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00:00Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. So we're going to start this video with a few questions.
00:03Question number one, how often do you feel that you are in tune with the people around you? Never,
00:09rarely, sometimes, or always. Question number two, how often do you feel that you lack
00:14companionship? Never, rarely, sometimes, or always. Question three, how often do you feel
00:20that there is no one that you can turn to? Question four, how often do you feel alone?
00:26And question number five, how often do you feel part of a group of friends?
00:31Now these are some of the questions from the UCLA loneliness scale, which is the most commonly used
00:35questionnaire in research around loneliness. There's normally 20 questions, I'll put a link
00:39down below if you actually want to do it properly, but in this video we're going to be talking about
00:41the epidemic of loneliness, why is it a problem, and crucially what can we do about it. Now two
00:46researchers in 1981 defined loneliness as the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person's
00:51network of social relations is deficient in some important way, either quantitatively or
00:56qualitatively. In other words, loneliness is the feeling of being socially isolated and the feeling
01:01that your social connections are not good enough, and this is particularly a problem for adults as
01:05they get older. Now this is a cool survey that was done in 28 countries, and one of the questions
01:09from this was how often do you feel lonely? Over on the left this is the percentage of people that
01:14said they feel lonely often, always, or some of the time, and over on the right we have the
01:18percentage of people that said they feel lonely hardly ever or never. Now you can see here that
01:22the global average is 33% which means one in three people feel lonely often, always, or some of the
01:28time. Interestingly 50% of people in Brazil feel that way, 46% of people in Turkey, 43% of people
01:34in India, and if we look at this list the least lonely countries seem to be the Netherlands with
01:3815%, Japan with 16%, and Poland with 23%. And the reason that I'm personally interested in this
01:43topic is because I've just turned 30 and I've read a bunch of things and seen a bunch of data that
01:47shows that men in particular as they get older tend to experience more loneliness than any other
01:53group, and so because I'm all about trying to build a life I love I've been on a bit of a mission to
01:56figure out okay what are the things that I can do that will help diminish my chances of feeling
02:01significant loneliness as I get older. So firstly we're going to talk about why people feel lonely
02:05and what is so bad about it, and then we're going to share five actionable strategies that you and I
02:09can apply to our lives from today to help reduce the risk of feeling lonely. So question number one,
02:15why do people feel lonely? Well there's a concept in research around this area called the
02:19displacement hypothesis, and this is where we as a species are broadly reducing the amount of time
02:24we spend with people in real life and replacing it with time spent online. Now obviously social
02:28media is good for connecting with people and blah blah blah, but there is really nothing that beats
02:32in-person connection and we are replacing that in-person connection with TikTok, Instagram,
02:36YouTube, Twitter, the whole shebang. But on top of the social media apps there are a bunch of other
02:39reasons why this is happening. We are increasingly working from home, and working from home is bad
02:43for your social connections because you're not in an office with people, which used to be a thing
02:46back in the day. We are increasingly becoming more independent and moving abroad. I'm thinking for
02:50example of leaving the UK and leaving my friends and family behind because I've got freedom, I can
02:54do what I want. But you know as increasingly more and more people do that the social connections
02:57become more fragmented, with a lot of the aging populations we see in developed countries,
03:00older people are becoming less and less mobile and are therefore physically unable to see friends.
03:04These days there are a lot fewer public hangouts, there's a lot less street parties and just
03:08generally hanging out in the neighborhood and all that kind of stuff that used to be a thing back
03:11in the day. And with the whole rise of independence and autonomy and all that kind of stuff, younger
03:15people are moving away from their family and their family home and therefore the family is becoming
03:19destroyed as a bit of a unit in like a non-weird way. And so we've got a bunch of these different
03:23instigating factors that can cause people to feel this sense of loneliness, a sense of social
03:27isolation, and then we can become trapped in the loneliness loop. So initially because of a bunch
03:31of these different factors we can get this feeling of loneliness, which as we talked about is perceived
03:35social isolation and poor social connections, and the negative feeling that arises from that.
