How much social connection do we actually need? Loneliness, stress, and midlife health | Anders Hansen

0:00Anders Hansen:Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10Anders Hansen:Well, I read here and you said in a snippet in your book, how many people can we be friends with? And you said that Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has suggested that humans are capable of having relationships with about 150 individuals. While we can recognize and remember the names of many more, the number of stable relationships, where we also know what a person thinks of others is somewhere in that region. And this is known as the Dunbar's number. That feels like a lot for me. 150. Yes. I mean, you should ask him about these things. But his point is the fact that you could know names, of course, of more than 150 people, but you can only manage 150 individuals when it comes to knowing how they are related to one another.

0:59Because you must not just know, okay, this is Michael, but you have to know that Michael knows Maria, and Maria doesn't like Anna. So if I make Michael upset, he will tell Maria, and that will in turn come to Anna, etc. And in that case, it seems to be a limit for the human brain. And that seems to be around 150. And 150 is a number that comes up again and again and again in history. Villages were often that big. And maybe that is because the human brain can't handle more connections than that. But I think one of his main points is the fact that human social life is small scale. We are still evolved for living in small groups and meeting in real life, physical, because if we did not meet, we died.

1:54To be by yourself, to be isolated, that was certain death. And it's not just to see each other on a screen. Yes, we get some of the social input from that, but you can't replace all human social life with digital life because there's so much more that we register when we meet in real life. it's not just how we look it's you know we how we smell how we touch everything goes into the brain and if it doesn't get that these signals it will it will think that we are isolated and to be isolated that meant certain death for our ancestors and that is probably why we suffer so much from loneliness loneliness has been a topic for medical researchers during the last 20 years and there's been many many studies that shows that loneliness is not just it doesn't just increase the risk of depression and anxiety, but it also comes with the risk for the body.

2:52For instance, the prognosis for all forms of cardiovascular disease is worse if you are isolated and lonely. And loneliness also increases the risk of colon cancer, and actually some other forms of cancer as well. And that's very strange. I mean, how could loneliness be dangerous for the body? and the reason is probably that when humans during almost our entire history were isolated and lonely there was no one there to help them. They only could count on themselves and then the smoke detector in the brain gets even more sensitive for threat. Well that means that loneliness is not the state where you are passive it's a state of stress that goes on and on and on And that low-level constant stress is probably the reason why it comes with the risk for disease.

3:51And I think this is, of course, very sad to hear, but there has been studies that show that you don't need to do much in order to neutralize the dangers that comes from loneliness. There was a study done during COVID where you had people who were very lonely, and they were called three times a week on the phone, 10 minutes every time, and someone just chatted with them. And after a couple of weeks, they felt much less lonely. Now, then you think, okay, who were these callers? They must have been super psychologists or something. Well, they were not. They were high school students, basically. And these students, they had been given very simple instructions, which were listen to the person you're talking to and let the person decide the topic and be interested in what's being said.

4:41So it seems like with rather a small effort, you could make someone feel less lonely. And by definition, then, lower their risk of several forms of cancer and give them a longer life. And I think when you are calling your mom or your grandpa, someone who is lonely, you are sending a signal to that person. Someone has your back. There is someone there for you if something will happen. and deep inside that person's brain that will be registered as I don't need to be so vigilant for threats anymore. The smoke detector sensitivity goes down.

5:20Anders Hansen:Yeah I was thinking about that about everyone calling their parents three times a week as thinking about something to like take into their year because I think so many times in our lives and I don't know if you've seen this but like hyper independence has become quite a big thing right now you know people are posting on Facebook like it's not cool to have a boyfriend anymore and everyone's kind of very becoming obsessed with their work and successful and building their own businesses and companies but with that also comes a lot more loneliness and a lot more disconnection to your kind of natural social groups so it's an interesting way to think about it like as we're developing and getting AI and maybe using AI more so than an actual real person in our lives.

6:06Anders Hansen:Like how important those three phone calls are a week to your parents could be fundamental. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we have seen people who have relationships with AI bots, which I thought was absurd a year ago. We did a TV program about this. And now it's happening more and more and more. And of course, I see the temptation to have something that just care about you. It's just your needs. It's just what you want. And that's convenient. But I think it will have very, very bad effects on our mental health if we do these things. And I was in Kenya a couple of years ago, and I was lucky enough to spend time with a group of hunters and gatherers.

6:50and they did not have access to water. They did not have water on the tap, so to speak. They moved from one place to another constantly. And when I met them, they looked like health models or something. Everyone was in fantastic shape and none of them exercised in any way. They got their movement from their daily work. And I remember I asked them, how many of you have sleeping problems? And they said, well, we did not sleep last night because there was lions here. And then I said, oh, come on, if there was lions in my house in Stockholm, the whole Stockholm will be awake. So that doesn't count.

7:32If there are no lions or no threats, how many of you have sleeping problems then? And then no one has sleeping problems. They were like, well, if nothing is disturbing you, then you sleep. Now compare that to Sweden, which where about a third of all adults say that they have sleeping problems. These people, these hunters and gatherers, and there have been studies that confirm this, depression seems to be very, very rare among them. It happens, but it's very rare. And they don't have any antidepressant medication. They don't have any therapies. They don't have anything of that. They are also very healthy in general.

8:12Well, diabetes is very, very uncommon. Very uncommon. Cardiovascular disease also. And they don't have any medication for these things. They don't have any medication against high blood pressure, etc. Despite all of this, they are healthy. And that's probably because they get more exercised. They live close to one another, so they are not lonely. And these things are so important for our health. And I think my occupation, psychiatry, has been so much focused on medication and cool molecules and mechanisms in the brain. And that's wonderful. But we also need to take a step back and look at our evolutionary history and see how we function the way we do and why we function the way we do and try to build our way around that and learn from the past, not just invent new medicine.

9:05Anders Hansen:I mean, that is the million dollar question, right? but I feel like as we are in a position in our world of history that's going quicker than ever before I mean the next five years I think so much of what we're going to be around is going to be unrecognizable and everything you just basically just explained to me there was simplicity simplicity of life like there's hardly any comparison there's just the people that they're around they're so embodied in nature they are getting their circadian rhythms because they're outside all the time. Everything is just a way simpler way of life. They may die of infectious diseases more, but actually the secondary ones that we all get, they don't.

9:47Anders Hansen:But yet we're living in a world that's going faster than ever before. So how do we balance this? Because I think in five years, it's going to be even worse. Yeah, you're right. You're right. And everything is going to change, as you say, but we are not going to change. We are going to be exactly the same. And I think that needs, that if we want to get the best out of this technology, we don't just have to understand the technology, we have to understand ourselves. And I call Achilles heels. We have to understand that it will feel very convenient to stay in the couch, even though that doesn't lead us to a good place.

10:25We need to understand that it might be very convenient in order to have a quote-unquote relationship with something that tells me exactly what I want to hear. But that's not a real relationship. That's not going to be beneficial to my well-being. So in order to strike the sort of the balance between these things, we need to be aware that, again, that if we just follow our instincts, we'll probably go in the wrong direction. So it's more important than ever to know yourself because humans will be the same and our needs will be the same, even though we have this fantastic technology.

11:04Anders Hansen:Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.