Hello, hello and welcome to Sheep Assisted the Genz mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a psychology student at the University of Pennsylvania. Let's get into it. Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini. This weeks guest is Jeffrey Hall
and we are talking loneliness. So we know that for generations, 50 years of research has found that there is a period of life that roughly happens between around 15 to 25 where people have the most friends are going to ever have. They spend the most time being social, they're ever going to be social. They spend the most time getting to know new people. After about 25 years old, people tend to leave college. They tend to work. They may move around a lot, pursue graduate education.
They may change jobs a lot. They may move out of their family of origin, their home. All of these things precipitate the loss of friendships. People don't think about how context creates opportunities for friendships or even very much dictate who it is that you're going to become friends or or a romantic relationship with.
As a consequence, when we leave environments where it's easy to make friends because they're always around, we actually struggle with it because it was so easy before. So what will happen is people will go. Well, there must be something wrong with me now because friendship is hard now, but it wasn't hard then. What people rarely do comparatively is go.
It was easy then because there are people everywhere and they're always up for hanging out and there are a lot of cool things to do. They tend to think that their deficiency in making friendship is because of something that they did. And I'm here to say there's nothing wrong with you. It's absolutely sensical that you would be in an environment that makes it hard to make friends, and that's just kind of how it is.
Part of the successes in the young adulthood of getting jobs and moving on and going to Graduate School and falling the love are also the very impediments to keeping friendships. So people tend to actually go through a period after 25 where there's a steady decline of the number of friends people have and the time that people spend with friends. That goes all the way until 40.
But there's also an incredible high degree of connection, companionship and friendship during that time of life. So young folks experience two things simultaneously, which are actually really difficult to resolve. 1 is a sense of loneliness. And the reason that happens is you leave school, you feel lonely, you break up with somebody, you feel devastated, you lose a friend because of conflict. And that's difficult and hard.
But on the other hand, this is a time of life where you have more companionship, you have a great sense of connection to people around you. So what's weird is, is that although, yes, it's the case that we should be concerned about young adult loneliness, we should also be quite aware that this is full of connection as well. And I think that loneliness in part comes from a feeling of wanting to be known at a deep and intimate level.
And that happens, I think, in the process of winnowing down all of that social world into specific close intimate relationships with one another. And that's a a gradual process that we have collectively tended to put off farther and farther into the future as we delay marriage, delay having children, delay kind of making those big decisions in life. One thing I'm a big proponent of when we think about loneliness, when we think about connection, it is both.
And it is both the case that we can be social and be, you know, talking a lot of different people and meeting new people and have a big social network. And it's also the case that quality, close intimate connection leads to higher well-being, less loneliness. They're both. But The thing is, is that tension that you feel, right? I'm around a lot of people, but I don't really feel fully known is actually part of the human experience.
And it's the part of the human experience that I think is particularly developmentally salient and powerful at that period of life. You're sorting out who you are and who you are to others. One of the benefits I've heard about middle age, what I think is very funny is the although people experience the lowest level of their well-being in
their life at middle age. Once they sort of realized that, you know, they know fully who they are, they have a lot more confidence in who I am and what I've accomplished in my life and
what I'm all about. A lot of the concerns of young adulthood and fall away and they're there tends to be an uptick in the middle-aged people's well-being because they go, well, you know what, my life, all those kind of crises about who I am and where I am and what's all happening have passed and now I'm able to fully embrace myself as who I'm in. But that's a long period of time between 25 to 40 to get really comfortable with you, where you're at.
And during that decline comes with also a lot of very difficult questions. What is your career going to be? What are you going to do about family? What are you going to do about relationships? So I think a both end perspective allows for us to understand that doesn't make you weird or bad or somehow deficient because you feel lonely while you're being social. Feeling lonely is part of what it means to be a social person. You would never feel lonely if you didn't care about other people.
It's a good thing to care about people. You will have better and more high quality days, weeks and months if you respond to your feelings of loneliness in ways that are pro social, inviting people, taking opportunities to talk, reaching out to friends, even through, you know, texting or whatever channels that you want.
But you have to respond to it. You have to treat it as a sign of rather than I'm lonely and I shouldn't do anything right, that this is a bad thing and there's something wrong with me. Instead, this is good. I feel lonely, which means that I'm going to take action. It's a functional system like hunger to motivate good quality actions.
So I would say that for those who are in the chronic lonely state, this is one of the last things I would like to say about this is that there is definitely treatments and therapies
available. So if you are a person who feels as if your loneliness is a state that just doesn't change and you're in, you're out, you still constantly are feeling lonely no matter what you do. You don't feel different, you know, you might benefit from from treatments that focus on momentous hand in hand with depression or whatever it else that you're coping.