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Inaudible. Were currently offering books on our website pretty click on the button below. We know that everybody search night. Thank you so much for that. You can ask your author a question by clicking on ask questions about of your screen. You can vote. Its a reminder that we include author and host. Inaudible. From 2014 2017. The author of facebook the healing power of the Human Connection. Hes been president ial candidate joe biden 20 and what we can do and spreads pretty. Inaudible. Is breaking up because you are speaking so quickly. And just start again. With the bio. He served as the 19th Surgeon General of the united and he is the author of tonights book together. In his one hour in the sometimes lonely world. He is been busy providing joe 20 and what citizens can do when it spreads. The doctor is joining conversation tonight. President obama as well as michelle obama. The book was released in 2019. The Services Tonight are provided. We welcome him here. It is such a joy to be here with my dear friends someone who i admire so greatly. It is a joint especially to talk about this book. It is by far for the most important books i have read in a very long time. Probably change my understanding of loneliness. Personally thankful as well is really enlightening. Thank you sarah for being here. And indulging me. In the Surgeon General of the United States of america. An athlete of Obama Administration ended, someone of memoir or leadership book wouldve been, golden airports everywhere. But you decide to write a book about loneliness. Serious problems here in america and around the world. Why did you decide to write this book and what makes it such a serious problem. Restate how wonderful it just to be here. To finally be sharing this book with the world. From the years in the Obama Administration, if you have secrets to share anyway. It was not an option for me. This equinox of this book, i did have some book ideas. Like coming out of office, and something on sort of a new view of Public Health. And maybe for the country to rebuild our Public Health infrastructure. The might time in office when i learned in government but some of what happened is sometimes you big plans and then the universitys in june a pretty thats what happened to me. So in 2017 wrote this article on loneliness in the workplace pretty and i really think the editors asked me to. I wasnt entirely sure how interested they would be in this book. What i found an days and weeks that followed the publication in the article, as i was getting so many messages from around the world. The media and folks who said we think this is a real problem in our country. Over the United States, india, japan, south korea, countries across europe and south america. Then he got of other messages this end, you know ive been struggling with loneliness for a long time. There might as has been didnt realize it was so common. The maybe dont need to be ashamed of it. And that was really striking to me. Long story short of that, it became clear that experience in the suggestions and of good friends and confidence. This is actually the issue that i would write about but i realize the more i talk about it, the more about a scene. It was resonating with my own experiences as a child and as a doctor. So that is what me led to ultimately focus on this topic. When i travel around the country and Surgeon General, and met people in small towns and big cities everywhere. I heard stories that were not surprising pretty stories about people struggles with substitute disorders and addiction. I heard about parents who had lost their own children who overdo waste photos from opioids. No parent should ever have to go through that. I heard about parents who were worried about depression and anxiety producing to be rising among kids and other children and generations. But what i started to see behind the stories was loneliness. And heres heart presented. Wasnt somebody coming up and saying hi my name is jack, im struggling with loneliness. People would say things like this. Enough, if you like we have to deal with all of these problems and appeal than i have to do it on my own. They would say that i feel is if i do this tomorrow, no one would know. I feel absolutely invisible. At that time after time hearing that, and started to register for me that there is something bigger going on here pretty he reminded me of my experiences in the hospital where the earliest days of doctoring i remember seeing patients who would come in and they had nobody with him. And sometimes when a really important diagnoses that we would make sure we had to make a really big decision about treatment. I would ask them, who put a call so that we could have a family conversation that these are really tough issues to deal with. And so often i would get the answers that there was no one to call. And even at the last stages of life, those final days and hou hours. I was seven people to be with them until the final moment. A lot of times it was just me and my colleagues in the hospital who were those witnesses. There was nobody else. No one is there. So it was reminded of those experiences of what i was traveling the country. In the more i looked into it, the more i realize that loneliness was more common and more consequential in terms of its impact on our health. And i even realized. Sounds like you were seeing it in many different populations. We typically think of the elderly is being lonely. But im hearing you saying that its affecting all ages and backgrounds pretty. Absolutely. And ive even traveled abroad and talk to people in england. In other countries. What i found is that most people have this notion is the elderly it was troubled with us. I thought as we get ogres, sometimes we have ailments or disability. Or maybe also the experience of losing most of her family and friends as we get older and others get ill. And we arent connecting to people