← Something You Should Know
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- [00:00]
Mike Carruthers
Bingo Blitz rules.
- [00:03]
Andrew Steele
If your bingo has ads in it, that's not a bingo. If it doesn't have the coolest tournaments, mini games, and the most breathtaking design.
- [00:10]
Edward Hallowell
Nope, not a bingo.
- [00:11]
Andrew Steele
If your bingo moment makes you feel so excited that you just want to burst in joy and scream out loud, bingo.
- [00:17]
Edward Hallowell
Sorry.
- [00:18]
Andrew Steele
So you're playing Bingo Blitz.
- [00:20]
Edward Hallowell
Now that's a bingo step for a world of excitement with Bingo Blitz, the number one free bingo game. Download Bingo Blitz and play for free.
- [00:29]
Andrew Steele
Now that's a bingo.
- [00:34]
Edward Hallowell
Today on something you should know. Are you getting touched enough? I'll tell you why it's so important then. A lot of things can accelerate aging, and there are so many simple ways to fight back.
- [00:47]
Mike Carruthers
I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia.
- [01:00]
Edward Hallowell
Also, why you need to check your tires now that the weather has turned colder. And loneliness, especially during the holidays, can be so hard to deal with and it's bad for your health.
- [01:12]
Andrew Steele
In fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease.
- [01:21]
Mike Carruthers
Loneliness.
- [01:21]
Andrew Steele
And most people don't realize social isolation is as dangerous for early death as cigarette smoking.
- [01:28]
Edward Hallowell
All this today on something you should know.
- [01:33]
N/A
You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [02:06]
Andrew Steele
Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.
- [02:15]
Edward Hallowell
Something youg Should Know with Mike Carruthers and Happy Thanksgiving. If you're listening to this on the day this episode publishes, which is Thanksgiving Day 2024. But then again, that's the thing about podcasts. If you're listening to this in the middle of the summer, well, that doesn't make any sense. So forget I said Happy Thanksgiving. We start today with touching. You know, I have this sense that people don't touch as much as they used to. Probably Covid had a lot to do with that, and maybe from that, this overall concern we have about germs and the spread of illness, but it does seem that people don't hug or shake hands as much as they used to, which can lead actually to something called touch starvation. It's a condition that happens when you don't get as much physical contact as you're used to, or you don't get any at all. Human touch is a huge part of how humans interact with others. We shake hands, we high five, we hug, we bond through physical touch. Your skin is the largest organ in the body, and it sends good and bad touch sensations to your brain. When you engage in pleasant touch like a hug, your brain releases a hormone called oxytocin. This makes you feel good and it firms up emotional and social bonds while lowering anxiety and fear. So for all these reasons and probably a lot more, we need to find more ways to touch again. And that is something you should know. I bet there have been times when you have been alone with your thoughts and you have wondered to yourself, I wonder how long I'll live. This happens often, I think, when someone close to you dies, especially a family member. I know some people believe that, hey, when your number's up, your number's up. And I guess to some extent that's true. But since, as the saying goes, all we really have is time, what can we do to prolong our time and live a happy and healthy life in the process? Well, as it turns out, there is a lot of really interesting research going on that I really think you want to hear about because it goes way beyond the, you know, exercise, eat right, see your doctor, and that's about the best you can do. Andrew Steele is a biologist. He is a science writer. He has his PhD in physics from Oxford, and he is author of a book called Ageless, in which he looks into the latest cutting edge research on longevity. And he has found some really interesting stuff that could actually affect how long you live. Because this new research could lead to treatments in our lifetime to extend our lifetime, which is pretty cool. Hey, Andrew. Welcome.
- [05:11]
Mike Carruthers
Hello. Thanks for having me.
- [05:12]
Edward Hallowell
So define what you mean by aging. And first of all, I've always had trouble with that term because it implies that you can stop time almost and that, you know, people, people get old. I mean, that's what people do. My car gets old, the trees get old, everything gets old. So what are we talking about, in your view, when we talk about aging?
- [05:34]
Mike Carruthers
I mean, that's exactly right. And I think one of the big challenges that I've Overcome is to explode people's conventional wisdom about what aging is. But what I mean by aging as a biologist, actually the simplest definition isn't a biological definition at all. It's a statistical one. And it's simply how fast your risk of death increases with time as a human. Our rate of aging as a species is that our risk of death doubles about every eight years. So let's try and put that into some kind of context. I'm 36, and that means my odds of death this year are about one in a thousand. And actually, you know, I quite like those odds. If that were to continue for the rest of my life, I'd live into my thousand and thirties on average. But of course, that isn't what happens. My risk of death will carry on doubling every eight years. And so that means if there are no advances in medical science between now and me, you know, fingers crossed, making it into my 90s, my odds of death by then will be 1 in 6 per year. Life and death at the roll of a dice. And so, you know, as a biologist, you look at this and think there's this exponentially increasing risk of death with time. That is the problem that we call aging.
- [06:30]
Edward Hallowell
I was surprised when you said that your chance of Death at age 36 is one in a thousand. That actually seems high to me. So one out of every thousand 36 year olds will die this year?
