Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic and welcome to Next Question today. As we venture intoday number who knows what of life in the age of shelter in place and social distancing, I want to talk about loneliness. It's a feeling like love and loss that is so universal that it's the backbone to untold number of songs that will make your heartbreak, like this nineteen sixty two classic by Bobby Bentonly I'm Mr Roy Orbison's is a little more upbeat. And then there's this one from John Prine, who died from COVID nineteen on April seven, called speed of the Sound of Loneliness. See, loneliness was already start need to be accepted as a global problem even before this pandemic hit. And now, whether you're alone or surrounded by people, that feeling of loneliness may be even more profound. It's not only dangerous for your mental health and can lead to problems like addiction. According to a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering, loneliness is also tied to an increase in heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and dementia. But this isn't news to Dr Vivic Murphy, loneliness is not existing in isolation. That's not just a bad feeling, but it's actually increasing our risk or other conditions that are deeply impactful to our life. As Surgeon General under President Obama, he identified loneliness as this country's fastest growing public health crisis. Loneliness is a subject to state. It's a feeling that the connections that you need are greater than the connections that you have, and that gap is what creates loneliness. It's distinct from the objective state of isolation, which is more of a description of the number of people you have around you. So I can be surrounded by hundreds of other people, like a student on a college campus or someone who works in a large office setting, but I can still feel profoundly alone. And by contrast, I may only have a couple of people around me, but may feel deeply fulfilled. It's about the quality of those relationships. It's about can I be myself when I'm with somebody else? Can I show up as my whole self? Um? Do I believe that they accept me for who I am? And can I do the same for them? His new book Together, The Healing Power of human connection in a sometimes lonely world explores this often invisible epidemic, which leads me to my next question. Long before we were forced into this physical separation, how did we all become so disconnected? And what can we do to take better care of each other? And who better to ask than Dr Murphy? But first I wanted to see how he was doing, you know, like everyone else, I've I've just been trying to make sense of this and find some some blends of order and the chaos that's become my life. You know, I'm working at home now, and I'm trying to take care of our two kids, who are three and two. My wife is in the same boat. Thankfully. We are down in Miami, Florida with my parents and my sister. This is where I grew up and most of my family is still here. But I have a ninety year old grandmother at home who recently fractured her head and we're worried about her health. My parents are also, you know, in their early seventies, and so we're concerned about their exposure. So we're grateful to be together, but figuring out how to keep everyone safe, especially when my father and sister are seeing patients and clinic is a daunting prospect and it certainly is a great source of stress right now. So they're treating patients and then they're coming back home. Are you worried about that? We're worried about them. We're worried about my grandmother. Um. We were particularly worried about them because, like many doctors around the country, they've had a really hard time getting masks, so they have had to see patients sometimes without the protection that they need for themselves, and that makes work even riskier. You know, they still go because they want to serve the patients who need them, and they've tried to they've tried to convert as many appointments to teleconferencing type consultations and such, but you know, there are times where you need to see somebody in person, need to examine them, and so they're still seeing patients on the limited asis. So yeah, I do worry about them. I worry about my grandmother at home. I worry about my mother being exposed, and I certainly worry about all the other friends I have who are doctors and nurses in the front lines, who are struggling to take care of patients without masks and gowns and gloves. It's so infuriating to me that they are doing so much for the public without proper protection, not only for themselves, but of course they could potentially spread it to other people as well. We're going to talk about your book and about loneliness specifically, but as someone who was the Surgeon General under President Obama, why weren't we better prepared for this? Having been through Ebola and Zeka during the Obama administration. A couple of things that we learned is one is that you're always going to stumble during these responses when you're responding to something new. But what matters most of all is how you respond to those stumbles, how quickly do get up, how transparent are you in the process, and how quickly do you learn from the mistakes that you made. The other thing that really matters is that you lead with science and with scientists. And this is not always easy because when you get in front of the cameras in the briefing room in the White House, it is incredibly compelling, and to be able to get up there and say something positive, you know, there's a huge uh. You know, in internal instincts, you have to want to make people happy, to make them feel better in a time of panic, and you have to do that while also not stretching the truth or misrepresenting science. And one that's why it's particularly so important that not only elected leaders use science and the decision making that they put also that they put scientists in front of the microphone and give them the opportunity to speak directly to the public about what we're learning about the pandemic. I think when I look at the current response, I think, yes, there were some stumbles, you know, early on when it came to getting testing up and running. To be fair, this was a pandemic that's greater than really anything that we have seen perhaps in the last century. So there's an extraordinary phenomenon that they were faced with here. But what I think were I think they could probably be stronger and almost certainly do better, is when it comes to making evidence based decisions, pulling out the stops and using every level we have to make sure that our healthcare workers have the materials that they need, and whether that means activating the the d p A earlier, which was a lot of that gives