Understanding Friendship | Lydia Denworth | Modern Wisdom Podcast 152

Lydia Denworth is a writer and Contributing Editor for Scientific American. It's cliche to say that we're more connected than ever but have never felt more alone, but for many people it's the truth. Expert to learn why friendship evolved, how we can deepen our connection to those around us, how friendship manifests in the brain, the dangers of loneliness, how effective online friendships are at combating solitude and many more interesting things. Get Surfshark VPN - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter Promo Code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off & One Extra Month Free) Extra Stuff: Follow Lydia on Twitter - https://twitter.com/LydiaDenworth Buy Lydia's Book - https://amzn.to/392ZU20 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #friendship #evolution #biology - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Loneliness is your body's signal that you need to connect, just like thirst and hunger are a signal that you need to eat or drink. And so if you're feeling it, you should take that as, you should take that seriously. You should take that as a warning.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Lydia, has there ever been a better time to be talking about friendship?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  It's pretty top of mind these days, isn't it? Right now. It's critical that we hang out with our friends, that we help. I'm sorry. You know what? I shouldn't be saying that right now. We shouldn't be hanging out.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  You can't hang out. And that's the problem, right?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  You can't hang out. Right. And so, but the thing is that our need to connect is a fundamental piece of the fabric of society and of what it is to be human. And so we have to find ways to be with our friends from a distance right now. We have to show up from a distance.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose that previously, if we'd had a global pandemic at any other time in human history, we wouldn't have had the technology to facilitate this, our, our tech friendship that we're about to have for the next 45 minutes or so, you know, like.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  No, that's right. You know, and the irony is that so many people are so worried about the effects of technology and.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped growing? You starve, you freeze in there. That's what.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  This sort of digital revolution on friendship and on social interaction. But right now. The the timing is perfect for us to embrace digital friendship and all that it has to offer. And I hope what we do is that from this experience, we take the good and then, you know, we get back to spending some time in real life with people. I mean, that should never go away as being important, but since we can't do that right at this moment, there we are really fortunate that we have these ways to connect. And in fact, I'm having more Zoom video conferencing with my friends that I mean, in fact, I never did that with my friends. I only did it for work and now everybody wants to have a Zoom conference. It's really kind of hilarious.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's kind of funny, this proxy for friendship that we've got. So how do you define a friendship?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Well, what's really interesting is that when biologists and neuroscientists and anthropologists really set out to study friendship more seriously recently, one of the things that they were trying to do from the start was define it and and measure it, figure out what it was exactly, because in science, you have to be able to you have to be able to measure, you need definitions. And really, it comes down to a very simple sort of minimal. There are three minimal requirements. A friendship is a relationship that's long lasting, so it's stable and reliable. It's, you know, somebody you've known a while. It's positive, it makes you feel good, both of you, and it's reciprocal.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  So there's cooperation involved. So you have to have give and take, right? It can't just be it can't be lopsided, let's say.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how many people who have friendships or that think that they have friendships when applying them to those criteria would realize that they absolutely definitely don't have friendships?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Well, this is the thing, it's three legs of the stool, right? And and a lot of us have two, but we maybe don't always have the third consistently. And now I should also say that in human friendships, you can have a lot of other things too. I mean, there can be people like to people think of loyalty and trust and things like that. And that's all great, but without those three things I mentioned, you know, you're you're not quite there. And so one of the things that comes up the most often is that we have a lot of long time relationships, but that don't always make us feel good, that can be even. It can be ambivalent or worse than that. And sometimes we hang on to them just because, you know, there's a lot of history there.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And so I think that one of the things that the science of friendship should do is get people thinking a little harder about who's in their life and why and what to get out of it and what it might cost them.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. I'm a big proponent of people questioning who is in their life. You know, the, you're right, we kind of grandfather these old artifacts of a past life in. You know, the, the guy who used to be a rugby, American football bro back when he was 18, but now after two doctorates and a bunch of other stuff, and he's still got these friends and there's a bit of a juxtaposition and he doesn't really know how, how that works. You know, it's, it is interesting. So why did friendships evolve? Why do we have them?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Well, we have them really fundamentally, we have them to help protect us against the stresses of day to day life and, but they evolved initially as a way to protect against predators. I mean, quite literally the lion on the savanna in Africa and, and also as a way to help find food and things like that. And then they evolved because in order to solve those kinds of problems, early humans had to live in groups and even other animals had to live in groups and like non-human primates living in groups and they do that to protect themselves and to better their chances of survival. And the more individuals are in your group, the more complex the social interaction is.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  And so that is part of the explanation for why we have the brains that we have. You know, the size of our brains is partly dictated by the complexities of our social world. And so, you know, there aren't lions in most of our lives today anymore, literally, except there are plenty of figurative lions, you know? I live in New York City and there's challenges to living in New York City today and my friends are really there to help me get through those. But the important thing is that our brains are very, we, we feel rewarded by the time we spend with friends. We really enjoy it. And that reward, that says reward is part of what makes us keep coming back and sort

• 6:46Speaker 00

  of deepen the relationship so that those people are there when we need them or they need us.