03:39That can then reduce our motivation to connect with other people. When we're not connecting with
03:42other people we know that leads to a reduced feeling of psychological safety, which then
03:46creates this negativity bias within us where we pay more attention to negative social cues like
03:51rejection or isolation. This leads to us literally having more negative memories, like we remember
03:55more of the negative things that have happened to us rather than the positive things, which then
03:59increases the negative interactions that we have with other people. Broadly people don't like being
04:03around people who are very negative all the time and so we then end up pushing people away, which
04:06then further increases our social isolation and then we complete the loop and we get into this
04:11vicious cycle of loneliness. There's also some cool studies that show that loneliness is actually
04:15contagious, so if you spend time with people who feel lonely you are also then more likely to start
04:20feeling lonely. Now one very practical method to avoid loneliness is to not work at home and
04:24instead join others at a co-working space like WeWork who are very kindly sponsoring today's
04:29video. Now WeWork has become an essential part of me and my team's workflow now that we are a fully
04:33remote team, but the nice thing is that even though we are a fully remote team we have a
04:36handful of people who are in London and we love to meet up at the various different WeWorks in
04:40London and we use the all-access areas and meeting rooms. I also love how WeWork has locations all
04:44around the world, so I've been to WeWorks in LA and in New York when I was visiting America and
04:47my team members who are also now traveling around because it's a remote job can now just go into
04:51any WeWork anywhere in the world and be super productive. Having a WeWork pass is amazing, it's
04:55super hassle-free, it's great for flexibility as a business because you can flex it up and down based
04:59on you know how big your team is and they have a bunch of free perks like free coffee and some
05:02really nice snacks and table tennis tables and stuff in most of the WeWork locations. WeWork
05:06is also great for entrepreneurs because it's full of lots of interesting businesses and founders
05:10and I generally find that if I strike up conversation with someone over table tennis or
05:14over a coffee or whatever generally they're very entrepreneurial and ambitious either they're
05:17working for a small business or they own a small business or they're a freelancer and so it's a
05:21very fun and nice community to be around especially if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and also to be
05:24honest one of the best things about WeWork is that working from home can genuinely just be really
05:27lonely and kind of boring which is why I personally even though I have a place in London I still go to
05:32local WeWorks because it's just more fun than being at home all the time. So if any of that
05:35sounds interesting then you can get 20% off your WeWork all access membership with the coupon code
05:40AliWorks20 at we.co slash AliWorks20 and that will be linked down below as well so thank you so much
05:45WeWork for sponsoring this video. Okay so all of this is happening but then that leads us to question
05:48two which is like is loneliness actually bad for us? How does it impact our mental and physical
05:52health? Now firstly it's important to separate loneliness from solitude. Solitude being able to
05:57enjoy spending time on your own is broadly a good thing that is where you don't have the negative
06:00feeling associated with feeling as if you don't have enough social connection in your life or
06:04feeling as if the quality of your social connection is not where you'd like it to be. I love having
06:08evenings of solitude to myself where I can play PlayStation once in a while but if I had too many
06:12of those and I didn't have the ability to hang out with my friends or felt like I didn't have
06:15a strong circle of friends and family around me then I'd be feeling lonely rather than experiencing
06:19the joy of solitude. Anyway so how does loneliness impact our mental and physical health? So one
06:24interesting thing which is kind of sad is what's called the widowhood effect. This paper says the
06:28increased likelihood for a recently widowed person to die, often called the widowhood effect, is one
06:33of the best documented examples of the effect of social relations on health. The widowhood effect
06:37has been found among men and women of all ages throughout the world and recent longitudinal
06:41studies put the excess mortality of widowhood compared with marriage among the elderly between
06:4530% and 90% in the first three months and around 15% in the months thereafter. You are literally
06:52more likely to die if you've had a partner that has recently died. So that's obviously an extreme
06:56example but there's all sorts of other studies that show this incredible correlation and sometimes
07:00even causations between social isolation and loneliness and negative health outcomes. So for
07:04example in terms of our physical health loneliness increases our risk of things like cardiovascular
07:08disease. It also makes our immune system weaker. It also makes us more stressed and also reduces
07:13our sleep quality and on top of that and maybe unsurprisingly there are also negative mental
07:17health impacts of loneliness where loneliness increases our risk of depression and anxiety
07:21and even dementia. Now here's a really interesting study about the effects of loneliness or perceived
07:25loneliness. So this was a kind of mean study that researchers did back in 2005 and it basically got
07:29some people into a lab and they split them up into three different groups and they got them to take
07:33some sort of quiz but then regardless of what the participants put in that quiz the researchers
07:37told them one of three different things. For the first group of people this was quite mean.
