Your brain is struggling with social distancing! Why?
Social distancing is challenging for most of us. With the stay-at-home orders, rates of depression and anxiety have gone up. Many people are feeling sadder, lonelier, and more disconnected. Unfortunately, this trend towards disconnection began long before our social isolation, but it is getting worse in the midst of the pandemic. We will look at the reasons why social isolation is difficult, why connection matters, and what we can do about it.
Evolution
We all have a fundamental desire to be part of a group, but why? We evolved the need to be in groups for protection, to protect ourselves from predators, and increase our chances of getting food. Back then, social separation and isolation meant death. Our brains signal thirst and hunger to alert us to the danger of not finding food and water. Our brains evolved to feel social separation from the group as painful, to signal that we were in danger. Researchers observed people who are lonely and found that they wake up more at night and remain vigilant during sleep(Cacciopo). Signaling the feeling of pain is our brain’s way of protecting us from predators, as it knows being on its own is dangerous.
Our Brains
We see this pain from social exclusion show up in a simple cyber-ball experiment. In a study, three people were virtually tossing a ball through a computer simulation. Lieberman found that when the two players began only tossing the ball to each other and left out the third player, that third player’s anterior cingulate cortex often lit up, which is the part of the brain responsible for our emotional reaction to physical pain. They then gave Tylenol to participants for three weeks before the experiment and played the game again. This time, when they excluded the player from the ball tosses, the anterior cingulate cortex did not light up. In other words, “Tylenol made the brain’s pain network less sensitive to the pain of rejection”.
In another experiment, people who had just gone through an unwanted break-up were asked to look at a photo of their ex-partner and think about being rejected. Kross found that the secondary somatosensory cortex and dorsal posterior insula (responsible for detecting pain) became active. In other words, social rejection and social disconnection hurts.
However, connection shows up differently in the brain. Being cared for promotes opioid-based pleasure processes in the brain (Lieberman). Also, providing support to a partner in distress releases oxytocin and lights up our reward system (Brown). In other words, our brains are wired to want to be cared for and to care for others. When people had to estimate how steep a hill was, they estimated it was steeper when standing alone, and less steep when a friend was next to them. In other words, life can feel more challenging and overwhelming if we are on our own, and we need others to get through the hard times (Schnalle).
Our brains are designed to connect with and understand other people’s feelings. When we are trying to understand how someone is feeling, we often unconsciously mimic that person’s facial expressions. When we do this, it tells our brain how they are feeling. Botox, which paralyzes the muscles in the face, makes it difficult for people to mimic facial expressions. As a result, they are worse at recognizing emotions in others, which makes empathy hard.
The Goal
By examining evolution and neuroscience, we know we should be connecting with other people, but what does that really mean? Science has identified two kinds of connection that we need: social support and social integration. Social support, or human connection, is being able to share your thoughts and feelings with a person, and call on them when you are going through a difficult time. Many people have between zero and three people they can connect with on this level in a lifetime. We also need social integration or to feel part of a larger community. We will be focusing on human connection.
The Disconnection Trend
Unfortunately, levels of real human connection are going down. In 2018, an insurance company, Cigna, surveyed more than 20,000 U.S. adults ages 18 years and older. They found that “nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent). One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them. Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).” Similarly, McPherson found that “the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled” from 1985 to 2004. This trend is going in the wrong direction.
Benefits of Human Connection
Happiness. Robert Waldinger, studying Harvard students over time 1938 in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.
Physical Health. Julianne Holt-Lunstad conducted a meta-study and found that the best predictors of people living longer were high social support and social integration. From the Harvard study, we know that the “people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.” This was more predictive than cholesterol levels.
Mental Health. We also know that with feelings of social isolation come higher levels of depression and anxiety, addiction, poor health, and extremist behavior—all of which have been increasing over time.
Human Connection is Hard
There are many reasons we don’t share our thoughts and feelings. Niobe Way highlights that our society tells men to be strong, independent, and to not show weakness. Men think if they share their feelings they will look weak, people won’t like them, and they will lose that connection. So instead, many men talk about safe topics and avoid talking about their feelings, so they appear strong. Gilligan asserts that we socialize women to be nice, and we threaten that if they create conflict (by sharing their feelings), people will think they are not nice, and people will not like them. As a result, many people are scared that if we share our true feelings, we will lose that connection that we so deeply desire.
Brene Brown shares that shame, or the fear that we are not good enough, prevents us from sharing our feelings. She explains that we are afraid that if people see our imperfections, they will not like what they see, and they may leave us. We desire connection, but fear that sharing our vulnerabilities and saying what we truly feel may cause disconnection. However, Brown believes that sharing our insecurities is not weakness. In fact, it is courageous because it is one of the hardest things we can do, and it is the only way to connection. Unfortunately, in trying to preserve a connection, many of us keep our feelings to ourselves, and in the process we give up real human connection.
How can we build real human connection, given social distancing?
1. Take inventory: Identify where you are with your close relationships: do you have the amount and quality you want? Pick one or two people you would like to connect more deeply with during this time.
2. With that person (preferably face-to-face or on screen), ask them questions to understand them on a deeper level (and share your answers with them as well):
· Happy and hurtful experiences from your childhood and adult life
· Your fears, and things that make you sad and afraid
· Your hopes, desires, and dreams
· Things you may be embarrassed about, ashamed of, and your insecurities
· For some, it is easier to work through a list of questions with the person: Link to questions on my website
· Be sure to move beyond surface human connection, where you talk about safe topics like cars, sports, daily activities
3. Begin a ritual: Set up a time daily or weekly to check in and get to know this person again. You can set family expectations or friend goals: how much you would like to communicate.
4. Try to maintain Gottman’s 5:1 ratio: five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Positive interactions include giving compliments, doing nice things, or laughing with this person. Invest in the relationship buy building a strong foundation, so when you need to have the hard conversations, you know you are on solid ground.
5. Reach out to others who may feel socially isolated, and those who might need physical or emotional attention. Ask them how they are feeling about things, not just how they’ve been keeping busy. You may want to reach out to those that are risking their lives, as they work at hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants, etc.
