Why You’re Struggling with Loneliness & How to Heal It

There is an extremely strong correlation between using social media for 30 minutes or less a day and improving your mental health, including overcoming depression, loneliness, and anxiety. So almost every mental health issue can be significantly improved with less social media time. Hey, welcome to the Growth Lab Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Josh Axe.

Today we're gonna be talking about the epidemic of loneliness, including the science behind it and some of the natural ways that you can overcome loneliness. Also, the government is looking at putting out a bill here soon called the Loneliness Bill in ways the government may help take on loneliness.

However, I think you may know a lot of times when the government tries to take things on, it is very ineffective. So I'll give you my thoughts about that as well. Today we'll talk about the Loneliness Bill, Gut House social media community, and all things related to Loneliness. Now, loneliness has been on the rise with rates having doubled since 1980.

You know, and it's kind of a paradoxical twist to consider how modern technology and social media has allowed us to be more connected than ever before from a distance. However, I believe our relationships are much more shallow. And research even tells us that the higher the social media use, the more pervasive loneliness is.

And you may wonder how prevalent loneliness is, well, according to similar studies, nearly half of Americans report feeling lonely or isolated, and over 40% say their relationships aren't meaningful. And I want you to think about this even for yourself, is how often during a week do you feel lonely or isolated, or how many of your relationships are truly meaningful, they're purpose-driven?

I can even share for myself, I think sometimes people that are You might be watching this, you might be an entrepreneur or somebody in leadership, and you might feel alone as well.

Because I think one of the big reasons we feel loneliness, and this is true according to studies, is when you don't have a commonality with somebody, if you're not sharing values, and if you don't have a mission where you're going forward with other people together, those are some of the root causes of loneliness.

Now, I want to go over just how damaging loneliness can be and why if you feel lonely, It's okay to feel that way for a period of time, but you don't want to feel lonely all of the time, and here's why. Former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy relayed a shocking discovery in an article he wrote in Harvard Business Review.

He reported that having weak social connections is as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Now, we all know the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes, But being lonely is just as unhealthy. And here's how this works. When you feel loneliness, it actually affects your lungs and so, and your immune system.

And so when you feel lonely all the time, you're alone, you're isolated, you're not worthy, when you have those feelings constantly, it weighs— different emotions impact different organ systems. So for instance, anger affects your liver and anxiety affects your blood pressure will go up. Well, loneliness affects your lungs. And so it's the equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

And if you have a few moments of loneliness, that's normal. But if you're feeling this every day, it starts to build up like a toxic disease within your body. Now, I want to go through some of the science here and then go into some of the solutions.

The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology studied undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, and they were assigned to limit their social media use. They looked at 3 social media channels, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And they said, we're gonna limit your use to 10 minutes per platform per day. So basically they said for 3 weeks, you can only use social media for 30 minutes a day.

Now, the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over 3 weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decrease in anxiety and fear of missing out over the baseline. Here's what the study found.

There is an extremely strong correlation between using social media for 30 minutes or less a day and improving your mental health, including overcoming depression, loneliness, and anxiety. So almost every mental health issue can be significantly improved with less social media time.

You know, I was recently talking to a friend and he was telling me, His girlfriend, he said, hey, how much social media do you use a day? And I went and looked at my phone and it was around, it was a little over about 7 hours. So I did about an hour a day. And a lot of that was for business and learning and growth.

And the person he was dating was doing it 32 hours a week, which essentially is, well, you can do the math there. It's a lot of time, right? So we're talking about over, it's 4 hours a day, right? So, so, so a lot of time there, 4.5 hours a day on social media. And that's about the average, 4 hours, some people 6 hours a day of social media or screen time. So it's very high.

So the reality is a lot of the world is spending that much time on social media per day. And what my recommendation is, is doing 1 hour or less a day on social media time. And here's the other big thing. What are you looking at on social media that's affecting loneliness? Here's what most people are doing. They're grabbing their phones and they're looking at everybody has perfect lives.

And it makes you feel bad about yourself. The other thing that happens is when you spend more social time on social media, you are connected to more people. You go very wide in your connections, but less deep. If you want to overcome loneliness, you need to go deep with people.

You need to find people that share your similar values and purpose in life, and you need to do things with them that impact the world in a positive way. And so, to give you an example of what that looks like is I have a group of friends who are into health and fitness, and we might work out together. So, we're— by working out together, we're all improving our health.

We have a goal, you know, different goals related to fitness. We're moving forward together. Another one might look like a group of us who are very into philanthropic efforts. We want to go and serve our community in different ways. Maybe that's, you know, serving in the nursery or the parking lot at church or the synagogue, right?

It's— you're doing something with a group that's all about purpose and meaning, but that's what you want to do is you want to have deep, meaningful conversations with people. That has been shown to help you overcome loneliness. Now, I want to talk about something that just recently came out in the news. Senator Chris Murphy is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.

He introduced legislation to create a national policy to promote social connection. And address the soaring rates of loneliness. And the bill would also provide $5 million in annual funding to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, to track loneliness and its prevalence and a number of other things. Now, I wanna say this.

I do not believe that the CDC is going to do much good with the $5 million of taxpayer money, but that is, there is a bill that says that right now. And one of their points is, and it's not a bad point, but it's right now we don't have any surveillance on loneliness and isolation in this country. The problem is the solution almost always tends to be something pharmaceutical related.

Now listen, listen what some other countries are doing right now. The UK recently appointed a Minister of Loneliness in 2018 to combat what has been called the sad reality of modern life. And in 2021, Japan followed suit with its own minister to tackle social isolations because of the rapidly increasing rates of suicide. Now, COVID-19, the pandemic, didn't help the situations.