- [06:43]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, I guess you got to look at that as 0.1%. And actually, most of that when you're my age is still down to external things we call extrinsic forms of mortality biologically. So that's things like, you know, car accidents. And unfortunately, suicide is a really big cause of death for men at my age as well. So it's not generally the sort of cancers and the heart disease and that sort of stuff that you associate with older age. It's the external causes of death. And then obviously, as you get older, the risk of diseases increases and starts to swamp those external causes.
- [07:11]
Edward Hallowell
And as you get older, as you say, your risk of death goes up exponentially. But at the end of the day, I mean, everything gets older. My car gets older, you know, the trees outside get older, and eventually my car breaks down. One day the trees will die. One day I will die. Everything gets older and goes away.
- [07:34]
Mike Carruthers
Well, this is the fascinating thing because obviously that happens to cars, it happens to machines, it happens to our pets, it happens to our farm animals. You know, you can easily imagine that aging is a universal process, but actually this just isn't the case, because we've got a huge advantage as biological organisms. Organisms, we can repair ourselves. If we didn't have these incredibly intricate mechanisms of repair that are buzzing away inside of our cells every single hour of every single day, all the time. You know, correcting mistakes, disposing of rubbish, that kind of thing, we would die an awful lot sooner than we actually do. And, in fact, there are some animals that have got so good at repairing themselves that their risk of death doesn't change with time. That's a phenomenon that in biology, we call negligible senescence. So negligible just meaning, you know, not much. And senescence is just the biological term for growing old. So the reason there's a tortoise on the COVID of my book is because that is a negligibly senescent animal. It's an animal whose risk of death stays constant when it becomes an adult. And that means that they can live an incredibly long time. But most importantly, it's not just their risk of death that stays constant. They also don't have any increase in frailty as they get older. They stay reproductively active no matter how old they are. That means that they grow older, but without growing old in the way that we humans do. And so I hope that by understanding the biology of aging, we can try and transfer some of that wisdom and some of those sort of biological techniques to keep us sprightly into our old age, too.
- [08:51]
Edward Hallowell
And the goal is what? Because one day your day will come. I mean, you can't put off death forever. So is the goal just to put it off as long as possible? Put it off as long as possible and be healthy? What is it that we're trying to accomplish with all of this?
- [09:10]
Mike Carruthers
The goal is definitely health. And I think that you got to think about what actually kills you. Although decades ago, it was permissible for doctors to write death by old age on an older person's death certificate, now we understand that you can't just die of old age. You die of heart disease, you die of cancer, you die of dementia. One of these diseases that are much more likely is you get older, and these diseases, too, get exponentially more likely as you increase in age. That's something that eventually becomes severe enough to take your life. And so it's very much the pain, the suffering, all of these things together that we want to try and get rid of. And actually, it's a really good way of thinking about it is to think about. A lot of modern medicine seeks to treat individual diseases. But even if we had Hypothetically, a complete success treating an individual disease. And let's take the example. Imagine that we cured cancer tomorrow. That would only add about three years to human life expectancy. And that's because, you know, if you avoid getting cancer, you've probably already got a bit of heart disease or diabetes or, you know, dementia starting, you know, waiting in the wings to kill you as you get older. And so that means that it doesn't make you healthier for much longer. Whereas by treating the aging process, the thing that causes all of these diseases, we can potentially defer those diseases, maybe even prevent them entirely, and create a lot more healthy years for people.
- [10:18]
Edward Hallowell
And isn't the prescription for doing that just lead what we've been taught is a healthy lifestyle, to eat well, sleep well? Isn't that the prescription?
- [10:29]
Mike Carruthers
These are all good ideas, and they're definitely something that I would encourage people to do. But the fact is, we can go beyond this with medicine. And I think the best way to explain this is with an example. One of the biological processes behind aging is the accumulation of aged senescent. There's that word again. Senescent cells. And they build up in our bodies as we get older. And we know that they're responsible for a whole range of age related diseases. And we've also got drugs that can kill those senescent cells while leaving the rest of the cells in the body intact. So we've done experiments using these drugs on mice, and we wait till the mice get to about 24 months old. Now, mice obviously have a much shorter lifespan than humans. So that's something equivalent to about 70 in human years. So that means we give these old mice the drugs, it clears out those aged cells, and what we find is the mice basically get biologically younger, they live a bit longer, which is a good thing. But they're not just sort of stumbling along in ill health, unable to muster the energy even to die. They're healthier. They get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts, they're less frail, so they can run further and faster on the little mousey treadmills that they use in these experiments. They're more curious. So if you put a young mouse in a maze, it's often very exploratory. It wants to look around its new environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious, maybe just a bit lazier, because it's a bit more frail. And by giving mice these senolytic drugs that kill senescent cells, you restore some of that youthful curiosity. And finally These animals, they just look great. You know, I was a computational biologist, so I never dealt with mice in the lab. And if you look at a picture of one of these mice that's had these drugs, they've got better fur, they've got thicker, plumper skin. They just look fantastic. And so the point is, you know, you can't diet and exercise and live a good life to a healthy, you know, guaranteed healthy hundred years old. Whereas by using some of these drugs that could potentially slow down, maybe even reverse the aging process, we can allow ourselves to live longer and healthier than any current lifestyle intervention would allow.
