that became really a primary force in my life for a number of years. And, you know, and while I did have some wonderful kind of shorter term relationships, I never found that, you know, that partnership that around which you could build a family and so on. Nor did I even think it was possible for me, actually. I mean, this was all going on somewhat unconsciously. You know, I just thought, well, I guess that's for other people. My job is to work. Yeah.

Here's where I got to be. Wow. And sorry. No, I just say, you know, I feel fortunate. I had I had that as you're well aware as a psychologist there. There are other ways people distract themselves that are a little less healthy. Yeah, exactly. That's really right. Yeah. Yeah. So that was not an issue.

But that's but, you know, the nice thing about life is it continues. And if you stay curious and pay attention, you begin to learn things and then other opportunities do appear. Present themselves. Isn't that so true? And as you then stepped into this world, like, you know, what I loved even before we turned the tapes on today is you said, you know, I now teach a course on loneliness that started before the pandemic. How has this experience, this global experience expedited this, the concern, if it has, around loneliness? And, you know, what do you, what do you see in that world? Yeah, I think the variety of, first of all, let's just be clear what loneliness is versus being alone. You know, many people still

find that confusing, understandably, because they almost have the same word in them. So being alone is the objective state of no social context, right? You can just count the social context. Do you connect with people and so on, or are you isolated? So social isolation, it's objective, it's measurable. You know, you can see it. But it can also be quite a positive experience, right? If you use that alone time to be thoughtful about who you are, what matters to you, how do you design a life with meaning and purpose? How do you enjoy nature, stillness, all things? In fact, you know, it's such an important state. We have a high class word for it. We call it solitude. Yeah, that is very sexy. I love that. I get some solitude, but I love that you say that. Lonely and being alone, two very different things. And I think in this busy world, it's almost like it has become something we identify as an epidemic, but it's also so necessary with the noise and inundation of social media, the ease to be able to do that. So I love that differentiation. Yeah. So loneliness, different from being alone. So being alone is just being isolated, no one around. Often by choice, if no choice, then it can be toxic, you know, so it's not sometimes social isolation can be, you know, health impairing also. But

loneliness is a very different thing. It's a, it's not an illness or a disease. It's a mood. It's an emotion. It's a feeling that there's a kind of social connection to others that we want that we don't have. So it's the gap, right? So imagine the social connections you desire, dream about, right? And then what you think you have, what you feel you have access to every day. And that gap is what we call loneliness. It's always the sense that something is missing. And, you know, I've read in your work as well, it's really this idea that it's almost more than a feeling because it can certainly affect not only your mental health, but your physical health. There's a lot of connections between that one emotion, isn't there? Well,

we know emotion changes are both our mental and physical health. Look at what stress does. Same thing. Stress is not an illness. It's a brain state. It's marked by certain brain changes and then mood and attitude changes and then behavior changes. But like loneliness, it can spiral out of control and be very harmful. I think one of the most important things I discovered in learning about loneliness is we're all lonely from time to time. It's this desire you want, you know, human connection may be the most human emotion we have. And it's a signal. It's a signal that may have evolved evolutionarily from, you know, earlier times when if there weren't people in your tribe, people looking out for you, you were seriously at risk in a dangerous environment. To a feeling now that, you know, that there's something wrong with us if we don't have human content, that we're flawed. And what I suggest, and I'm working on this too, it's not always easy, is that we view loneliness as a signal

that we need human connection. Just like thirst is a signal we need hydration. Yeah. And then you use that as a signal to navigate it, not say, oh, I'm broken or flawed, but just say, oh, there's something I need. How do I get it? Yeah. Now, unlike thirst. So we don't you know, when when people are thirsty, they don't get ashamed of being thirsty. You got to get something to drink. Yes. And the question is, why are we so ashamed of being lonely in our culture? And it's a cultural construction and there's probably a lot of roots to it. But, you know, I think it's just unnecessary to feel that if you're alone and misleading to think if you're lonely, it's your fault.

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Get Maple. Get well. Sooner. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Do you think there's a skill involved in creating relationship? I mean, this is the thing that I wonder about with my own kids.

