00:00:00We have a loneliness epidemic.
00:00:02You want to be known, but we don't necessarily want to know people very well.
00:00:06And therein lies the trouble that we have in our modern society today with loneliness.
00:00:10We're getting worse at knowing others.
00:00:12And as we're getting worse at knowing others, other people don't know us as much.
00:00:18And that's what puts us into the post syndrome of, you know, not being a very good friend,
00:00:22and so therefore not having very many good friends.
00:00:25When people feel understood, it activates the pleasure centers in their brain.
00:00:30Notably the ventral striatum, the ventral tegmental area.
00:00:33And while they feel misunderstood, it stimulates their pain centers,
00:00:36most notably the anterior insula.
00:00:38It's not going to be good enough for anybody to say, "You know, I feel cosmically significant,
00:00:43even though nobody actually cares about me."
00:00:45That's not the way it works.
00:00:46If no one knows you well, you can't be happy.
00:00:49If you need to get out of loneliness, here's what you do.
00:00:58Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours.
00:01:00I'm Arthur Brooks.
00:01:01This is a show about love and happiness.
00:01:04How you can have more of it, how you can bring more of it to other people.
00:01:08I'm a teacher of happiness.
00:01:09It's what I've been teaching at Harvard University for the past seven years.
00:01:12And I want you to join me in this moment of teaching love and happiness
00:01:16to other people using science and ideas.
00:01:19That's really my stock and trade, that I can't do it by myself.
00:01:22I need leverage.
00:01:23I need people who are actually in the movement.
00:01:25And here's the reason why it's a good thing to do.
00:01:27It's a good thing to do.
00:01:28It's an ethical thing to do.
00:01:30But when you become a happiness teacher,
00:01:32I promise you that you'll be the one who actually gets happier.
00:01:35There's a lot of data on that, but you don't need it.
00:01:38You know there's the truth.
00:01:39That if this becomes something that you're talking about,
00:01:42that you're sharing, you're going to enjoy the biggest benefit of all.
00:01:46Well, that's my appeal.
00:01:47That's what I like to talk about an awful lot.
00:01:49But I want to look at it from one particular angle today,
00:01:52which is actually unhappiness.
00:01:53And specifically, one element of great unhappiness that we see a lot of today,
00:01:57which is loneliness.
00:01:59We have a loneliness epidemic.
00:02:01A lot of people have actually written about this of late.
00:02:04The former Surgeon General of the United States
00:02:06actually wrote a really good book about loneliness.
00:02:09I'll put that in the show notes.
00:02:10But I want to talk about it from a particular vantage point today
00:02:14about how you can understand why loneliness
00:02:17tends to be self-perpetuating in your life.
00:02:19And most importantly, some specific techniques on how you can experience
00:02:24less of it in your life and help other people as well.
00:02:27Before we get started, as always,
00:02:28if you've got some comments that you want to give me,
00:02:31you've got some criticisms, you've got some questions,
00:02:33you want to feedback, you want to tell me about your life,
00:02:36I'd love to hear it.
00:02:36Please write to me at officehours@arthurbricks.com
00:02:39or put it in the comment section any place where you're watching
00:02:42or listening to this.
00:02:44Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple
00:02:47and subscribe on your platform of choice.
00:02:50To hit it right now, hit the subscribe button.
00:02:52Thank you for doing it.
00:02:54That helps us actually spread the show ideas to more people.
00:02:58Hey, friends.
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00:04:22When I think about loneliness, a case study that comes to mind
00:04:27is one of my favorite authors, who is Edgar Allen Poe,
00:04:30the American author from a couple of hundred years ago,
00:04:33who wrote a lot of early horror fiction,
00:04:37a lot of kind of creepy short stories.
00:04:39I loved that stuff when I was a kid.
00:04:41I had my dad read them to me.
00:04:43Well, it turns out that Edgar Allen Poe was a very troubled guy.
00:04:48You might actually ascertain that just from reading his stories.
00:04:52But he was a very lonely person.
00:04:54And he actually wrote a poem in 1829 called, well, Alone.
00:04:58And I'm not going to read you the whole poem.
00:05:00But let me read you just a couple of lines.
00:05:02"My sorrow I could not awaken.
00:05:05My heart to joy at the same tone.
00:05:09And all I loved, I loved alone."
00:05:11The love alone, kind of the definition of loneliness, isn't it?
00:05:17I thought to myself when I read that for the first time,
00:05:20well, poor guy, why weren't there more people around him
00:05:24who had given outstretched hand to help him where he actually needed it?
00:05:29Well, I got a little insight into what the problem was
00:05:32when I read his obituary in one of the Richmond, Virginia papers.
00:05:36He died in Baltimore.
00:05:37So he was in the region where I actually live and find myself now.
00:05:41And it described Edgar Allen Poe in the following way.
00:05:44He had very few friends and was the friend of very few.
00:05:48In other words, the problem wasn't that people didn't like him.
00:05:54The real problem is that he didn't like anybody.