- [12:11]
Edward Hallowell
And so that would mean what to me? What would I be doing? Where do I go get these drugs?
- [12:17]
Mike Carruthers
Well, we're going to have to wait for some of the clinical trials to happen. So I'm very excited that these things are going to be here in time for all of us, because they're already in human clinical trials. But at the moment, mostly we're looking at results in mice, and we've got the first tentative results starting to come out in humans. So hopefully in the next five or so years, we're going to have some of those answers. Do these drugs work in humans as well as they do in mice? And we can start thinking about taking them.
- [12:37]
Edward Hallowell
What is the connection between how you look, how young you look, how healthy you look, and how you age internally? Is there any connection, or are those are two separate topics?
- [12:49]
Mike Carruthers
It actually is, yeah. There's a fascinating study that was done a few years ago where people were asked to rate the photographs of other people to guess how old they thought they were. And what they found was that people who looked older tended to have a greater risk of dying in the near future and a greater risk of contracting certain diseases. And actually, what this really tells us is that there is a sort of fundamental collection of underlying processes that are responsible not just for your internal aging, but for your external aging as well. And so someone who is wrinkly or someone whose hair is a bit grayer, they probably have older insides, the same processes are giving them an increased risk of cancer and increased risk of heart disease. And so actually, although I very much hope we don't initially go after these cosmetic things, they're obviously less important. One researcher I spoke to said I'd far rather have improved strength and resilience in my arteries than in my skin. So they're not so worried about wrinkly skin, but wrinkly arteries effectively. I actually think we're going to solve quite a few of these cosmetic Problems almost by accident, because we'll go after the causes of these particular diseases, and then what will happen is those same processes are responsible for the wrinkles, the gray hair, all the external stuff. And so we might find that those things improve at the same time.
- [13:53]
Edward Hallowell
What do we know about the things that people do in their life that are the worst that, you know, whether it's drinking or stress or what are the things that are killing us slowly?
- [14:07]
Mike Carruthers
The absolute top of my list, and this isn't going to come as a surprise to anybody listening, is smoking. It's so, so bad for your health. But what you actually find when you dig into health advice is something that's really, really encouraged me, actually, to make sure I am doing every single thing I possibly can to be that little bit healthier. And that's because all these different things that were advised about trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, most of them actually slow down the aging process itself. And I think a really good example of this is exercise, because when you're sweating away on a run or something, it's really obvious your lungs are going. You can feel your heart beating in your chest. You know, your muscles are obviously doing an awful lot of exercise. You can see how that exercise is benefiting your muscles. It's strengthening them. It's benefiting your cardiovascular system. But actually, this process seems to slow down the aging process as a whole. So it's not just the heart disease that you're deferring by doing exercise. It also defers quite a lot of kinds of cancer. It's even. There's even quite good evidence that can reduce the risk of getting dementia, you know, neurodegeneration. And, you know, you just wouldn't necessarily think that working out on the treadmill or going for a bike ride or lifting weights is going to improve your cognitive health as you get older. But because these processes are also interconnected, you know, it just means that doing all of these bits of health advice can improve your health in so, so many different ways, not just the obvious ones.
- [15:19]
Edward Hallowell
We're talking about longevity, what we can all do to live longer and healthier. And my guest is Andrew Steele, author of the book Ageless.
- [15:29]
N/A
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- [16:53]
Edward Hallowell
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- [17:34]
Mike Carruthers
So some of the things are surprisingly obvious. Making sure you don't eat too much, smoking, exercise, that kind of thing. Not drinking too much, getting enough sleep. But actually, the other thing that can happen is that by understanding the aging biology, you can uncover some slightly less conventional bits of health advice that are nonetheless really important. I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth. So we've begun to understand that a lot of the aging process is driven by a process called chronic inflammation. So let's unpack what that means. Inflammation is the process by which your immune system goes and fights off various threats. So it can fight off an infection, or it could rush to the site of an injury to try and start the healing process. And when you're youthful, that process is often acute. That is, it turns on very rapidly when it's needed, and it turns off again once the immune system has done its job. But as we get older, this process can become sort of chronic. It can just be turned on A little tiny bit all the time. Kind of a paranoia in your immune system. What's going on if you have poor oral health? Well, you've got bacteria in your mouth, they're infecting your gums, they might be decaying your teeth. And the, the reason that the dentist has such a sort of comparatively primitive set of tools, they can yank out teeth, they can drill holes in them, is because your immune system never quite wins this battle. So there's this constant process of inflammation going on in your mouth. And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia. So again, it just seems like the whole body is this incredibly interconnected thing, and keeping one part of it healthy can have huge effects on the whole aging process of every single part of it.
- [19:02]
Edward Hallowell
I think people believe, and probably because we see evidence of it, that there is a bit of dice rolling in all of this, that, you know, people get cancer very early for no apparent reason. Or then there are other people who lead a rather unhealthy life and live to 105, and that perhaps genetics plays a big part in this.
