David Cooper (host)

If you are lonely, could reading a book make you less lonely?

A massive new study says that just getting lost in a book could make older adults feel less isolated.

So much so, it could be more effective than them joining clubs or even volunteering.

I'm here with someone who's worked on this study.

He's an assistant professor of public health at the University of Nevada, Reno.

His name is Haosen Sun.

Haosen, welcome to the show.

Honestly, I've heard this advice from everything from friends to my therapist, that if you're feeling lonely, if you feel like you have no sense of community, that you should join a club, that you should volunteer, that you should expand your social circle.

What made you look into reading as a way to deal with loneliness for older adults?

Interesting.

So you looked at a lot of adults, like over 30, 40,000, something like that.

That is a huge data set.

When you looked at it and you saw that reading helped with loneliness, what made you say like, oh, something interesting is going on here?

And reading is something you can do every day.

When you tell an older person they need to go join a class or something, it might be weekly or monthly and only for a few hours.

Could that be one reason for it, that reading is something you can do just all the time?

I've been like 10,000 feet deep in a book, and I do feel like I have a connection to the characters.

Do you think like fictional relationships that you feel like you have or you feel like you're experiencing can kind of scratch the same itch as having real relationships?

And you mentioned puzzles, like, I don't know, crosswords, Sudoku, that kind of thing.

Why might that not have an effect?