07:41This was the future alone group where they basically told them you are the sort of person
07:46who will end up alone later in life. You may have friends and relationships now but by your mid-20s
07:50most of these will have drifted away. You may marry or have several marriages but these are
07:53likely to be short-lived and you're basically going to end up being alone forever. They told a third
07:57of the people this. Then for the second group of people they told them that they are way more likely
08:00to have lots of friends and family as they age and for the third group they told them that they're
08:04more likely to have just generally bad things happen in their life like being in an accident or
08:08breaking bones or being injured that sort of thing. Now based on being primed with these three
08:12different messages the students in the study were then asked to drink vinegar. Now I don't know if
08:16you've ever tried tasting vinegar but it's not very nice and they were sort of measuring how much
08:20vinegar were the students drinking after being told to drink and this is essentially a measure
08:24of self-regulation. Drinking a bitter thing like vinegar and being able to keep on drinking it
08:28relies you to self-regulate a lot which happens from the prefrontal cortex which is the area at
08:32the front of our brain where we can like do things that don't feel good that we want that our higher
08:38kind of brains want to actually do. And what's interesting is that if you look at the group that
08:40was told they were going to be alone forever their self-regulation at drinking this vinegar was
08:45drastically lower than the other two groups even the group that said they were going to have loads
08:48of accidents. There's something about the thought of being alone forever that really really affected
08:54these students. So the most important message here is that the effects of loneliness are a lot worse
08:58than you might think and at the same time we know that working on our social life is actually a very
09:02good thing for us because data from thousands of people shows that those with strong relationships
09:06are more likely to literally survive by up to 50 percent. So we've established that loneliness is a
09:11problem increasingly more and more people are becoming more lonely especially as they age and
09:14especially as we spend way more time online. This is really really really bad for us and now we're
09:19going to look at five actionable things that you and I can do to help combat the effects of
09:23loneliness. Oh by the way if you're interested in like a holistic approach to improving your life
09:27there is an exercise that I really like called the wheel of life and it's a tool you can use to
09:30assess where you currently are in your life and you can figure out what you want going forward.
09:34Basically you split up a big wheel into three sections work health and relationships and within
09:39relationships for example you can split it up into romance family and friends and the whole
09:42exercise gets you to rank how satisfied or aligned you feel in each of these different areas of your
09:47life from a scale of zero to ten and this is actually a pretty good way to work out which
09:50areas of your relationships and other areas of your life you might want to put in some more active
09:54work into. Feel free to do this by yourself on pen and paper if you want but I'll also leave a link
09:58to a little interactive survey thing that we've created that will take like a couple of minutes
10:01to do that'll be linked down below if you want to check it out. All right so let's start with strategy
10:06number one and there's a cool study that really illustrates this where researchers looked at
10:10around 40 nurses and they split them up into two groups to see can you actually train these nurses
10:16in social skills and what impact does that have on their feelings of loneliness and to cut a long
10:20story short they found that the nurses who underwent this sort of training in social skills
10:25actually reported significantly lower feelings of loneliness. So this is a nice little study
10:29admittedly with a small number of people but backs up something that I definitely anecdotally know to
10:33be true and you might have that experience as well which is that social skills are skills and like all
10:38skills, skills can be improved. Over the years I have read dozens of books on how to improve my social
10:43skills. Back in the day I was very interested in reading books about how to improve my dating life
10:47and how to talk to girls because I was like really scared of doing that when I was a teenager and a
10:50little bit beyond and then over time I also read books about charisma and confidence and a big part
10:54of why I'm I think pretty good at public speaking and like putting myself out there and stuff is
10:58the fact that I've read these books, books like Charisma on Command, books like the Charisma Myth,
11:02books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and you know these books about improving
11:05your social skills kind of might seem weird initially but it does work, it does help you
11:10actually make more friends and helps you therefore reduce your feelings of loneliness. So if you are
11:15feeling lonely I'd be proffering the question to what extent have you tried to actively improve
11:19your social skills? This is actually fairly easy to do, you can just search YouTube for
11:22how to improve your social skills, you can search Amazon, you can find books on how to improve your
11:25social skills. I think it's very good, I 100% would recommend it. Next we have strategy number two which
11:30I like to think of as the go first rule. This is a rule that has made an enormous impact on my life
11:35and the idea here is that basically imbibing the idea into our brains, giving ourselves a bit of a
11:40firmware update that everyone is friendly but you have to go first. If you are in a new place, if
11:45you're in an event, if you're in class or whatever, everyone is friendly, you should just assume that
11:50but you have to go first. You have to be the one to make the first move as it were, you have to be
11:54the one to say hello, you have to be the one to talk to that person next to you who's like sitting
11:58in the lecture and that you've never met before, be like hey my name's Ali, I don't think we've met
12:01before, what's your name? And then that sparks off a conversation. It feels initially weird because
12:05you're putting yourself out there and stuff but everyone is friendly, you just have to go first.
