Dr. Vivek Murthy

Thanks so much for inviting me, Shoshana.

Most of us have felt lonely at some point in our lives.

Maybe that's when we moved away to college.

Maybe it's when we moved to a new job and left old colleagues behind.

Or maybe it's when we were kids and we moved because of our parents' job and had to just start all over in a new town.

When you think about going beyond that, then we can get into definitions, which is that loneliness itself is a subjective term.

It describes the experience of feeling like the connections I need in life are more than the connections that I actually have.

And in that gap, I experience loneliness.

But it is distinct from the objective term isolation, which is more a descriptor of the number of people you have around you.

And the reason this is important is because it turns out that you can be not isolated at all.

You can be surrounded by hundreds or thousands of other people the way college students are on campuses.

But you can feel very lonely if you don't feel connected to those other people, if you don't feel you can be yourself or don't feel like there's anybody you can reach out to in a crisis.

And this, turns out, is the common experience that people have in the world today.

We're surrounded by lots of folks, but often it's the lack of comfort in our connection, the lack of feeling like we can be ourselves, be open, be vulnerable, that leads many of us to feel lonely in a crowd.

When I was going through medical school, I remember it was a time where we had so much focus on physical health, but there was this growing recognition that, hey, our mind influences our body as well.

And now fast forward a number of years, and we see that understanding has only grown.

And we see now just often very clearly ourselves as clinicians in the hospital that how a patient feels, how they're doing, are they anxious?

Are they depressed?

Are they optimistic?

Are they feeling worried?