Storytelling with Impact

Kasley Killam: Why social health is key to happiness and longevity @ TEDNext 2024

February 20, 2025/in Health, Mental Health, Relationships, Social Health, TED Talk/by Mark Lovett

During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fifth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

When I was growing up, physical health was talked about as the key to longevity. Are you eating a balanced diet? Getting enough exercise? And getting an annual checkup? Mental health was rarely talked about in any depth, and the notion of “social health”, well, I can’t recall ever hearing it mentioned.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

So I was intrigued with Kasley Killam took the stage at TEDNext to talk about the importance of social health, and what each of us can do to strength it. Her story reminded me that I don’t spend enough time reaching out to friends as a way to keep important relationships alive and vibrant. And it inspired me to dig deeper on the topic.

I discovered the general concept is not new, as the World Health Organization made mention of social well-being in their constitution. But it never seemed to get its due until the 2020 pandemic. That’s when there was a noted increase in attention being paid to the effects of isolation and lack of social interaction.

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. ~ Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization, signed July 22, 1946

And in a recent paper entitled: On social health: history, conceptualization, and population patterning, David Matthew Doyle and Bruce Link define their idea of social health “...as adequate quantity and quality of relationships in a particular context to meet an individual’s need for meaningful human connection.“

How do you see your own level of social health? To what extent is your personal story affected by the interactions that you have with other people? As I’ve talked about in the past, threads from the stories we’ve heard become woven into the tapestry that defines our true nature. And when we cut ourselves off from the diversity of narratives that surround us, we limit the richness of our own story.

Transcript

So, a couple years ago, a woman I know, who I’ll call Maya, went through a lot of big changes in a short amount of time. She got married. She and her husband moved for his job to a new city where she didn’t know anyone. She started a new role working from home. All the while managing her dad’s new diagnosis of dementia. And to manage the stress of all this change, Maya doubled down on her physical and mental mental health.

She exercised almost every day. She ate healthy foods. She went to therapy once a week. And these actions really helped. Her body got stronger. Her mind got more resilient, but only up to a point. She was still struggling, often losing sleep in the middle of the night, feeling unfocused, unmotivated during the day. Maya was doing everything that doctors typically tell us to do to be physically and mentally healthy. And yet, something was missing.

What if I told you that what was missing for Maya is also missing for billions of people around the world, and that it might be missing for you? What if I told you that not having it undermines our other efforts to be healthy and can even shorten your lifespan? I’ve been studying this for over a decade and I’ve discovered that the traditional way we think about health is incomplete.

By thinking of our health as primarily physical and mental, we overlook what I believe is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time, social health. While physical health is about our bodies, and mental health is about our minds, social health is about our relationships. And if you haven’t heard this term before, that’s because it hasn’t yet made its way into mainstream vocabulary. Yet, it is equally important.

Maya didn’t yet have a sense of community in her new home. She wasn’t seeing her family or her friends or her co-workers in person anymore. And she often went weeks only spending quality time with her husband. Her story shows us that we can’t be fully healthy, we can’t thrive if we take care of our bodies and our minds, but not our relationships.

Similar to Maya, hundreds of millions of people around the world go weeks at a time without talking to a single friend or family member. Globally, one in four people feel lonely. And 20% of adults worldwide don’t feel like they have anyone they can reach out to for support. Think about that.

One in five people you encounter may feel like they have no one. This is more than heartbreaking. It’s also a public health crisis. Disconnection triggers stress in the body. It weakens people’s immune systems. It puts them at a risk, greater risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, depression, and early death.

Social health is essential for longevity. So, you might be wondering, what does it look like to be socially healthy? What does that even mean? Well, it’s about developing close relationships with your family, your friends, your partner, yourself. It’s about having regular interaction with your co-workers, your neighbors. It’s about feeling like you belong to a community.

Being socially healthy is about having the right quantity and quality of connection for you. And Maya’s story is one example of how social health challenges come up. In my work, I hear many others.

Stories like Jay, a freshman in college who’s eager to get involved in campus yet is having a hard time fitting in with people in his dorm and often feels home. homesick.

Or Serena and Ally, a couple juggling the chaos of young kids with demanding jobs. They rarely have time to see friends or spend time one-on-one.

Or Henry, recently retired, who cherishes time with his spouse, and yet feels untethered without his team anymore and wishes he could see his kids and grandkids more often.