• 6:53Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So is the reason that we feel good around friends that that would have been fitness enhancing evolutionarily?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, absolutely. So often, we feel, we enjoy the things that we should do more of. Now, of course, that's a little complicated because there are some things we do that we enjoy that are not always so great for us. But it is very much true that the reward centers in the brain are generally designed to encourage behavior that is going to help us survive, is going to increase our fitness. And so enjoying the fun that we have with friends is, is not just a sort of byproduct. It's, it is there for a reason. It's, you know, so the pleasure we get from each other is, is really, is not just psychological,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  but physiological. I mean, the way, for instance, our bodies produce neurotransmitters like oxytocin that make us, that increase our bonding with a person and not just, you know, we think of oxytocin as something between mothers and babies perhaps, and it is, it's, it's released when mothers are nursing newborns and things like that. But it also is released in, in other people who are just friends when they're interacting. And so it's strengthening the tie. It's making you feel stronger about your relationship with somebody. And then that makes you keep, keeps you coming back.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  How many friendships can I have? Because I've got like four and a half thousand friends on Facebook. So can I be friends with that many people?

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Not in the same way. You can, you can be Facebook friends with that many people.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  And I am.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  The reason, and you are, and, and I, I am too. I have thousands of friends on Facebook, but, but.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  You so interestingly, quality is more important than quantity. And when it comes to your health, the most, the biggest change difference, the step change is between zero and one friends. So really, truly, if you have just one friend, you are better off by a mile than if you have none. But most of us in our, in our inner circle have an average of four really good friends or people that we really feel are essential to our life. And that is usually split between family and friends. But most of us don't have more than say six, like eight would be really unusual. And, and so like I say, four is the average.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And so we're not saying you have to be the life of the party. Your Facebook friends are something different. I'm guessing that some of those people are people that you really see a lot outside of, you know, in your on offline life. And some of them are people that you barely know, if you have ever met them at all. And that's just, it's a different, that's a different thing. And we know the difference, by the way, between Facebook friends and actual friends. That's why we use the phrase Facebook friends.

• 9:48Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of disparaging a little bit, isn't it? To say, oh, I know them on Facebook, but I'm not really friends with them. You were talking there about the, the fact that we've got gradations of friends, you could call it, like this, this depth of friendship. What is it that makes someone be part of the one or the three or the six and someone be part of everything else? What's the difference?

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Really just how, how close you are, how, how much you like each other, how friendship is about, it literally is about a difference, a differentiation in the relationships, meaning that, you know, I'm closer to this person than to that person. And that's okay. I mean, one of the, it's sort of interesting because a lot of times we feel badly about that, but we don't, we just don't have enough time to be friends in the same way with everyone in the world. And it doesn't necessarily mean that we don't like the other people. It's just that. We are, for whatever reason, we got drawn to the people we're we're close to. Usually it's things like similarity and proximity, you know, that play a part.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  And there's a chemistry to friendship, just like there is to romance, you know, you get. There are people you meet and you think, oh, I really think I could be friends with her or him, you know, right from the start. And but it still takes time. You have to put in the hours. But so that same kind of liking that that comes from. I mean, for many things, you find somebody funny, you have similar sense of humor, or you have a similar background and experience. So you have a lot in common to talk about. Or you've been through something similar, like I I have been, I'm noticing with coronavirus that there are. You know, there are people who were on the cruise ships together who have become good friends and they've been texting each other when they're in quarantine. So they've been through the same hard experience.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  And then that that helps you bond with people. So there's all different kinds of ways to become friends.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  I've got a similar experience to that. I was on a show called Love Island in the UK.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:47Chris Williamson?

  Which is a reality.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Oh, you were on, I did not realize that.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  I was, I was indeed for my sins, Lydia. And that was, that was very similar. A traumatic experience where I was locked in a building with a bunch of other people and I couldn't escape.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  The press were on us, you know, so I I completely understand where they're coming from. And, you know, interestingly, from that, a lot of the people that were on the show, they're still bonded. You know, a bunch of them are out in Dubai together at the moment. It's a very unique experience. That brings everyone together. One thing that I brought up the other day, actually, on a podcast with Morgan Housel. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this is, at the moment, with the coronavirus outbreak. It is one of the very few things which happens globally. You know, it doesn't even rain everywhere in the world at the same time.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  No, I know.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, you're, the markets don't even open. The Chinese, Japanese markets don't open the same time as New York Stock Exchange, the same time as the German markets. And it is bizarre at the moment, seeing people pulling together against this common foe in a little bit of a way. It's odd that you have something that's so universally.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  Felt.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I agree completely. I was having the same thought today as I was reading about the restrictions in various countries and how, you know, how similar it's going to end up being. You know, everybody, some countries are catching up to where others were, but I think we really are all, we are literally in the same boat. We are literally on the same planet, suffering from the same problem right now. And, and the, you know, the good thing here is that in that, I mean, friendship, even though we need to keep our distance from each other, friendship really is fundamentally that that reciprocal cooperative part is about a willingness to help in times of crisis especially. And so that is where we are, right? And we just have to think a little bit more

• 13:38Speaker 00

  creatively, all of us about how to help and, you know, how to do it, like I said, from a distance. But, but yes, we're, we're bonding over this shared bizarre experience we're having.

