The Loneliness Epidemic Is Worse Than We Thought

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

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2:42Darin Olien:truly known by them. That's the difference. And it doesn't have to be someone physically next to you. And you also can be lonely with someone physically next to you. However, being understood by someone, being seen by someone deeply is powerful. Here's what I didn't know then, but that I know now, that loneliness, that specific invisible kind of ache was not just an emotional experience. It was all throughout my body, a slow fire triggering a cascade of now that I see biological events inside every cell that was contributing to biological risk, which we're going to get into today. Some of those risks I discovered, which we'll talk about, is increased heart disease, dementia, autoimmune dysfunction, cancer, and early death.

3:44Darin Olien:That's right. And this is not fringe science. It is some of the most replicated, well-funded, consensus-driven and research in all of modern medicine. And almost nobody is talking about it in the health and wellness space. We talk about food all the time. We talk about the right supplements. We talk about sleep, movement, about stress. All of those are important, of course. But we almost never talk about the number one predictor of how long you live, how healthy you will be, your happiness quotient, and how much capacity you have of joy. That predictor is the quality of your close relationships.

4:35Underscore quality. So it's not just happening.

4:39Darin Olien:There's something I'll discover later in the episode that will give you a key to being able to cultivate this. I'm Darren O 'Lean. This is Super Life. And today is the episode I've been building on for years, and I'm about to tell you about it. So here's the thing. We absolutely have a loneliness epidemic in the world, and it's getting worse. In the May of 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, did something that had never been done before. he issued a formal advisory, the same distinctions used for the AIDS crisis or the opioid crisis. Now listen, just because you're creating an advisory situation doesn't mean the problem's away, but at least it's on the radar.

5:33Darin Olien:Because it was declaring that loneliness and social disconnection is a national public health crisis, not a social problem, not a mental health concern, Of course, all of those play in, but a public health crisis on par with epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here are the numbers, and I need you to literally sit down for these. 50 % of all American adults report measurable levels of loneliness, up from roughly only 20 % in the 1980s. This is not a blip or a hiccup. It is a generational collapse of connection. 29 % of adults say they have no one they consider a close friend.

6:31Darin Olien:29%. That number has tripled since 1990. 26 minutes less. the average person, the average American spends 26 fewer minutes per day in a face-to-face social interaction compared to 2003. Less face-to-face connection. That's across every age group, every demographic, full stop. And this isn't uniquely American. The UK appointed the Minister of Loneliness in 2018 after their research found that over 9 million people, nearly one in six, often or always felt lonely. Let that sink in. Japan followed in 2021. Australia launched a national loneliness strategy in 2023. Are you seeing a theme? We have built the most connected-looking civilization in human history.

7:38Darin Olien:More smartphones, more social platforms, more ways to connect anyone at any place on the globe almost instantaneously. And we are more isolated than at any point in recorded modern history. Something has gone catastrophically wrong. and the body is keeping score. This isn't just a feeling. This has ramifications. Loneliness is not a feeling to be managed. It's a biological alarm as primal and as urgent as hunger or thirst. And when we ignore it long enough, it begins to eat at us from the inside. Unquote. Before you tell yourself this isn't you, like I did, let me describe who we're actually talking about.

8:36Darin Olien:Because loneliness looks nothing like the image most of us carry around in our heads. It's not just the elderly widow eating alone at home. it's the 34 year old CEO who hasn't been in a vulnerable conversation with anyone in his adult years now we're going to go back to vulnerability because that is a key and it's also the new mom who is physically never alone but feels utterly unseen it's the guy who has a fantasy football group chat, but no one he could call at 2 a.m. in a real crisis. It's the person with 3 ,000 followers and four real friends and who's slowly replacing the real friends with a scroll.