- [19:25]
Mike Carruthers
And actually the genetic contribution to longevity is surprisingly small for people who live a normal length of time. So if your parents live to 70 or 80, you really shouldn't see that as a ceiling on your own lifespan. We think that genetics only contributes maybe somewhere between 5 and 20% of how long you can go on to live. But the one exception to this is the people who do live an exceptionally long time. So people who make it into their hundreds, centenarians. There seems to be a huge genetic component to this. In fact, if your parents are centenarians, or, you know, if you have a centenarian parent, or if you have a sibling who makes it into their hundreds, you've got a 10 times greater chance of doing so yourself. And it really seems that the way in which these centenarians make it to these advanced ages is they just got protection from age related disease. They really do just age slower than the rest of us. So if you look at studies of centenarians, they don't tend to be much healthier than the general population. They're still a little bit overweight, they often smoke, they often drink just as much as regular people do. But the fact is that they've got the genetics that keeps them effectively impervious to these bad lifestyle habits and allows them to live long enough anyway. So for most of us, the best advice is to carry on with this stuff because unfortunately, we haven't got those centenarian genes that are going to allow us to power through anyway.
- [20:30]
Edward Hallowell
There is a ceiling, though, as I've understood it when I've read about this, is people are getting older on average, but the oldest of the oldest don't get a lot older.
- [20:42]
Mike Carruthers
It's a really fascinating subject. And so the record for longevity is 122 years, held by a French woman called Jeanne Calment. And she set that record in 1997, I think, which is really quite incredible. I think the fact is that people who make it to these exceptionally old ages, they're just so rare that it's very, very hard for that record to be pushed back and back. But also, I think you are right that, you know, with the current state of, you know, no matter how well you live, no matter what medical care you have access to, it's very, very unlikely with the current state of medicine that you're going to be able to live longer than that. The only way that you can stop your body falling apart on that schedule is to intervene in the aging process itself. Because, as I sort of alluded to earlier, say you're 110 and you get cancer, and we cure that cancer. There are still loads of other things wrong with your body that are going to probably take you out in the next few years. Whereas if we could actually slow down aging, that would mean you could make it to 110 in a much healthier state. And that would completely change the game in terms of the limit on human longevity.
- [21:34]
Edward Hallowell
But no matter how hard you try, I mean, the parts of the human body can't last forever. Eventually they're just going to wear out.
- [21:43]
Mike Carruthers
I mean, I think the best counter to that is just to look at these negligibly senescent animals. I already mentioned tortoises have this property, but it's not just tortoises. There are actually loads of animals out there. So there are various kinds of fish are negligibly senescent. There's a salamander. There's a tiny little water creature called a hydra. There's a bit closer to us on the evolutionary tree, something called a naked mole rat, which is a rodent, a bit like a rat or a mouse. But whereas mice live, you know, maybe two or three years in the lab, naked mole rats live to 30. They seem to be almost immune to cancer. They're almost immune to neurodegeneration. But most importantly, their risk of death is basically constant throughout their adult lives. And then they suddenly basically fall off a cliff when they get ill toward the very end of their lives. And so this isn't a biological impossibility. The fact is that we aren't cars. We've got these incredible self repairing capacities inside ourselves. And if we can just learn how to augment those with medicine, there's no reason why we couldn't keep ourselves going healthier for longer.
- [22:34]
Edward Hallowell
But do you think that there's a lot of dice rolling going on here and that. Well, you know the saying, when your number's up, your numbers up. So that people kind of throw caution to the wind and say, I'm just going to live my life because I could go to the gym, but then how many years am I spending at the gym to add how many years to my life? So I guess what I'm wondering is, are people doing themselves a disservice by believing in this? When your number's up, your numbers up?
- [23:05]
Mike Carruthers
I think there is like a frustrating degree of randomness to this because the fact is that in order to get cancer, you have to get something like an average of 10 mutations, and those mutations have to be in one particular cell. So say you've got nine mutations in one of your cells right now, then it could just basically be luck whether you get that 10th one and whether that becomes a cancer. And then whether that cancer is spotted by your immune system is partly down to luck. And whether that cancer then goes on to accumulate further mutations that allow it to spread throughout the body and cause serious disease that might go on to kill you again. All of these things are, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle, but at the end of the day, some people do die of cancer in their 30s. The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, you know, it's like we were discussing earlier, the odds of death for someone in their 30s are about one in a thousand a year, which is incredibly low. So if we can just get a little bit closer to that, then people could live much longer, healthier lives. And the reason that I'm particularly excited about trying to follow all this lifestyle advice now is because it means that if I can live a little bit longer, that gives scientists longer to perfect some of these treatments. And then by living longer with those treatments, that gives scientists longer still. So, you know, say, for example, I can keep myself good and healthy, you know, into my 60s, 70s, 80s, I'll be healthy Enough to benefit from that first generation of senolytic drugs that can remove those aged cells and increase my lifespan. I'll be able to benefit from other new treatments that are developed over the next few decades. And if that gives me more years of healthy life still, I can develop. Sorry, I can benefit from whatever treatments are developed after that as well. So I think we're just living at this pivotal time where the longer you live, the more medical technology is going to be available. So I think, yeah, to sort of neglect your own health at a time like this is doing yourself a huge disservice.