• 13:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a great equalizer, you know, I think, I don't know much about people from China, you know, I don't know what side of the road they drive on. I don't know if they said hello to me, I'd probably not know what word it was, you know, I'm so, so distant from them. I don't have, they essentially could be a different species or from a different planet. But I know that their physiology is reacting to the COVID-19 outbreak the same way that mine is, the same way that my mom's is, their parents are the same as my parents are the same as my, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  And, um, yeah, I genuinely do wonder, obviously massive tragedy, I do not want this to happen, given the choice between the world without it and the world with it, I would much sooner that it wasn't here. But trying to, you know, draw some silver linings from around this cloud is, I certainly feel more empathic towards people globally. And I'm, my empathy is crippling, like I don't need any more of it. It weighs me down on a daily basis, but I have even more now. Does that make sense?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  It does. I mean, I'm glad to hear you say that. Unfortunately, not everyone is the same. You know, some people are having the opposite, more xenophobic response, and they're blaming the Chinese and things like that. And that's just wrong. I mean, you know, viruses and bacteria don't discriminate. They travel the world quite freely. And, you know, wherever they start, doesn't doesn't really matter as much as exactly what you're saying, that they affect us all the same. And, and so, yes, I, I do think, I mean, it's going to be really interesting to see, you know, we're having this conversation somewhat at the beginning of this being such a global phenomenon. I mean, it's, it's been in China for a while.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  It's really heating up in the rest of the world. And so, I mean, I don't know about there in the UK, here in the US, every day, some new restriction is announced. And, and it does feel now like you can imagine what it, before it was sort of a novelty to watch the people in China who were, you know, having to stay home and were quarantined. And now we're all saying, oh, I guess we better pay more attention to how they got through that. This is happening to me as well. And I, you know, and so, yeah. It's, it's, these are challenging times. But it really is true that the, that, that the, the way we're going to get through it is connecting both with the people that we already know, and then having empathy, as you were just saying, for everybody else who's going through the same thing.

• 16:20Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So you said the, about you, the big differences between having non-in-one friend. There was a study that I heard cited a number of times last year or the year before, I think, where it said the most common answer, not the mean answer, but the most common answer to the question when asked of Americans was how many friends do you have that you could call on in a crisis? And the most common answer was zero. Is that right? Did you look at this?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  No, that's not right. There was

• 16:47Chris Williamson?

  Fake news, fake news.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Fake news, right. There was, oh, it's a little complicated. Let's see. There was a study a ways back that, that seemed to say that, that

• 17:03Speaker 00

  There was a tripling in the number of people who said they didn't have any close people they could rely on. But it was never everybody saying that. And it turned out to be that there was some, there was some mix up or some methodological problems with the studies. So what, what you're referring to is a sort of long-running study in the US where one of the questions they ask is, how many people have you discussed important matters with in the last six months? And if you say none, zero, then the assumption was that you don't have any close people to count on, right? But what happened, and so it was only ever like, so usually the, the number of people

• 17:45Speaker 00

  who say that they have no one to count on or to discuss important matters with, and I specify that because that is important, how they ask the question, was in the single percentages, like eight percent or five percent. But in this one study, it looked like it had jumped up to 24%. But then it turned out, so that, that's why you got all these headlines about a loneliness epidemic and Americans are, you know, have no friends and friendless in America. So, but the, the truth is that while it is true that loneliness is a serious health problem and, and on some levels, the numbers are growing because the demographics are growing, it's also true that that jump didn't really happen to that degree.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  So it's still more around under 10%. And one of the reasons just is, is that the studies, the way they asked the question changed and the way, also the way people understood it changed. So it turned out that some people, it wasn't that they had no one to discuss important matters with, it was that they had no important matters to discuss. Ah, the arrow of causation. So during the period of time in question, the arrow of causation, right? So, so anyway, there, for a bunch of reasons, that, that is not quite right, but you're not alone in sort of grabbing hold of it and then thinking that that is what's going on. But so, no, Americans, like everybody else, have, you know, an average of these smaller

• 19:10Speaker 00

  circles of close friends and then larger groups of people that they're close to. It, you know, to lesser degrees, moving out in concentric circles.

