friends

ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

Posted on by vlaw759

A Healthy Minds Monthly Poll reported by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in early in 2024 found that 30% of adults said they experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week while 10% said they felt lonely every day over the past year. Unless otherwise noted the following assertions are from this poll.

What do I mean by lonely? “Feeling like you do not have meaningful or close relationships or a sense of belonging.” This is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s definition of loneliness.

Who are All These Lonely People?

They’re young. People aged 18-34 were the loneliest, with 30% saying they felt lonely every day or several times a week.

They’re single. Singles were nearly twice as likely as married adults to say they had been lonely on a weekly basis over the past year (39% vs. 22%).

Overall, 63% of men reported feelings of loneliness in this year’s survey, a ten-point increase from a year ago. For women, the increase was not as sharp; 58% of women reported loneliness this year, up from 54% a year ago.

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D., M.B.A., called loneliness a public health epidemic. APA President Petros Levounis, M.D., M.A. said, “The U.S. Surgeon General is correct to label it as a public health problem with troubling outcomes…”

Where are We not Lonely?

The 2200 survey respondents ranked areas where they felt the highest sense of community and belonging:

  • Among their family (65%)
  • With friends (53%)
  • In their neighborhoods (20%)
  • At work (17%)
  • On social media (16%)
  • At the gym or fitness classes (5%)
  • With sports and recreational teams (4%)
  • In online communities and discussion forums (3%)

Responses to many options hovered toward the middle (full details available in the report).

How Do People Cope?

Respondents reported easing their loneliness many ways (selected from a list of choices provided) most notably:

  • Younger adults are more likely than older adults to say they use drugs or alcohol when feeling lonely.
  • Females are 1.5 times more likely than males to say they reach out to a friend or family member.

Is Technology a Help or a Hindrance?

Technology, when used carefully, can help alleviate loneliness. Many survey participants reported that technology…

  • “Helps me form new relationships” (66%)
  • “Helps me connect with others more frequently” (75%),
  • “Is beneficial for forming and maintaining relationships” (69%)

However, respondents were split on the types of relationships technology fosters, “meaningful (54%)” or “superficial (46%).”

“Clearly we believe technology can be used to connect with others. In some cases, it seems to be helping us reach people who become part of our inner circles or to communicate with those who already are. However, distracting yourself when you’re feeling lonely with social media might be a double-edged sword: while it can connect, it can also lead to feelings of missing out, and we need to make sure we remain conscious of its effects on our mood. In this tech-heavy world, we should not forget the value of in-person interaction.”

Saul Levin, M.D., M.P.A., APA CEO and Medical Director

Age and Technology

Various sources slice the pie differently, but basically support the conclusions of the APA report. According to a CNBC report of January, 2023 a survey of 10,000 adults found:

  • Three out of every five adults, or 61%, report that they sometimes or always feel lonely, according to the Cigna U.S. Loneliness Index. That’s up 7 percent from the previous year.
  • Among workers aged 18-22, 73% report sometimes or always feeling alone, up from 69% a year previously.

There is a greater feeling of loneliness among people who use social media more frequently, the study found. One reason younger people feel more isolated may be their greater tendency to use social media. The study found an increasing correlation between social media usage and feelings of loneliness. Seven out of 10 heavy social media users, 71%, reported feelings of loneliness, up from 53% a year ago. That compares to 51% of light social media users feeling lonely, up from 47% a year ago.

Lonely on the Job

At work, men appear to feel much more isolated than women. Forty percent of men reported feeling a general sense of emptiness when they’re at work, compared to 29% of women.

Another reason younger people may feel more alienated could have to do with being at the bottom rung of the employment ladder. Entry-level workers scored significantly higher on the Cigna Loneliness index than experienced workers, middle managers and executives. More than half felt there’s no one at work they can turn to.

Nearly two-thirds of workers who’d been at a job less than six months reported experiencing isolation, compared to just 40% workers who’ve been with a firm for 10 years or more.

But it is just as lonely at the top of the ladder. Fifty-six percent of senior executives reported feeling there’s no one they can talk to, with 69% saying that no one really knows them well.

Baby Boomers and workers older than 72 are the most likely to feel that they generally have people they can turn to at work and really understand them, with only 18% reported feeling alienated on the job.

Cigna researchers estimate that employees who feel socially isolated miss work as much as five times more than their connected co-workers due to stress, and are twice as likely as to think about quitting their jobs.