12:09Okay next up we have the rule of rituals. Now repeated rituals are one of the most reliable
12:15ways to increase your amount of social contact and reduce feelings of loneliness. This study for
12:20example brought students together to play basketball three times a week over a three-month period and
12:24they compared the changes in loneliness with the students who were invited to play the basketball
12:28compared to the students who didn't play basketball, the control group. So this is what the results
12:32look like. We've got loneliness scores on the y-axis and we've got time on the x-axis. This is
12:37the line for students in the control group, i.e the ones who didn't play basketball, so you can see
12:41the line is pretty flat. Nothing really has changed in their feelings of loneliness. But then this is
12:45the line for people who are playing basketball three times a week for three months and perhaps
12:48unsurprisingly you can see that there is a significant drop in their feelings of loneliness.
12:52The key here is that being able to find recurring rituals that can help you connect with people is
12:57super super helpful. I found this when I was at university, I would have recurring rituals around
13:01people coming over to my house for game of thrones night, I'd go to a badminton club, even studying
13:05with friends. We had a bit of a sort of study themed ritual where I'd invite friends to my
13:09college's library and we would all study together in exam term and all of these were recurring
13:13rituals that had calendar invites and like recurring events where everyone knew that like
13:17okay Tuesday evenings are where we go to the Emanuel College library and we all study together,
13:21things like that. And increasingly over time as I've graduated and started working and then stopped
13:24working and I'm an entrepreneur and stuff, I've tried my best to incorporate these various different
13:28rituals into my life. I could still do a way better job of doing this and I'm planning to
13:32move to a different country, not sure what country yet, but one of the big things that I'm going to
13:35do as a strategy for making friends is to start initiating a lot of these recurring rituals. To
13:39book a five-a-side football pitch once a week and find a group of people to come together to play.
13:44To host like a Sunday brunch or something, just have that as a recurring calendar event where
13:48anyone that I meet can be invited and then that's how friendships and relationships form. It's sort
13:51of a combination of this idea of the rule of rituals and also the go first rule. The more
13:55ownership and initiative you can show over these sorts of things, the more likely these events are
13:59to happen. And I think to be honest, a lot of people sort of wait around to be invited to things,
14:03but you don't need to wait around to be invited to things. You can just create the thing and then you
14:07can be the one to invite the people to the thing. Everyone wants to hang out, it's just no one wants
14:11to do the work of organizing. So if you can do the work of organizing, you'll never run out of
14:15friends basically. Next up we have the mindfulness rule. So when people are lonely, they often
14:19experience other negative emotions too, with things like social anxiety, you'll avoid other people,
14:23you'll remember only the bad things that came up in a conversation with friends for example. And so
14:26one way to overcome the feeling of loneliness is actually to practice mindfulness. Now this study
14:31from 2019 is really nice and it tested how effective this was in adults who were around
14:3532 years old on average. And over two weeks they had to complete a guided meditation course on
14:39their phones, where each day they listened to a 20-minute audio lesson and then they completed a
14:43homework task afterwards that took them around 10 minutes. Now this course was called Monitor and
14:47Accept. So they had to listen to social interactions and monitor how it made them feel on the inside,
14:51and then they were encouraged to accept all of these emotions, both the good ones and also the
14:55bad ones. You can see from this graph that there was basically no change in the adults who took a
14:59monitor-only course, where they were taught to be mindful of their feelings, but they weren't
15:03encouraged to accept these emotions. And loneliness also did not decrease in those who took a more
15:07general course on their phones either. And this third group of adults were told to let their minds
15:11drift instead of monitoring and accepting their emotions. Now even though the course was pretty
15:14short, it was interesting to see a 22% decrease in loneliness in the group of adults who took the
15:19Monitor and Accept course. So the key takeaway here for me seems to be that if I'm experiencing
15:23any kind of feeling of loneliness, A. it is useful to monitor what those negative feelings are, because
15:27loneliness as we've established is by definition a negative feeling, and secondly to accept that
15:32emotion, to not judge that that emotion, to not kind of further beat myself up for like, oh my god
15:36how can you be experiencing loneliness, you've got no friends, all that kind of stuff. It's about
15:39monitoring and it's about accepting those emotions as they arise. And actually the study concluded,
15:43this study shows that developing an orientation of acceptance towards present moment experiences
15:48is a critical mechanism for mitigating these social risk factors.