00:05:58Now, I'm not saying that all lonely people
00:06:00have some sort of behavioral condition where they hate everybody.
00:06:02The case I'm going to make is that all of us
00:06:05have a little bit of Edgar Allen Poe in us.
00:06:07That part of the problem with our isolation
00:06:10is the way that we isolate ourselves to a very large extent.
00:06:14And I see it more and more and more for people who are suffering from loneliness.
00:06:19Now, I'm not blaming the victim here.
00:06:20I know there's a lot more that we can do to help other people.
00:06:24But what I really want to do in this show
00:06:26is for you to learn how to help yourself in those lonely periods in your life.
00:06:31Now, this syndrome is more and more common.
00:06:34This loneliness problem, maybe even the Poe syndrome of the way that we self-isolate.
00:06:40There's a very interesting survey that comes out now pretty regularly by Cigna,
00:06:44which is the health company, the health insurance company, health services company.
00:06:48And in a survey from 2018, which has since been updated, showing the same patterns,
00:06:53more than half of US adults said that they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well.
00:06:59More than half.
00:07:02Now, that's kind of unthinkable in the past, but something was actually going on.
00:07:05Now, why do I choose 2018 for that stat?
00:07:07It's before the coronavirus epidemic.
00:07:09Everything was weird and wonky during the coronavirus epidemic.
00:07:12You know it and I know it.
00:07:13And a lot of people were really isolated because of the policy response to the pandemic.
00:07:18But even before that, we had a trend.
00:07:20We can't blame everything on COVID.
00:07:23It wasn't COVID.
00:07:25It was us.
00:07:26It was something that was actually happening to us.
00:07:29And I want to get in a little bit to what's going wrong.
00:07:32But more than anything else, I want to get into how you can actually make it right.
00:07:36Being known.
00:07:37Nobody knows me well.
00:07:38This is the essence of the sense of isolation.
00:07:40Being known is the essence of feeling loved.
00:07:44And that's at the center of higher well-being.
00:07:46Remember, happiness is love.
00:07:48The great Harvard study of adult development, that 90-year study I talk about sometimes in the show
00:07:52that detract people from when they were in college or college-aged all the way until death.
00:07:58The biggest predictor was being known by someone, being known by others.
00:08:03Happiness is love.
00:08:04It is.
00:08:06And being loved is being known.
00:08:08That's the important thing to keep in mind.
00:08:10Now, being known and being understood are slightly different.
00:08:13And this is a distinction that I want to make because, for example, in marriage,
00:08:17this is a really big deal.
00:08:18And this is a kind of a gender deal, believe it or not.
00:08:21What you find is that women really need to feel understood.
00:08:25And they actually need to feel understood in their marriage more than men do.
00:08:28So when women feel misunderstood, interesting study shows that their life satisfaction falls
00:08:34about three times more than men when they don't feel understood.
00:08:37So guys, this is important for you to understand is that if you're married,
00:08:43that your wife needs to feel understood, needs to be-- no, no, needs to be understood.
00:08:50And that means you need to know her deeply, which means you need to listen more is what
00:08:56actually it comes down to.
00:08:57And one of the most important things that I actually-- when I'm counseling couples,
00:09:00which I wind up doing a lot, my wife and I, we wind up doing this a lot.
00:09:03Couples that are about to get married, couples that are different points in their marriage,
00:09:06it's like, how much are you listening to each other?
00:09:08Really listening.
00:09:10Now, why is that important to listen?
00:09:11Because you need to understand each other.
00:09:13And it's especially important for her.
00:09:15But both of you need to actually be known.
00:09:19That study, by the way, that I referred to before is from the Journal of Research and
00:09:23Personality.
00:09:24It's a wonderful apex journal in psychology.
00:09:26And I'll put that in the show notes.
00:09:28The article is called "On Feeling Understood and Feeling Well, the Role of Interdependence."
00:09:33So it kind of says it all in the title.
00:09:35OK.
00:09:36Let's get back to why this is so critically important.
00:09:39Why is it so important when we don't feel known, when we don't feel that someone loves us,
00:09:46why is that so critically important for our happiness?
00:09:48Why am I talking about this today?
00:09:50Remember, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
00:09:54Meaning, in turn, is made up of coherence, why things happen the way they do, purpose,
00:10:00where am I going in my life, and significance.
00:10:03Why does my life matter?
00:10:04Significance.
00:10:05Now, this is the one I want to drill into here a little bit.
00:10:08To be significant while your life matters, it has to matter to someone axiomatically.
00:10:14Somebody has to care about you.
00:10:16You have to be significant in somebody else's eyes.
00:10:19It's not going to be good enough for anybody to say, you know, I feel cosmically significant,
00:10:23even though nobody actually cares about me.
00:10:25That's not the way it works.
00:10:27You need to be known by somebody so that you know they care about you, and you need them
00:10:32to care about you because you need significance.
00:10:34You need significance because you need meaning, and you need meaning because you need happiness.
00:10:38And that's the algorithm that takes us back to well-being, the reason we talk about this
00:10:42in the first place.