Health Risks of the Lonely

Social isolation and loneliness can increase risk for health and work problems:

  • Heart disease and stroke
  • Type 2 diabetes
  • Depression and anxiety
  • Suicidality and self-harm
  • Dementia
  • Earlier death

Cost of Loneliness

As with so much in the healthcare system, cost is often what triggers getting help. The hope is that by addressing some of the so-called social determinants of health that contribute to isolation among seniors, Medicare can reduce spending. To this end:

  • Medicare plans are offering greater flexibility to focus on the impact of social isolation on the health of older adults.
  • Researchers from AARP and Stanford University found that the government spends more than $6.7 billion annually on additional medical costs for Medicare recipients who lack social contact.
  • Cigna is advising companies to do greater outreach about mental health counseling to help workers deal with stress.
  • Cigna also offers expanded virtual mental health services to make accessing care more convenient and attractive for younger workers.
  • Employers should also look for ways to promote greater in-person communication among workers, including programs that foster more connections like affinity groups and volunteer activities.
  • The Cigna study found that people who get more time interacting face to face with others at work feel less lonely or alienated. More than half of remote workers who telecommute, 58%, reported feeling left out at work.

How to Deal With Loneliness

Please note: the following are on-line suggestions, offered for information only, not as professional advice.

Alone vs Lonely

Know your loneliness is normal. Everyone goes through lonely periods in life. Feeling lonely does not mean there’s something wrong with you. Feelings of loneliness often come and go during life. Sometimes the best thing to do is accept you feel lonely in the current circumstances and that this is okay.

  • Boost your self-esteem by finding things to do that are achievable and building on them little by little.
  • Enjoy your own company. Spending time alone can be liberating and being alone with your thoughts can be a great way of winding down.
  • Often we like the company of people who are comfortable in themselves. Learning to be on your own and like your own company is a step towards this kind of confidence.
  • Online communities can be a great social outlet, but do not rely on them too much. Make sure you balance your social life and make the effort to talk to people in person.
  • Take what you see online with a pinch of salt. People often publish the best of themselves online. Try not to compare yourself to other people’s photos and posts. And don’t spend too much time online.

Meeting New People

Keeping yourself busy is a good way to deal with loneliness.

  • Parenting alone can also feel isolating, especially when your children are younger. It may be helpful to seek out adult company and maintain existing friendships.
  • If you’re on your own in a new place, a hobby can be a great way of meeting new people and making new friends.
  • If you’re feeling lonely for no obvious reason, doing an evening class or sport can help take your mind off it. Consider activities to do with others.
  • Being unemployed can also can cause you to feel isolated. If you’re bored or cannot find a job, volunteer with an organization you care about or an event you might be interested in. Feeling needed and useful is important sometimes.
  • When you’re lonely, you may place too much weight on new friendships and relationships. Build trust gradually, take it slow and accept your new friends as they are. Take your time with new relationships.
  • Be wary of certain groups. Cults and gangs often target lonely people, knowing they might be vulnerable. Make sure the group you join is a positive influence and makes you feel good about yourself.

Getting Support

If you’re constantly lonely for no obvious reason, it could be a sign of depression. This is something you should talk about to family, friends, a counsellor, or your GP.

CrisisTextLine offers free, confidential support via text or chat. (Text 741741)

The AARP has initiatives to help people build community and volunteer. The also have a Friendly Voice helpline to call if you’re looking for a friendly person to talk to.

Just like dating apps, friendship apps allow people the opportunity to match with potential new friends online. Two examples are BumbleBFF and MeetMyPaws.

MeetUp is a social networking website that allows users to organize in-person activities to meet others who share their interests or hobbies.

Bottom Line: Loneliness is pervasive, normal, and problematic for good health and work success. Choose a way to cope that works for you;

CHILDHOOD FRIENDS

Posted on by vlaw759

A few days ago, I learned from former classmates that my high school sweetheart had died suddenly the day before. I had not seen Bill or heard from him in more than ten years, but I found his obituary online and was immediately swept back in time to my childhood in a small Ohio town, where most of us were classmates and childhood friends from first grade through graduation.

My Childhood Friends

Research has proven the importance of childhood friendships for social and emotional development. But my focus here is more personal, on the importance of childhood friendships for me. I believe these observations hold true for other adults as well. 

My childhood friends and I share a unique history and understanding of each other’s lives. We knew each other’s parents, siblings, activities, achievements, and (sometimes) failures.

In a broader sense, we shared music, movies, TV, major news events, and cultural icons.

These shared experiences bring feelings of familiarity that make so many of us enjoy high school reunions.

Some experiences are shared with only one other. With the death of my high school sweetheart, that reflection of me—that mirror—is gone forever. No one else knew me—or could ever know me—in quite the same way.

Similarly, only one friend was present when I learned to ride horses bareback or tried playing chess and decided it wasn’t for me. The retelling is thin, lacking the intensity, thrill, frustration, and laughter. There’s a reason people say, “You had to be there!”