• 19:20Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So you talked about brain size earlier on, and the reason for having bigger brains potentially being that we have these complex social structures. We've got to understand how that's John. John used to go out with Joanne. Joanne is the brother, the sister of this person, blah, blah. Um, is that where Dunbar's number comes from? Did you look into Dunbar's number?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yes. So Dunbar's, uh, well, Dunbar's number is 150 and he, um, he is, uh, he claims that that is the kind of the number of people that we can have meaningful relationships with, but not that that's the number that we would consider close friends, because that's a much too big of a number. Um, but that the number 150 shows up in a lot of ways in society. So military units are often 150 people and, um, some kind of, uh, uh, some societies set up sort of, um, their settlements at about 150 people and then they tend to break off and

• 20:22Speaker 00

  make a new one. There's a lot of reasons to think that that is a number that seems to make sense in, in, for humans. Uh, but, but where that 150 actually comes from too, though, is that there's these series of concentric circles in the way Robin Dunbar does his, his work as well. Um, and yes, it's all based on the social brain hypothesis, which is that idea that the complexity of our social lives is dry, has been driving the size of our brains and, um, and that we start though, with maybe five people in the inner circle, then it goes out in these, uh, exponentially. So five, 15, 50, 150. And actually even further out from that,

• 21:05Speaker 00

  I, I think he says that 1500 is about the extent of names that we can actually remember. So you could have meaningful relationships with 150, but you might know the names and faces of 1500.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Recognize 1500, yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So, um, but, but yes, there's now, since Robin Dunbar made the social brain hypothesis.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Famous. There's been more sort of conflict within the evolutionary biology world. And so it doesn't really, we're going to let them fight it out in the journals, let the scientists argue amongst themselves. What they're fighting about is whether it's the most important reason for the size of human brains. But what's relevant for people like you and me is that it doesn't have to be the most important thing. It can be a major contributor, right? It's a big part of why humans have the brains that we have. And it is definitely true that our societies are more complex than anybody, any other species. And so it makes sense that our brains had to evolve to, exactly as you said, to keep track of, not just that, I can't remember what you said,

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Joe and Joanne, and, but then maybe I shouldn't hit on so and so because I'm friends with her.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  It's not simply good enough to be able to identify who they are, it's to understand their relative ranking.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  The relationships between them and the history and the way people interact and the emotions. And so we all have to have, you know, we all have, you were talking about empathy earlier. Empathy is complicated in your brain. And so it requires all these circuits in your brain to understand what somebody else is thinking, that they have a perspective that might be different from yours, and that, and that they believe things that are different from what you believe, and that they don't see the world exactly the way you see it. And that is something that, that humans have sort of developed to a fine art, and it is fundamental to our friendships and our ability to, to socialize.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So do all animals make friends? Or during the course of your research for the book, did you find, is there like the, the total introvert animal out there, like the introvert fish or something?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  There are some animals who are more solitary, for sure. Like some of the big cats tend to operate more on their own. Polar bears, male polar bears, spend a lot of their time on their own. But a lot of animals are very, very social, or they have, they have friendship or something like it. And in, so in primatology, where they study monkeys and apes, That's been, there's been really important work. I mean, that's one of the things I focus on in the book because that, that work has led to more of the breakthroughs in understanding the evolutionary function of friendship in humans. And because monkeys and apes have

• 24:05Speaker 00

  social behavior that looks a lot like ours, it's obviously not exactly the same, but there's plenty there. I mean, I, I spent time watching monkeys in Puerto Rico and baboons in Africa. And I, one of the scientists I talked to said, if you spend a year watching the monkeys, you'll never look at humans the same way again. And then I think that's really true. I mean, you do really see things about the way they interact. And they're also, they have different personalities, just like we do. There are some that are kind of neurotic, and there are some that are bossy, there's some that are laid back, and some that are charming, and you know, and, and then each of those is kind of a strategy for how they interact with the other animals in their, in their troops.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  The animals that are, the, the species that are more solitary, a lot of them still do have important bonds with each other, though. So it's interesting, like even, I don't know, there's, there's different, and I think a lot of scientists are just beginning to figure this stuff out, or, and studying to study it in other species. But even fish have like social, they have stuff going on in their brains when they interact socially that looks surprisingly like what happens in human brains, obviously in a much simplified version. But I mean, one of the things I cite in the book is the story of zebra fish

• 25:28Speaker 00

  who freeze when they come across a group of unfamiliar fish, and then they relax when they can smell that they're with familiar fish, when they're the fish that they normally hang out with. And in their brains, neuroscientists, believe it or not, could look inside the brain of a zebra fish, and they can see that there's some social, there's some activity in the brain that looks a little bit like what happens when you and I either are hanging out with groups of people that we're familiar with, or when we come across, you know, groups of strangers.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty cool.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  I like it.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:04Chris Williamson?

  Can men and women just be friends?