These stories show that social health is relevant to each of us at every life stage. So, if you’re not sure where to start, try the 531 guideline from my book. It goes like this. Aim to interact with five different people each week to strengthen at least three close relationships overall and to spend one hour a day connecting. Let’s dig into these.

So, first, interact with five different people each week. Just like eating a variety of vegetables and other food groups is more nutritious, research has shown that interacting with a variety of people is more rewarding. So, your five could include close loved ones, casual acquaintances, even complete strangers.

In fact, in one study that I love, people who just smiled, made eye contact, and chitchated with a barista felt happier and a greater sense of belonging than people who just rushed to get their coffee and go.

Next, strengthen at least three close relationships. Okay, we’ve all heard of a to-do list, but I would like to invite you to write a to-love list. Who matters most to you? Who can you be yourself with? Make sure that you invest in the names of at least three of the people that you write down by scheduling regular time together, by showing a genuine interest in their lives and also by opening up about the experiences that you’re going through.

And I’m often asked, does it have to be in person? Right? Does texting count? Studies have shown that face to face is ideal. So do that whenever possible. But there are absolutely benefits to staying connected virtually.

And last, spend 1 hour a day on meaningful connection. Okay, if you’re an introvert right now, you’re probably thinking, “One hour sounds like a lot.” I get it. It might be surprising, but I’m actually also an introvert. However, keep in mind that just like getting 8 hours of sleep at night, the exact amount that’s right for you personally might be higher or lower.

But if you are thinking that 1 hour a day sounds like way too much because you’re just way too busy. I challenge you. Adults in the US spend an average of 4 and a half hours each day on their smartphones. So instead of scrolling on social media, text a friend. Instead of reading news headlines, write a thank you card. Instead of listening to a podcast, call a family member.

Maya put this into practice by scheduling recurring hangouts with the new local friend that she made, by attending community events and dropping cards off in her neighbors mailboxes, by planning trips to see family and inviting friends in other cities to come visit.

And bolstering her social health made more of a difference than focusing solely on her physical and mental health ever could. And I know this because Maya is actually me. I am so passionate about sharing tools to be socially healthy because honestly I need them too. And the 531 guideline is one way that we can be proactive and intentional about our relationships. And that is really the point. Be proactive and intentional about your social health.

So zooming out beyond the steps that you and I take individually together, we need to shape a society that thrives through social health.

Over the next decade, I envisioned educators championing social health in schools. And just like kids build their physical muscles in gym class, they’ll exercise their social muscles in connection class.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

Over the next decade, I believe that social health will become as ingrained in our collective consciousness as mental health is today.

Because not that long ago, mental health was a taboo topic shrouded in stigma. And now public figures talk openly about it. There’s an entire industry to support it. And more and more people think of going to therapy like going to the gym. In this future, loneliness will subside just like smoking subsided when we recognized and treated it as a public health issue.

In this future, I hope that social health will become so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture that no one needs the 531 guideline anymore. So to get there, make relationships your priority, not only for you, but also for the people you love.

Because the beauty of nurturing your own social health is that it naturally enriches the social health of everyone you connect with.

Thank you.

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Rhaina Cohen: Why Friendship Can Be Just As Meaningful as Romantic Love @ TEDNext 2024

November 26, 2024/in Emotions, Family, Friendship, Relationships/by Mark Lovett

I’ve always thought of relationships as constituting the fabric of life, with those closest to us becoming metaphorical threads woven into our human tapestry. But are all threads treated as equals? In her TED Talk, Rhaina Cohen speaks to “…a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance.”

I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but that statement rings true for me. In my experience, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, the most prevalent question is, “Are you seeing anyone?” It seems that not having someone to share your life with means your life is somehow incomplete. Which is to say, the story of your life is missing a few chapters. But Rhaina has a different take — one in which friendships can be just as rewarding.

Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there’s an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship.

Rhaina uses a variety of story blocks, from her own experiences, to an American Supreme Court case, platonic co-parenting in Canada, statistics about marriage, a reflection on ancient Rome, and platonic life partners, to name a few. While a lot of TED Talks deal with learning something new, in this case I felt her talk was more about shifting perspectives, encouraging the audience to think beyond the status quo when it comes to the value of the friendships we build and maintain.

Transcript

There is a Supreme Court case that you could mistake for a sermon. It’s the case that recognized that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Here is a sense of what Justice Kennedy wrote: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.”

He goes on to say that marriage offers care and companionship, and the decision argues that these are basic human needs that everyone should have access to, whether they’re straight or queer. Validating.