the government ability for the Defense Production Act that's right. So whether it means activating the Defense Production Act earlier and using every lever to take over the supply chain and ensure that we're both producing and distributing materials where they need to go, you know, there are several things I think that we could have been uh, just bolder and stronger and quicker to do when it came to this response. And the reason that speed matters so much is that when it comes to pandemic response, speed equals life saved. If you look at the curves the model of the models that have been constructed not just in the US but around the world of the pandemic response effort, what you see is that even a one day delay in instituting stay at home measures or a strict mitigation efforts actually increases significantly the number of lives that are ultimately lost. So speed is of the essence here. The last thing I would say is about communication, though you know, one of the things that it was abundantly I think clear to many of us, both in republican and democratic administrations during these kind of responses, is that the most important asset you have in this kind of response is public trust, and you have to preserve that and treat it as a as a sacred bond and a sacred investment, if you will, And that means that you've got to make sure you're communicating openly and honestly with the public about what you know and what you don't know. And the reason trust is so important is because during pandemics like this, there are times where you're going to need people to take action that might be quite painful for them to do, but it is essential to be able to get the pandemic under control. And we're seeing that right now where we're having to ask people to stay at home and to not go to work, not go to school, not go to college, not visit their friends. This is extremely painful both economically and socially and emotionally for people. But people will only follow what you're telling them to do if they trust you, and so you you can't squander that trust by stretching their truth or by contradicting each other being inconsistent in your message. You've got to be very clear and how you communicate. Many of the people listening right now are focused on keeping their families safe, but you could change one letter in that word, and they're also focused on keeping themselves and their families sane, and that's where the topic of loneliness comes in because for many people, they are sheltered in place by themselves. It's hard enough with a family getting along with a spouse, homeschooling, working from home. The pressures are really unparalleled, I think. But then you have people who are all by themselves. And we're really here to talk about loneliness today because that's something that you've been focused on for a few years now. You decided to take this issue on when you were the surgeon General in the Obama administration, and I'm curious how it caught your tension and why, O Katy. I didn't think that I would focus on loneliness. When I began my tenure, I had spent a lot of time thinking about what my priorities would be. I had in fact, spoken and testified in front of the Senate and shared what my priorities would be, and loneliness was not on that list. But what happened to me is I was really educated by people around the country who invited me to their homes and into town hall meetings in their communities, and you being ad to tell me stories about what it was that was on their mind. Yeah, I've been going to those meetings with usually a simple question, which is how can I help? And I heard stories that were not entirely surprising, about opiod addiction, about violence and communities, about people's struggles with depression, and anxiety by their worries that their children might be using social media too much. But what was interesting in what I did not expect to hear was it behind so many of these stories, where threads of lonelines us, with so many people saying to me, you know, I feel like I have to deal with all of these issues on my own. I feel like no one has my back. I feel like I disappeared tomorrow wouldn't matter. I just feel invisible. And so even though people didn't come up to me saying hi, my name is Vebic or my name is Katie and I'm struggling with loneliness, when they would say those things, it made me wonder if they felt alone. So I began surfacing it more proactively in conversation, and what I experienced also surprised me again, which was that I saw these visceral looks of recognition in people's faces, saw it in their eyes, that kind of recognition that said, I've felt this before, or people who are close to me have experienced this, and I'm aware of it. And that was true. Whether I was talking to people in remote villages in Alaska, whether I was talking to members of Congress in DC or to parents in Oklahoma, people seemed to deeply connect with the issue of loneliness, and they weren't always comfortable with it. In fact, they often felt a sense of shame when admitting to their own loneliness. But it was familiar, and that was my first signal that there was something deeper going on in the country that I had not previously paid enough attention to. I had noticed it in my own life. I had struggled with loneliness and not a lot as a child, and many times during adulthood, including during my time a surgeon general, I had seen loneliness a lot among my patients, noting that so many of the people who came to our hospital and sought care came alone and at some of the most critical moments of life, during major illnesses when they had to make decisions about treatment, and even Katie at the time of death, that they're only people who were with them were They're my fellow doctors and nurses in the hospital, but there was nobody else who was there to witness those critical moments and help them in their decision making. So I had seen loneliness, I had seen it up close, I had felt it personally, but I had no idea, Katie, how common it was. And it was those experience, as it was those conversations that include me into something that I had been missing. Tell me about your own experiences with loneliness as a child um as as a child of immigrants. I know that you struggled with feeling different and alone. I did, Katie. You know I I always really blessed to have some amazing people in my life, most of all my parents and sister, who who were just my ultimate safety nea and whenever I came home, I felt safe and secure. I felt loved, I felt seen, I felt value. But school was a different matter entirely. When I would go to school as a very shy kid who had trouble approaching other kids, I found it hard to make friends. And one of the scariest times of the day for me was not when a test was being