Hello, hello and welcome to Sheep Assisted the Genz mental
health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a
psychology student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Let's get into it. Happy Monday and welcome to your
mental health mini. This weeks guest is Jeffrey Hall
and we are talking loneliness. So we know that for generations,
50 years of research has found that there is a period of life
that roughly happens between around 15 to 25 where people
have the most friends are going to ever have.
They spend the most time being social, they're ever going to be
social. They spend the most time getting
to know new people. After about 25 years old, people
tend to leave college. They tend to work.
They may move around a lot, pursue graduate education.
They may change jobs a lot. They may move out of their
family of origin, their home. All of these things precipitate
the loss of friendships. People don't think about how
context creates opportunities for friendships or even very
much dictate who it is that you're going to become friends
or or a romantic relationship with.
As a consequence, when we leave environments where it's easy to
make friends because they're always around, we actually
struggle with it because it was so easy before.
So what will happen is people will go.
Well, there must be something wrong with me now because
friendship is hard now, but it wasn't hard then.
What people rarely do comparatively is go.
It was easy then because there are people everywhere and
they're always up for hanging out and there are a lot of cool
things to do. They tend to think that their
deficiency in making friendship is because of something that
they did. And I'm here to say there's
nothing wrong with you. It's absolutely sensical that
you would be in an environment that makes it hard to make
friends, and that's just kind of how it is.
Part of the successes in the young adulthood of getting jobs
and moving on and going to Graduate School and falling the
love are also the very impediments to keeping
friendships. So people tend to actually go
through a period after 25 where there's a steady decline of the
number of friends people have and the time that people spend
with friends. That goes all the way until 40.
But there's also an incredible high degree of connection,
companionship and friendship during that time of life.
So young folks experience two things simultaneously, which are
actually really difficult to resolve. 1 is a sense of
loneliness. And the reason that happens is
you leave school, you feel lonely, you break up with
somebody, you feel devastated, you lose a friend because of
conflict. And that's difficult and hard.
But on the other hand, this is a time of life where you have more
companionship, you have a great sense of connection to people
around you. So what's weird is, is that
although, yes, it's the case that we should be concerned
about young adult loneliness, we should also be quite aware that
this is full of connection as well.
And I think that loneliness in part comes from a feeling of
wanting to be known at a deep and intimate level.
And that happens, I think, in the process of winnowing down
all of that social world into specific close intimate
relationships with one another. And that's a a gradual process
that we have collectively tended to put off farther and farther
into the future as we delay marriage, delay having children,
delay kind of making those big decisions in life.
One thing I'm a big proponent of when we think about loneliness,
when we think about connection, it is both.
And it is both the case that we can be social and be, you know,
talking a lot of different people and meeting new people
and have a big social network. And it's also the case that
quality, close intimate connection leads to higher
well-being, less loneliness. They're both.
But The thing is, is that tension that you feel, right?
I'm around a lot of people, but I don't really feel fully known
is actually part of the human experience.
And it's the part of the human experience that I think is
particularly developmentally salient and powerful at that
period of life. You're sorting out who you are
and who you are to others. One of the benefits I've heard
about middle age, what I think is very funny is the although
people experience the lowest level of their well-being in
their life at middle age. Once they sort of realized that,
you know, they know fully who they are, they have a lot more
confidence in who I am and what I've accomplished in my life and
what I'm all about. A lot of the concerns of young
adulthood and fall away and they're there tends to be an
uptick in the middle-aged people's well-being because they
go, well, you know what, my life, all those kind of crises
about who I am and where I am and what's all happening have
passed and now I'm able to fully embrace myself as who I'm in.
But that's a long period of time between 25 to 40 to get really
comfortable with you, where you're at.
And during that decline comes with also a lot of very
difficult questions. What is your career going to be?
What are you going to do about family?
What are you going to do about relationships?
So I think a both end perspective allows for us to
understand that doesn't make you weird or bad or somehow
deficient because you feel lonely while you're being
social. Feeling lonely is part of what
it means to be a social person. You would never feel lonely if
you didn't care about other people.
It's a good thing to care about people.
You will have better and more high quality days, weeks and
months if you respond to your feelings of loneliness in ways
that are pro social, inviting people, taking opportunities to
talk, reaching out to friends, even through, you know, texting
or whatever channels that you want.
But you have to respond to it. You have to treat it as a sign
of rather than I'm lonely and I shouldn't do anything right,
that this is a bad thing and there's something wrong with me.
Instead, this is good. I feel lonely, which means that
I'm going to take action. It's a functional system like
hunger to motivate good quality actions.
So I would say that for those who are in the chronic lonely
state, this is one of the last things I would like to say about
this is that there is definitely treatments and therapies
available. So if you are a person who feels
as if your loneliness is a state that just doesn't change and
you're in, you're out, you still constantly are feeling lonely no
matter what you do. You don't feel different, you
know, you might benefit from from treatments that focus on
momentous hand in hand with depression or whatever it else
that you're coping.