An article I saw in The Wall Street Journal before the holidays really hit home with me on issues around aging, health and lifestyle. More Than Ever, Americans Age Alone, published two weeks before Christmas, profiles several baby boomers to illustrate a larger trend of aging alone, and the risk that doing so poses to health and happiness. The article claims that loneliness “is as closely linked to early mortality as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day or consuming more than six alcoholic drinks a day, and goes on to say that eight million Americans that have no close kin, a figure that is expected to rise. The author attributes this statistic to the fact that “[t]he baby boomers prized individuality and generally had fewer children and ended marriages in greater numbers than previous generations.” Isolated adults “are at an increased risk of depression, cognitive decline and dementia, and...social relationships influence their blood pressure and immune functioning, as well as whether people take their medications.”

Worrisome stuff, to be sure, and reading such an article at the height of the holiday season was sure to be an emotional trigger for many, myself included. I recognize my good fortune in having a number of close friendships and a loving wife. Much of my work life, however, is spent alone reading, writing or researching. My wife spent 2018 completing a degree in mathematics, which meant many of her evenings and weekends in the past year were dedicated to her studies. As a result of decisions we each made in our younger days, we live great distances away from some of our closest friends and from other family members. Neither of us has the easy closeness that can result from staying in or returning to your hometown, but we are not interested in sacrificing the good things in the lives we have built together for a chance for one of us to capture that feeling. I have known for some time that, because of my work and life situation, it would be important to make a concerted effort to attend to my own social needs.

Reading the article brought to mind the excellent 2012 book, Triumphs of Experience by the former director of the famous Study of Adult Development at Harvard University, George Vaillant. This study has tracked the lives of 268 Harvard University male undergraduates from the classes of 1939-1944, and continues tracking the surviving men today. The book is well worth the time to read, and is full of interesting conclusions, although I found reading the book required considerable focus. Some of the most important takeaways can be absorbed more quickly through reading this 2017 Harvard Gazette article or watching the November 2015 TED Talk of the study’s current director, Robert Waldinger. The five important points he shared from eighty-years-and-counting study with the TED audience and over twelve million YouTube viewers to date:

1. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

2. Money and power correlate poorly with happiness; it is better for you to be content with your work.

3. We can become happier in life as we proceed through it - our start in life need not determine our path.

4. Connection with others is essential for joy, and becomes even more so as we age.

5. Coping well with challenges makes you happier.

The learnings of the Harvard study, commonly known as the Grant Study, were further validated by a meta study done by Brigham Young University’s Julianne Holt-Lunstad. Her review of 148 independent studies on loneliness, cited in the Wall Street Journal article, found that greater social connection was associated with a fifty percent lower risk of early death. It seems clear that humans are meant to be social animals, building and maintaining caring relationships is important, and that long-term isolation can be very unhealthy. Because each of our life situations is different, we may not find the kind of love and validation we need among family or work colleagues, and thus need to seek to cultivate relationships elsewhere. Dr. Waldinger points out that connectedness - relationships - increases in importance with age. The point about improving our lives even if we are not born into great circumstances is also exceptionally important to retain. The research shows that one can influence one’s own trajectory, and need not maintain a fatalistic attitude towards aging and happiness.

Many of us have made our lives in cities far away from our hometowns. Some never married; some divorced and never remarried. Some are childless; some are only children. Some of us have lost our parents; others have parents and/or siblings but those relationships may be distant or irreparably broken. Some work alone or in environments that do not lend themselves well to connectedness or cultivating friendships. Those for whom connectedness does not come naturally or easily might need to take affirmative steps to build and maintain a connected life.

The government of the UK felt strongly enough about the public health problems associated with loneliness that it established the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness in 2018, and appointed a Minister of Loneliness. The Campaign to End Loneliness, also UK-based, says there are nine million lonely people in the UK - more than one in eight Britons. Each website is full of data and reports about the impact of loneliness on health, and advice for public officials and others with a public health responsibility. What advice is there for those who seek to take care of themselves? The Campaign to End Loneliness offers the following:

• Think about yourself. Invite friends or family to visit. When you feel lonely, you may not think others want to visit. People do often respond to invitations and will be willing to spend some quality time with you.