administered. It was actually lunchtime, when I had to go to the cafeteria and wonder if I was going to be sitting alone, and that makes me cry of the Well, it turns out I wasn't alone in this loneliness. But there's so many young people, you know, and people who are older now, when they think back on their their times in elementary school, they recall moments like this. And what's so interesting about loneliness among kids is that we tend to focus a lot on bullying as the experience that is really traumatic and harmful to children, and with good reason. It's common, it's consequential, we should pay attention to it. But loneliness is interesting because even though it can be a byproduct of bullying, even though it can be a risk factor for bullying, it's also its own separate thing. When she would peek kids experience of loneliness, often what they'll say is, nobody did anything bad to me. They just pretended I didn't exist. They just didn't notice that I was even there. And that is the experience that I found an interview after an interview with parents who had kids struggling with loneliness, that was true to their own experience. And so for me, you know, thinking about those moments in elementary school, thinking about how I would just wait and watch the clock and be so excited when I finally hit three o'clock in the bell rang, so I could just run out to the front and seeing my mother waiting in the car for me and jump in and go home. When I think about those moments, um, I'm struck by by a couple of things. One is the shame that I felt around feeling so lonely. You know, to this day, i'd actually never talked to my parents about that loneliness that I experienced. Yeah, I never have, and at the time I didn't because I was ashamed. I thought that saying that I was lonely was like saying, you know, I was I wasn't fit enough to make friends, or I wasn't likable. I was socially deficient in some way. Now I don't tell them about it or talk to them about it, not because I'm ashamed of it, but because I don't want them to feel bad. I don't want them to think that I was in pain as a child and they didn't know about it, or that they did something wrong, because they didn't do anything wrong. Oh, thank goodness, you had them because I as you tell the story of the VIC I think about kids who don't have loving parents and are lonely at school. And I know your loneliness was exacerbated by the fact that you're you know, you're Indian, and a lot of people didn't appreciate or understand your family special customs and traditions. It was an interesting thing because I went to a school that had growing up in Miami, Florida, that had a large African American and Latino population, and diversity was is there in some respects in the school, Yet in terms of my own cultural background, there was nobody else other than me and my sister in the school who were of Indian descent. Now that in and of itself wasn't problematic, except that, you know, we found that many kids who didn't understand what kind of Indian we were would, uh, would think that we were Native American, would call me, you know, tomahawk boy, would make all of these jokes about, you know, about Native American culture, which you know, frankly didn't even apply to me, but felt offensive nonetheless, And they were all of these um sort of It was around the time and that the movie Indiana Jones was made. And this may not be remarkable to most people, but for people of Indian descent, that movie was highly traumatic because they painted this picture of India that was inaccurate and frankly quite offensive. You know. So we had all these kids in school who thought that we ate monkey brains, uh, you know, and who thought that we ate cockroaches and and and all kinds of insects, and they just thought it was all disgusting. You know where we came from, but they had no idea what it was like. But they took this from Indiana. Jones and the Temple of Doom. That's so interesting. Yeah, And it's funny when I when I talked to the Indian men and women who were of my age and when I mentioned that movie, I've seen many of them shutter because they recall these conversations that they had to have with kids in elementary school informing them that no, they did not have cockroaches for dinner. No, that's not something that we eat. This shows how shows how impactful cultural uh, you know, events like a movie like that. I would never strike me that that was very traumatic and triggering for for people in that community. It was. And you know overtime, you know, as I got older, it was easier to have a thoughtful conversation with people and say, hey, that's actually not what we do at home. In fact, most of us are vegetarian. But but you know, in elementary school, when you're in fourth or sixth grade, like you know, the conversations a bit different. Middle school can be a little rough. So you know, I would say that those experience, as painful as they were, they certainly gave me an appreciation for how difficult this social experience can be for children in school, especially in a culture that's largely built around extroverts, and where the notion of you know, being alone or even wanting to spend time alone and sort of looked at as evidence that something be wrong with you. Up next, how we can avoid a social recession in the wake of this pandemic and use this time to appreciate and strengthen our most important relationships. At the start of two thousand and fifteen, after being appointed the nineteenth Surgeon General of the United States, Vivic Murphy criss crossed the country on a listening tour, which is where he was surprised to find that loneliness was an almost ubiquitous experience among Americans. It was a realization that would reshape his mission. You know, traditionally the Office of the Surgeon General has focused on deeper would causes like physical activity and nutrition, but this was an unexpected one and I started to see very clearly in these conversations, and as I delve into the science behind loneliness, of which there was a surprising amount, I started to realize that loneliness is not existing in isolation. That's not just a bad feeling, but it's actually increasing our risk or other conditions that are deeply impactful to our life, conditions like cardiovascar disease and depression and anxiety and dementia. There was some very interesting studies out of Brigham Young University showing that loneliness is strongly associated with a reduction in lifespan as well, a reduction that is similar in magnitude to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and greater than the magnitude of mortality impact seen with obesity or with sedentary living. But I was also seeing the stories of people who were struggling with opioid addiction and with