00:10:42If no one knows you well, you can't be happy.
00:10:45That's the bottom line.
00:10:46There's nobody who's strong enough to actually get beyond that.
00:10:49OK.
00:10:50So that's really what it comes down to.
00:10:51And again, we're talking about people here, but not just about people.
00:10:57Religious traditions really understand this.
00:10:59You know, one of the most beautiful passages in the Hebrew Bible.
00:11:03Some of you have heard this.
00:11:04Some of you haven't before.
00:11:05But if you haven't heard it, you're going to love this.
00:11:07This is where in the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, where God is talking to humans
00:11:14and he's saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
00:11:17It's beautiful.
00:11:20It's beautiful because what that says is there's this metaphysical love for me.
00:11:24I'm significant.
00:11:25I'm significant in God's eyes.
00:11:27Why am I significant in God's eyes?
00:11:29Or how do I know I'm significant in God's eyes?
00:11:30Because even before I was born, God knew me.
00:11:33He knew me.
00:11:34You need that.
00:11:36You need that in the divine sense.
00:11:38And if not that, you need that in the human sense.
00:11:41And that's really what it's all about.
00:11:43Now, no one knew Poe well.
00:11:47No one knew Edgar Allen Poe well.
00:11:49I mean, it was by his own admission.
00:11:51He wrote a poem on it called Alone.
00:11:53But in his obituary, we know that no one knew him well because he didn't want to know anybody
00:11:59well.
00:12:00And this is going to get to the punchline of what I'm talking about here.
00:12:03You want people to know you?
00:12:04Go know people.
00:12:05That's what it comes down to.
00:12:07That's the most important thing.
00:12:09But there's a problem here.
00:12:11There's a problem, which is that that's hard to do.
00:12:14And we don't have an incentive to know other people well.
00:12:17We want to be known, but we don't necessarily want to know people very well.
00:12:22And therein lies the trouble that we have in our modern society today with loneliness.
00:12:26Not quite there yet.
00:12:27So hold that thought.
00:12:28Now, let me go to a little bit more of the basic science, even the neuroscience of how
00:12:35important it is to be understood.
00:12:36There's a bunch of interesting papers that use FMRI technology.
00:12:42So imaging of the brain, functional imaging of the brain, where neuroscientists are experimenting
00:12:50with people where they feel understood or they don't feel understood.
00:12:53And there's a lot of ways that you can do this.
00:12:54You can imagine you put somebody in an FMRI machine, and you're communicating with them,
00:12:58and they're talking to you.
00:12:59And you're going, yeah, and you showed that you really understand what they're saying.
00:13:02Or you don't understand what they're saying, and you don't care.
00:13:05And then you look at what's going on in their brains, which is a classical type of study
00:13:09that neuroscientists like to do today.
00:13:11When people feel understood, it activates the pleasure centers in their brain, notably the
00:13:16ventral striatum, the ventral tegmental area.
00:13:19If you follow my work, you know that I talk about these parts of the brain a lot.
00:13:22And while they feel misunderstood, it stimulates their pain centers, most notably the anterior
00:13:27insula of the brain.
00:13:29Yeah, that's right.
00:13:30It's physically pleasurable to be understood, and it's physically painful to be misunderstood.
00:13:36That's how important this is.
00:13:38That's the neurophysiology of how this relates to your well-being.
00:13:42When you're not understood, when you're not known, when you're lonely because nobody knows
00:13:47you well, look out.
00:13:49This is highly correlated with premature mortality, bad cardiovascular health, high inflammation,
00:13:56hormone disruption, sleep disorders.
00:14:00I mean, fill in the blanks, man.
00:14:02You know, when you don't have this, it's going to rain chaos in your life.
00:14:08And this kind of makes evolutionary sense, by the way, especially when we talk about
00:14:11the neurobiology of how this works.
00:14:13Our brains are built to give us pleasure and pain on the basis of things that are good for
00:14:19us for passing on our genes and surviving.
00:14:22Being understood is a really, really good thing to survive another day, right?
00:14:26When people understand what you're all about and they're sympathetic to what you're talking
00:14:29about, you're more likely to be able to exist well in your kin group, in your 30 to 50 person
00:14:34band, being misunderstood, chronically misunderstood, not known well, being a stranger, that's a
00:14:41predicate to walking the frozen tundra and dying alone.
00:14:44So therefore, you need to have a neurocognitive incentive to be misunderstood and to have
00:14:51an aversion to being misunderstood.
00:14:53And your brain is actually equipped for that marvel at the human brain.
00:14:56It's so beautiful.
00:14:57It's such a miracle, isn't it?
00:14:59We're always like, "Oh no, I want to get rid of all my bad feelings."
00:15:01No, your bad feelings are incentives for you to understand that there's something that's
00:15:07not good for you.
00:15:09They're alerting you to something that you should avoid.
00:15:12And that's good and healthy.
00:15:13That's a beautiful thing.
00:15:14And it's a gift, actually.