9:31Darin Olien:The research confirms this. Loneliness has almost nothing to do with how many people are around you and almost everything to do with whether you are genuinely known, valued, seen, and securely connected to even just a few people. The clinical term is perceived as social isolation, and the body responds to perceived isolation almost identically to actual physical isolation. Your brain cannot tell the difference between being alone on a desert island and being in a room full of people who don't really see you. So just let that sink in. There was a meta-analysis in 2015 in perspectives on psychological science, analyzing 70 studies covering 3.4 million people across multiple continents and found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 26%, loneliness by 26%, and living alone by 32%.

10:46Darin Olien:To put that in perspective, those figures exceed the mortality risk of obesity, which is 18%. It's almost double. Physical inactivity estimates between 20 % and 30 % and are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This was not a survey study. It was a synthesis of mortality outcomes across millions of real human lives. So I'm going to nerd out here for a second just for the people that want to know what the hell is biologically going on and what may be going on in our genes. So here's where the science gets wild and kind of extraordinary. And that's where this stops the conversation about feelings per se and becomes a conversation about what's going on biologically.

11:44Darin Olien:Inside your cell, there's a protein complex. I didn't even know about this before I dug into this. There's a protein complex called NFKB, nuclear factor kappa B. It's one of the master regulators of what? Your immune system. and it controls the expression of dozens of pro-inflammatory genes. NFKB is supposed to activate in short bursts in response to actual infections or tissue damage. It ramps up inflammation to fight the threat, to fight what your body needs. Then it backs down. This is the design. But researchers at UCLA made a stunning discovery. social isolation and perceived loneliness reliably and consistently upregulated this NFKB activity.

12:40Darin Olien:Loneliness literally turns on inflammatory genes at the transcriptional level in your genes. It changes which of your genes are being expressed and it does it chronically. Because the loneliness doesn't resolve. What does chronic NFKB activation cause, you ask? Cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, cancer progression, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune flares, accelerated cellular aging. This is not a metaphor. This is a molecular pathway. The science, which I grabbed a lot, is also in the show notes. Cortisol and sleep inflammation cascade. It doesn't stop at the gene level. The cascade happens every single day chronically with lonely people.

13:37Loneliness signals threat.

13:40Darin Olien:Threats trigger the stress axis, the HPA axis, which pumps cortisol, elevates the cortisol at night, destroys sleep, destroys the architecture. and where the brain tries to clear the amyloid plaques, it doesn't get a chance to. So this disrupts the sleep, increases the inflammatory markers and turns on a whole bunch of gene expression just by that alone. Elevated inflammation, worsening moods, reduces motivation, increased pain sensitivity. It goes on and on and on. I'd like to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Fatty15. That's right. I want to talk about something that isn't talked about enough, keeping our cells healthy.

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18:07Darin Olien:Alzheimer's is the ultimate loneliness. You're in your own bubble and you can't remember people. You can't have interactions. So I want to spend a moment here because this is wild. Loneliness is now one of the most robust modifiable risk factors of Alzheimer's disease ever identified. A study in 2020 in PLOS, P-L-O-S-1, following over 12 ,000 people found that those reporting high levels of loneliness had a 40 % greater risk of developing dementia compared to those with strong social ties. That's 40%. The mechanism is dual. The cortisol disrupts sleep, allows amyloid beta plaque to accumulate faster.

19:03The protein tangles associated with Alzheimer's and chronically elevated neuroinflammation

19:12Darin Olien:accelerates the degradation of neural networks. Your brain is literally shrinking. The hippocampus, your memory center, is measurably smaller in chronic, lonely people. This is an ultimate fatal convenience. We have traded the convenience of maintaining real, deep, vulnerable friendships for the convenience of surface-level digital connection, and we are paying for it. for cognitive decline, years of quality of life, true quality, and the epidemic of preventable diseases. There is also oxytocin economy. If you don't connect with someone deeply, you're missing out on genuine, warm, reciprocal social connections, where your brain releases is oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, all four simultaneously.