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yes, there is no biological reason why they cannot just be friends. I think that, I don't know, this is just a speculation on my part, but I feel like culturally, you know, we've set it up to make it feel like that can't be true, that men and women can't be friends. But, but there are lots of examples of men and women who are friends and are only friends. And, and of course, if there's sexual attraction, that adds something different and it can, it can complicate things. One of the things that's interesting, I mean, you asked me about what is friendship at the beginning? And what I didn't say, and what we usually think of is that the straightforward definition of friendship

• 26:51Speaker 00

  is that it's someone with whom you do not have sex and to whom you are not related. Except, except that, you know, we have the phrase friends with benefits, right? And we also often, especially in Western countries, we like to imagine that our romantic partners are our best friends. We often say that. It is interesting because that is not universal. There is a study I cite in the book where they asked people in Jacksonville, Florida, you know, do you think of your spouse as your best friend? And something like 60% said yes. And then they asked the same question in Mexico City and almost no one said yes.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But I don't think that has to do with the state of marriage in Mexico as much as with the habit of using the phrase, the word friend to describe your spouse. They think of them as two different things, right? So when West, when people who do like to use the word friend are using it to describe a spouse or a sibling or somebody else like that, that with whom they have another kind of relationship, it's to add qualitatively to what you're trying to say. Like if I tell you that my husband is my best friend, I say that because I want you to understand something about the strength of our relationship, right? How positive it is. And it's, so there's some ways in which this science of friendship blurs the lines

• 28:17Speaker 00

  so that sex and whether you're related genetically matters less than what does the relationship actually look like?

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  I get it. The lines are blurred though, aren't they?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  The lines are blurred, right?

• 28:29Chris Williamson?

  And I think as well is because of the way that we adopt societal norms and then make them our own without realizing and then feed them back out and think that they were our own ideas. Now, this, this romantic version of your partner being your best friend to someone from Mexico sounds weird, but to perhaps an English literature student who's spent all of their, their time reading romance novels and, and you know, Renaissance stuff at Oxford University, they have this unbelievably different view of what both romance and friendship are, and also how those, those two can mingle. That is, uh, yeah, I like that. Um, so I want to get on to the, the

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  loneliness epidemic that we're hearing about at the moment. What, what did you look into regarding that?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Well, here's the thing is that loneliness is a public health problem. It truly is. Loneliness is bad for your health, just like friendship. I mean, it's two sides of the same coin. So social connection and friendship is really good for your health. It's as important for your health actually as diet and exercise and loneliness is, is bad. Now, the, one of the important points here though, is that when I say loneliness in this context, generally the definition that the social psychologists are using who were doing this work is that loneliness is the mismatch between the amount of social connection you want and the amount you have, right? So if you're completely satisfied to be home watching Netflix all

• 30:02Speaker 00

  by yourself and you know, um, then you may be fine. Although a caveat is that I find that there's plenty of people who tell me how introverted they are and how much they don't want to socialize. But I think sometimes they're not being fully honest with themselves or with me or whoever about, um, what they feel they're missing. But it's definitely true that there are some people who are much more content to spend more time alone than others. And there are people who are very lonely in a crowd. And so both things are true, right? Both things are possible. So, so loneliness is about your perception of how isolated you are, or how connected or disconnected you feel. And if you, the problem

• 30:42Speaker 00

  with loneliness is that it, it literally, now we understand that, um, it gets inside your body and your biology and it can make you sick. And, and so

• 30:55Speaker 00

  At first, everyone said, well, how is that possible? Like, a social relationship exists outside your body, right? It's over here. It's like, you know, the food you eat, you can understand, okay, I'm eating this and it's getting into, you know, so I can understand why, you know, too much sugar might be bad for me and vegetables are good for my body and my health. Or when you go for a run, you're using your muscles, you're getting your heart rate going. So you can make the connection much more easily to why it would have an effect on your heart and your blood pressure. But it turns out that loneliness, on the one hand, or social connection on the other, affect your cardiovascular functioning, so your heart and your blood pressure. They affect your immune system and how resilient you are to inflammation and viruses. Time, timely, the fact that we're talking about viruses today.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  It affects your cognitive health, your mental health. It affects your stress responses and it even affects the rate at which your cells age. So there's, there's a little cap on your cells called a telomere and it shortens over time and it shortens faster in people who are lonelier. And that means that they are biologically aging faster. It's like a little clock inside your body.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  That's serious. The implications are really big. How, how do I know if I'm lonely then? I can kid myself into believing that I am or I'm not sometimes. How can I check if I'm lonely?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think you have to, you have, most people who are lonely do admit that they're lonely. So, and it's, I think that loneliness, and this is not just me saying this, I mean, some of the researchers said this, that loneliness is your body's signal that you need to connect, just like thirst and hunger are a signal that you need to eat or drink. And so if you're feeling it, you should take that as, you should take that seriously. You should take that as a warning. Of course, the problem is that a lot of lonely people say, well, but I'm lonely, but I can't, you know, what, what am I supposed to do about it? Because I have no one to hang out with. And