So I have two, I have a set of twins that are 10 and our oldest is 13. And I think about the ability to develop skills to sort of mitigate loneliness, which is, you know, how do you initiate a conversation in a elevator? How do you wave at somebody on the street? How do you do these things? Those are not the skills that kids are born with, right? You have to watch somebody, somebody to show you how to do that. And the less and less we interact with people, I'm not even sure if this data is true, but the less and less we interact with data, with people, right? We're not showing our kids how to do it. We order our groceries in, we don't go out, we don't have fights. And you know, our kids are supposed to lose their frigging minds in a shopping center. But we just we just order it from Amazon

now. So we don't like our is there also one of the contributors to loneliness? I'm wondering in my head, is this ability or lack thereof of sort of showing the next generation how to navigate the nuances of engaging in relationship? I think that's absolutely at the heart of it. And I think that's one of the reasons why recent research has showed that the loneliest demographic for adults is 18 to 24. That's after a decade of being on cell phones, on smartphones, because part of what happens when you remove yourself from the messiness of human interaction, right? Because people are complicated, right? And if you have to navigate kind of a traditional non-electronic community, right? Not something you put together on Instagram or on a platform,

then you have to deal with the challenges of just very different people with different demands. You have to learn patience. You have to learn patience. You have to learn tolerance. Otherwise, you just can't make it work. Well, if you don't have patience and tolerance, then it's very hard to do anything other than retreat. If you deal with a challenging social situation and you find increasingly that's what people do into these carefully curated digital communities that they put together. If there's discomfort or someone they don't feel comfortable with, they delete them. They edit them out. Gosh. And what do you see? I mean, as you sort of notice this now and, you know, with your research and I know, you know, I can't

wait to dive in more into your book, but what do we think about, what are our fears for the next generation, right? Do you think this is something that we can mitigate? What, what do we need to be doing as, as parents, as educators to be able to sort of instill, insert some of the things that our kids are going to need? Well, we're already seeing very worrisome trends, you know, among the younger generation. A recent Center for Disease report that came out said that levels of persistent sadness and hopelessness in teenage girls is now 60 percent. Three out of five are persistently sad or hopeless. That's twice what it was 10 years ago. What? Twice in a decade? Twice in a decade. And we know that anxiety, depression, addiction and, you know, overuse of toxic substances and suicidality is also up in both, you know, teenage boys and girls and young adults. And so there's a price we're paying

for this loneliness. And, you know, I think it's clearly, clearly related. Now the question is, what do we do about it? You know, so the goal of Project Unlonely, which arose out of our work at the Foundation for Art and Healing, is to do three things, three goals. So first is to increase awareness about loneliness and how bad it is for both your physical, mental, and social health, because a lot of people just don't know that. And in fact, we didn't even know. We knew about the mental health challenges for a few decades. That doesn't surprise anyone, the risk for anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicidality. But loneliness also increases risk for heart attack and stroke and death from either by 30 percent, increases risk of dementia by 40 percent, diabetes by 50 percent.

Wow. Loneliness as a brain state also increases inflammation. It reduces immune system function. So it actually reduces life or it increases the risk of dying early by about 30%. So this is one of the reasons why it is a public health urgency. Yeah, it's not just a feeling. And loneliness, right. So that's the first thing is awareness.

That's the first goal of the foundation or the Project Unlonely. The second is to address the stigma that surrounds it. People do not want to, particularly young people, they do not want to say I'm lonely out loud. Now, it's where and as a psychologist, you may be aware of this. You know, it's where depression was not too long ago. Now, it's not where it needs to be, but people feel much more comfortable saying I'm depressed and asking for help. So we know we know we can get through stigma. There are strategies to do it. You have to normalize it. You just have to make it part of the

cultural narrative to recognize loneliness. So that's the second goal. The third is to do something about it, to make available creative arts and mindfulness-based programs that we design and test. We don't deliver it. We're not a service organization, but we make them available to a wide variety of community-based organizations so that they could use it for the people and populations they serve. So community centers, faith-based groups, museums, libraries, sometimes health care places, employers, higher education. So they make so they have tools and experiences they can offer people so they can be better connected. So why expressive arts? Because this feels so unscientific in so many ways. Why? Tell me the research about this, where we're giving people a place.

