I’ll kick this one off with a confession. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost 30 years and yet I still look forward to reading the Sunday New York Times. There are plenty of reasons to attack any newspaper at this point. Journalistic integrity is challenging in highly charged times. Which is exactly what made Sunday’s piece “Why is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” so gosh darn compelling.
Because it’s about all of us. Loneliness is a non-partisan issue.
According to the Surgeon General it’s more threatening to our health than obesity, heart disease and smoking cigarettes. Which sounds pretty dire. What doesn’t sound bad, are the suggestions given to help people feel less alone. And the hopeful note Matthew Shaer ends on. He suggests that we are in a technological evolution much like the Industrial Revolution where loneliness was also an issue. In time, we will adjust and instead of all this tech continuing to drive us to screens and away from each other IRL, we will find a way back to human connection.
Until that time, there are things we can do to help each other! The Harvard lecturer and psychologist Richard Weissbourd, in evaluating people’s feelings of isolation, put this question,
“Has someone taken more than just a few minutes to ask how you are doing in a way that made you feel they genuinely cared?”
So instructive because it actually has one antidote hidden inside it! Something we talk a lot about in service of creating laughter too! Active listening. At work, at school, at home, we can all take a few minutes to ask how a person is doing free of distractions. And listen to the answer.
According to the article, “we know loneliness raises our blood pressure, negatively alters our cognitive functions, is associated with Type 2 diabetes and shortens our life spans. (Subsequent studies have linked the emotion to suicidality, Alzheimer’s and leukemia.)”
Here’s my Healthy Aging Month challenge, like the ice bucket one without the ice or the bucket. For the month of September, take time once a day to reach out to someone, ask them how they are doing and listen to the answer.