15:53Well let's now move on to rule number five, which is the rule of selfless help over self-help. Now
15:57this last tip isn't actually about helping ourselves, it is about helping others. Now
16:00interestingly studies have looked at how toddlers under the age of two react when they are given
16:04goldfish crackers. I found even more treats and I'm going to give them all to you.
16:14But you know I don't see any more treats. Will you give one to monkey?
16:20Yeah? Yeah.
16:23Mm-hmm.
16:35And what we see is that they're happy when they get given the crackers, but they are even happier
16:39when they give those crackers away to a toy monkey. And this is like a bit of a dumb way of showing
16:44something that we all know to be true, which is that helping other people brings us joy. And this
16:49is especially the case when we can see the effect this has. So the actionable takeaway here is to
16:52try and adopt the mindset of giving rather than taking. And one way to do this is to set more
16:57service goals. And I've thought a lot about this after listening to a conversation on the diary of
17:00a CEO between Stephen Bartlett and Simon Sinek. Individual athletes who become champions and then
17:06suffer depression, it's a fairly common story. You hear this from Olympians, you know, Michael
17:12Phelps becomes the most meddled, you know, Olympian of all time immediately suffers depression.
17:18Andre Agassi becomes the most storied, you know, tennis player of all time immediately becomes
17:24depressed. And what I've learned from talking to some of these,
17:30these particularly athletes, but I think it happens in the business world as well,
17:34which is from a very young age, they set themselves a goal that in my words would be a very selfish
17:41goal. I want to be the best at X, the best tennis player, the best golfer, the best whatever. And
17:47their entire lives from pretty young ages, every decision they're making is to help them advance
17:55this finite goal. And all of their relationships are, can you help me achieve my goal? Right?
18:05And if you can no longer help me achieve my goal, I don't need you anymore as a coach
18:10or even a friend. And there's huge sacrifices, missing of birthdays, missing of Christmases,
18:17missing of major life events, because I have to practice so I can achieve my goal.
18:24Selfish goals are those goals that you want to set for yourself, whereas service goals are goals
18:28that you want to achieve to help other people. So volunteering, for example, is a service goal
18:32and has been shown to reduce loneliness in older people. And another service goal, for example,
18:35could be something simple like calling a friend if you know that they're going through tough times,
18:39just to sit and listen and hold a space for them. For me, the main thing that I'm taking away from
18:43all this research is that loneliness is bad, and there are definitely actionable things we can do
18:47to improve it. And a lot of those are about taking ownership and initiative rather than thinking of
18:52it being other people's job to meet our needs for social connection. It's our own jobs to organize
18:58things and take initiative and finding ways to meet our own needs for social connection. And
19:01you find when you do that, that if you become the organizer of events and the person who's
19:05proactively reaching out to people that you hopefully will not be starved of social connection
19:09and like social isolation and stuff as you get older. If you enjoyed this video, you might like
19:12this video over here, which is seven daily habits that improved my romantic relationship. And in
19:16that video, you'll find lots of other ways to help you build stronger and more meaningful connections
19:19with the other people in your life. So thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you hopefully
19:22in the next video. Bye.