Because I mean, anyway, you tell me, because I've just looked at everything on the website and I was like, wow. Particularly with those with a trauma history. I just think, yes, this is where we need to be. Well, interestingly, a lot of our knowledge about how the arts can connect people came out of our work on using the arts for trauma. And 20 years ago, when I started the Foundation for Art and Healing, the research around the arts was just getting started. There was empirical research. Art therapy had already been around. That wasn't new. But what was going on in the brain when you did creative work or what goes on in the brain when you behold the creative work of others.

They were just starting to have the functional MRI scan technologies and the other modalities that could allow us to do that level of brain research. What we found, this is fascinating, is that the arts do some amazing things to our brains. So I'll start with that because that's really at the basis of really how it then changes mood and then changes behavior. So we've known for a while now that the arts reduce the levels of the stress hormone cortisol and not just making art, but receiving art from other people. Our stress levels go down. It's fantastic, but that doesn't surprise people because they have the experience of listening to music or visual arts or dance. It could be any art. Is that like how would we define art? Anything that anything that that touches the creative imagination. And so drawing, painting, music, dance, any of those things fits into this category. Yes. And so those are the traditional high arts, right? So music, movement, visual art, and language arts, poetry, novels, and so on. But we use our creative

imaginations in daily life in other ways, right? So culinary arts, right? You know, even like the color, the shape, you know, when you're chopping a salad, you know, you're making, continually making and creating. Now, obviously, sometimes you're in production mode for food. I understand that. I've been there too, but it's also an opportunity for creative making. The textile arts, knitting, sewing, crocheting, quilting, which is all storytelling for many people. These have been around for centuries. And then one of my favorites is gardening, you know, which a friend of mine calls the world's slowest performance art. That's so true. I love that. I've never, you know, so many people just speak about that, right? Where you just go and watch something produce. It's just so healing. So, okay. So tell me, wow. Yeah. So that, so we've learned that,

that the arts have that, you know, kind of remarkable effect. They reduce the stress level cortisol, but they also increase the so-called feel good hormones, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin. So at the very start, the arts relax you and put you in a good mood, which is a pretty nice way to connect. Yes. But recently there's even more provocative studies that when you engage with the arts, it actually stimulates the part of your brain that makes sense of your social environment and whether people around you are opportunities or threats, right? And the more we think about the people around us as opportunities, this is empathy, this is compassion and leads to connection. So the arts are more powerful than

just turning up and down stress. They actually change our social cognition in some very positive ways. Well, I would imagine often like it pulls on your prefrontal cortex. And so we, we talk a lot about emotional dysregulation around here. And so are we engaging in things on purpose that then center us back in our bodies and engagement with other people? Right. And I love I love this idea. And so tell me a little bit more about Project Unlonely. Then is it really I mean, I know the book is phenomenal. Is it really then just, as you say, making resources, programs available? Like what is the initiative? Yeah, almost all of our programs inter-thread three modalities, all of which have very,

very well-established research bases and evidence base. So the first one is mindfulness. So what mindfulness does just takes you right to awareness. And there are lots of ways almost anyone can tap into a heightened set of awareness, everything from breathing exercises to visualization. You know, so almost all of our making activities, we start with some mindfulness to calm people down, center them in the activity and so on. Then we we offer them a prompt and say, get curious about this prompt and then make something. And then here's the other, the third of the three modalities, social, emotional learning, social learning, have a conversation, a meaningful conversation about what you made,

how you felt before you made it, what you now feel after having made it. And use it as a catalyst to share your story. And I think we talked about it earlier. Stories are how we make sense of the world. It's how we make sense of ourselves. And it's actually how we connect. We connect through our storytelling. And that's kind of if there's magic in what we do, it's those three things. Be curious, make things, have conversations. Wow. And that sort of loop of tying it together, I would imagine, is also important at some neurological level. Hey, like not only just to sort of create things, but what does it mean to you? And being able to even verbalize that, I guess, you know, or explain it in some way then increases the connection inherently.