• Look after yourself. Taking steps to improve your health, eating better, exercising gently or taking other steps to be active can help you relax more fully in your own company.

• Find local activities. The Campaign’s website mentions some UK-based groups, but every community has local activities available for all interests and ages.

• Speak to a health worker if you feel very lonely. Long term loneliness could contribute to later depression and other help problems. A physician should be able to direct you to local services that can help.

• Volunteer your time. Causes large and small are constantly in need of help. Volunteering can help one feel good about making a difference and provide social contact. The Campaign cites UK organization, but in the US, the United Way is probably the best-known volunteer clearinghouse.

Loneliness does not only affect older adults. The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness defines loneliness as “a subjective, unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship, which happens when we have a mismatch between the quantity of social relationships that we have, and those that we want.” All of us will feel this way occasionally or for stretches of time during our lives. Creating opportunities to mitigate loneliness can support mental health during these inevitable stretches. Below I share a couple of successes I have found cultivating connectedness in my own life.

• Creating and maintaining rituals with friends or family. Not long after moving back to Austin, I discovered that a good friend from college who lived nearby had been writing a blog devoted exclusively to reviewing books he had read. I had wanted to broaden my reading interests away from business and economics, but had no plan for making myself do so. Reading my friend’s blog also intrigued me, as I discovered interests of his of which I never knew during our college days. We started a monthly book club, invited other friends to join us over the years, and have managed to keep it going into its second decade. Maintaining this ritual has extended both of our social circles and introduced us to a much wider variety of topics and viewpoints than any of us would have found on our own. Whatever the interest is - reading, golf, quilting, role-playing games, or a thousand other possibilities - finding or building a consistent, meet-in-person, group activity around it can be very rewarding.

• Daring to reconnect. I completed all of my formal education before social networks were ubiquitous, so with few exceptions, moving around meant losing touch with nearly everyone from my early years. I also never joined Facebook, as my concerns about privacy, apparently well-founded, overrode my desire to join the world’s largest social network. A couple of years ago, one longtime friend who is active on Facebook told me of my high school’s upcoming thirtieth reunion. He could not make it because he lives in London and could not get away to upstate New York for a weekend. Even though it was easier for me to arrange a trip to go, I struggled with the idea of facing a bunch of people I had not seen since high school. What would they be like? What would we have in common other than faded, old memories? I had no desire to relive the past, but my curiosity about what people were doing now, quite possibly piqued by my absence from Facebook, outweighed my objections in the end. The result was a great weekend of reconnecting, and the resurrection of some old friendships that I thought were relegated forever to the past. My key learning from the weekend was that many, if not most, of the awkward, immature adolescents we were have grown up to be kind, warm, engaging, interesting people. Unlike similar people I might meet today, I share a bond with this group that comes from a common past. Attending the reunion in a lot of ways opened a door to myself that I had nailed shut. Having rekindled those friendships has provided more social opportunities since the reunion and I expect will continue to do so in the years to come. The rewards I got from attending far outweighed the risks of feeling bored or embarrassed for a short time.

Good things can happen when you attend reunions.

For many of us, especially those of us who sincerely value our independence, the struggle against bouts of loneliness is real. In our younger years we may put career and achievement ahead of connectedness. While this may not necessarily be a mistake, time has taught me that taking the time and making the effort to prioritize friendships, family and relationships can pay off as we get older or as life circumstances change. While reading the Journal article that prompted me to write this, I could not help but wonder what decisions the people profiled had made in their youths that contributed to the isolation they found themselves experiencing. We cannot control much of what happens to us in our lives, but just as we can improve our physical health with attention to diet and exercise habits, we can combat our own feelings of loneliness by regularly making a mindful effort to enjoy activities with a variety of friends, family and associates.

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