- [24:36]
Edward Hallowell
Anything else about the way we're living or the things we're doing, anything else that really affects our longevity that maybe people don't realize.
- [24:46]
Mike Carruthers
I think something that's been illustrated perhaps a bit more to us over the last year, but still hasn't necessarily entered the consciousness, is the importance of the prevention of infectious disease. There's actually some quite good evidence that children who grew up in environments of lower infection, and obviously this really started to transform in the first part of the 20th century with vaccines and antibiotics and improvements in hygiene, Kids started to be able to grow up without this huge spectrum of childhood diseases. And what they found is that by looking back at this, they seem to age better as well. So it seems as though, you know, having less of that inflammation caused by disease throughout your life can improve, improve your health in the longer term. And we also know there are certain cancers that are specifically caused by particular viruses, particular bacteria. So I think avoiding infectious disease, quite apart from avoiding the immediate misery of being ill, is a really good thing to do to try and extend your lifespan overall.
- [25:33]
Edward Hallowell
One of the criticism, or not criticism, but one of the complaints people have about this whole idea of longevity and increasing is you get the extra years, but you get them in your 90s and. And in your hundreds. It would have been so much better to get them in my 30s or my 20s when I was young and could enjoy them more.
- [25:52]
Mike Carruthers
And that's exactly what really excites me about this actual anti aging medicine, a real anti aging medicine, because the fact is that if we did cure cancer, unfortunately we tend to treat these diseases in silos. So, you know, you find a lump, you know, you might go to your general practitioner, your general practitioner refers you to an oncologist. The oncologist will give you chemotherapy, maybe operate on your tumor, etc. Etc. All of this is really focused on getting rid of that cancer, that single problem. But actually, you know, you might have a host of other problems. By the age that you're traditionally diagnosed with cancer, you might have a diabetes, you might have a heart condition that's sort of nascent and not necessarily quite as advanced as the cancer. Yet you've got all these other problems brewing. But the point is that by treating the aging process, because we know that it's your risk of disease goes up exponentially with age, if we can sort of flatten that curve, we can reduce that exponential increase of disease that can hit all of those diseases at the same time, it can reduce our risk of cancer, reduce our risk of heart disease, reduce our risk of dementia. And it's also really important to say that it's not just the diseases, it's the frailty, it's the cognitive decline, it's the incontinence. All of these things aren't necessarily going to actually take your life, but dramatically reduce the quality of it. All of these things are caused by the same biological processes. And so by intervening in these biological processes, we effectively will give you extra years. You're perhaps not in your 30s, depending when you start taking the drugs, but if we can stretch out your 60s so they last 15 years in comparatively good health, then that's going to be a massive improvement over the situation we have today.
- [27:11]
Edward Hallowell
Yeah, well, but. And the situation we have today is a whole lot better than it was 100 to 300 years ago. We're living longer and living healthier. So it just keeps getting better. Andrew Steele has been my guest and the name of his book is the New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on Andrew. Thank you.
- [27:33]
Mike Carruthers
Thank you very much. Cheers. Want to shop Walmart?
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Edward Hallowell
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Andrew Steele
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Mike Carruthers
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Andrew Steele
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Mike Carruthers
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- [27:54]
Edward Hallowell
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- [28:00]
Mike Carruthers
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- [28:05]
Edward Hallowell
Seared in flavor for sides. Choose Whole Foods Market Grab and go platters. Go even further and get your whole meal catered. Just order online by November 26th. Get Thanksgiving ready at Whole Foods Market. Terms apply. Loneliness is a feeling I suspect everyone has felt and everyone knows it doesn't feel very good. Feeling lonely around the holidays is perhaps the worst. And since this episode is publishing on Thanksgiving, I Figured it would be a good time to tackle the topic of loneliness and most importantly, things we can all do to get rid of that feeling and keep it away. There is no one better to discuss the topic of loneliness than Dr. Edward Halliwell. Ned is a psychiatrist who wrote a great book some years ago called Connect, in which he really explored the topic of loneliness and the need for connection. He also has written several other books about distraction and ADHD. His latest is a bestseller called ADHD 2.0. Hey, Ned, thanks for being here.
- [29:16]
Andrew Steele
Hello, Mike. Nice to be with you.
- [29:18]
Edward Hallowell
So what is loneliness? How do you define it? How do you look at it?
- [29:23]
Andrew Steele
Lonely is a lot different from being alone. You can be alone and not lonely. You can be alone and reading a book, listening to music, entertaining your fantasies and favorite hopes for the future. And you're not lonely. But you can also be lonely. And that's the active presence of absence. It's like you're feeling what isn't there. It's a terrible feeling. You're feeling that here I am alone, no one's with me, no one likes me, no one cares about me, or so and so died or I miss my dog or I wish I were back home. You feel what you're missing.