addiction to alcohol that there was this profound sense of loneliness that they spoke about that just came through in their stories and the writing of the book. I I delved more deeply into these stories and visited people who had spent many years in prison as well to understand more about the origins of the life of violence as they described it that they had led and there too, with so many of them told me was that it was their loneliness at a young age had led them to join gangs. Um it was a sense of loneliness and still a nod at them, you know, during their time in prison and when they got out afterwards. So again and again and again, it seemed that loneliness was not only common, but it was driving us to do things that were often harmful to ourselves and to the people around us. When I read your book that I was thinking about all the mass shootings that I've covered and the fact that the shooter, the perpetrator, is often described as a loner. So I started thinking about violence, gun violence and other kinds of violence and thinking that loneliness was at the foundation of those events as well. Yes, and it's true when you look at the notes that are left by the perpetrators of mass shootings, they often do speak to loneliness, often directly. So I want caveat, don't want to make here is is The message here is not that everyone who's lonely is dangerous or violent in some way. But the message here is that when we don't address our loneliness, it can manifest in a whole variety of ways. It can make us shrink back deeper into our shell, and we can experience greater depression and anxiety. It can cause us to be more aggressive or angry or irritable with people, even in our own family, people that we love. Um, it can lead us to reach for things to numb the pain that we're feeling, things that may not be good for us, like alcohol or unhealthy food. And so as we think about this deeper emotional pain that I found so common in the stories of people around America, what I realized is that a lot of this pain is manifest in loneliness. But there's a flip side to this as well, which is that social connection, it turns out, is an extraordinary source of healing. And when I think about the things that I prescribed as a doctor, that I studied in medical school and in my residency training, the medications that could help people, the exercises that could strengthen them. We never really studied social relationships. We never thought of that as a tool for improving your health, for staving off illness. But I came to see that social connection is one of the most powerful resources we have. It enables us to not only be healthier, but to perform better and to show up better, whether it's for our family, in school or at work. More than the US adult population admits to suffering from loneliness. It's complicated, but in an age when we're ostensibly more connected than ever, how did we get to this point. Well, I think there's no one single thing that led us here, about a combination of factors that ultimately have contributed to the loneliness we're experiencing today. I think one of them is we are certainly more mobile than we were fifty or seventy five hundred years ago, which creates extraordinary opportunities for us, but also means that we leave communities that we've come to know and that serve as anchors, and that can be a lonely experience. The other factor is the way we in which we use technology. I think is also contributing to a weakening of our connections with each other. This is not intrinsic to technology itself. In fact, technology, at the end of the day, is a tool, and the question of how we use it, how we design it, is what makes the difference between whether it's strengthens or weakens our connections. It's interesting because technology is serving such an important purpose now, but I just hope when this pandemic is over, people won't keep relying on it and think, well, I don't have to have that human interaction. I don't have to have the face to face connection. I can just FaceTime my friend. And one of the points in your book is human connection. There's no substitute for that. One of my hopes, Katie, is that is it we can come out of this moment of so physical distancing, that we can emerge from this pandemic with a greater appreciation for the value that our human connections bring to our lives. You know, as I walk around the circle that I grew up on, you know, these days in Miami, I find that there are more and more people who are outside, but they wave enthusiastically and smile in ways that they've never done before. It's almost like they're hung agree to see another person. When cars drive by around our circle, I see the drivers slowing down and then waving furiously, and then I wave furiously back because I'm also so excited to see another human being. And so the question is will this last? Can we hold on to the deepening appreciation that we have for human connection, and also can we use this time to actually deepen our connections even though we're physically distant from each other. A few things that I think can be quite helpful in moments like this is Number one, to make sure that we're spending some time each day connecting with someone we love, whether that's on video conference or by phone, or writing to them to say that we're thinking of them. When you do that consistently, day in and day out, that can really build a lifeline to the outside world. The second, I think it's important to think about the quality of that time. This is a moment where we can refocus on the quality of our interactions with each other. When you put away distraction and you give somebody the gift of your full attention, what you do is you actually stretch time. Five minutes of a conversation where somebody is listening fully to you, and when you are openly sharing with them can be more deeply fulfilling then thirty minutes spent in distracted conversation. But I also finally think that the third way we can really build our strengthen our connections with each other now is to serve each other. One of the great learnings that I took away from the research and stories that I encountered in this book is that service, it turns out, is the an unexpected but powerful solution to loneliness because when we help other people, what we do is we shift the focus from ourselves to somebody else in the context of a positive interaction. That's so important because when we are chronically lonely, one of the paradoxical things that can happen is that we start to focus more and more on ourselves, which makes it harder to connect with others. The other thing about service is that it reaffirms to us that we have value to bring to the world, which is so critical because chronic loneliness can also chip away at our self