00:15:15And this is a perfect case in point.
00:15:18We shouldn't feel lonely because loneliness is dangerous for us.
00:15:22And so we feel horrible when we're actually lonely.
00:15:26Now here's the problem, and I hinted at it before.
00:15:28We really thrive by being known.
00:15:31I just showed you that in the paper that I was talking about a minute ago.
00:15:34By the way, let me cite it specifically.
00:15:37The neural basis of feeling understood and not understood, and that's the social and cognitive
00:15:41and affective neuroscience going into the show notes.
00:15:43Here's the problem.
00:15:44We thrive from being known a lot more than knowing others.
00:15:48We have a huge incentive to be known, but we don't have very much of an incentive to know
00:15:52others.
00:15:53But you already know, you get into Poe syndrome, is that when you don't know others well, they're
00:15:58not going to know you either.
00:15:59And so what we need to do consciously to get the thing that we want unconsciously is to
00:16:04consciously do the thing for which we have less of an incentive.
00:16:08This is the same lesson that you learn over and over and over again in life.
00:16:12It's better to give than to receive.
00:16:15You read that's biblical, but it's also common sense.
00:16:17And your grandma taught you that.
00:16:19Give the thing that you actually want to get.
00:16:22If you're at a dinner party and you want people to listen to your point of view, listen to
00:16:26their point of view.
00:16:27If you're having an argument with your spouse and you don't want it to become really, really
00:16:31bitter, then don't do the things that will actually make it better.
00:16:35Guess what?
00:16:36Everything goes better.
00:16:37Give the thing that you want to get.
00:16:39That's a good rule in life.
00:16:40And this is really a case in point.
00:16:42Work to know other people and then you will be known.
00:16:46But that's hard because of this dislocation between incentives.
00:16:52We want to have the thing, but we don't have very much of an incentive, especially if we're
00:16:57not thinking about it, to go give that particular thing.
00:17:01Okay, now a ton of research actually bears this out, that we show that knowledge of one's
00:17:07spouse, if you really know your spouse, it's great.
00:17:10It feels great for sure.
00:17:11It enhances intimacy.
00:17:13It improves your adjustment to marriage.
00:17:15It increases your trust.
00:17:16But being known by your spouse improves all of your measures of marital happiness a lot
00:17:23more than that.
00:17:24So knowing your spouse is great.
00:17:26But being known by your spouse is pure pleasure.
00:17:29That's the data that we get that actually supports this dislocation between the two goals
00:17:34that we get.
00:17:35Now, even when you're trying to understand your spouse, it turns out that that succeeds
00:17:40in giving your spouse what your spouse actually needs so that they don't...
00:17:43Even if you really don't understand, if I don't understand, you know, Mrs. B, we're having
00:17:50an argument.
00:17:51We have tons of arguments.
00:17:52She's Spanish.
00:17:52And that's like basic communication the Spanish households is arguing.
00:17:56And sometimes I don't understand.
00:17:57I don't understand.
00:17:58I'm just a doofus.
00:17:59I don't get it, right?
00:18:00But if she actually feels like I'm trying to understand, that's more than half the battle,
00:18:05really.
00:18:05And good research shows this.
00:18:08My friend Bob Waldinger has a great paper in the Journal of Family Psychology about how
00:18:13couples, they do better when at least they're trying, when they're trying to know each other.
00:18:18This kind of explains the vicious cycle of Poe syndrome that we're seeing more and more
00:18:23and more of where, especially in the way that we use modern technology today, we have less
00:18:28of an incentive.
00:18:29We're less with other people.
00:18:31And so the result of it is we're getting worse with the electronic mediation of our relationships.
00:18:36We're getting worse at knowing others.
00:18:38And as we're getting worse at knowing others, other people don't know us as much.
00:18:44And that's what puts us into the Poe syndrome of not being a very good friend and so therefore
00:18:50not having very many good friends.
00:18:51And this actually explains.
00:18:53This whole thing explains this downward cycle, this self-reinforcing pattern of loneliness
00:18:59that we're seeing that's actually increasing, particularly among people under 30.
00:19:03And that's a weird, ahistoric thing.
00:19:05If you go back 25 and 30 years and before that, the loneliest people were never between 18
00:19:11and 25 years old.
00:19:12But that's where we see the highest levels.
00:19:13of loneliness today because that's what's being disrupted by the misuse and overuse of technology,
00:19:17which is the known and being known stuff that we're talking about.
00:19:20We're a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe's.
00:19:22That's what the misuse of technology is actually getting us.
00:19:26So here's the question.
00:19:27How do we get out?
00:19:28How do we get out of it?
00:19:29Now, there's a lot of things in life that put us in a downward cycle, a self-reinforcing
00:19:36negative pattern in life.
00:19:38Homelessness, for example, is a classic case of a policy and social problem that we see
00:19:42that tends to be very self-reinforcing.
00:19:44If you're homeless, it's hard to get out of homelessness because to be not homeless, you
00:19:48need a place to stay and you need a job and a way to support yourself.