- [30:07]
Edward Hallowell
I love that definition that you're feeling what isn't there. Because as soon as you said that, I could feel it. I mean, that's exactly what it is. It's that absence of something that you want or need or miss or something.
- [30:21]
Andrew Steele
And it's a terrible feeling. You know, it is really bad for you. In fact, the Surgeon General defined loneliness as the number one medical problem in the United States today. Not cancer, not heart disease. Loneliness. And most people don't realize how bad it is for you. In fact, social isolation is as dangerous for early death as cigarette smoking. Most people have no idea about that. If you ask them to list risk factors, they'll say, cigarette smoking, obesity, genetics, don't wear your seatbelt. Nobody puts down loneliness. But my gosh, it's right near the top of the list. And if people would make it a priority to connect, I call it the other vitamin C Vitamin connect. It is the most powerful force that most people don't make use of. I urge people, if you go to the supermarket, talk to the guy at the checkout counter, he needs it or she needs it as much as you do.
- [31:16]
Edward Hallowell
So help me understand why. What it is about loneliness that makes it so dangerous? Is it the loneliness itself, or when you're lonely, you tend to do bad things like Drink more, smoke more, eat more. Or is there something inherent about loneliness that is harmful?
- [31:35]
Andrew Steele
All of the above. When you're feeling lonely, your immune system suffers and you are putting out stress hormones that are caustic. And then what? You also said you're inclined to try to fill in the emptiness with things like online gambling or drinking or drug use or dangerous liaisons or dangerous business deals, reckless going online, connecting in chat rooms where you don't know who you're talking to. And it's really just about people trying to find meaningful ways of connecting. And I can't tell you how many patients I've prescribed a dog for. I mean, dogs are the world's greatest. I dedicated my last book to dogs. I said, it's no accident that God spelled backwards as dog. You know, dogs are the world's best connectors. And, you know, so if you have a dog, chances are you're not going to feel lonely or nearly as lonely.
- [32:36]
Edward Hallowell
Yeah. And anybody who's ever had a dog knows that that relationship is very fulfilling, but it's still a human dog relationship. It isn't the same as connecting with people.
- [32:51]
Andrew Steele
And in fact, I tell people, young people, what is the purpose of growing up? What is the goal of growing up? And the answers I get are like, get into the best school you can get into. Lay the foundation for making a good living. And I say, no, no, the purpose, what you want to do while you're growing up, is fall in love. You want to fall in love with a person, that's fine, but with a subject, an idea, an activity, an ant. The great entomologist E. O. Wilson, who just died, fell in love with ants in a parking lot in Alabama because he was a lonely kid. So he went out to the field next door and started studying ants and became one of the great entomologists, professor at Harvard, author of many books and. But it was born out of his feeling lonely as a kid in Alabama, and he found his companionship in ants.
- [33:42]
Edward Hallowell
But what is the reason, do you think that people have such trouble connecting with people? Because, you know, there's a lot of people. There's like billions of them. So you would think that connecting with people would be easier than it apparently is. Why do some people find themselves lonely?
- [34:00]
Andrew Steele
The reason people stick with loneliness is they're afraid. They're afraid of being rejected, they're afraid of being sued. They're afraid of saying the wrong thing. You know, in this age of PC, everyone's afraid to say the wrong thing. They're afraid of looking stupid. And so they hold back. They hold back on life out of fear, and they create their own little bubble, their own little prison, which is toxic.
- [34:25]
Edward Hallowell
And so you said a few moments ago that you need to connect and that one thing you could do is talk to the cashier at the store or wave to the person next to you. That's not really a connection. That's just a kind of a polite, hi, how are you? See you later. So how does that help?
- [34:42]
Andrew Steele
Well, it actually is a connection. You'll get a little drip of dopamine when you do that. You'll get a little affirmation. You can wave to a stranger all clear across the parking lot. If it's a snowy day or something, you say snowy day, and he waves back. It takes a half a second. That is a connection. It's not a lifelong connection. You'll never see the person again. But don't take it lightly. Small talk is very big talk. Small talk is the root into deeper relationships for sure, but it all begins with small talk. You know, the strong, silent man is a lonely man on his way to a heart attack. You know, it's not a good recipe. So make the little chit chat. Make the. Don't take it lightly. It's very, very, very important.
- [35:29]
Edward Hallowell
I remember hearing, and maybe it was from you, and we've talked in the past, that that intense pain that loneliness causes is evolutionary, that we're not meant to be that way. We can't survive if we're all alone. And that's a motivation, a push to get rid of that feeling. And the only way to get rid of it is to go connect with people.
- [35:53]
Andrew Steele
That is so true. It's wired into us, it's wired into our endocrine system, even any of you listeners who've had children. The moment you give birth, either through the normal way or through adoption, the moment you become a parent for the first time, nature sees to it that you enter into a permanent state of psychosis. Your whole body changes, your brain changes. You fall madly, insanely crazy in love with this little peeing and pooping machine whom you don't even know. And yet you've almost instantly become not only willing but eager to give away your time, your money, your sleep, your dignity. And you gotta be crazy to do it. And you say, this is so much fun. Let's do it again.