Absolutely. And the one thing that people are often, oh, I'm not an artist. It's the act of expressing. Exercise is parts of our brain, still mapping out what they are. But, you know, the part that gets exercised when you imagine something, then when you think about making something, and then when you have to come up with meaning and use the language center of your brain to talk about it. And then when you have to come up with meaning and use the language center of your brain to talk about it. And then when you talk about, you know, the skills we need to have, one thing that people really need, in fact, to connect is you have to disclose something important and authentic about yourself. Well, that sounds great, except then people say, well, what if I become vulnerable and then I get rejected and I get hurt? Judged, yes. Yeah, judged, right?

So it's like part of this practice is to build the muscle that allows us to tolerate the discomfort of disclosure. Oh, I love that because I think it is so much, you know, that I think we get confused about so many times is that we're not born with these skills, right? So even when, you know, to be able to softly criticize another, to have empathy for another, none of those things that, you know, we're born with. And I love, you know, speaking with teachers often, you know, when we think about, well, this kid has no empathy, this kid doesn't know. This is our ability to be able to teach them, to show them, means that they have to experience. There's no probably, I don't know, replacement for experience. And when you want to get creative, I guess this is you've got to practice it.

That's right. That's right. And so that so we built that methodology. really important in public health is to recognize that while a little bit of loneliness could be a signal like thirst, when it starts to get excessive, it can spiral out of control. So in the book, I identify five territories of human experience where you're very much at risk for spiraling loneliness so we can be aware of it when it's happening to ourselves and get the connections we need, but also keep an eye on friends, neighbors, and family and see how they're doing. And then to the extent we can, let's change our social norms so it's accessible to everyone. Here are the five territories. The first one, and we talked about it already, is the territory of

trauma. And there are lots of kinds of trauma in the world. So we, we, we've done things with military trauma, but there's also domestic violence. There's having your house destroyed by a storm, but there's also other kinds of trauma, you know? And so anything that causes significant and sustained injury tends to make your brain tells you withdraw. So as you withdraw, then you start becoming more disconnected from the people around you. Because of that loneliness, our brains become more impulsive, more fear driven, more irrational. You withdraw even further. This is why I call it a spiral. Okay. I love that. Yeah. It feeds upon itself. I mean, just like the fundamental basis of anxiety, right?

I can't do this. The less, the more I don't do it, the more I don't want to do it. And the more I fear that I don't have the skill to do it. Yeah. So spiraling is pretty common in biologic systems. And that's another one. So that's, so that's trauma. Many people, sometimes some more dramatic than others.

So, you know, having my father die in front of me definitely was traumatic and it had changed the way I felt about myself and that led to other kind of things. So it's very common. The fact that we're in any of these territories is just human experience. So that's the first one. The second one is illness. So particularly serious illness like cancer or some neurologic defects or illnesses or chronic illness, serious chronic illness, you know, these change. We feel we're different from other people because we are. And if they're serious illnesses, we often start thinking about mortality and, you know, did my life matter? And did my life have consequence? And sometimes if you don't like the answers to those internal questions, you feel guilty, ashamed, withdrew. You know, so this illness is its own territory and risk for spiraling.

Now, you don't have to. You can get the kind of support you need in illness. Be connected. I have friends who with serious illness who inspire me with how connected they are. I talk, I give positive stories too. This is not all these, this book is not a gloomy book in any way. I know it's amazing. Yes. Right. Yeah. So that's the second, the third territory, which I think most people often are aware of because it's part of our kind of cultural, you know, understanding. Well, and this is aging. As you get older, you lose friends,

you lose physical and mental capability is you, you become more isolated. So not just lonely, but also isolated. So aging is a zone where we have to be careful about spiraling. The fourth territory is difference. Are we different because of race? Are we different because of gender identity, LGBTQ kinds of identity? And do people see me and accept me for who I am? But it's also disabilities. It's also being a new immigrant or a new asylum seeker into a country.