00:19:51But if you're living outside, it's very, very difficult to have an address and you probably
00:19:56don't have a means of communication and you probably don't have clean clothes.
00:19:59And so therefore, you can't get a job and you can't get a job.
00:20:01You don't get money.
00:20:02You can't...
00:20:02You see my point.
00:20:04That's a self-reinforcing pattern.
00:20:05Once you're in the vortex, it's hard to break out of that.
00:20:09Poverty is the same way.
00:20:10Once you're in poverty, it's really hard to break out of poverty.
00:20:13Joblessness.
00:20:14If you're unemployed, you lose your job, you lose your job skills, and the longer that there's
00:20:18a big space in your CV, the more that potential employers go, "Huh, I wonder if there's a reason
00:20:25for this."
00:20:26So you get my point.
00:20:27Loneliness works the same way.
00:20:29It's very self-perpetuating.
00:20:31And part of the reason for this is when you don't feel known, you have less and less of
00:20:36an incentive than you had before to know other people.
00:20:39It's weird, you know, that when you're feeling lonely and you're feeling kind of sorry for
00:20:42yourself, what do you want to do?
00:20:44It's like, "I don't know, man.
00:20:46I'm not going out.
00:20:47I'm feeling crummy.
00:20:48I'm going to, you know, wrap myself in a fuzzy blanket and lie down on the couch with a pint
00:20:52of Haagen-Dazs and binge a show on Netflix," which makes you feel lonelier, nothing against
00:20:57Haagen-Dazs or Netflix.
00:20:59But, you know, being by yourself and cocooning is the opposite of what you need to do.
00:21:03And part of the reason for that is that there's very interesting research that shows that
00:21:07loneliness interrupts your executive function.
00:21:09Your executive function, which is largely having to do with rational decisions that are being
00:21:15made in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the C-suite, the executive centers of your
00:21:19brain, those are decisions that will make you do the right thing, but that's interrupted
00:21:24by your feelings, by loneliness.
00:21:26There's a lot of signals that you're not actually taking all the way to your executive center
00:21:32to make rational decisions.
00:21:33On the contrary, you do a lot of self-defeating things when you're lonely.
00:21:37Loneliness is bad for you because you tend to make the wrong decisions about getting out
00:21:40of loneliness is the whole point.
00:21:43That's how all self-defeating patterns work.
00:21:45So what do you do?
00:21:48Let's just say now that you're in a cycle of loneliness, and we've all been in this, by
00:21:51the way.
00:21:51I'm the world's biggest extrovert, and I've been lonely too.
00:21:55I remember when I first moved away, when I first dropped out of college, dropped out,
00:22:00kicked out, splitting hairs, when I was 19 years old, and I went on the road as a musician.
00:22:05But I was living on the West Coast.
00:22:06I'm from Seattle originally.
00:22:07My parents were in Seattle.
00:22:09And I went out east.
00:22:11I moved to the Washington, D.C. area, and I didn't know anybody except the guys that I
00:22:16was working with, and they had their own lives, and they had their own stuff going on.
00:22:19So I was alone all day long except for when I was on tour with my musical group, 19 years
00:22:25old.
00:22:26So I got this little house, I didn't know anybody in my neighborhood, and I was just
00:22:31like lonely as a cloud.
00:22:32It was just terrible.
00:22:34And I remember just lying on my couch going, "This is really nothing to do.
00:22:37What am I going to do?"
00:22:38I wish I had the information I'm about to give you now.
00:22:41If you need to get out of loneliness, here's what you do.
00:22:43You need to do four things, four things.
00:22:46There's always a list.
00:22:47Number one, you need to practice the opposite signal strategy.
00:22:54When you're feeling crummy about your life, probably your limbic system is lying to you
00:23:00and you're impairing the functioning of your prefrontal cortex, the executive centers of
00:23:05your brain.
00:23:05So what do you need to do?
00:23:07Especially loneliness.
00:23:08Loneliness is the biggest example of this.
00:23:10Do the opposite of what you want to do.
00:23:12You want to cocoon, don't cocoon.
00:23:14You want to isolate yourself, don't isolate yourself.
00:23:16You don't want to talk to anybody, talk to people.
00:23:19The opposite signal strategy means ignoring your instincts when you're having these negative
00:23:24cognitions and emotions.
00:23:26Think of it like a workout routine because that's another example where you need to focus
00:23:31on the opposite signal strategy.
00:23:32The more sedentary you are, the more sedentary you're going to want to be.
00:23:36And this is a really common problem.
00:23:38When people get out of the cycle of moving and walking and working out and going to the
00:23:42gym, they tend to get stuck in the sedentary behavior of lying on the couch and not working
00:23:50out.
00:23:50And what you need to do is to do the opposite signal strategy, do the opposite of what you
00:23:54want to do.
00:23:54When you're working out a lot, you're working out every day, you want to work out every day.
00:23:58When you stop, you don't want to stop stopping.
00:24:01You don't want to get back into it.
00:24:02Getting back into it is really hard.