as well. All this is true. But what i found out really interesting late is that loneliness is affecting people across the age gap. Theres a spike in young people. Millennial generations. But i also found interesting late was that it seems to be the great equalizer the sense but found that whether you were rich or poor, i was hearing stories of loneliness. Rural areas. And traveled to fishing villages and i heard stories of loneliness. Members of Congress Washington dc who would tell me in hushed tones that they were struggling with loneliness. In many of the parents were too. Moms debts, and people who were rich. Everybody seem to have an experience to share, they need somebody in their life who are struggling. And also when he realizes something is different going on here. They need to come together on but i found interestingly enough, and the environment that were living in, and talking about the subject of loneliness and social connection it resonated with everybody. And i would say there was no topic including the Opioid Epidemic that touched on in my tenure, the seem to be struck a chord within people. In terms of the effects of it, seems like their Mental Health effects. It struck me how it actually has physical Health Effects two. See equivalent of smoking a number of cigarettes a day. Was talking. This was surprising to me as well. I learned through the conversations with people that i had and also did the research afterwards that loneliness is more. It has deep consequences to our health. It turns out that it has major consequences outside of her health as well. There is a Strong Association between loneliness and the risk of Heart Disease and dementia and depression and anxiety, people who struggle with loneliness have more fragmented, the quality in the sleep is impaired, given everything we are learning about the importance of sleep of her Overall Health in the increaser east of obesity, we are realizing that sleep is important and the impact of loneliness is profound, perhaps most striking is that you reference the study done by Brigham University and it shows the association between loneliness and longevity is quite interesting and the mortality impact or the degree, when you struggle with loneliness the mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in the mortality impact of obesity, i see this as someone who served as Surgeon General that has spent decades working on smoking, obesity and physical activity, it has not focused on the issue and we never appreciated the impact to had on her health. That is extraordinary. , just to think back very quickly, when you say loneliness i want to define, what do you mean in your book you distinguish between loneliness and solitude, is loneliness being alone or something more to it than that . Its a great question, loneliness is a subjective term, its determined about how we feel about the quality of our connection, i would say if you had to define it further, loneliness is a gap between the social connection and we feel that we need and the ones that we have in our life, the gap is where we experience loneliness. Theres a couple things that i want to say that are important, loneliness has unfortunate stigma around it, many people feel to admit your lonely you are not likable or socially broken in some way, i see that not as a theoretical point, i see that from practical experience, personal experience because of my own struggle as a child, thats how i felt, thats why never talk to my family about loneliness, i felt deeply blessed to have my mother and a father and his sister who deeply love me and i knew that from my youngest memories so i always felt secure filled love at home. For the essential belonging when i walk into school in the morning, i felt the sinking pit in my stomach and each day when my mom carpooled up right in front of school to drop me off, i was scared about the moments on the playground when everyone would be picked for a team and id worry about being the loss from being picked even though i had good athletic ability, i worried about lunchtime and walking into the cafeteria and not knowing if there would be somebody to sit next to or rake room for me and i cannot wait until 3 00 p. M. When the bell rang in Elementary School to find my parents to go back home i felt myself secure and i know from firsthand experience that the shame that comes in with loneliness is profound and it keeps us from admitting to ourselves what is happening but it makes you feel youre alone because everyone else is hiding their loneliness. But the reason i bring this up, i think theres an important reason for us to understand that loneliness is not something to be shameful but a natural signal that our bodies have, just like we experience hunger or thirst when we need something for survival, when we lack social connection or something that we do need for survival, evolution has led us to, we feel a similar signal unlawfulness and if we respond to the signal by seeking out meaningful connection in our lives by calling a parent or dear friend by going to visit, the loneliness needs time of the lonely is processed for a long period of time, then we can start to see and run into the consequences that were talking about an interesting thing happened when loneliness is chronic, we start to develop patterns which can dig deeper into loneliness, when we experience loneliness, what is happening from an evolutionary perspective, we are wired to feel that were in a state of threatened danger when we are lonely. The reason has to do with how we evolve over the thousands of years, when we were hunter gatherers, safety really did depend on numbers and if we Work Together and trusted relationships, there was a greater chance that we could take turns watching out for predators and make sure that we did not start. When we became separated from her tribe the chance of survival automatically dropped and that became based into our nervous system, we