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In the short term if I feel loneliness, it's like any other biological signals. It's like hunger or thirst. It's alerting me that something that's critical for my survival is missing.
Giving and receiving kindness are easy ways to feel good and to help others feel good too. People, organizations, and societies thrive when they are grounded in a culture of kindness.
I think that if we want to create a healthier country, we need to empower more people to make changes in their lives. But we also have to empower them to help change their environment.
When it comes to our relationship with loneliness, specifically, it's important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction.
When I look at the patients that I've cared for with mental illness, I know that many of them took years to come forward and tell somebody that they were in pain and that they needed help.
Anchors are those people in your life who remind you of who you are - your values, aspirations, and worth - even when you forget. Keep them close and always let them know how much they mean to you.
Well, the responsibility of the surgeon general is to make sure that the public has access to science and access to it in a way that is understandable and that is applicable to their everyday lives.
I want to work with faith-based leaders to address the negative attitudes that are still too often associated with mental illness, attitudes that hold people back from getting the help that they need.
When I went through my confirmation hearing to serve as surgeon general they asked me what my priorities would be and I didn't list loneliness in that priority list because it was not one at the time.
We live in a society where individual effort and progress is valued, and that's absolutely correct and is as it should be. But we also are interdependent creatures. We can't succeed solely on our own.
I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn't expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.
My father grew up quite poor actually in a small farming village in South India. His grandfather was a farmer, his father was a farmer, and he was expected to be a farmer as well - his life took a different path.
When you help someone else, not only do they benefit, but you reaffirm to yourself that you have something of value to give them, and you help to strengthen and nurture a bond with an individual that you're helping.
As prevalent as loneliness is, many people don't recognize that people that they know may very well be suffering from loneliness. It's important for many reasons, one of which is that it has a profound impact on health.
One of the things that happens in our regular lives is that when we're in moments of pain or feeling alone, we may hesitate to reach out to others because we may think - they're not going through the same experiences I am.
Empathy is choosing to see ourselves in another despite our differences. It's recognizing that the same humanity - the same desire for meaning, fulfillment and security - exists in each of us, even if it's expressed uniquely.
I can learn a lot from reading briefing books and talking to experts, but that pales in comparison to what I can learn from going out and talking to people about what they're actually experiencing and hearing about their ideas.
A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.
We can experience an erosion of self-esteem when we're lonely, as we come to believe that it's because we're not likable or because something is broken inside of us. And that can just compound that loneliness further and further.
Emotional well-being is more than the absence of a mental illness. It's that resource within each of us which allows us to reach ever closer to our full potential, and which also enables us to be resilient in the face of adversity.
You can be surrounded by many people but still feel quite lonely if you don't have strong connections and if you feel you can't be yourself with them. Conversely, you can just be around a few people, but feel deeply connected to them.
With any sort of major change we need to make in our lives, it's much easier to do it with other people. We succeed and thrive best when we work together and support each other. When we struggle alone, that's when the struggle can seem impossible.
Surgeon generals are appointed by presidents, but our work isn't about politics. Our highest duty to to the public. Our true guide is science. Our job is to speak the truth about public health, even when it's controversial or perceived as political.
Be very disciplined about dedicating some time - even if it is five minutes a day - to calling or talking to someone you love. That kind of consistency, even if it is just five minutes a day, helps to remind us that we have a well of connection in our lives.
When I was younger, my family suddenly and unexpectedly lost all of our life savings to a man we had trusted as a friend. The financial loss was difficult, especially because my sister and I were both in college. But the breach of trust was even more painful.
Science tells us more and more now that there is a strong connection between emotional well-being and health outcomes, and that you can proactively cultivate emotional well-being through relatively simple practices like sleep, social connection and meditation.
I think of emotional well-being as a resource within each of us that allows us to do more and to perform better. That doesn't mean just the absence of mental illness. It's the presence of positive emotions that allows us to be resilient in the face of adversity.
Touch is incredibly important as part of the human experience. Our ancestors relied on human touch to form and strengthen bonds with each other. Touch can accelerate a feeling of connection and releases hormones in our body that engender trust and build connection.