00:24:04That's why you need to say, "Okay, I'm going to do the opposite of what I feel, and that's
00:24:07the right thing to do."
00:24:08Loneliness works the same way.
00:24:10Follow an opposite signal strategy.
00:24:12That's the first big thing to do.
00:24:14Okay, two, what should I do with my opposite signal strategy?
00:24:18When I want to cocoon and draw inward to myself, that's a function that St. Augustine, he called
00:24:26curvatus in se, curvatus in se, which means curving in on yourself in Latin.
00:24:33That's what we do egotistically, but that's actually what we do psychologically, too, when
00:24:38we're feeling really bad.
00:24:40And we need to not be curvatus in se.
00:24:44We need to be proactive about being outward focused to do some things that we might not
00:24:52otherwise do.
00:24:53And that means proactively going and knowing other people.
00:24:57My friend David Brooks, the columnist at The New York Times, among other places, he has
00:25:02a really great book called How to Know a Person.
00:25:04And he observes that there's a lot of people that are diminishers, that they're self-involved
00:25:10to the point that they make other people feel small and unseen.
00:25:13They don't know others.
00:25:14They're not interested in knowing other people.
00:25:16And they always speak about themselves, for example.
00:25:18And then there are people who are illuminators.
00:25:21He calls them illuminators.
00:25:22And those are the people who are persistently curious about others asking questions and
00:25:27listening to others.
00:25:27So the first area of opposite signal strategy when you're feeling lonely is to get more curious
00:25:33about other people, to be engaging other people about their own lives, to try to learn more
00:25:38about them, to try to know other people, even though you don't want to because you're in
00:25:43curvatus in se, right?
00:25:46And I think about this a lot of time by the people that I really admire the most in life.
00:25:51For those of you who followed my work for a while, in 2023, I published a book with Oprah
00:25:55Winfrey.
00:25:56And that was this incredible experience, incredible experience.
00:25:59Because, I mean, just writing a book with Oprah Winfrey is sort of awesome.
00:26:02But that's not the point.
00:26:04The point was actually getting to know one of the maybe five most famous people in the
00:26:08world and who she is in private.
00:26:10And one of the most extraordinary things about Oprah Winfrey you need to understand is she's
00:26:13the same person in private as she is in public, which is to say super interested in other people,
00:26:20super curious about other people, really trying to know other people.
00:26:25That was the secret to her success on her show besides just being highly intelligent and really
00:26:29good at media.
00:26:30She was intensely interested and focused on knowing other people in depth.
00:26:36That's why everybody watched her show.
00:26:37Four or five million people a day watched her show.
00:26:39Well, it turns out that if you're having dinner with her alone, she's the same person.
00:26:43This is one of the reasons that fame and fortune haven't been bad for her.
00:26:49On the contrary, she sees those as a gift to refract on other people to lift them up because
00:26:56she cares about them.
00:26:57And so when I first met her and had dinner with her, and we were talking about a project
00:27:01working together, she really wanted to know me.
00:27:03She wanted to know me as a person.
00:27:05And that was really evidence.
00:27:07And that was an amazing thing.
00:27:08And so when you are lonely, I'm not saying that she is, she's not, but we can be more
00:27:13like her on purpose if we decide to be.
00:27:15So channel your inner Oprah of being intensely curious about knowing another person, even
00:27:22when you don't feel it.
00:27:23No, especially when you don't feel it.
00:27:25That's number two.
00:27:26Be proactive.
00:27:27Number three, to do that, these are all building on each other, ask more questions without being
00:27:34weird.
00:27:34Interview people.
00:27:36If you don't know what to do, and you want to know somebody, ask them a whole bunch of
00:27:39questions about their own life.
00:27:41And this is incredibly important.
00:27:43So I have a colleague at the Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks.
00:27:46She's not related to me, but the fact is that she's a Brooks, and I'm a Brooks.
00:27:50I mean, we get each other's email all the time.
00:27:52So I know all the people who are writing to Alison Wood Brooks, but I know her too, and
00:27:56I really like her work a lot.
00:27:57She's done work on dating.
00:28:00She's done work on how people actually interact with each other on dating.
00:28:04At some point, I'll have her as a guest on the show.
00:28:06She's terrific.
00:28:07And if you ask a lot of questions on a first date, you will be 9% more likable.
00:28:129% is the difference between meeting your soulmate, your future spouse, and not, quite frankly.
00:28:18How do you meet your soulmate?
00:28:20When you go out on a bunch of dates, always ask a ton of questions, which is, of course,
00:28:24being proactive, which is, if you've been lonely and suffering before that, an opposite signal
00:28:30strategy to what you actually want to do.
00:28:32And it's shocking how many people actually don't do that.
00:28:35How many people actually ask zero questions on dates?
00:28:40A lot of my students, especially young women who are my students, they date.
00:28:44They're dating, of course.
00:28:46And I say, how many questions do guys ask on dates?
00:28:50They're usually like, zero.
00:28:52Like, bad strategy, guys.