In fact, Americans experienced a 5% increase in the prevalence of loneliness throughout the pandemic. And the thing that's sad is, is that those numbers have stayed relatively high. In a 2021 Harvard study found that 36% of people reported feeling lonely frequently or almost all of the time. Wow.

And so this is a major issue, and especially rates were higher for those between the ages of 18 to 25 and for young mothers. Okay, so a lot of young mothers feel really lonely and really isolated, and part of this has to do with our culture. I want you to think about this.

So my wife and I are incredibly blessed to have our, uh, my wife's grandparents very close with us, and even, even my parents are willing to as well. To where they'll, you know, to where they'll watch our daughter, Arwen, if we wanna go out and do a date night or wanna get a workout or just wanna go and do some self-care.

And so we have family around us, but there are a lot of young single mothers out there who maybe don't have that community and support. And that's why that number, over 50% of young mothers feel major, major loneliness and those depressive symptoms that accompany Loneliness, and so it's a it's a major issue today.

And so what some of the idea ideas are on ways to improve this, I want to go through some of the general recommendations here. And I also want to mention this too: loneliness is associated with major major issues, including heart disease, type two diabetes, depression, anxiety, insomnia, insomnia, and even premature death, according to Johns Hopkins University. And even dementia.

So this is something we really wanna take care of. Now, according to the Making Caring Common project, this is a Harvard Graduate School of Education, an article that they, that was written. Here were their ideas on how to improve loneliness.

They said, we need to do a better job of making people aware of spaces that support people, such as houses of worship, whether that be, you know, Christian houses of worship, Jewish, Islam, Buddhist, but getting around houses and places of worship. More clubs, fitness centers, public libraries were some of the ideas there as well, and also getting out and serving in your community.

And I think these are really, really good recommendations and ideas there as well. I wanna also now go through another study that was really interesting when we look at the cause of loneliness. So what we've talked about so far is, The biggest cause of loneliness today is the fact that our relationships are very wide and not very deep.

So when you're spending time on social media, you're looking at people saying their life is perfect. That doesn't make you feel good about yourself. You're not truly connecting with people emotionally when you're doing that, and you're only going wide. You're not going deep. And so to truly overcome loneliness, you want to build deep, meaningful connections with people and you want to get support.

Now, listen, if you're in a place in life and you're saying, listen, I, I don't want to feel lonely. I want support, but I don't feel like I have anyone to support me in my life.

That's where getting connected to a local support group or a local center, whether it's your local YMCA or Jewish synagogue or a church, like a place of worship, going and getting plugged in there and say, I need help, I need community, and getting plugged in, that's a great solution. And finding a community of purpose Really, really helps in helping you overcome loneliness.

And so the thing is, you've got to pursue it. What we tend to do oftentimes when we come into conflict is we go into isolation mode and try and figure it out ourselves. What the study and the data show us is that's the exact opposite of what you want to do. If you're feeling lonely, you want to go and do everything you can to get yourself, and if you have kids, plugged in.

To a community such as a place of worship, a community center, or something like that. All of those will help. Now, another recent study found that our diet and our nutrition affects our feelings of loneliness, even though we may not be with people or we might be with people, your gut microbiome affects feelings of loneliness.

In fact, what they found in this study, this was a study done at the University of California, San Diego, They found the less diversity you have in your gut microbiome, the less resistant and less resilient you are to stress-related issues, even like a virus or immune-related issues, and the more inflammation you have throughout your body.

And what they found in the study was if somebody just ate the same meal over and over and over again, like a low nutrient-dense diet— let me give you an example. There are a lot of people that wake up in the morning, have the same cereal with the same milk. And then for lunch, they have the same sandwich and the same potato chips.

And for dinner, they have the same meat with the same pasta or whatever. In the study, they found if you can have a wide array of vegetables, fruits, things like meat and beans and nuts and seeds, when you have a vast variety of real food in your diet and probiotic-rich foods, the less lonely you'll feel, the better your mental health will be.

And so another key factor in overcoming loneliness is consuming a diet. And this is something that I've recommended for years, as other physicians have. Think about the colors of the rainbow. You know, try and make your plate throughout the week look as colorful as possible. So on Wednesday, lots of greens. The next day, lots of red, right? So your raspberries and your beets and your strawberries.

And another day, your spinach and your Granny Smith apple. And another day, your grapes and your eggplant. But make your plate look like a rainbow throughout the week. And if you can do that, It can greatly help your gut microbiome, which helps with loneliness. The other thing I would recommend would be an omega-3 supplement and a probiotic supplement. Those are also gonna help the gut microbiome.

So here are some action steps for you to overcome loneliness. Number 1, eat a diet high in prebiotic foods that support the growth of probiotics, like vegetables, berries, and herbs and spices, like ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon. Number 2, take a probiotic supplement, specifically one that has soil-based organisms. Number 3, limit social media time to 1 hour or less per day.

Number 4, get involved in serving your community. Number 5, pursue a group of encouraging friends. And number 6, attend a place of worship and get plugged in. If you can follow those action steps, It's gonna help you overcome loneliness and improve your mental health. Hey, if you've enjoyed this live news segment here on how to overcome loneliness, hey, make sure to subscribe here to the channel.

I've got so much more content coming out on how to grow yourself, your health, your wealth, your life, and your career. And so this has been me, Dr. Josh Axe, with the Growth Lab Podcast. Thanks so much. And if you've enjoyed this or know someone else who's struggling with loneliness, It needs a solution. Share it with a, share it with a friend. Hey, thanks so much for watching.