Sheer proximity guides some of the most intense childhood memories.  Because I was seated behind her in first grade, I may be the only one of our classmates who remembers Mary Jane peeing her pants in first grade. (The teacher, who thought too many kids were requesting bathroom passes, denied her.) 

Friendships require shared interests, activities or tasks—something to bring people together. Bill was a long-distance runner and captain of the track team. I was the statistician for the track team, and we often sat together on the bus to and from away meets. We started going steady and ended up being voted class sweethearts senior year.

By the Numbers

Adults report that, most frequently, their friends are coworkers. Among children most share school, farm chores, sports, music, or other extracurricular activities.  Research indicates that children usually have lots of friends, typically 10 to 20.

Friendships become more selective during adolescence, averaging 5 to10 close friends. In adolescence, friendships become more intimate, with the sharing of personal thoughts and feelings as well as time.

Young adults usually experience a further decline in the number of close friends, averaging around 3 to 5, and are likely to be lasting, meaningful connections.

When childhood friendships last a lifetime, they provide a sense of stability and consistency in one’s life.

Sharon, who was my best friend from first grade until we went to separate colleges, has never lived near me since then. But whenever we manage to visit, it’s like we were never apart: we immediately talk freely about matters of family, health, spouses, or social concerns—i.e., anything and everything. I can always count on her.  And I believe our mutual comfort is rooted in our shared history.

When childhood friends remain close for a lifetime, they are an important source of support and companionship, even in old age. 

Although childhood friendships can last a lifetime for some, others fade due to changing interests, life circumstances, or personal growth.

Some make a distinction between friends of the road and friends of the heart. The former are intense and important until changes like those above separate them. The latter are the ones that last forever, regardless of changes and distance.

Both leave traces in our heats and in our memories.

Bottom Line: Even when they are over, friendships are never completely gone.

AGE AND HAPPINESS

Posted on by vlaw759

Surveys and studies in developed countries around the world have investigated the relationship between age and happiness. Psychologists measure happiness by looking at “emotional well-being”—i.e., when a person consistently reports more positive than negative feelings. They have discovered that, by this measure, seniors are happier than their juniors, as a Scientific American study explains.

Better With Age

Plenty of recent research agrees. For example, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry published a study in 2016, in which researchers analyzed data collected from a random sample of 1,546 people from ages 21 to 99 in San Diego.

Older people were physically more disabled and had more cognitive impairment than younger ones—the natural deterioration of aging—but in mental health, the advantage flipped. People in their 20s and 30s reported having the highest levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. They also report the lowest levels of happiness, satisfaction and wellbeing.

Older people, surprisingly, were the happiest, as Mandy Oaklander writes in Time.

The U Shape of Happiness

Yew-Kwang Ng, an economist at Monash University in Australia, compared research from the past twenty years in his 2021 paper “Age and Happiness.” He found that overall happiness throughout life tends to follow a U shape. Younger children are generally fairly happy; the beginning of adolescence coincides with a decline in “subjective well-being.” Yew-Kwang Ng theorizes that this may result from changes in sleep patterns adolescents experience.

Many factors impact the timing and shape of this U-shaped happiness curve: gender; health; lifestyle; income; national per-capita income; the overall happiness of the country; formative events in early life; and early self-esteem. Still, studies in multiple countries and internationally agree that most people start to experience a decline in overall happiness in their late teen years or early twenties. A Chinese study found that the lowest point for most people occurs around age 34.

After a period of low happiness in middle age (roughly ages 40 to 65), the majority of people begin to feel an uptick in overall happiness later in life. Over time, this upward trend plateaus again, and reported happiness levels don’t reach the same heights as those from earlier ages. An Australian study found that many people experience another decline in happiness in the last years of their lives.

The following chart illustrates this relationship, starting during teen years.

Happiness and Age, World 2012
Happiness and Age from the Brookings Institute

Maximizing Happy Aging

Margie Zable Fisher wrote a great overview for Fortune Magazine – The 3 Habits That Can Help Boost Your Happiness As You Age. She included the work of several acknowledged experts, including Laura Carstensen, Katharine Esty, and Robert Waldinger.

Elders’ happiness has to do with what Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity calls emotional wisdom.

“As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don’t have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly. We take less notice of trivial matters. We savor life. We’re more appreciative, more open to reconciliation. We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we’re happier day-to-day.”

TED Talk: Older People Are Happier

Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents and help to delay mental and physical decline. Research at Harvard suggests these ties are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both Harvard men and the inner-city participants.

I’ve taken these recommendations from the Fortune article cited above.