perceived separation and loneliness and we experienced it with elevated threat level, with an increased focus of herself and worried about safety. The evolutionary context, the transfer to the modern world into think about what happened in the modern world where you are feeling lonely when youre more suspicious of People Development around you and you can see how it makes it harder to connect with people when youre in the mindset and as it shifts away with the selfesteem and start to convict if they were not likable makes her harder to venture out, and the paradox of both, you find when you are lonely you can be further and further into your shells just when you need to reach out, thats one of the reasons it can be so persistent unless we understand how to approach her correctly. That is heartbreaking to think about the spiral where loneliness and leads to deeper loneliness and is a very painful place to be. Stepping back, all historical trends and societal trends have led to loneliness, and particular interested in the role of the internet and social media and not just causing loneliness or alleviating loneliness. Which is it, the responsible for loneliness, do people feel less lonely, what is the role of that in the transit we are seeing . Let me say this from the onset, the talk of loneliness, you might say that sounds like a downer but ill tell you in my experience talking to people about the subject and studying over the last few years has led me too feel deeply inspired and hopeful in the story about loneliness is also about the office of loneliness which is the extraordinary power of Human Connection in the power of the connection to heal not only our body and our mind but to heal the Broader Society in which we live in those stories that emanated from those that meaning realize that we have at our fingertips the ability to build the world that cannot only sustain us in a fulfilling way but it can also support our children in the way so we hope they can live so i know we will talk more about that but i want to mention that because its important to recognize out of the challenge of loneliness comes a discovery with the deeper resource that can be deeply deeply sustaining. Where did this come from, it turns out loneliness is on you, it did not happen when the internet started but people have been lonely for generations and generations and we have not written about it for the longest of times, it seems like shakespeare should be writing about it. And what strikes me as mobility, the opportunity and we move away from communities that weve come to know over time and the other challenge is a cultural challenge, its one of the most insidious and difficult to address, even though if i went onto a Street Corner and asked ten people, what is your number one priority, i almost guarantee they would say a person or group of people or kid or spouse or et cetera. Even i would not say that, if you look at how we live our lives and judged by where we put our time, our attention in our energy, for many of us and certainly this is been the case for me over the last many years, that focuses not on other priorities. Or because we dont value human relations, we do this because we live in a poulter that tells us that success is defined in a particular way. It is designed not by your ability to build positive relationships and nurture them over time it is defined by your ability to acquire one and rethink, power, reputation. If i build a company to sell and make a lot of money, im called successful in the media, if i have lots and lots of followers on social media and to have people around me all the time, people that are well known and i really hate it, i made a name for myself, we hear that term all the time and if i acquired a position of power and become president of the United States, ceo of my company and a manager of my organization, principal of my school, people say he has made it and contended achieved his position of power. When you talk to people who have achieved in these three areas or any one of them, they will almost uniformly say the pursuit of the goal contrasted with how they felt after the achieved which is a moment of exhilaration, not a lasting fulfillment that they wish that they had, this is a culture that leads us to prioritize and define success in a way that is different and separate from human relationships and is one that ultimately needs to focus on things that separate us and ultimately need us to d prioritize human relations in our life. Technology is the single most common question we get asked about, parents in particular who see their kids on devices all the time and even into weekends want to know is this hurting my child, is it making my child more lonely, these are really important questions to ask, my belief about technology from everything that i had seen and understood now, technology itself is a tool and the question of how do we use it, we can use technology in ways, for example if we live far away from a relative and we cannot go in travel to see them often but we can facetime with them on a regular basis, that can actually be using technology to connect with people offline, that can be powerful too. And were coming to florida for example, i post on facebook and my friends free to hang out or catch lunch or dinner and we actually meet up, thats a great way of staying connected. If you also find yourself that are many people around to raise their ethnicity and find that youre gay for example, there not many gay people around you in the community, Online Platforms can be colorful to helping people connect with others who have shared experiences. All those ways have to be helpful, what i worry about with technology, predominantly where you think technology is in a way that for the disconnects, i think what is happening with the use of technology is number one, the time that we spend on social media on her email or devices is taken away from the time that we would normally spend