We can no longer remain within our exam rooms and ignore what happens in our communities. As physicians and dentists, we must have a presence in both places. Our sacred responsibility is both to help the patient in front of us and also to safeguard the health of the nation.
It's easy to say that health is all about personal responsibility and we should all make good decisions for ourselves, but the reality is far more complicated. We know that in the case of motor vehicle accidents, how other people drive makes a difference in how safe you are.
When I was Surgeon General, I spent a lot of time talking to people in living rooms and town halls all across the country, and one of the things I started to notice was that behind many of the stories of addiction, violence, depression and anxiety were threads of loneliness.
There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.
The amount of time it takes to recover from the coronavirus differs widely. Some people will get the virus and have no symptoms at all, other people will have mild symptoms like a low-grade fever or a mild cough and others will get really ill and will need to be hospitalized.
When it comes to creating emotional wellbeing, we are only going to achieve this, I believe, if we help each other in that effort. Part of that is reaching out and building social connections in people who may not always have the social connections or the support that they need.
Unlike many other illnesses, what I find profoundly empowering about addressing loneliness is that the ultimate solution to loneliness lies in each of us. We can be the medicine that each other needs. We can be the solution other people crave. We are all doctors and we are all healers.
If you've ever had the experience of being in conversation with someone when they were fully present, listening deeply to you when you're sharing with them, you know that five minutes of a fully present conversation like that can be more powerful than 30 minutes of distracted conversation.
We know that chronic loneliness has consequences. It certainly depresses our mood. And in terms of our health, people who struggle with loneliness also have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Loneliness is also associated with a shorter lifespan.
What you quickly realize once you commit to getting more sleep is it can increase your productivity, it can improve your mood. And that doesn't just help you at work, but it helps you be the kind of person you want to be with your family and your friends and that's ultimately what matters most.
If we approach other people understanding our own value, being confident in who we are, being centered and grounded, it's actually easier for us to connect with them because we can listen more deeply and we can express ourselves more authentically without fear of being judged or not being enough.
Sometimes when you get sick and you go to the doctor, it can feel like you didn't get your money's worth if you don't come away with a pill. I've had many, many conversations with patients who I've cared for over the years about why it's actually in some cases better not to go home with antibiotics.
Loneliness is different than isolation and solitude. Loneliness is a subjective feeling where the connections we need are greater than the connections we have. In the gap, we experience loneliness. It's distinct from the objective state of isolation, which is determined by the number of people around you.
When I was training in medicine for example, there was a culture in medicine that strong people didn't need sleep, that the less you slept, the more you just powered through a tough call not on no sleep, the stronger you were. That is not helpful to have a culture that supports healthy practices like that.
It is true that there are some parents who have concerns about vaccines, but while we hear about these concerns a lot in the media, I don't want people to think that the majority of parents out there do not believe in vaccines and then most kids aren't getting vaccinated. In fact, it's exactly the opposite.
I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.
We have to recognize that we can help increase happiness of other people by reaching out, and building connections. People have done that for me in my life. There have been many times that my family and friends have reached out to help support me and contributed to my emotional wellbeing, and ultimately to my health.
I believe that inspiration is one of the most powerful forces in life. In career and in relationships, it's worth searching for the path that inspires you. Pursuing such a path often entails risk - it may involve making a big change in what you're doing - but the career risks we regret most are the ones we don't take.
It turns out that our ability to connect with other people is driven by our ability to connect deeply with ourselves. And that can be just a few minutes sitting on your porch feeling the breeze against your face. That can be a few moments spent in meditation or in prayer or remembering three things you're grateful for.
I think sometimes in the focus on deep friendships and on romantic relationships, we can lose sight of how important the small connections we make are with strangers and with people that we may encounter for just a few seconds or a few minutes, whether it's the barista at our coffee shop or the stranger next to us on the subway.
The surgeon general is responsible for sharing scientifically-based information with the public so that they can improve their health. But I will say personally that my goal as surgeon general is to help build a culture of prevention in America so that we are a nation that is as good at preventing illness as we are at treating it.
I have experienced loneliness at many, many points in my life and felt this profound sense of shame about it - all the years when I was a child that I struggled with feeling lonely when I was scared to go to school and petrified of walking into the elementary school cafeteria because I was worried I wouldn't have anyone to sit with.