1. Maintain Friendships

Consider spending more or all your time with people who make you feel good. Try to maintain friendships with people in a range of ages, some older, some younger, some the same age. Esty suggests that we all need three different types of friends to really thrive:

  • Neighbors and others who provide practical help when we need it, such as running errands or watching pets.
  • Confidants with whom we can have open, honest communication about feelings or inner conflicts. We shouldn’t have to hide major parts of ourselves from good friends.
  • Friends who are fun to be with and with whom we can do fun activities.

2. Ask for Help

Although help is often easier to give than to receive, “The best relationships are two-way—where we give and receive help,” says Waldinger.

For midlifers thinking about retirement, “… many people aren’t certain what they want to do with their lives after retirement. They need to have a sense of purpose,” Esty says. “It works well to form a small group of friends who meet on a regular basis to discuss the issues in their lives and talk about their dreams for the future.”

3. Take on Responsibility

Many people consider shedding personal responsibilities and work duties to be one of the perks of growing older. However, this gift may come with unexpected pitfalls.

As Esty explains, a study of elderly residents in a nursing home showed that “more choices, more decision-making possibilities, and more responsibility raise the level of happiness in older people.” The key, she says, is to take on only responsibilities that you enjoy and to say no to other requests.

It may help to take on responsibilities related to an activity you enjoy. You might join a book club and offer to host meetings. If you enjoy a sport, consider becoming involved in a local league or even coaching a youth team.

And one more happy note: Although studies find that satisfaction with life and positive emotions decline with mobility problems and the deaths of spouses and other loved ones, research by Anthony Bardo of the University of Kentucky and Scott Lynch of Duke University shows that the cognitive impairment that can accompany aging does not preclude happiness and a high quality of life.

Note: age and happiness are correlated; however, getting older doesn’t cause happiness. We can all name several causes of (un)happiness, everything from not having enough money to an unsatisfying marriage/partnership. But all that is beyond the scope of this blog.

Bottom Line: Nobody will be happy all of the time, but we can expect to be more happy than not with age, especially if we lay a good foundation.

FRIENDS OF THE ROAD, FRIENDS OF THE HEART

Posted on by vlaw759

These phrases are loaded with emotional meaning. Pretty much any English speaker would agree that friends of the heart must be better than friends of the road. I beg to differ.

Just so we’re on the same page:

  • Friends of the Road change as we move along the road of life.
  • Friends of Heart remain close regardless of distance and circumstances.

My basic premise is that they are different but equally necessary.

Friends of the Road

Why do friendships come and go? How does a once-bosom buddy wind up erased from your address book? Is a friendship that fades away necessarily a bad thing?

No. Some friendships are meant to be fleeting. A line from the novel Centennial says it perfectly:

“God, he wished he could ride forever with these men… But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.”
(Photo from the National Archives)

In other words, some friendships are meant to be transitory. Like college roommates coworkers, or people in military boot camp, sharing secrets and experiences, sometimes threats or dangers. When those life times come to a natural end, it’s time to move on.

friends on a bus

Life is rich with friends of the road who join us for a part of our journey, friendships formed due to time, place and circumstance. These brief—i.e., not lifelong—friendships can last for years. They are intense, necessary, and worth treasuring. In that time and place, you can’t survive without them.

Drifting apart from these friends can feel like failure. But a friend of the road is someone who is “walking the same road as you” in one way or several. Examples include neighbors, families from your child’s school, co-workers, etc. You spend a lot of time with them, share great memories, and genuinely enjoy your time with them. But if and when these friends take a different “road,” your time together ends. You lose touch. Your motivation and effort to do what it takes to maintain the relationship drifts off. Often these friends end up as fond memories and social media connections.

Is a friendship that doesn’t survive changed circumstances a “real” friendship? Yes. You genuinely love each other. Not forever is okay.

Friends of the Heart

dog friends

Friends of the heart are the traditional, everlasting ideal.

Please note: every friend of the heart starts as a friend of the road. But when the common road ends, the friendship continues. It makes no difference if you are 10,000 miles apart or haven’t seen one another for years, when you get together, it is as though no time had passed.

A friend of the heart is one who “strikes” you. You connect on a level that has depth. Even if your journeys take different paths, you remain connected. The friends of the heart live in your heart. They have touched your life in such a way that you will be different for having known them.

Lillian Rubin wrote a whole book on friendship (Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in our Lives). She says that the depth of a friendship – how much it means to us – depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares, and validates.

Friends of the road, friends of the heart, friends of the belly…

Friends of the heart are people you meet along the road whose paths end up forever intertwined with yours. They are not your family, but friends you can turn to in a moment’s notice, in joy and in sorrow, in illness or trouble. They see you, know you, and love you just the way you are.

Bottom Line: Make as many friends of the road as possible, enjoy them all, and treasure those friends who step off of the road and into the heart.