- [36:39]
Edward Hallowell
This episode is publishing on Thanksgiving Day 2024. And holidays, especially the winter holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the holiday season can somehow make loneliness even more acute. Because you're remembering, maybe people who have died or people who have left your life. And if you don't have replacements for that, something to. Yeah, replacements for that. It can be really hard this time of year.
- [37:13]
Andrew Steele
My advice to you is maybe take that holiday as a chance to developing some kind of connection that can become meaningful. Maybe it's a time to get a dog or maybe it's a time to go back to church or synagogue. Or maybe it's a time to take up some hobby that you've wanted to take up. Even something as simple as crocheting or cooking or starting a little garden inside your house. There are things you can take up that will serve as points of connection and then you can find other people who are interested in that. And one of my favorite lines, I use it all the time, really. It's a line to live by. Never worry alone. So when you're feeling upset, worried, concerned, reach out somehow. Doesn't have to be in person, it doesn't have to be against your grain, but don't worry alone. That's when bad things happen. That's when you do self destructive stuff. That's when you feel intense despair. That's when people commit suicide, you know, when you're worrying alone. So never worry alone is a really good watchword. And another thing you can do is when you're feeling these bleak black moments where you're sort of ruminating. We know from brain science there's a certain network in the brain that takes over. It's called the default mode network, the dmn, which I called the demon. What you want to do is don't feed the demon. And what do you feed it with? Your attention. Well, do something else. Fry an egg, dig a hole, do a crossword, do something else. Shut off the DMN's oxygen supply, which is your attention. And by the way, the reason that we feed it is contentment is too bland. You don't say he or she was riveted in contentment, but you do say he or she was riveted in despair, loneliness, misery, foreboding. It's riveting and that's why you keep feeding it with your attention. You got to be ruthless and shut it off. Redirect your attention onto something else and it literally can save your life if you do that. But try to keep those two phrases in mind. Never worry alone and don't feed the demon.
- [39:32]
Edward Hallowell
That is some really great advice because everyone who has ever, and I assume it is everyone has ever worried alone knows that when you bring somebody else in on your worry, it Somehow lightens up.
- [39:45]
Andrew Steele
It's magical. It's magical and it really is. Suddenly the worry turns into problem solving. It is magical. It's like my thought experience. Imagine you're standing in a big, dark warehouse by yourself. You feel terrified, paranoid. If you're there with someone, you laugh. There's something about the presence of another person that instantly, as you put it, lightens the load. And the next thing you know, you're problem solving. How do we get out of here?
- [40:16]
Edward Hallowell
I've heard it described as a paradox, really, that we are, with social media and the Internet, we are more connected than ever. And yet a lot of those social media kind of connections aren't real connections and exacerbate the problem of loneliness because you're connected, but not in the way that people used to be connected. What do you think about social media connections? Is it that? Is it exacerbating the problem?
- [40:46]
Andrew Steele
I take issue with that point. It's all a matter of how you use it. My family, for example, uses social media to great advantage. We have a. You know, I don't know what the word for it is, but we're all on the same little platform and we send each other messages and it facilitates, deepens human connection. Now the danger is when it replaces human connection. That's the danger. So it's all a matter of how you use it.
- [41:12]
Edward Hallowell
It would seem that because loneliness is so painful, and a lot of people suffer that pain in silence, it must be because, at least in part, that it's just so difficult to get up and go, try to connect with people. It's just really hard for them to do so. What's your advice for those people who would love to connect but just don't even know where to begin?
- [41:40]
Andrew Steele
I'll tell you a quick story. Do we have time for a quick story?
- [41:43]
Edward Hallowell
Sure, of course.
- [41:44]
Andrew Steele
Oh, great. Okay. Well, so I consulted some 20 years ago to the Harvard Chemistry Department because they had their most gifted graduate student committed suicide and left a note explicitly blaming Harvard. As we looked into it, the chair of the department, Jim Anderson, a wonderful man, basically put his research career on hold to figure out what was going on. And we discovered it was one of many suicides in that department in the previous decade. And the reason for it was the community was horribly disconnected. It was like a dungeon. It was just. There was no connection. Everyone was paranoid. There were two coping styles, work harder or get drunk. And most people did both every day. So you had an entire department with five Nobel Prize winners in it and some thousand brilliant little Genius postdocs and graduate students miserable because they were so disconnected. So we had to figure out a way to connect them now with, you know, that group of people, really smart, often middle European, barely English speaking, very high IQ folks. If you said, let's have a mixer, nobody would show up because it's not in their comfort zone. And so we had to figure out, how do you bait the trap? How do you bring people out of hiding? Because they were hiding. They were paranoid. Well, you know, one of the universal answers to that question is food. So we'd reach out to the best restaurants in Cambridge and we'd cater weekly buffets where, you know, there'd be wonderful good food, there'd be some beer and wine. And these introverted shy grad students would come out of hiding for food. And the next thing you know, they get talking to one another in spite of themselves. And the next thing you know, there's a softball team, there's a symphony club. They started putting wax boards next to the elevators. So instead of making small talk at the elevator, they could draw equations and tell each other what they were working on. You meet them where they are, and lo and behold, over the course of the year, we really changed the culture of that department. So it's a grim statistic, but it's very significant. There have been no suicides since. The proudest award I ever got was the chemistry department gave me the department medal. I'm the first non chemist who has ever received that.