esteem and make us believe that we're actually lonely because we're not likable or because we're not lovable, even though that's not the case. So this is a time when a lot of people need help, a lot of people need the service that we can render. And service in this moment doesn't necessarily mean volunteering in a soup kitchen. It can mean checking on a neighbor who might be elderly and might be worried about going to the grocery store and exposing themselves. It could mean calling a friend who might be struggling to homeschool their kids and fellow work at the same time, just to say, I'm thinking about you. I want to know how you're doing. What I can do. Can I spend some time talking to your twelve year old just to give you a break? Exactly? Exactly? That can be immensely mentally helpful. We talk about loneliness affecting older people, of course, but I was surprised and interested to read that one of the peaks of loneliness happens in young adulthood. Part of me was surprised, but part of me wasn't, because I look at my college experience, for example, and I compare it with my daughters. When my daughter had downtime in college, she'd often lie in her bed and be on her computer and writes and watch some really highbrow show like The Real Housewives as a way to kind of get her brain off more important things. And I thought, when I had downtime in college, I would sit in the hallway eating popcorn or cup of soup that I made on my little hot plate, or we'd all share a pizza, and we would just sit around b seen talking about everything and anything. And I thought, Wow, what a change, because it's so easy to have downtime alone now it is. And one of the things that's happened in the modern world is that all of that white space that we used to have in our lives, those few minutes or a few hours in between meetings or tasks when we would just sit and think, or maybe pick up a book and read, or maybe just take a walk and let our mind wander. Those moments have all been sucked away. They've evaporated, because those moments are now filled with our devices. That's right. There's something about solitude and about taking our minds off of a specific task that can facilitate our thinking in our creativity. We tend in the modern day to look at that as time wasted, and in fact, we look at our phones as efficiency tools, so that if we have five minutes and we can clear out five emails, you know what, we're waiting for the bus, then that's great, that's maybe more efficient. I can be on the subway and listen to an audiobook or catch up on the news, and I have just saved time. And there is undeniable efficiency that comes from our devices. But I think what has happened is that because we have perhaps lost sight of the value of solitude, we've allowed it to be edged out more easily. And that solitude is important not just for our creativity, but for allowing us to reflect on our own experiences. You know, one of the things I realized in the when I was studying and understanding loneliness more deeply is that the foundation for connecting to other people is a strong connection with ourselves. And a strong connection with ourselves is marked by understanding our value and our worth. It's a feeling of being centered and grounded, and that comes when we have self knowledge, which comes from in part time spent reflecting, but it also comes from self compassion. And self knowledge and self compassion I would allow us to accept ourselves. The compassion pieces perhaps the harder of the two though, because many of us, myself included, we're raised in a culture that tells us that being hard on ourselves is how we push ourselves, it's how we achieve more. And we don't want to be soft on ourselves or cut too compassionate, because then we won't strive as much and will lag behind. It turns out that that can be taken to an extreme, which it often is, where people beat themselves up to no end, and that ultimately destroys their confidence and makes it harder, I think, for them to approach other people from a healthy state of being. So this is, I think, to me, one of the great important lessons I took away from the book, and frankly, on a personal level, one of the personal struggles I have. I've never been sort of a naturally self compassionate person. I think I naturally am, but for many years that I have not been that way. Um And so part of my own struggle as I seek to build a more connected life is to find ways to be more compassionate, both towards others but also toward myself. Are you worried about a social recession that could be even more damaging than an economic one. I do think it. You know, this moment where we're so deeply worried, appropriately so about the impact with COVID nineteen is when we were talking a lot about the direct health impact and the economic impact of social distancing. But I think that there's another equally important impact here, which is an impact on our social lives. And I do worry that in our response of COVID nineteen that we will not only sustained damage to our health and to our economy, but that we will also incur a cost to our social lives, to our social health. And the longer this period goes on, with people being separated from each other, we run the risk of incurring a social recession, which is marked by deepening loneliness. But I don't think that that's inevitable. I think there's a choice that we can make here about whether we allow the current moment to not only physically distance our from each other, but socially distance ourselves from the people we love, or on the other hand, we can use this moment to recenter ourselves on their relationships that matter to us, to recommit to spending time with the people that we love, even if it's virtually and making sure that time counts. We can re commit ourselves to helping and serving not only the people we know, but the strangers around us who form a part of our community. You know, in these moments like this, so many people would give anything just to be able to go sit in a coffee shop with strangers, to be able to walk around a grocery store and see other people shopping without fear that there be at their source of infection. It turns out it's not just our best friends and our spouses. It's also our friends, our acquaintances, and the strangers who we may not know in our community who form the mental, complicated and rich networks that ultimately help us feel connected. So I do think that as much as we are at risk for a social recession, we can also come out of this with a greater sense of why relationships matter and appreciation for the fact that it is our relationships that are the foundation on which we build everything else, And this is our moment to realize that we can make those relationships stronger. If I had one