You know it's important to take care of your physical and mental health. But what about your social health? Social scientist Kasley Killam shows how feeling a sense of belonging and connection has concrete benefits to your overall health — and explains why it may be the missing key to living a longer and happier life.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When we go to the doctor, they assess our physical health, our vital signs, maybe our cholesterol, making sure we're generally on track. Doctors may also have a certain set of questions to check up on our mental health.
But connection connoisseur Kasley Killam says one key metric is missing in the way our health is understood. And that's our social well-being. In her 2024 talk, she explains why connection is so key and how not prioritizing it can cost us.
So a couple years ago, a woman I know who I'll call Maya went through a lot of big changes in a short amount of time. She got married, she and her husband moved for his job to a new city where she didn't know anyone, she started a new role working from home, all while managing her dad's new diagnosis of dementia.
And to manage the stress of all this change, Maya doubled down on her physical and mental health. She exercised almost every day, she ate healthy foods, she went to therapy once a week. And these actions really helped. Her body got stronger, her mind got more resilient, but only up to a point.
She was still struggling, often losing sleep in the middle of the night, feeling unfocused, unmotivated during the day. Maya was doing everything that doctors typically tell us to do to be physically and mentally healthy, and yet something was missing. What if I told you that what was missing for Maya is also missing for billions of people around the world, and that it might be missing for you?
What if I told you that not having it undermines our other efforts to be healthy and can even shorten your lifespan? I've been studying this for over a decade, and I've discovered that the traditional way we think about health is incomplete. By thinking of our health as primarily physical and mental, we overlook what I believe is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time.
Social health. While physical health is about our bodies and mental health is about our minds, social health is about our relationships. And if you haven't heard this term before, that's because it hasn't yet made its way into mainstream vocabulary, yet it is equally important. Maya didn't yet have a sense of community in her new home.
She wasn't seeing her family or her friends or her coworkers in person anymore, and she often went weeks only spending quality time with her husband. Her story shows us that we can't be fully healthy. We can't thrive if we take care of our bodies and our minds, but not our relationships.
Similar to Maya, hundreds of millions of people around the world go weeks at a time without talking to a single friend or family member. Globally, one in four people feel lonely. And 20 percent of adults worldwide don't feel like they have anyone they can reach out to for support. Think about that. One in five people you encounter may feel like they have no one.
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