- [44:07]
Edward Hallowell
Well done.
- [44:09]
Andrew Steele
Yeah, thank you. But it really drove home to me, number one, how lethal disconnection is. I mean, literally people dying. But how plantable it is, how startable it is because it's in. Even the most introverted, reclusive person wants to connect. Loneliness hurts everybody. So if you. You just have to find the right way. And like in our case, food was, was the. Was the catalyst. Food was what got the ball rolling. Then. Then people jump in and take over. And the next thing you know, the. The town can go from being isolated and separated and paranoid, as so many places are these days, to connecting. Maybe you have a block party, maybe you have a yard sale, maybe you have a, you know, let's root for the local team movement or something that people can join in and connect with each other without making them self conscious about it. That's the key. Most people don't want to sit down and talk about their feelings. They're afraid of that. It makes them feel very awkward. But if you give them some task to do, some project to jump into and some food to eat and even better, some wine to drink. You got a connection thing going. And it's so great to see it happen because it's what people need and you just see them brighten up like a Christmas tree. I mean, it's just, it's a wonderful thing. And it can be, you can start it truly anywhere.
- [45:38]
Edward Hallowell
You know, I like to think, I know it's not a two way connection, but I like to think that people listening to us right now, learning about this is kind of a connection and it can help ease that pain of loneliness.
- [45:54]
Andrew Steele
I mean, you are doing a tremendous service. You have a big following. That's a huge service. People don't realize you have regular listeners and that's a big deal. And they don't understand by listening to you, by tuning in regularly, they literally are extending their life. I mean, that is a proven fact. Reducing social isolation extends life. And what you're doing with your podcast is a wonderful way of reducing social isolation. So, yes, it is ironic that we have unintentionally conspired to create circumstances where one of the things we need absolutely most is really hard to get, but it is not impossible to get. And that's why I'm saying use your imagination, but reach out, you know, another reach out to someone you're on the outs with. Forgiveness is a wonderful tool for connecting. And you know, forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself.
- [46:53]
Edward Hallowell
Well, anyone who knows that feeling, and I assume it's everyone who has had that feeling, that deep sense of loneliness, knows how horrible it is. And I think this is such an important conversation to have. Edward Hallowell has been my guest. The name of his book is Connect, which he wrote several years ago. And I promised him I would mention his new book, which is about ADHD, called ADHD 2.0. And you can find a link to those books in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Ned, and talking about this. It was good to hear and it was a lot of really good information. Thank you.
- [47:29]
Andrew Steele
Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on. You're a terrific, terrific host.
- [47:38]
Edward Hallowell
Now that cooler weather is here, more and more of us are actually driving around on under inflated tires. That's because when the temperature drops outside, the air pressure goes down. So it's really worth stopping into the gas station for a quick air refill. Driving on under inflated tires is less fuel efficient and it can even be dangerous when your tires are low. There's much more wear and tear on the tread and you're more prone to blowouts because there's more friction between the tire and the road surface. And that is something you should know. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Something you should know. A reminder, please to tell someone you know. Tell a couple of people you know about something you should know. Maybe it'll come up in conversation if you share something you learned in today's episode. But invite them to listen. I would appreciate it. I'm micahruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Buffet Brawlers. Glory holes gone wrong. Cannibalistic Castration cabins. Public poopers. These are just a few of the crazy topics you'll hear covered on Excuse Me, that's Illegal, the pettiest podcast around. Whether you need a break from all that murdery true crime stuff or just enjoy hearing hilarious stories told in a unique way, I got what you need. I'm Leroy Luna, your fearless host chauffeur. So come hop in my minivan and let's go for a ride. I promise you probably won't be disappointed. Excuse me, that's Illegal is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, basically everywhere you consume podcasts with new episodes dropping on the 10th, 20th, and 30th of the month. Baby. There is a fascinating and unique podcast I'd like you to check out as I have. It's called Only One in the Room. A few years back, Laura Cathcart Robbins attended a writer's retreat where out of 600 attendees, she was the only black one. So later she wrote about her experience and the article went viral because people understand what it feels like to be the only one in the room. Only one in the room is for anyone who has ever felt alone in a room full of people. I bet you've had that feeling. Listen and you'll hear guests like Hillary Phelps, sister of Olympian Michael Phelps, sharing her story of her secret addiction, former Fox News reporter Christine O'Donnell, who was fired after one of her social media posts was taken out of context. Context Only One in the Room was named a top podcast by Reader's Digest, the Manual, and Bustle magazines. Every week, Laura and her co host, Scott Slaughter invites you to join them for an hour and lose yourself in someone's only one story. Check out Only One in the Room. Wherever you get your podcasts.