credo for this book, Kay, it would be put people first. That's the most important lesson that I took away from this book and a society that is often centered by default around the acquisition of wealth and reputation and power as sources of worth and meaning, it's important that we reconfigure ourselves and say, actually, people and relationships are our greatest source of strength and power and health. So let's design our workplaces in school is around strengthening connection. Let's decide to spend our time and attention on people and prioritize them in our lives. And let's also think about relationships in the context of our politics, recognizing that the polarization that we are experiencing, the difficulty that we're having coming together to take on big issues, is just a reflection of the deeper erosion of relationships that we've had over years. And we know that when we're able to build relationships with other people that it makes it easier for us to communicate with them, to listen to them, and to overcome difficult problems together and define common ground. So what are some of the things that you saw being done by individuals or at a community level and wrote about in your book Together that we could learn from And so one of the encouraging things about this journey of writing this book on Loneliness and Social Connection is that as much as one might think it was hard to hear these stories of loneliness and it was, it was also inspiring to see the many ways that people have found to build connection into their lives and their communities. There is great hope for us to in building a more connected world, and I think there are some concrete things as individuals that we can do to strength and connection our lives. One of them is is focusing on the quantity of time that we spend with the people we love, recognizing that many of us can go days and days without even having a ten minute conversation or fifteen in a conversation with someone who's meaningful to us. But one of the keys to building strong, strong connections is to recognize that small steps can make a big difference. That the five, ten, or fifteen minutes you might spend calling a dear friend, or writing to an old mentor or video conferencing with your parents. These are moments which seem very small, but they can have a powerful impact on how you feel in the moment and how connected you feel in the long term. The second thing I found is important to focus on is the quality of time that we're spending with each other and making sure that that time is as undistracted as possible. When we focus on other people with our full attention, it brings a richness to that interaction that really does a stretch time. And so quality matters. And that doesn't mean we should never use our devices. We absolutely should um But even if that means that we spend less time with people, but we make it high quality time, that's the better choice to make. I don't think we have to wait until the end of our lives to build a life that's centered around people. I think we can make that decision right now, and if we do, then I think we will give ourselves a better opportunity at living a life of greater health, greater strength, and also deep, deep fulfillment. Vivic Murphy's book is called Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a sometimes Lonely World, and I highly recommend it. It's out now. When we come back, a massage therapist tells us what you can do to combat your own loneliness. The coronavirus pandemic has upended life as we know it. As we do everything we need to try to prevent the spread of COVID nineteen. Whether you're living in a house with six increasingly annoying people just like I am j K, or living in an apartment on your own, this new world is, let's face it, lonely, So I wanted to see how some of you were coping and if you've found ways to help ease the isolation. Sarah Horowitz from Brooklyn said the loneliness she's feeling is all too familiar. I was widowed suddenly six years ago at the age of forty two, so I've been dealing with loneliness for a while now. And the thing that is getting me through now is I joined an organization called the w Connection, and there's chapters around the country and it's an organization for widows and it's not a bereavement group. It's more a support group and how to move forward in your life. And right away early on they got online with Zoom, so we do our meetings on Zoom now and we're getting to meet women from all the different chapters, which has been really um nice. So it's just been a lifesaver during this And then the other thing I've been doing is once a day, different times of the day. It's not the same every day, and I just blast a song. I pick a song, and I just danced around my apartment and I opened the window. And I'm on the second floor, so I know people probably look up and wonder what the heck is going on, but it just releases the stress. And I just kind of flailed around the apartment for one song's worth, lasting the music. Amy McMullen, who's quarantined alone in Birmingham, Alabama, shared this story about a kind act that helped make her situation a little less isolating. My seventy one year old mother who's recently with it, has two Westy dogs. She is Lindlaine. I doubt and really breaks my heart, my sister's heart, not to be able to be with her right now, but I matter. This past Sunday in between our towns, of all her groceries and she wanted to give me Easter baskets, so she had made for my naieces who live in my town. She included in her hall in the Easter basket for me and tucked intoide my Easter basket was one of her Westy dogs, little Lacie. She just insisted that I take her because she knows what loneliness is, not just from the quarantine, but from this past year experiencing such great loss. She knows how much a dog can help earn those times. And she wanted to give me a reason to get outside, something to care for, a reason to walk, a reason to get out in the sunshine, and someone to keep me company. I'll push back, and we argued back and forth, but we all know that mother's no best and so ultimately relented, and it truly has been the best gift. Lucy has been something else to fake us on and something else to worry about, a companion by me during those isolated work hours and the after hours, and the barking in the background, I gotta say has made for great conference called distractions. So ultimately, I'm so thankful to my mother for sacrificing one of her dogs to me. And it truly just praves that dogs are man's or in this case, single quarantine. Female best friends, cuddling our pets, and dancing around our living rooms are fantastic ways to help combat these intense feelings of loneliness. But there's something else that can help us find that