• 32:56Speaker 00

  And unfortunately, one of the things that happens is that when we're lonely, we feel psychologically threatened. It's a little bit like being the animal on the outside of the herd, right? And sometimes the first thing to go are your social skills, actually. So that is unfortunate because it means that the people who most need social connection are then least able to achieve it.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  It's like a vicious spiral.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  It's a vicious spiral, right. But what I hope is that recognizing that and knowing that even can can sort of help people be aware of why they're behaving the way they're behaving. Also, to sort of say, first of all, to say, you need to get out there and connect if you possibly can. And secondly, have a look at how you're behaving when you're doing it and what kind of response you're getting from people. And but, you know, I mean, the ways to connect are not are not, it's not complicated. It's usually things like shared interests. So let's say people all, you know, you live somewhere where everybody likes to go hiking

• 34:02Speaker 00

  and you love to go hiking. There's probably a club you can join, right? But or I was just talking with people in Las Vegas for a radio show, and it turns out that Las Vegas is famously unfriendly. And so they were having a, you know, it's a, it's a city where people, there's very transient, a lot of people move in and then leave and, you know, and so people, some people find it very hard to make friends. But they were telling me that there was a whole group of people who were very passionate about craft beers, you know, so brewing.

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  Do they all have beards? They all have beards?

• 34:39Speaker 00

  No, beers.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  No, but did they all have beards?

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Oh, did they all have beards? Yes, I have no idea. I don't know. I didn't see.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  They did, Lydia.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Maybe they did. Maybe they did. But so they had this whole set of social things that they set up around craft beer. And so the people who were interested in that had these things they could join in and go to these events all about craft beer. So, I mean, that that example amused me, but you know, it can apply all kinds of ways, right? And so I do think one of the things that happens is that when we're adults, we often feel like it's harder to make friends, because it is compared to when we were younger and we were just sort of together with people our same age all the time, in this easy way, and you just had more opportunity to build those relationships. So as an adult, And sort of you have to go out and do it. You have to be motivated to do it. You have

• 35:30Speaker 00

  to make yourself vulnerable sometimes, right? You have to put your like, go to the event full of people you don't know in hopes of meeting someone you might like and be friends with. And nowadays, apparently, there are apps to help people not to date, but to find friends. Like, they're specifically not meant for romance. They're meant for friendship. And I think that's really interesting. It's a sign of the times that that's, you know, that that's where we're going. But it also tells you that this is something people really want and need and are looking for.

• 36:00Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a really, really cool idea. I remember hearing about it a while ago. I was reading Mark Manson's Models, which is a book about dating for men quite a while ago. And in that, he talks about what is the sort of woman that you want to date? What would be her characteristics? And you'd say, well, that she has to go to the gym, and she really needs to be into reading. And I love a girl who does X, Y, and Z. Pick your characteristics. And he's like, well, that is where you go to find the person you want to date. Do those things, you know? Go to the, you want a girl that trains? Go to the gym. You want a girl that's into reading? Go to a book club. And I think because of

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  the way that the, the dating market is seen as something that's a challenge to do, I feel like it's something where people go, well, you know, finding, finding the real, the real guy, the real girl, that's actually, actually fairly challenging. Whereas you saying, well, I need to do the same thing. I need to optimize my strategy to get friends. It feels, it feels like there's something wrong, even though there's, there's nothing wrong with that. But it does, there's, there's something about that sort of social leper. Well, why haven't you already got friends? Have you not, what's wrong with you? What's the reason for that, you know?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Right, and this is because we assume that it's easy and we assume that it just comes naturally. And that, um, and so, I mean, one of the other things that I sometimes say is, you know, it's clear from this research that people need to prioritize their time with friends. And, you know, we spend a lot of time booking in those hours we're going to be at the gym or whatever it is, but we don't do the same thing for our friends. They often fall to the bottom of the list, especially if we've just fallen in love or dating somebody, we tend to ditch our friends, right? And it's not that you shouldn't spend time doing those other things, but that time that you were planning to go to dinner with your friend and then keep canceling, that dinner is just as important for your health as all these other things you're doing.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  And yet, if I say to someone, you know, you should schedule that and put it in your calendar, they're like, oh, that's not, that seems really, you know, corporate or something.

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it seems forced, right?