You know, there's a risk that other people, you know, won't really let you in, that you'll be systematically excluded because of a superficial trait or characteristic. So this is the world of difference. OK, so marginalization in many ways would fit into that category. Yes, very much so. Yeah. And you can have marginalization in illness, right? There's certain illness, you know, when AIDS was more prominent, AIDS was marginalized, right? And long COVID is, you know, is often marginalized because people sometimes think, oh, well, you don't have a real disease. It's all in

your head. You know, it's a little bit like fibromyalgia. I was just going to say that, fibromyalgia. Yeah. Yeah. Those things where you're on the outside and people are questioning whether that's really a thing. Yeah. Okay. I get it. And the fifth territory, which we're all in right now is modernity, right? So this is this wonderful but scary time we're all in where, you know, the roadmap for the future kind of goes right into the fog. There's no script. We don't know where we're going. There's no script. That's called modernity. In the territory. That's what I call it. The modern world.

I have never heard that word in my life. OK, Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by that. Well, this is where, you know, we are navigating ways society has never been. Like we've never had a wealth divide the way we have now. I can't speak for Canada, but in the U S I heard something the other summer, which really sometimes, you know, kind of a statistical really bring it home for you. And I knew there was a wealth divide. There always has been in society, right? Haves and have nots. But I heard a statistic that was quite compelling that the 50 wealthiest individuals in the U.S. had as much money as the 150 billion poorest. No, I can barely imagine that. I can't either. Good God. So that's an issue. And then we talked about social media being used in this way that literally divides us from our authentic self. Right.

You know, you post pictures, you know, in young women, it's often hypersexualization. In men, it's risk taking, you know, kind of, you know, running on top of subway cars. It's like because we want to be viewed as daring or sexy. And so we pursue that, but that's not who we truly are inside. So there's a growing gap between our digital avatar persona and who we really believe we are. Right. And that's a form of loneliness too. Oh gosh. I love that so much because, you know, the comparison that is so

readily available for everybody. And, you know, I say this as a parent as well. I mean, our kids grew up with this and in some ways have maybe, and I'd love your take on this, more of a script around that place than even those of us, you know, this first generation of parents where we're parenting kids who are much more comfortable with the communication tools and can know so much more about how to stay connected to each other with very little prefrontal cortexes. And there's, we're, we're in this ignorant state of like, I just don't know. And, you know, I see that as sort of that added disconnect because we don't even know how to communicate with the kids these days. And some of us, you know, the older we get, which we didn't know how, you know, I don't want to push a wrong button.

I don't know how to. So, you know, I think it further perpetuates that. Do you find that as well? Well, I think the technology is intimidating for some people, but even if it's not intimidating, the technology itself is designed to be a little bit isolating, you know? So one of the giveaways to this is a lot of the senior executives of the tech firms in Silicon Valley wouldn't let their kids use smartphones because they knew that it had been designed very specifically to hijack the reward center, the dopamine reward circuit for the brain, you know, and keep you on those screens. Right. Because if you're on those screens, that's money's being made.

Yet you're buying, you're selling, you're doing all the things they want you to do. Gosh. And so would you say now what is what is the thing moving forward? And I know I cannot wait for our listeners to get your book. Where do we go from here? So I think it's both an individual growth opportunity, but also society has to make it easier for each of us to do what we need to do to be unlonely. So the title of the book is Project Unlonely, Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. And I do use examples from our project on lonely work

in order to explain how it's worked. You know, some of our programs, you know, the power of mindfulness plus creative making plus social learning. That is what we do in our programs. But the goal of the book is to invite people to design their own project on lonely, their own personal project on lonely.

And it's not a how-to book because you can't write a how-to. It's like a how-to book about how to have a happy life, right? You know, they're principles though. And so I outlined some of those principles. We've talked about some of them here. If you're lonely, it's not your fault that the arts can help you and kind of supply your brain with some of what you need, but you still have to take risks in order to disclose and connect. So there's nothing surprising, but it is an opportunity for each of us. And we also have to ask some of our major institutions to become more, to foster a culture of connection where it becomes encouraged and rewarded to be connected, to tolerate the discomfort of disclosure. You're allowed to be authentic. And I make the point that they shouldn't be doing it for charity reasons, that it'll actually help their organizations grow and flourish.