human connection that Dr Murphy was talking about something that's right at our fingertips. Touch is essential in reminding us of who we are both as individuals. Touch literally keeps us grounded in our own bodies, but then also just as important, physical contact reminds us who we are as families and as communities. David Loebinstein is a massage therapist in New York City and for fifteen years he's run of private practice called Full Breath Massage, where he uses touch every day to help others, or at least he did until recently, like most of the rest of us, I had to close my business nearly a month ago. This was brutal. I dearly missed my clients, and uh, you know, as you can imagine, my touch other people professionally for a living. So not being able to touch other people except for my my wife and my my kids has been surprisingly challenging for me. So David did what so many of us are doing these days. He went online and now twice a week he holds massage tutorials on Instagram Live to instruct other people, whether you're alone or with others, about how transformative touch can actually be. We need to recognize that a lot of the difficulties that we are feeling are the symptoms of loneliness, of isolation, of distancing, and all of those things manifest in our body, both emotionally and physically. So loneliness is that anxiety that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Loneliness is that um gut clenching feeling in your in your intestines. Loneliness is that that racing in your hearts, the feeling of that that vice grip that's clamping around your shoulders. Even though the body is this reservoir, is this feel this this place that feels like all of these awful things are manifesting, The body is also the solution. The body is the place that we can turn to. The body is the place that we can uh, we can learn from as a way to move through this feeling of loneliness, this feeling of isolation. The body is where we can return to ourselves, can know ourselves so that even in this moment of incredible uncertainty, we can be conscious of who we are and how we are going to move through this moment by moment, day by day. Today, David is sharing with us two techniques to help you and your quarantine partners feel a bit more grounded. He'll walk us through something we can do to ourselves. But the first technique is for a partner. So grab a friend, your husband, your wife, your significant others, your child, and follow along to give them a moment of zen. You are going to instruct your partner to sit in a hard backed chair, not a couch or something super smushy, right, but a dining room chair or a desk chair. The key is that your partner should scoot their lower back and their glutes all the way to the back of the chair so that they feel like they are fully supported um by the back of the chair. In this position, you want um. You want your partner to feel like they are sitting on their sits bones. Okay, similar to how you might do in yoga class. So make sure that you've guided your your partner um into that position, sitting in the chair long and and upright. Now, for this shoulder sinking technique, you are going to use your forearms. You want to stand behind your partner, so you're standing at the back of the chair. Okay, So you guys should both be looking in the same direction, right, both facing forward. Your forearms should be a little bit higher than their shoulders. Okay, if the chair is super tall, or if your partner is super tall, you want to just pause for a moment and get a stool or get a short chair that you can stand on so that you're a little bit more elevated. Okay, So I want you to imagine the place where if you follow them, their neck all the way down to the base of the neck, right right where the base of the neck meets the top of the shoulders. That's where you want your forearms to be. Okay. You don't want to use your elbows, because your elbows can be a little pointy. You just want to use that broad base of the of the forearms. Okay. So now I want you to think of placing both of your forearms right on your partner's body. So your right forearm on their right upper shoulder right or what we're calling the top of their shoulder on the right side, and then your left forearm at the top of their left shoulder. Okay, you're not doing anything. You're not applying any pressure here. You're just placing your arms. You're introducing your contact. Now, the single most important thing that you are going to do is next. You are going to slow down your exhalation. You are going to feel your own body tall and long and loose, and then you're just going to follow that next ex lation all the way down to empty. However long that breath is for you is fine. This technique and every massage technique will feel far better if you, the giver, are relaxed, so feeling that long, easy exhalation. I want you, on the next exhale to just think of tipping your body weight forward, pouring your body weight, if you will, into your forearms, so that you are giving your partner some pressure into those top of the shoulder spots. Okay, but you're doing so in a way that is gentle. You're not pressing down with your arms and muscling into their shoulders. You're just pouring your body weight into their shoulders. Check in with them, see how the pressure is. Chances are, with all the stress we're all feeling, they'll be happy with a little bit more pressure. So then on your next exhalation, you can think of just tipping a little more of your body weight forward, Okay, sinking a little bit deeper if they want more pressure. You can even think of rising up onto your tiptoes and then on that next exhalation, sinking your body weight down into the shoulders. Now, chances are your partner will not be complaining right now, and your partner will be happy to have this go on for a good long time. The key here is that you do not need to get fancy. You don't need to do any special tricks. You just need to give your undivided attention to your partner. You need to just give your body weight, your breath to your partner. Now, if they're ready for a little bit more, you're also welcome to instruct your partner to gently stretch their head from side to side and front to back so as you'll see and as they will tell you, you can maintain that easy pressure. And then you can just instruct your partner to think of bringing their left ear towards their left shoulder, very slowly, taking five or ten seconds, just gradually stretching. What they will feel and what you will feel is where your right forearm is making contact. All of those muscles will be lengthening, will be stretching underneath your pressure, So that can be a beautiful way of continuing to lengthen and soften those tissues all the way along the right side of