Dr. Vivek Murthy

That actually has an impact often on their physical health.

We can see that in the form of your heart rate, right?

When you get anxious, sometimes your heart rate goes up.

So as your blood pressure goes up, so we know there's a connection between body and mind.

The challenge with states like loneliness is that they're chronic stress states and stress while in the short term may be beneficial, motivating you to act or to think more sharply or to focus.

When you have long-term stress, that can actually start to become detrimental to the body, lead to increased levels of inflammation in our body.

It's why we see actually that people who struggle with a chronic sense of social disconnection

that they actually appear to have a higher risk of poor physical and mental health outcomes.

So we see not only a doubling in the risk of depression, increased risk of anxiety and suicide, but we also see a market increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, around 30%, for example.

We see a 50% increase in the risk of dementia among older people and an overall mortality impact.

associated with social disconnection that's comparable to what we see with obesity and with smoking.

And so I say that plainly, but that was quite revelatory to me when I saw this data years ago.

And it helped me understand, especially as somebody who was serving as Surgeon General at the time and who was part of an office whose tradition was to work on issues like smoking and obesity, it helped me understand that social disconnection is as important a public health issue and one that we need to pay more attention to.

Yeah.

The stories I encountered on the road during my first term as Surgeon General that made me pay attention to this issue, I didn't actually come into office thinking loneliness was a public health issue or that it was a crisis in any way, shape, or form.

I knew that it wasn't a good feeling.

I had experienced a lot of loneliness as a kid who struggled in elementary school in particular with making friends because I was very shy and very introverted.

I had seen loneliness in my patients as a doctor, even though I never learned about it in medical school.

There it was in the stories of the patients that I was admitting to the hospital and seeing in clinic.

But despite all of that, I kept thinking somehow that maybe that was just peculiar to my own experience.