00:28:55But the bad strategy for anybody, people are super interesting.
00:28:59If you sit down next to me on a plane and have the bad judgment of engaging me in conversation,
00:29:04I'm going to interview you.
00:29:06And I'm going to find out.
00:29:07I'm going to ask you questions like, what are you most afraid of?
00:29:10I'm trying not to be weird here.
00:29:13But I want to know.
00:29:14I want to know.
00:29:15If you're going to talk to me, I want to know what actually makes you tick.
00:29:18Now, part of it is because I'm a behavioral scientist.
00:29:19And this is like my lab is figuring out what you're most afraid of.
00:29:23But mostly, I'm a person.
00:29:25And I want to have connections, real human connections with other people, even if I'm
00:29:29not going to know them for more than an hour.
00:29:31And that's the kind of questions I'm actually going to ask.
00:29:33I'm going to find out what really makes you tick, what's written on your soul.
00:29:37And that's super fun and really interesting.
00:29:40Now, that requires, however, listening to the answers.
00:29:43The worst thing that you can do is ask people questions that they not listen.
00:29:47So and the first one, by the way, is, what's your name?
00:29:49And then one second later, you don't remember.
00:29:52That's because you weren't listening.
00:29:54You were thinking about the next thing.
00:29:56People chronically don't listen at universities.
00:29:59At universities, listening is also known as waiting to talk.
00:30:02Don't be that person.
00:30:05That's not listening.
00:30:07And you're doing that if you can't remember somebody's name that you've just asked for.
00:30:11And so the key thing is listen to learn and then make a note of what you're actually hearing.
00:30:15Because that's actually how you're going to know that person.
00:30:18And they'll know.
00:30:20And when they know, they'll want to know you.
00:30:23And that's the basis of actual human connection.
00:30:26And that's the basis of you being less lonely.
00:30:28One more thing, one more modern thing.
00:30:30And I wouldn't have had to bring this up 25 years ago.
00:30:32If you're trying to know somebody, here's the biggest opposite signal strategy of all.
00:30:36Don't look at your phone.
00:30:37Don't look at your phone.
00:30:39I had this friend who was with a great big private equity firm in New York City.
00:30:44And he was doing a lot of the hiring for a lot of the junior talent.
00:30:47People coming out of places like where I teach at the Harvard Business School.
00:30:50The one thing he was looking for in an interview is whether they could connect with another human being.
00:30:55And the biggest giveaway that they can't really connect with another
00:30:59person is if during the interview they'd peek at their phone.
00:31:01Don't be that person.
00:31:04It's a huge mistake.
00:31:05It's basically you showing that you don't want to know that person.
00:31:09You want to know, you want to look in the mirror that it is your phone.
00:31:12Which is to say, is somebody texting me?
00:31:15Did I get something in my notifications?
00:31:17What was that chime?
00:31:18Don't look in the mirror.
00:31:20Look at the other person.
00:31:21Be other focused, not self-focused.
00:31:23And he actually said that if somebody, that was the acid test in this interview.
00:31:29If he couldn't have an interview where they got to know each other.
00:31:33Because the other person even peeked once at their phone.
00:31:36Out!
00:31:36That candidate was gone.
00:31:38And so this is the fourth thing that is really indicative of probably the greatest source of loneliness.
00:31:44Remember the intermediation of relationships because of our technology.
00:31:47Our intermediation with devices and screens.
00:31:50This is the rule.
00:31:52Leave your phone in your pocket.
00:31:54Leave your phone in the car.
00:31:56Leave your phone at home.
00:31:57Don't have your phone when you're actually trying to get to know a person.
00:32:01Because that is the first thing that's going to make them believe that you're not really into knowing them.
00:32:07And then they won't know you.
00:32:08And we get into the cycle that we're talking about in the first place.
00:32:12Now there's, you know what I'm talking about, trying to solve a particular problem.
00:32:18There's no law of nature saying that this problem is going to solve itself.
00:32:23And that's one of the things that really worries me.
00:32:25When I'm looking at the data on Gen Z today and I see these incredibly high levels of loneliness.
00:32:31Which is to say very high levels of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.
00:32:34This is not a problem that's going to solve itself.
00:32:37Because there's nothing in nature that says if you wait long enough you'll be happy again.
00:32:41It's not true.
00:32:42We need to actually solve this problem.
00:32:45That's why I need you to solve this problem in your life and help other people solve it as well.
00:32:50This is one of these things that's not a self-correcting issue.
00:32:52And I don't want to see what's actually going to happen if these numbers and loneliness continue to go up.
00:32:57Now to begin with, they don't have to go up in your life.
00:33:00You are the entrepreneur of the enterprise of your life.
00:33:04So at very least that problem stops today with you.
00:33:10Let's take a couple of quick questions before we finish.
00:33:12Let's start with James Walters.
00:33:14Thanks for giving me first and last names.
00:33:16I like that, Mr. Walters.
00:33:18This is by email.
00:33:19Which times of day are most critical for limiting devices?
00:33:23Yeah.