But what do these words say to you if you’re single? Anybody single here? I mean, there should be quite a few of you, because in the US, the percentage of American adults who have never been married is at a record high. Married people, you’re not off the hook. I’m going to get a little morbid for a moment and have you contemplate what happens if your marriage doesn’t last until the end of your life, whether because of divorce or outliving your spouse? In the US, about 30 percent of women over 65 are widows.

The reality is, any one of us is unlikely to have a spouse by our side until our last dying breath. Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there’s an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship.

I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into. We would see each other most days of the week, be each other’s plus-ones to parties. My friend has this habit of grabbing my hand to hold, including when I brought her to my office, and then I’d have to be like, no, not in the office.

(Laughter)

But I mean, I wouldn’t let my husband do that in the office either. It’s just, you know, setting matters. But it was only an issue because for us, affection is a reflex. And I knew it couldn’t be just us. I went out and interviewed dozens of people who had a friendship like ours, and I wrote a book about them. And the kinds of friends that I spoke to, they don’t just have a weekly phone call. They’re friends like these.

Natasha and Linda are the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada. And this is them with their teenage son on vacation. Joe and John have been best friends for many decades. When Joe was struggling with alcohol and drug use, John got him into recovery. And then John decided that to support his friend, he would also become sober. Joy took care of her friend Hannah during Hannah’s six-year battle with ovarian cancer. And that included flying out to New York, where Hannah got specialized treatment. Joy had trouble actually sleeping overnight in the hospital, because she was too busy watching to make sure her friend’s chest was still rising and falling.

Some of the friends that I spoke to had this friendship occupy the space that’s conventionally given to a romantic partner. Some had this kind of friendship and a romantic partner. It’s not either/or. As I spoke to these people, I realized that they were at the frontier of friendship, helping us imagine how much more we could ask of our platonic relationships. Which is true, but another way of looking at it is they’re doing something retro, even ancient.

In ancient Rome, friends would talk about each other as “half of my soul,” or “the greater part of my soul.” The kind of language we now use in romantic relationships. From China to Jordan to England, there was a practice called “sworn brotherhood, where male friends would go through a ritual that would turn them into brothers.

About a century ago, friends would sit for portraits like these, with their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies up close. What I took from this history is that if we don’t limit friendship, it can be central to our lives.

But today, not everybody recognizes that. I spoke to a mother who really tried to get her son to make dating a priority because she wanted him to find emotional wholeness. And her son told her, “I found it in my platonic life partner.” His best friend, who he had known since high school, who had moved across the country to be near him, to live with him, in fact.

The mother said, “I don’t understand how you can be partners with someone you’re not romantic with.” Understandable as a reaction in a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance. We get that message from rom-coms, from Supreme Court justices, also from policy.

So Joy, during the six years she took care of her friend, she was not entitled to family medical leave. When Hannah died, Joy was not entitled to bereavement leave, because the two of them were considered unrelated. In our government and workplace policies, friendship is invisible.

Sometimes this diminishment of friendship comes from the outside, and sometimes it comes from the inside. A woman wrote to me about her friend who she considers her person. She spent so much time with her friend’s kids that she was given car seats for them. She’s also divorced and tried to find a new spouse because there was a hole she wanted to fill in her life. Then she read stories of people like Joe and John in an article I’d written. And she realized there was no hole. She had been happy all along, but she hadn’t known, been made to believe that it was possible to have a friend be enough.

If we can recognize what friendship has the potential to be, and if we can recognize that there is more than one kind of significant other then we can imagine more ways for us to find love and care and companionship. And we can support people who have these kinds of friendships. So the mother I mentioned, she’s completely changed her tune. She now admires the commitment between her son and her son’s friend.

I feel like I get to live in a future world where you can just build a life with your friends. I live not only with my husband but also two of my closest friends. One of them we kind of like had a courtship process to recruit him to come to our city and live with us. The other had a job in our city, and we invited her to stay.

It didn’t take long for us to start scheming with about a half dozen other friends, about trying to buy property together. The kind of place where we could raise kids alongside one another, our working title for the place is “The Village.” I don’t know if this will work out. I can keep you posted about it, but if it does, I feel really confident about one thing. That if one of us has a migraine at 6am and there’s a toddler bouncing around, or we get a terrifying diagnosis, we will not be a lonely person calling out only for no one to answer.

And this is what I hope for all of us. That we feel like we have permission to share our lives with whoever we are lucky enough to find, whether that’s a spouse, a sibling or a house full of friends.

Thank you.

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