Why Americans are lonelier and its effects on our health

Laurie Santos:

I think the first piece of advice is just to remember that it's a common problem. I think loneliness can feel stigmatizing. You can feel like there's something wrong with you if you're feeling lonely, but if you realize that upwards of 60 percent of people out there are feeling the same, you know, it's not such a bad thing, right? It's something that you can admit to. And I think admitting that you're feeling loneliness is part of the first step.

I think one thing to do is then to make sure you're really connecting with the folks who you have in your life. One of the problems with being really busy is that we don't often take the time we need to connect with the people we care about our friends, our family members. But it's as simple as picking up the phone to try to reconnect with them. I think there's also ways that we can try to make new connections, and this is something that I think we often forget to do. Right.

Again, it's too easy to stay in our house and watch Netflix, but if you're watching the basketball game, could you head out to a pub and watch that basketball game? If you're going to be doing something engaging in knitting or even on a craft, can you join a craft group and so on.

This is another big change we've seen since the 1970s, is that these so called third places that people would meet with other friends, like bowling leaks and so on, these kinds of things have gone away in the modern day, but we can bring them back. We can take some action to make those kinds of collective social connections as well.

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