00:33:23Are there certain kinds of digital activities that are more detrimental than others?
00:33:27Yeah.
00:33:27Screens, first hour of the day, last hour of the day.
00:33:29That's it.
00:33:30And during meal times.
00:33:31This is the way that you detox from your devices without getting rid of your devices.
00:33:34I'm not getting rid of mine.
00:33:36You're not getting rid of yours.
00:33:37You're looking at me on a device right now.
00:33:39That's fine.
00:33:40But the point is that if you actually want to have them interfere least with your happiness,
00:33:46least deleterious to your quality of life, you shouldn't.
00:33:49If you can avoid it, look at your devices the first hour of the day and the last hour of
00:33:53the day.
00:33:54The first hour of the day because it will be better for programming your brain for maximum
00:33:58positive affect, minimum negative affect, and highest productivity.
00:34:02And the last hour of the day because it minimizes negative affect before you go to sleep.
00:34:07And it gives you better sleep and won't interfere with the activity of your pineal gland leading
00:34:12to melatonin production among many other things.
00:34:15And then while you eat.
00:34:16Why?
00:34:16Because we as an evolved species are evolved to look at each other in the eyes as we're
00:34:22eating a chunk of yak meat around a fire.
00:34:25And you interfere with that even if the phone is on the table face down because it's going
00:34:31to interrupt the oxytocin flow, the neuropeptide exchange, the love hormone that we're getting
00:34:37in our brains from having conversations and having communion with other people.
00:34:43So that's the time to do it.
00:34:44First hour, last hour, meal time.
00:34:46That's the most important time.
00:34:47Second question is from Dan Clements.
00:34:49This is on Spotify.
00:34:50"Speaking about the anxiety cycle, how does one break free from shame about being anxious?"
00:34:56I love this.
00:34:56This is really complex.
00:34:57Some people don't just suffer.
00:34:58They suffer about suffering.
00:35:00It's like this recursive kind of suffering.
00:35:02And the classic time would be when you're on a date, which I haven't been on a date for,
00:35:07I don't know, 37 years or something like that.
00:35:09But you want to be really cool and relaxed, but you're not.
00:35:15And so you're ashamed about not being cool and relaxed, which makes you less cool and
00:35:20relaxed.
00:35:20And that's a problem.
00:35:21That's a self-reinforcing cycle.
00:35:23What do you do about that?
00:35:25And the answer is you rebel against your embarrassment by naming it.
00:35:30It's really important.
00:35:31And actually, you can see.
00:35:32I mean, it's sort of charming.
00:35:34Not for everybody.
00:35:35It might not work in your particular case.
00:35:36But if you're really, really stressed out on a date, you say, gosh, you know, I'm really
00:35:40nervous right now.
00:35:41I don't know why I'm so nervous.
00:35:42That's sort of charming in its way.
00:35:44I mean, at least that would have been charming to me.
00:35:46I mean, I'm an old guy, so who knows?
00:35:47But rebel against your embarrassment.
00:35:51Or one of the things is that I used to say this sometimes when I've been doing public
00:35:56speaking for a long time.
00:35:57I get up in front of 10,000 people.
00:35:58I'm not nervous.
00:35:59But when I was running a company, I was a CEO for 10 years.
00:36:02And I would get up in front of my own staff, 300 people that they worked for me.
00:36:07I was like, my knees were knocking, man.
00:36:10I mean, it was so weird.
00:36:12And so I remember getting up.
00:36:14And I said, I don't know what it is about, but you people really just freak me out.
00:36:19And it was just it broke the ice, and that's how to deal with it.
00:36:22You're ashamed of being anxious?
00:36:24Are you embarrassed about being anxious?
00:36:25Name it.
00:36:26Own it.
00:36:27And that's the way that we actually get around a lot of these problems by bringing them to
00:36:32the surface.
00:36:32Because remember, you can be managed by your limbic system or you can manage your limbic
00:36:38system.
00:36:38The way that you manage your limbic system is moving the experience of the emotion into
00:36:42the prefrontal cortex where it becomes conscious.
00:36:46And that's a perfect example of a technique that we call metacognition.
00:36:50And Dan Clemons, thank you for giving me the opportunity to bring that idea up one more
00:36:55time.
00:36:55Well, we're done.
00:36:56As always, let me know your thoughts.
00:36:58officehowers@arthurbrooks.com.
00:37:00That's our email address.
00:37:02Like and subscribe.
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00:37:03Hit the subscribe button.
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00:37:10I will read it, I promise.
00:37:12Even if it's negative, especially if it's negative.
00:37:14Thank you for watching the show, even if you've got some constructive criticism.
00:37:19Follow me on all the social platforms, on Instagram.
00:37:22A lot of people get new content or original content that I don't post anyplace else on
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00:37:28And in the meantime, please do order The Meaning of Your Life to learn more about all the things
00:37:32I'm talking about here.
00:37:33In the meantime, bring more love and happiness to other people.
00:37:36And I'll see you next week.
00:37:44you