• 38:10Speaker 00

  But the point, it seems forced, except the point is find some way to make yourself do it. I don't really care how you do it, but I'm, you know, I do think that actually if you can get your head around thinking that it's important enough to rate being scheduled or to be more intentional about it, like you're just talking about with the dating, then maybe that won't feel so foreign to, to approach it that way or so forced. And, you know, because that, that's kind of the problem is that we just haven't, we haven't appreciated enough how hard it is to do it well. And we haven't been explicit enough about what's, what it takes and, and that there's effort involved.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  Being intentional with your friendships, I really like, I think that's a good way to go about it. So how, how often do I need to see my friends and how can I have better friendships?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Well, how often you need to see your friends is going to vary a bit according, you know, we were talking earlier about the introverts who like to spend time on the couch. Um, and so.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  It's not that there's any one, it's not that there's any sort of set amount of time. What there is, is your own sense of your kind of internal thermostat, I guess we could say. You know, I said earlier that loneliness is the mismatch between the amount of connection you have and the amount that you want. And if you find yourself sitting at home by yourself, feeling lonely, then you're, then you, that should be a sign that you're not getting enough time with your friends. And the, but the way you go about being a good friend is kind of an echo of the definitions of friendship I gave earlier. So if being a good friend, if, if a friendship is positive and involves making each other

• 40:00Speaker 00

  feel good, then you should be working to make your friends feel good. You should be trying to acknowledge every so often that you care about them or what, you know, what, if they do something nice for you, you should be appreciative. And the reciprocal cooperative part, it's really, really important not to just always be on the taking side of that, right? And I think sometimes we don't realize, we're not paying attention. And I'm not trying to say that it should be a very, there's not an accounting, a tit for tat here. Prescriptive, yeah. Right? It doesn't have to be like that. In the grand scheme of things, it should even out, right? So sometimes one person needs more help than the other, and that's fine.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  But what happens over time is that if one person is always kind of the needy one and does all the talking, never listens, the other person is going to find that draining in time, right? So you really want to make sure that, that you are showing up for your friends, you're noticing what's going on in their lives, and you're responding, and you're commenting, even if there's nothing you can do about it. Just saying, wow, that, you know, I realize this must be hard, or something like that means a lot to people. And people really just want someone to listen. And we're so often, we're busy. Waiting for our chance to talk about ourselves, right? And not really listening.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  So, um, and I really, I said it, I said it in passing there, but I just think showing up in every sense of the phrase is one of the most important things you can do for your friend. Whether it means showing up for like a birthday party or the flip side, like, I mean, when my father died and I had friends show up from all around the world, my friends, not just his friends, but my friends, that was so meaningful to me, right? And, uh, or you show up right now, people are self-isolating because of coronavirus. Or, you know, you show up by text or email, or you call, or you, you know, um, and you set up ways to connect with people. And, and some in this moment, I mean, now this level of disruption is getting so severe

• 42:13Speaker 00

  that there's going to be almost no one who's not badly affected, but some people are more affected than others. I mean, I'm supposed to be there in London right now. You know, my book's coming out this week and I'm not, I'm in central New York and, but, uh, like for instance, I have a son who, um, just had the rest of his senior year of college canceled, which is harder than having your sophomore year canceled because seniors are, this was the end of their time in college. So the point is just that, you know, some people are much more affected than others. And it's important to at least notice and to acknowledge that if you know somebody who's in an hourly job that where they really couldn't afford, you know, this, I don't know,

• 42:56Speaker 00

  there's a lot, lot of people who are really going to suffer more than some other people. And so I, my, my own sense of it for, for me is, you know, like, I'm aware of my own disappointments and the disruption that this is causing me, but I also recognize that it's so much worse for so many other people, right? And so you always have to have that perspective. I mean, that's just kind of a, an analogy for how to be a good friend in general is to notice what's going on with other people and to keep your own life in perspective.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've got a couple of, a couple of friendship hacks that I've kind of come up with over the last.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, let's hear them.

• 43:32Chris Williamson?

  So one of them is actually a reflection upon doing the podcast and I found that having a deep conversation with someone uninterrupted, focused on a topic where we both hold ourselves, hold each other to a high level of, I guess, intellectual rigor or at least precision with what we say. I felt like that was a type of food, like a type of nutrition that I'd never had. I realized just how much I was missing it when I started to do it. And then, you know, it's now two episodes a week. It was one episode a week. Now it's two episodes a week. Now the episodes are a little bit longer and blah, blah, blah. And I honestly, the, I can't think of anyone for whom they wouldn't enjoy it. So I've said, one of the life hacks that we came up with a couple of

• 44:14Chris Williamson?

  months ago was, once a week, schedule half an hour with someone that you know to sit down and have a conversation about something that you care about. You know, just sit down, phones left outside of the room, focus on what it is that you want to talk about. Another one of the ones that I came up with was, whenever you think about one of your friends, you, I'm thinking about my buddy from school or cricket or the gym or whatever it is, text them, text them and tell them, hey, man, thinking of you. Hey, dude, thinking of you, whatever it might be, you know, like those little things. And it's made such a difference with some of the, the depth of the friendships that I've got as well. And you, it's what you said before, it's people being aware that you're there, people seeing you, feeling wanted, feeling like you're a part of something, you know, between those two things, telling people when you miss them. Oh, there's a third one as well.

