PBS News Hour

JOHN YANG

People with robust social connections are more likely to live longer, healthier and happier lives. But according to Census Bureau surveys, people were spending less time with friends and more time alone even before the pandemic, which only intensified the sense of social isolation and loneliness. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at Yale University, where her class, Psychology and the Good Life, is one of the school's most popular courses. She's turned it into a podcast, the Happiness Lab. Laurie Santos, how pervasive is this problem in America right now?

LAURIE SANTOS

I mean, it's pretty bad. It's often talked about as an epidemic. You know, some surveys reveal that around 60 percent of people in the U.S. right now report feeling lonely on a pretty regular basis. And that's pretty devastating from a public health perspective. Right. This is worse than rates of obesity. This is worse than rates of diabetes. And everything we know suggests that loneliness might be as big of a public health threat in terms of the effect that it has on our bodies and our minds.

JOHN YANG

What's brought this on? Why? Obviously the pandemic, I think, aggravated it. Even before the pandemic, people were talking about this.

LAURIE SANTOS

Yes. If you look at rates of loneliness, there's lots of evidence that they've been increasing linearly since the 1970s. Right. And that's long before the pandemic. That's actually long before some of the other culprits things like cell phones and so on. And so I think the evidence really points to the fact that there are probably a lot of causes going on at once, but those things are coming together to really make us a much more unhappy and a much more isolated kind of population right now.

JOHN YANG

What are some of those causes that are running together?

LAURIE SANTOS

I think one of the big ones that we don't often think about is just time, right? People are busy. People are spending more time at work. I think that we just don't have enough free time to connect with the people that we care about. I think there's also lots of other interesting demands on our time. You know, back in the 1970s, there wasn't Netflix and all these video games and the kinds of things that we could be doing by ourselves to entertain ourselves. And I think also, you know, like this social media wasn't around in the 1970s, but I think it is having a big effect. Right. Our technology in theory is there to connect us socially. How many times have you been to a restaurant, seen people not talking to the folks at their table because they were looking down at their phones? I think more and more we're connecting through our technology, but that means missing out on the kinds of connections we can experience in real life.

JOHN YANG

What are the health effects of loneliness?

LAURIE SANTOS

I mean, there are many and surprising. So individuals who report feeling lonely are more likely to experience things like dementia, heart disease, stroke. It actually affects longevity. Meaning that people who self-report feeling lonely are even more likely to die than those that aren't. Vivek Murthy the current surge in general estimates that reporting that you feel lonely is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of its impact on our health and our well-being.

JOHN YANG

It used to be that a lot of this discussion about loneliness focused on older people, that retired people losing that social connection of work. Their spouses or partners may die. But are we seeing this more among younger people now?

LAURIE SANTOS

I mean, that's the most striking thing, especially for me as a college professor, are the rates of loneliness that we see among our young people right now. So nationally, among college students, we see levels of loneliness around 60 percent, which was so striking to me. Right. These are students who are young, who are living on campus, often in the dorms with other students, yet 60 percent of them are reporting feeling very lonely most.

JOHN YANG

And explain I talk about that they were living in a group situation, yet they're lonely, what -- sort of alone in a crowd.

LAURIE SANTOS

Yes. And I think interacting with their technology in a way that prevents connection in real life. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've walked into my dining hall and seen proud of students, each of whom have big headphones on, looking down at their laptop screens, looking down at their phones. I think we're really missing out on the kind of connection that can happen when you talk to a person in person and you have that in real life social connection.

JOHN YANG

What can people do to avoid this? Or if people are feeling lonely, what advice do you have for them?

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.

JOHN YANG

Laurie Santos of Yale University. Thank you very much.

LAURIE SANTOS

Thanks so much for having me.