20:13Darin Olien:Oxytocin specifically is the most anti-inflammatory molecule in the human body. Hug someone, hug someone longer. Look at them, look at them longer. Connect with them, connect with them deeper. This research is astonishing. Research from HeartMath Institute shows that emotional, warm, coherent social connection synchronizes heart rate variability between people. Your nervous system actually entrains. You borrow each other's calm. You regulate each other's biology. So we are definitely, definitely connected. This isn't soft science. It's one of the most elegant examples in all of medicine of how our social environment is literally our biology.

21:07So the real barrier, my friends, that we can change, I believe, is vulnerability. The willingness

21:15Darin Olien:to be vulnerable, share how you feel, because that creates, I see you, I want to be close to you. And this is, vulnerability is a massive topic. Maybe one day I'll talk a lot about it. But I have experienced vulnerability, certainly in the last few months, at a depth that is extraordinary. And every time, I didn't want to do it, necessarily. I mean, I did, but it's uncomfortable because you're getting vulnerable. I had one of the most powerful conversations I've ever had with my brother, my mother, ex-partners i mean two my ex-wife and an ex-partner and it created a level of i owned stuff that i should have owned a long time ago but no there's no shoulds but i just got vulnerable i also got vulnerable with in a good way with how much i appreciate people in my life stepping in and giving compliments and being the source of the vulnerability which every time and i'm talking in 10 different conversations with different people in my life, every time it's met, every time it's wanted, every time those people gives them the permission to step in.

22:33Darin Olien:It's extraordinary. Research by Brene Brown at the University of Houston on over a decade of interviews identified one clear distinguishing factor between people who had deep, nourishing social connections and those who didn't. those with social, those with connection believed they were worthy of it. That's it. Not that they were more charming or more interesting or more whatever. They simply believed. They embodied the belief and they stepped in. This is incredible. This is one of the greatest things that I've researched right now and sharing with you. What can you do? Take a depth audit. Take a piece of paper, write down some names of every person in your life, and genuinely, is there something, is there a judgment I'm holding on someone?

23:26Darin Olien:Can I own something? You don't have to go into it going, I need them to apologize. No, just own your shit. Or just, I haven't told them how much I care about them. I haven't told them how much I appreciate them. I haven't told them how much I love them. And just in the middle of the day, there's no perfect time. So if you're holding back, that is the point to lean in. Schedule time today to be with someone without the phones. Schedule a sacred hour, go for a hike, leave the phones in the car. Just sit with someone. Just listen without your mind needing to fill the gaps of their story. just listen to someone.

24:10Darin Olien:Vulnerability creates the opening. What's actually hard for you right now? Ask someone that. What's going on for you? I'm here to listen. Is there anything you haven't talked to anyone about lately? And or come to that yourself going, hey, something's on my heart today. I told my brother how much I respected him and holding, being the glue to our family and helping my mom and helping everyone around he's he does it unapologetically no matter what for anybody in our family incredible so i told him all these things vulnerability just gets blown away because other things seem to be more important protect yourself from social media and scrolling be present in your relationships look for connection even when you're going to a grocery store, look people in the eye.

25:04Darin Olien:And if they have a cool shirt on them, say, man, that's a cool shirt, brother, sister, with not needing anything in return. Be the source of happiness and joy and connection. Instead of your head down, worried about nothing, just ruminating nonsense. So I was lonely sitting here in the yurt for seven years. Yes, I love it out here. I've cultivated a life with my two dogs and oak trees and I was feeling lonely. It wasn't crippling me. It was subtle. I do have deep friendships, but I just went deeper, meaningful, not flippant conversations, acknowledging great people in my life at any time, no matter what.

25:58Darin Olien:So if you are feeling lonely in any way, there's ways that you can change it. Get vulnerable. Open your heart. If you want love, give love. You want connection, create connection. Be the source of your life. Generate the kindness, the care that you want to see, and it will come back to you. This is Super Life. I'm Darren O 'Lean. Peace.