Yes. ourselves, around connecting principles and not only better serve the people, their communities who take advantage of what they have to offer, but actually become more sustainable and flourish as organizations. And I think that's the right future for them. As organizations. And I think that's so true. I mean, when I get to speak to corporate places and I do that quite a bit, the question is, you know, how do we get more productivity? How do we decrease burnout? How do we, um, increase empathy among our staff? I mean, people are leaving. We got a mental health problem. Nobody's committed. And I say, you know, so many of the times is when people are acknowledged, they rise. And so how do we provide opportunities to get your employees to be most productive? You get them. I mean, this is my opinion. You get them back in the office and you set rules and parameters and limits and all these invitations to, you know, not have kids on their cell phones during the school day.

It just doesn't happen in this particular institution because some of this in my mind has to be done on purpose. And I think about this even as an individual, right? Do I, am I a better mom, a psychologist, a wife, a whatever, however I show up in my community, if I do things like not engaging in my phone before I get to work in the morning? Do I have breakfast with my children? Do I make it a point of, you know, going for dinner with my friends and everybody leaves their phones in the car. Are these some of those decisions that we now have to make with respect to, do we want to be healthier?

Do we want to be happier? Do we want to be more creative and productive? Do we do those things on purpose? Well, I think that is the opportunity we all have. I think we can have a connected design strategy, both at the individual and the community level. And I think there's a growing understanding of how we would all benefit if we had that. There's momentum in that direction. I hope my book is a catalyst for that.

And I think the arts are an underappreciated aspect of that because for years it was like entertainment and distraction, but it's actually a fundamental force that's guided civilization since the history of history. The history of history. And I mean, the therapeutic value. And I mean, people kind of get scared when we start to talk about those things, but I really love that idea that if you really want to be healthier, engage in these things, do some things that are fun. Joy tends to be the most vulnerable emotion on the planet. And when we do those things, creative expressions, then we get back to the best parts of ourselves. Absolutely.

And, you know, creative activity is playful. Right. And just watching, you know, we did some work. There was a major hurricane in the New York area, Hurricane Sandy. It was, I think, 2012. And so we were able to, and so there was a temporary shelter built for families that had nowhere to go and their homes were flooded and so on. So this was in Queens. And we got some very generous donations of art supplies. We had 14 art therapists staff this shelter.

We kept it going for six weeks. And, you know, the force that was bringing these kids into making art and having a great time, it was stronger than the hurricane. Oh, I love that. Stronger than the hurricane. And I'll tell you, I mean, when we look around the world today, we're going to need some forces stronger than a hurricane to help, you know, kids and families survive, I think, in even some of the worst times. And I think I love everything about what you're doing. I love the Project Unlonely, everybody in this community. I want you to take a look at this book. We'll put everything in the show notes, know Dr. Nobel that I'm going to be following you just every step of the way, because I'm just, I'm so honored that you would sit with me in this community today. Where can people find you? Well, you can go online and it's www.artandhealing.org. Our initiative is Project Unlonely. Come to our website. We have ways to

educate and inform, just starting with some fun exercises you can do, films you could watch, and that unpack loneliness and have conversations with people you care about after watching those films. And be invited to be curious, make things, have conversations, be connected. Oh, thank you. I am so inspired by this conversation and I know this community is just going to fall in love with you too. So thank you for joining us today and to the rest of you.

I can't wait to see you again next week, but in the meantime, look after each other and thanks for being here today. My pleasure. Thank you, Jodi. I'm a registered clinical psychologist here in beautiful Alberta, Canada. The content created and produced in this show is not intended as specific therapeutic advice. The intention of this podcast is to provide information, resources, some education, and hopefully a little hope. The Everyone Comes From Somewhere podcast by me, Dr. Jodi Carrington, is produced by Brian Seaver, Taylor McGilvery,

and the amazing Jeremy Saunders at Snack Labs. Our executive producer is the one and only, my Marty Piller. Our marketing strategist is Caitlin Beneteau. And our PR big shooters are Des Veneau and Barry Cohen. Our agent, the 007 guy, is Jeff Lowness from the Talent Bureau. And my emotional support during the taping of these credits

was and is and will always be my son, Asher Grant. Woo! We'll see you next time. to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.