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  So it's called gas your friends up. And it basically means when you see someone doing something good, like you, you give them, you kind of go a little bit all in on the compliments. Man, that's so good. Thank you so much.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Oh, beautiful. That's that making, that's the positive part. That's making them feel appreciated. I love it. That's great.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  So there's, there's, there's three things and you know, maybe, maybe someone that's listening can apply that to their life. So I wanted to finish up with talking about digital friendships and how they compare to real life friendships. Cause I think that's important, you know, Cal Newport has this beautiful bit in digital minimalism, where he talks about the difference between time on your own and solitude, because people. People in solitude often will still have the input of other minds. And he defines solitude, pure solitude, as time away from the input of others. Which means you don't have your phone, you don't have your laptop, you're not at the mercy of email and WhatsApp and Skype and blah blah.

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  So how do digital friendships map onto real friendships? Can I, can I be on lockdown for the next four months and never see someone and just Skype everyone? And is that going to make me feel fine or?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Well, so these are unusual times for this. So my first answer is before coronavirus is that, on the one hand, it turns out that there's a raft of new research showing that social media and digital technology is not as harmful for friendship and relationships as people think. It is, it is true that having your phone up and in between you and someone when you're together in real life is terrible. And we need to drop our, we need to put our phones down and we need to focus on the people in front of us.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  But it's also true that if you use social media as just one extra channel with which to communicate with someone that you see in other ways, it strengthens that bond that you have. And it's also true that people with bigger online networks tend to have bigger offline networks. So there's this mirroring of our online and offline lives that not everybody is always acknowledging. So most people who have, like you do, thousands of Facebook friends, don't just have one friend that they see in their private life offline. The, the issue with social media generally has been, and it's looking more and more like people for whom it increases depression or anxiety

• 47:28Speaker 00

  and even loneliness, may already be suffering from those things offline. And so the question of that, that causation and which way the direction is going is a little bit of a, is up in the air now. You know, a lot of people thought that social media was the culprit, but it now seems that for the population at large, that's not so true. What's happening is that the science is getting better and sharper and more rigorous, but there are still a lot of questions to be answered. All that said, in this time of social distancing and coronavirus, we have to embrace digital friendship because it's what we've got. You know, it's, it's the, the way that we can get through this. And, um, and it is definitely true that while it's different

• 48:11Speaker 00

  for you and me to be talking this way on a screen instead of in real life, you know, real life eye contact, for instance, it, it gets your social brain going. It triggers all the communication parts in your brain in a way that even a video chat like this cannot do. Um, but, but video chat is a whole lot better than nothing. And it's really good to see people's faces and not just to be texting them or to, you know, so if, if a video conference through Zoom with your friends is what you can do while everybody's being isolated for the next couple of months, then that's absolutely what you should be do, you should be doing. And we're really, really fortunate that we have this technology to help us get through this time.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the add-on, it's the dressing on the salad rather than the salad itself with social media.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah. No, go ahead.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  I just hope once we reintegrate after the coronavirus, that it doesn't cause people to, to adopt this new world of friendship as how they're going to proceed moving forward. You know what I mean?

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I hear you. I don't know. I'm not afraid of that because I really feel that into my research, it became so clear how much we value and protect our close relationships and that we, we evolve according to, you know, the, our, the environment and our experience. But we're always working to protect those relationships and there's a core of them that always are going to involve in real life activity, face-to-face contact. And that hasn't changed. That is still true today, even though we have these different social lives on online. We still know who our good friends are. We still spend time with

• 50:02Speaker 00

  them offline. And I think we will return to each other exuberantly, hugging each other, high fiving, and having massive parties to celebrate when we can be together in person to get again.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. Lydia, thank you for today. Friendship, your book, is it out now? Can people buy it right now?

• 50:21Speaker 00

  It, yes, they can order it. It's out. It's out on the 19th of March in the UK, but you could preorder it right now. I don't know when this is going.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  It's very well made go up on the 19th. So if it's not, the link to preorder will be in the show notes below. If it's out, the link to order will be in the show notes below. If people want to find you online, where should they go, Lydia?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  LydiaDenworth.com. You can find everything else. That's my website. I'm on Twitter at Lydia Denworth. I'm on Facebook at Science Writer Lydia. I'm everywhere. But you can find all those things. My website leads to everything, leads to my books, leads to my social media, my newsletter, et cetera, et cetera.

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Hopefully, we've encouraged people to rekindle some friendships and also perhaps given them some some ideas of how they can continue to stay connected. Obviously, they're not going to be distanced.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  I hope so. And I hope that this gives people permission to think about friendship as a priority. Instead of making it feel like something you have to do, I feel like it's something you get to do, right? Like, hey, going out with your friend is so important for your health. So go do it.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Lydia, thank you so much for your time.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris.

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