with somebody in person, there is an attraction for only 24 hours in the day, the second thing, technology dilutes the interaction that we have quite often, how many of us have had lunch or dinner catching up with her friends at a restaurant and have found that each of us are checking our phones in between her getting distracted when alerts pop up on our phone, it certainly happens to me but even worse than that, many experiences of talking to friends on the phone, then finding myself scrolling through my email or my social media feed or question that came up, i dont need to do that, its so successful is right there you fall into it and it does dilute the quality of our conversation and it defines health. Clearly. When we think were multitasking, were actually switching between one thing and another very rapidly, this is why i think its important for us to ask a question, not only the quantity but perhaps even more importantly the quality of time by the attention and focus that were giving other human beings. All this to say, the technology can be used to strengthen our connection, i worry that how were using isnt always serving us well in particular when i think about young people, when i think about my kids when they grow up in social media in the social media where people are posting about their bastille and were comparing it to our average day and is likely going to come up short, that is a recipe for chipping away of selfesteem which makes it harder to connect with others. Lets open it up to audience question, this is solution, what i was particular he moved and uplifted by, the stories of so many people who are engaging in solutions to loneliness and american around the world, individual schools, communities, cities, states, some of the solutions in particular one that could be relevant right now because obviously were in a pandemic and those who are responsible and engaging social distancing, there is a line that struck me that biologically prime not just to feel Better Together but to feel Better Normal together. I think a lot of us are not feeling normal, the solutions that you found prepandemic but may be some that can be helpful right now. This is most inspiring, i had an incredible privilege and often virtually and sometimes in person, these external individuals have struggled with loneliness and felt in these extraordinary ways to connect to people, ways that took courage and risk and initiative into creativity, they were showing me through this example that we are not confined to be lonely, that does not have to be our destiny so we can find ways to do connection in our life to help others to find connection as well. I found in the course of reflecting on these stories, there were a few key principles that came up and i wanted to share some of those with you. Principles of a think about being the bedrock of living and one has to do with time, specifically with the quantity of time. And if we can make sure that we are spending some time each day even if it be 15 minutes a day connecting with someone that you love, that can be an extraordinary foundation, that can be time spent on videoconference, that can be calling a friend to hear their voice, it can be writing to somebody that we love and say im thinking about you. I want to know how youre doing, that 15 minutes may not seemed like a long time, one of the things i have learned a little bit goes a long way when it comes to our connection that we dont need to quit our jobs and spend all of her time with friends although you can do that. We dont need to turn our entire life upside down at the moment but we can start small with 15 minutes and we will feel much more deeply connected. The second thing i learned, the quality of time really matters in the way to improve the quality of time with other people to start is to eliminate instruction were more with others, one to agree that will get full attention, i mention this because we are so primed to ask to solve problems and other people, it is easy to forget that listening deeply and presently can have a profound feeling of effect on people, if you think back to an experience that you had were somebody has been fully present with you and they listen actively to what youre saying, you had an amazing feeling of being seen and upsetting and you feel like its an incredibly intimate experience and it can all happen without uttering a single word. And by eliminating distracting and by our full attention by actually being open and sharing and having the courage to be vulnerable in the moment, we can deepen the quality of an interaction that we have in five minutes of highquality interaction can be much more powerful than 30 minutes of distracted conversation. The third thing that i found helps, this is a bit of a surprise to me. With the service it turns out, it is a power plan to go to loneliness. As you understand the biology evolution and summary view understand how it has an effect of turning our focus inward and chipping away at selfesteem, you can understand why service helps, is shifted away from us to someone else and a context of a positive interaction. It reaffirms that we have value to bring to the world in a very, very tangible way that helps build up her own sense and it reaffirms and finally there is an important book made about the solitude. We dont always think about solitude and you may be alone in a state of solitude but at the present state and a welcome state, its one where we connect more deeply with ourselves and where we center ourselves in the five minutes that you spend feeling the wind against your face, it might be a few minutes you spend remembering three things you are grateful for, it might be time you spend at the beginning or the end of the day on simple education or per or walk that you take in nature, those moments of solitude are precious and powerful in its when we reanchor ourselves an approach other people from the state of centeredness, we can often have better conversation and enjoy a stronger connection. These four i would put together as a core principles, they are not always easy to do especially given the state of the world and how we are struggling with covid19 in this extraordinary and disturbing virus that can distance from each other, they become more important to build on these principles in building into our lives, we may be physically distancing but we cannot allow that to mean that we became socially distant and we have an opportunity to choose between loneliness as were more distance from each other in the path that will lead to a social recession if you will or we have the choice of living in the opposite direction and take a step back and to reaffirm the importance of connection in our lives and to recommit to people and relationships to prioritizing those relationships in our lives and to act on it by reaching out to people that we love, and small time with more focus and care, we advocate untrained chance whether to neighbor struggling work colleague at work having a hard time homeschooling their kids, through the small opportunity by shifting our perspective i believe we can only deepen the connection that we feel that we can set ourselves up to be more connected, more fulfilled and less alone than we were the prepandemic. Beautiful, what a beautiful sentiment, i love the term that you use with social recession, seems like what youre urging to counter that is when we urge people to get takeout from a Small Business and like you asking people to think about that socially and making those investments in the friendships and the social economy does not go into recession like the economic economy. I would say we can think of this as an opportunity for social revival, social revival does not mean that we have more parties and large group gatherings, that might be one way that people may enjoy getting together but whether youre an introvert or extrovert, we all need social connections in our life and social revival and where we reprioritize people in our life. I had one coming out of this book that would be put people first, those three words and i remind you thats what i need to do and what i want to do at the heart of building a people sent to world and we found out that we were pregnant with their first child and what i worried about with her second child and i worried about my wife in the world that they were in bahrain on. In the violence in communities and the growing polarization in the struggles with so many issues from Climate Change to healthcare and on and on the list goes, we were most concerned about how separated people seem to be and how mean people seem to be to each other at times and we wondered what kind of world will we bring our child into. As we thought so many parents do about how we can create a better world for our children and other peoples children, we recognize what we needed to do was to chip the scales in the world with love away from fear, we shot on tran12 a deep struggle between the two powerful forces and we see the forces manifest as generosity, compassion and kindness, im happy to see that especially during covid19. We also see fear man assessed as anxiety, frustration, insecurity, jealousy and that can have a toxic effect on our relationship an organization on our politics, ive come to believe that much of our decisions in life and motivation of what we do and say comes from these two sources, love or fear. And the whole reason we worked on this book over the last two years is because we saw as part of our effort and hopefully in a small way it will tip the world toward love and create a world that will heal by kindness and compassion in the forces that we know our children need to sustain them and receive from others that they need to receive from the world, that will only happen if we start in our own lives and ask how we can start living out of love than fear. Thats how we prioritize people even more in living a life even more, we all evolve to that. Amen. Im going to turn it to audience questions that weve gotten, someone asked does data show having a wider variety of friends, black young, broke conservative, is not better than having just friends who are like you . Thats a great question. I dont know that the data shows that clearly but one thing we are seeing from a lot of antidotal evidence, when you have a diversity of friends in terms of Life Experiences, that actually can open your mind up and make you more open to people who may think differently in different respects. In Traditional Society lets say 100 years ago, it was easy to live in a setting where you only associated with people who thought like you. You can do that and there was not your wife swapping with interaction and people traveling where you are now and having Diverse Communities with the United States in particular, in 2020, it is much, much harder to avoid diversity, avoid people who think differently and racial ethnic and religious backgrounds, part of what we have to recognize is in the setting of this diversity, we can go in one of two directions, we can either embrace it with a desire to understand and reflect that to the people that we enter gauge with or we can go to people who think like us, the problem with the latter because we will always be interacting with people who are different than us just by nature of the way the world works, if we had not cultivated the ability to understand that by interacting with them and befriending them and we run the risk of feeling more deeply and alienated from those around us. Thats what we see with society which have pulled themselves away who folks were not like them and feel resentful at times and feel angry that their way of life is being changed or others are diluting their priorities and we develop all kinds of narratives when we feel threatened by others and i think one way that we have to address this, we have to recognize that while that approach of pushing ourselves off and looking others as the other can lead to dehumanization and can distant tempting discord, the way to overcome is not to disturb people in a room together and talk about our views and cultural issues and Common Ground, i see this not just but its a common solution, especially in d. C. , we got everybody together with different sides of the aisle and we can come to an agreement. Thats not how human beings wo work, the way we overcome differences is not by talking about issues first, its about building relationships and when we get to know other people as human beings, they may come to understand their experiences but Common Ground with them, thats how we build relationships and we have relationships, we can deal with challenging controversial issues because. Reporter better able to listen to other people we have a relationship, just think of the aunt or the uncle that you have over for thanksgiving dinner and you have different views, on politics in different issues, you may not all agree on those topics but you still love them, youre more willing to listen to them then you are random stranger on the internet with an improving point of view, thats because the relationship is not the capacity to listen and the ability to listen is not the heart of the ability to work through the problems and solve big challenges like Climate Change or healthcare. We have two questions, the role of physicians, i will combine them, one says given the dire health consequences, you believe physicians should screen patients for loneliness or lack of social connection with mitigating the risks and another question, you talked about how many of the stories that you heard reminded view of times in the hospitals and the patients final days understanding the consequences that loneliness can have, what are your takeaways as a physician and what would you do to recommend Health Professionals do to help with this. This is the question with screening in dealing with loneliness. Is a really important question in a very personal one but obviously this is a position i found myself in. I think it is important that doctors and nurses and others on the front line of healthcare recognize loneliness and the consequences and that we have the ability to screen and know its out play in the care they were giving somebody there ability to engage with the care they were seeking to provide. In medical school we received very little training theres an important caveat, is it the responsibility of a doctor to identify, treat and solve loneliness. Thats a responsibility placed on nurses and doctors alone, i think all of us need to be better in recognizing loneliness and recognize it does not always look like a person sitting alo alone, it can look like anger and frustration he neared ability and it can look like i depression and anxiety, loneliness is a great mass curator but once we identify how we can connect people to the right resources in the community where they can build stronger connection, theres a movement called social prescribing which has been growing in england and increasing in other countries were doctors and hospitals are partnering with Community Organizations to identify people where it is connected with the Community Resources word can be built and there is tremendous value to being able to surface the conversation between a Healthcare Practitioner and patient. There are many times ill admit i did not know how to talk about loneliness with my patients or career because i was not trained to do that and had not through it enough and i felt bad because i wish i couldve done it along saying to the people struggling. When you train you have to understand loneliness, even surfacing with the patient can be powerful and transformative. There is a question of loneliness as a writer and many are skeptical when were learning of the softer side of health. It can be difficult to convey things like loneliness for beneficial things like gratitude and as a science writer, im curious what techniques used together past the skepticism in the Mental Health sigma. Its an important question and you can get people to take you seriously. Even if you engage on it, this is the reason i wrote the book, this is a really important issue that you had to take seriously, and i wanted to apply the Public Health in Vantage Point of looking at this that makes you feel bad but one that has profound consequences for society. Part of the way we can get people to take it seriously is to help rude it in our own experience. Many people who downplay loneliness or not that theyve never experienced it, it society around them tells them this is not something thats important. At a very different situation, all tell you from experience is what ive spoken to people and how important it is in the back that up and people almost has permission to recognize into validate their own experience and lastly sharing her own experiences can be extraordinarily powerful, not just for us but empowering to other people. In the substitute to work and to be Larger Movement around recovery, that is part of the movement and people coming forward sharing their stories, making the case that addiction is not a character thought but a real condition to address seriousness or urgency with compassion. I think the same is true here, when i think about those patients who i saw in the final moments of their life, when i think about the conversation that we had one that was privileged to participate, i would hold their hand sitting at the bedside i think about what they talked about, they talked about not the promotion that they had received but the amount that they had in the trust fund and bank account. Then they talk about having followers on social media were how many media profiles were written about that. The people talked about in their final moments of life were relationships, the people that they love, the ones they wish they wouldve spent more time with, the ones that broke the heart, the final moments of life are deeply clarifying, they give us a clue as to know whats truly important to us. One of my great realizations coming out of writing this book, we dont need to wait until the end of life to realize what matters. It is there in front of us asking to be erased, those of the people around us, the relationships that we often have the de prioritize, people that need us as much as we need them, if we can focus on the human part of connection, the common need that we all feel and not only finding to build a community the value and prioritizes connection, i think we can create a social revival, not just in the United States but all over the world. Amen to that, were gonna do two more questions, the first one i will combine two questions about children an early life, one is emma middle School Teacher and i noticed my students seem lonely in the Distance Learning environment, what do you use when talking with children about loneliness and the second, im struck by the potential connection to ace the screenings but the acronym for adverse childhood experiences, you see a connection between loneliness an early life trauma, how to teach people to connect to others, both about childhood and childhood experiences in trauma and loneliness. Thats a beautiful question and i think its important that we are able to tap conversations with her kids about loneliness, i see more broadly recent important to converse about emotion. Mark from yell has devoted himself to Building Social and Emotional Learning curricula to a particular program that he developed and its really designed to help build emotional literacy and become comfortable, not just talk about emotions but recognizing what theyre feeling. I think the startup powerfully by example, by his seen futures and parents and the adults around them talk about emotion and when you talk about feeling sad and its okay, we all feel sad from time to time, this is what it feels like for me. If a child has permission to think about it and talk about sadness and to experience it, the same is true for loneliness. If we can talk about her own experiences in our own lives, it can encourage a child to feel that way, if we give them permission to talk about as well. In kids that we may see clear is being lonely is not a sign that you are broken or deficient in some way and if we want to normalize, everybody at some point in their Life Experiences loneliness and we may show it in different ways and its invisible a lot of time, we cannot we see another people and its not there, i think thats really important for kids, when it comes to trauma especially, one of the things that i was struck by was a study in hawaii that i write about in the book in a study that looked at children to experience trauma and in the study what they found, and follow kids for several decades, they found that children who had experienced trauma were able to find Strong Social connections in their life far fewer of the negative after trauma then at children who do not have those relationships, i talked to people who have studied and worked on aces for years and years and one of the common themes is as powerful as they are, the adverse childhood experiences, the trauma in his life, as deep as the wounds bingo in a sparse as they may be from an addiction to long do these in the early mortality, it turns out one of the most powerful medicines that we have is social connection, it comes to relationship that can be i say this with love very intentionally and purposefully, i think its important that we talk about love, we dont talk enough about it. Love is not just a feeling, its a force, the doctor had written prescriptions for many medications over the years, there is nothing that i have prescribed that is more powerful as a healing of love, thats why as we go about our day and think about how we want to reconfigure and rebuild her life, to look at the loneliness that may be around us, its important to recognize that you dont need a medical degree or nursing degree to heal what is around you and to help people feel more connected, we need a willingness to show up in peoples lives with a full heart of compassion or desire to give and receive love, that is how we ultimately address loneliness and how we build a more connected wealth. That is beautiful, for the final question which is interesting in light of what the uk has done in establishing a ministry, does loneliness need a Public Policy solution, do we need a social stimulus plan, they talked about various Community School levels, do we need a policy to loneliness. Thats a really interesting question, there is a very Important Role for government, its not the response of any one entity, this is a shared problem that requires all of us to step up individual organization, profession as well as the Public Sector of the government. What government can do, it can invest for real resources and research to help us understand the solutions of loneliness, the second thing government can do is to help prioritize issues when the government states the certain issue is a crisis as we did when i was Surgeon General of the Opioid Epidemic, thats really important to do because you can convene and bring people together to Fashion Solutions but you can make it a point that this is a Public Health priori priority. A third thing, they can examine more deeply the impact of the policies on social connection, we now understand which we were able to appreciate 30 or 40 years ago that the policies have an impact on health and not Just Healthcare policy but transportation policy and housing policy have impact on health, education policy has an impact on health because what happens at schools the physical Mental Health of our children and in similar ways, if we look closely we will recognize that education and housing, transportation policies and the policies and the department offense as well which having spoken to many of our wonderful servicer have an impact on our social connection when we cup cities up with highways and design the neighborhoods and make the harder for people to connect with each other and when we build a culture that is powered by cars increasingly and people dont walk anywhere and run into each other, that impacts her social connection, when we push school to focus exclusively on testing for math and english and science but pay little attention to prioritizing the social Emotional Learning has an impact on relationships. All of these ways, government can have a profound impact on how we prioritize loneliness and how we understand the impact of policy and how we drive solutions by bringing the community. I know that our time has come to a close and i want to say that this is a very special experience being here with all of you because im doing this with a dear friend but also because this is one of the first events that we are doing with the bookstore to bring into the world and i want to say that in particular i want to pay tribute to my family, my wife alice, my mother, father, my sister and brotherinlaw into my grandmother, all of whom who have been extraordinary, powerful support but also teachers and when i ended the book and wrote the final pages of the conclusion, the story that i wrote was about my parents and my sister, the story about their patients, the patient the my mother and father cared for in a patient who passed away after a very difficult struggle with cancer and when he passed away in the middle of the night, my parents woke me up and mustve been to in the morning and they piled us into the car and we drove to a trailer park in miami where we are going to visit his widow because my parents were worried but they were grieving alone. They were doing that not because it was in the Job Description as doctors and the manager of the office, they were not doing that because to get reimbursed by an insurance company, they were doing it because its all responsibility of the member of the community and somebody who had a relationship with a wonderful family that was going through a hard time. To this tale never forget my mother and her traditional indian walking up the steps and embracing her, i remember the tears flowing down and i remember staring at them and thinking, how different they were, my mother having grown up in india and in the United States, is different Life Experiences but in the moment i realized they were connected, they were a family, not the kind that youre born into but the kind that you choose for yourself and i ended without story because i realized the whole writing of this book, that story ended up their stories that my parents had not just told but lived for me about Human Connection, and demonstrated through example though stories have been my guidance, they reminded me that our connection to each other is at the heart of who we are as human beings, how we experience joy and find support and meaning and i want to end without tribute because nobody is talking more, given me more or meant more to me than the family that i just named, i feel deeply grateful to share this book and all the lessons that we learned but it wouldnt have been possible at all without their example and encouragement. Knowing you i know that apple did not fall far from the tree, basically that had a huge impact and icy and your friend, thank you so much for the beautiful evening, i think this is what we all needed at this time. I absolutely agree, this was a total bomb and im so proud tobin watching along with you, thank you so much both of you for the really beautiful profound, very timely discussi discussion, think you guys and thank you everybody in the audience for being with us tonight, your patronage, your attendance and most important your book sales are what enables us to bring you this programmi programming, politics and prose, we pride ourselves and we love hosting these events, we really cant without the book, we so appreciate you all purchasing a book and coming out, we encourage you to keep supporting the authors that you love and the independent bookstores, you can follow politics and prose on the top of your screen, you can hit that and be notified of our future podcasts. Weaverville Great Program of events for the first of the month and going into may as well. So as we back up, im wondering, what are you guys reading during this time, is there anything you are turning too . [laughter] im not going to lie, i would say twitter, the new yorker, shorter things, i just bought rachels book, im going to do it, i need a little time. Im not reading adult books, im reading dr. Seuss another kids books because im entertaining when theyre on the porta potty at mealtime, anything i can do, thats a literature ive been doing these days. We love that. So we really hope that everybody in our audience and everybody here stays well, stay safe and staves well read, we will see you next time, by everybody. Thank you everyone. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy event from the president ial primary through the impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus, you can watch all of cspan Public Affairs programming on television, online or listen to our free radio out and be part of the National Conversation through cspan daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feed, cspan, created by americas Television Company as a Public Service and brought to you by your television provider. Welcome, thank you for joining us at the latest future ten, this is very exciting because im a huge fan and we all have to listen to churchill as were warming up to get into the mood. In the editorial director future tense which is a collaboration between new america, fleet magazine and Arizona State university, we look at the implication and the impact of technology on society, im also professor at the school of journalism at Arizona State university. It a

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