the neck and shoulders. Then just as slowly, you can have your partner come back up to neutral, and then they can do the opposite, so following their left ear towards their left shoulder, just as slowly, holding for as long as feels comfortable there at whatever pressure feels comfortable, and then coming back up to center. Then, last, but not least, you can instruct them again just as slowly to think of bringing their forehead down towards their feet. You can sinc with both of your forearms into those tops of the shoulders, and as they stretch forward, they'll feel that delicious lengthening along the back of the spine. And then whenever they're ready, they can come up two center. You want to end this technique as slowly and with as much love as you began the technique, and then you can gleefully tell your partner that it's their turn. Now. For those of you who are isolating by yourself, or frankly or just sick and tired of the people that you're isolating with, I also want to be clear that you can use your own body as a resource. You can, in essence contact yourself. You can feel a little less lonely, uh, just by getting a little bit more in touch with your own body. So one of my favorite tools to make that possible, UH is to use two tennis balls. What I do very simply is I placed two tennis balls in a long like a tube, sock, even a piece of pantyhose is okay. I stuff one ball all the way down to the bottom where the toes are, I tie a very tight knot. I stuff the second tennis ball in all the way down to that not, and then I tie another very tight not. So what you have here, in essence is like two sausage links, okay. And what you'll see is that this um ball and sock combination can be used as a um as a device for you essentially to sit on or to lie on, as a way to release some of those muscles that are hard for you to touch yourself. So the technique that I want to discuss right now is actually using these balls to sit on in a chair. In my experience, sitting on these tennis balls can be a marvelous way to counteract just some of that feeling of stress intention that comes from working a lot. And in addition, they can also remind us of our bodies. They can ground us in our bodies when we use these um balls. Just to be clear, you don't have to use tennis balls. They have a little bit of squish to them, so it's why I think they're beneficial. But you can experiment with frankly, with whatever round objects you have in your house, because I know our our means are a little limited these days, so improvise however you like. Once you have made your balls in a sock contraption, I want you to find a chair that's relatively hard. Ideally your feet will be able to touch the ground, since that will help to further ground you. And then you're going to place the two balls in a sock on the seat of the chair, closer towards the back of the chair, and then you're just going to sit down gently. The goal here is that the balls will rest right at the top of your hamstrings, so right where your hamstrings meet your sits bones. When you have found that spot, you'll see you might need to just roll around a little bit to find the place that feels right. The key here is that you'll find the position that has a um even a slight sense of discomfort right These are very unusual muscles were not used to them being touched unless you're a regular devotee of massage. Okay, so they can be quite sensitive. You don't want the contact to be painful, but it it is. Okay if it feels there's just a little bit of discomfort, but it should feel like a satisfying discomfort, one that you can breathe into and then when we're here, we just focus on finding the very bottom of our exhalation. You can literally think of that breath out as sinking your body further down into the balls. You can think of these muscles hamstrings, hips, glutes, and just imagine them melting ever so slightly each time you exhale. As you exhale further, you can also imagine the muscles of your back, the muscles of your shoulders, the muscles of your neck also melting ever so slightly. The beauty of these two balls is they provide a place for our awaren us. We almost never right, unless for example, we're giving birth right or we have a really bad case of hemorrhoids. We never think about these particular muscles, but they are literally at the seat of us. Okay, So if we can be more aware of the this seat of us right literally of our pelvis. We can be more grounded, we can be more present in our own bodies. So by following this exhalation, we're encouraging physically our musculature to sink and soften and release. So that feels good just on a physical level, okay, but then also on an emotional level and even on the level of our autonomic nervous system. That slow, easy exhalation is what bringing us back into our own body. It's what's getting us out of that fight or flight instinct that we are often locked in these days, where we're constantly worried about what's going to happen next. It allows us to just be in this breath, in this moment, right here, right now, which can be a great gift that you can give your own body and brain. I feel more relaxed already. How about you if you want to revisit these exercises or actually see how they work. David provided us some short video tutorials that will be in our morning newsletter wake Up Call, and on my social media channels, and if you want to learn more massage techniques, David is doing these Instagram live tutorials on Wednesdays and Sundays at four pm Eastern time. You can find those by searching David Loebinstein. That's spelled s T i n E on Instagram. And that's it for this week's episode. I hope it's helped ease some of the anxiety and loneliness of this unprecedented situation and perhaps inspired you to reconnect with people without distractions, whether through conversation service or touch. For the most accurate and up to date information on the coronavirus and how to keep you and your family safe, make sure you go to the CDC and the World Health Organization websites. You can also get wake up Call every morning in your email, where we're diligently reporting on the day's most pressing news. Just go to Katie Correct dot com and sign up. Until next time and my Next Question, I'm Katie Correct. Thanks so much for listening everyone, and stay safe. Next Question with Katie Couric is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Kurik Media. The executive producers are Katie Curic, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements. Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagan and Lowell Berlante, Mixing by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Curik dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Kurik. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows