 played. So again, I want to welcome you to this open forum discussion. And again, I want to emphasize what I think will be a really dynamic and interesting and important discussion about loneliness. Loneliness is in some ways a feeling. It's a subjective evaluation that all of us understand at some level. But what we're interested in is the impairment from chronic loneliness and trying to understand the causes and the modifiable aspects of the process that leads to so many people being impaired in their lives and their sense of well-being and their ability to function. And I think it will be very dynamic to think about this complex set of issues from multiple perspectives. And I'm very much looking forward to this discussion. And I want to like each of the panel members to introduce themselves briefly and give you an initial sense of their perspective that they're bringing to this complex set of issues. So, Lori. Hey, thanks so much for coming. So I'm Dr. Lori Santos. I'm a professor of psychology at Yale University. But I'm also a head of college at Yale. So Yale is kind of like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where it has like Gryffindor and Slytherin and things. And that means I live with students on campus as a head of college. And that was when I saw the mental health crisis really up close and personal. I saw loneliness in the trenches in this spot where students are supposed to be hanging out with one another in the dining hall. I saw them kind of feeling this awful sense they just didn't belong and that they just didn't feel connected to others. And so what I did was I retrained in the science of well-being to try to learn what the science says about how we can reduce things like loneliness and other things that impact our well-being. So that's what I'll be talking about today a little bit of some of the science of what we know about why we might be lonely and what the kinds of things we can do to reduce it. Ed Weissing, I'm the director of policy at the Wellcome Trust which is a big funder of medical research. I am not a scientist so I will bring absolutely no scientific insight to this discussion. So I apologize in advance. What we are interested in doing though and welcome is bringing the world together around mental health. So we want to change the way mental health science works, how we do mental health research, bringing together neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, a whole bunch of other people but critically to understand how we're going to tackle mental health by looking at what's going on in the world and what is going on with people and how people behave and what people feel because that is key to mental health and loneliness is going to be one of those big themes that we'll have to think about. When I think about mental health and I think about loneliness for me this comes back to a question of belonging and that feeling of belonging. I grew up in the north of England and discovering my identity in my teenage years as a gay man I felt no sense of belonging often with my peers and I felt very excluded. I know that's not an uncommon experience. I found music for me and membership of orchestras and bands was the way that I found my sense of belonging. But it feels to me that when we talk about mental health and loneliness that sense of togetherness of oneness is really important to cultivate in building the resilience in mental health. When I look around this week and thank you to everyone for allowing this circus to come to town I see these tribes with the badges and different color badges means you can get different things and it really cultivates sometimes a negative sense of belonging because you're thinking I'm in that tribe or I'm in that tribe and my question really for us and I hope for all of us is how can we cultivate this underlying sense of belonging of looking out for one another and that sense has been in the discussions we've had all week on mental health as I say we're announcing a big program this week $260 million to do this research and to invest into it but how can we make society work so that we can create more belonging as an underpinning sense of tackling loneliness. Good afternoon my name is Kim Samuel I come from Canada I am founder of the Samuel Center for Social Connectedness I'm a professor of practice at McGill University and really delighted to be here on this panel I love that this is an open session and love that it's taking place in in a school and and I love that you talked to talked about the importance of belonging I think about belonging a lot I think that we are all born with a right which I see as a human right of belonging really a God given right of belonging and yet at many times in our lives we can feel lonely and we can feel stigmatized or humiliated or ashamed and I I feel that none of that should happen and that we need to work very hard to prevent it and yet I see this not as a disease but as something that is entirely preventable as long as we have resilience and support each other so when I look at social isolation of which I see loneliness as a major component I've always had in my mind this vision of a person who is sitting all alone at the bottom of a well initially about 20 years ago I saw that because of my my father who had had a very serious brain injury was in a coma for three months and then a rehabilitation hospital for another three months and when he woke up very slowly I saw it wasn't about the many disabilities that he had it was this other pain that was present that came to me to to be seen as isolation and for my mother as his primary caregiver having been his wife of 40 years now having this this other designation and I realized that it wasn't because of what had happened to him it wasn't because of the disabilities it was because of the way people even well-meaning people valued him as being different and I would say even even less than and so I just decided at that point that I would be spending the rest of my life working on this and teaching and in writing and in spending time with younger people with older people and realizing that while we can talk about this and should talk about this in the genre of of well-being in the genre of mental health that actually this is an experience that I believe is as old as humanity and that if we if we value its significance then we'll really be compelled to do something thank you um for me loneliness is something which is very personal I I was in therapy most of 2017 and 18 to realize that the root cause of the physical symptoms and the emotional symptoms were loneliness and it was funny because for me it didn't look like a man sitting on the bottom of the well because I was in a relationship I was in an organization and I was a very confident person so it looked like I was very happy outside and little did I know that inside the subtler aspects were lonely and I was feeling somewhere that the intensity with which I was feeling things were not communicated to anyone around me and what I've been doing now is looking at bringing some of this work in my work with kids I'm teaching at a local school back in India and helping deal with working with kids who are displaced from their communities such that they build resilience and the language to be able to deal with loneliness speak about it speak their inner realities with their peer group such that they can cope with their situation better so that's the perspective I look forward to bring I run a company called the empathy business and I've started a campaign called the truth about technology because I think despite the promises of the tech companies to bring the world closer that actually technology is fueling the loneliness and empathy deficit we have in our lives and like Baron this is this is personal to me although the irony of me bringing my phone on here is not not lost to me so I think I have to admit I am somewhat addicted maybe like many of us in this room but this is a really important topic to me personally because my nephew was the first first child in the UK to be diagnosed with games addiction and my son has a problematic relationship with technology so I see it all around and I am worried about that and the UK is really recognizing loneliness for the first time ever and a lot of that is thanks to an MP Joe Cox who was brutally murdered who has done some great work in the UK and I'd like to recognize her now we now in the UK we have as of January 2018 we have a minister of loneliness because we know that loneliness is an early predictor of death they say it's the equivalent physically of smoking 15 cigarettes a day it's linked to increased cardiovascular disease so I think in the UK we are starting to be aware of that and that can only be a good thing so I would like to explore with you today whether technology is really increasing our social interactions or decreasing them and the impact impact that has on us and our children so that's a wonderful introduction to the complexity and the different dimensions of this set of problems and I want to unpack this a bit more as a way to ask some deeper questions here because on one hand what we've been talking about is a set of subjective feelings and we say lonely but of course sadness and loneliness go together and sadness and loneliness are often responses to loss feeling diminished as a person being left out and devalued or disconnected at the other end of the spectrum there is literally measurable levels of social connectedness how many people we interact with how many people we have a real connection with and then there's a set of things in the middle which is a subjective evaluation of being valued that could be separate from just whether you feel moments of deep sadness or whether you feel loneliness or whether you look sad or lonely that make people feel socially diminished and and this idea that what aspect of these processes and this is now to form a question if we want to have an impact into the causes and impairments from the set of problems what would you focus on either as something we need to understand more deeply in terms of causes or something we need to target to change to decrease the impairment and I'll start again with you yeah so so I'll take the perspective of the science of well-being like some of the things that the science tells us about the things we can do to feel happier and one of the sad things from this research sad as a human not as a scientist because scientifically it's very interesting but as a human I'm like this kind of sucks is that all the research suggests that for many of the things we go after were motivated to do our minds are lying to us about the kinds of things that will make us feel better like we just seek out the wrong kinds of stuff and I think this happens in the domain of social connection often we don't realize how nice it would be just to have some time with the people we care about so we don't seek it out often we just don't realize how nice it would be to just make a connection with a stranger you know in a line at the bank or in a line like waiting for coffee somewhere we don't realize how important it is and there's some lovely empirical work that study this there's one fantastic study by the researcher Nick Epley who's a professor at the University of Chicago and he had this idea that one of the reasons that people tend to feel lonely is that they don't realize that simple conversations with other people might make them feel better and so he did this funny study of commuter is going to work this is on the L train a train in Chicago in the U.S. he went up to people and said do you want to be in a study okay you have to spend the rest of the train ride either enjoying your solitude or you have to spend the rest of the train ride talking to some random stranger who's sitting next to you on the train like spend the whole train ride talking to them so he has people predict people predict maybe like some of you in the audience will predict because you're looking at me like what which is that talking to the person next to you is just going to be weird like it's going to feel too close and kind of it's going to impinge on their privacy and it's just strange so people don't do it but what you find when you force people to talk to someone on the train is that people in that connection condition feel much better afterwards it improves your positive move to have that connection he finds that that positive mood increase occurs even across individuals who report being introverts even people who really don't think that it would make them feel better it actually makes them feel better and the title is famous paper is called mistakenly seeking solitude and that's his idea we're social animals but we sometimes forget that we just need to like take action to talk to people and make more connections so I think one of the hypotheses and one of the things I think that's a challenge is that even when we're feeling lonely even when we're feeling yucky we don't realize the right next steps is just to reach out and make these connections we kind of feel like it won't work in the way that it ultimately will whoever wants to go next yes anyway okay we're going to be more dynamic shall I just go ahead yes okay I wasn't sure what the order was I I would like to come at this from a different point of view which is which is that this doesn't only happen to individuals and what I mean by that is that that groups of people can be what other isolated and experience that and it could be it can be a calm I'm sure it is always a combination of what do I perceive as an individual but that's going to be greatly affected by the messages that I'm getting from others and just two brief examples one coming from the UK which probably most of you will have heard about this horrific fire of a Grenville tower that that happened almost two years ago about two years ago and this was a social housing complex not far from where I live in London where I live part of the year and this is a fire that in terms of diagnosis simple diagnosis well the cladding was done wrong it's construction material why was it done wrong I'm oversimplifying this but I'm correct in saying that the cheapest materials were used so the cheapest materials were used and there wasn't sufficient protection for the residents of that community for for fire this is a community that advocated organized did all the things that communicated with each other communicated with local officials happened to be mostly made up of recent immigrants mostly made up of people living in poverty which I define as having many dimensions and and people of color and when that happened one of the things that I I thought about and have been thinking about ever since is about numbers and I think about in terms of numbers when you when you look at the about about 80 people I don't think there was ever an exact number perished everyone else was left homeless in that and yet and yet in terms of the the the organizing the the metrics the data that they had about what was needed all of that was there but they were not seen as being as the same value and when I hear a lot about loneliness people say to me and social isolation and in a way these these words can be used somewhat interchangeably because we're all talking we're talking about how it feels inside which tends to be remarkably similar I'm often told well this is your timing is really great because this is a really hot issue right now and I'm thinking really really I mean this is an issue that's that's as old as humanity and to go back a bit some hundreds of years earlier in the UK looking at what Charles Dickens wrote about the London the London fire and what studies show is that in the in the great fire of London there were about eight reported deaths that's almost nothing why because the the only deaths that were reported were were of the the the very the very poorest people were not and that sorry I'll come back on that the poorest people were not counted there were no numbers they didn't count and in one hand and in the other hand weren't counted so I think that's that's a you know we could look at lots of policy implications and we look at now with the Granville fire another example I'll give you is is refugees and forced migrants and I'll draw from an example in the U.S. the community of the first climate refugees who happen to be in in Louisiana an indigenous population most mostly made up of older persons and when it came time for something to be done about the land sinking and sinking nothing was done could have been done and so eventually the community all had to leave the government came up with a settlement I don't know how you ever can compensate people for their way of life but anyway it was done and then took years and years for them to to get anything back so just to to say on that that this is a collective and I think my fellow fellow panelists would agree that this is about mental health it's also about economics it's about social policy it's about environment and I think we really need to look at that systematically say I think you're right about it being an old-age issue but also I think what Laurie said is you know often what we think is good for us is not actually good for us and what I'm worried about is that actually technology it helps us avoid the realities of everyday life so it's literally like the worst form of therapy you can have but actually we use it the most and I'm worried about the next generation not having the skills the social skills the empathy skills to recognize to recognize that they feel lonely and that's obviously very different from being alone and that is a that is a real problem I think that we're not teaching our young people empathy we're not teaching them to recognize or process their own emotions of loneliness because actually you know a lot of the time you don't have to face real life when you're on your technology you know and I do the same it's like a comfort blanket it's like a it's like a you know a pacifier so I think part of what we need to do as a group is kind of recognize loneliness and and also make sure that we have the skills to actually deal with it I would actually second that because I think also growing up in India as a man never learned how to really check in into feelings and emotion so if someone would ask me how I'm doing various words of synonyms of fine would just be the learned script and you know did not realize that those were moments or opportunities to really check in and when the check in started I realized I didn't have the vocabulary what these beautiful feelings were all about what these different emotions were about when that happened then realized the third stigma which is around having conversations with this because now you know and and that's this is also the time I started feeling very jealous of my other gender because I was like how is it men never talk whom whom do I go up and and say I'm feeling nervous and you know will I feel will I seem to childish will I seem to boring will I seem too emotional and I was I was pretty much feeling that today as I was coming and I was sharing with Ed and I was like but I'm glad that I'm able to check in and just have this conversation with you but realize that this awareness was missing and I think yes technology completely does not even allow for that pause check in and have that one minute conversation in the UK where men who typically don't want to do therapy they go into a room together and make wood and it's it's like a woodwork studio and I think part of this debate and we're going to move on to actions later is us thinking creatively because Baron has so openly said he didn't feel comfortable and he all he didn't have the skills and I think a lot of us feel like that so actually you know this the answer to this is not therapy in its most traditional form um but the men shed could be a good one for you I just wanted to give Ed a chance too to I'm sorry um so I'll be quite quick just two quick things one really boring technical scientific thing we need more common measures so that we can bring science together around these problems often you can see amazing studies being done by psychiatrists by clinical psychologists and you can't really compare them because they're looking at completely different measures and they're saying okay I'm looking at this thing I'm looking at this thing they're really looking at the same thing but they're measuring it completely differently if we're going to bring science together around this we need common measures the what works well-being center I'm sorry there's so many UK examples at the minute I don't know why that is probably because we're all from the UK which is awful anyway uh they did a study of um well-being and in the existing science and they said the vast majority of studies into well-being and and loneliness well of people over the age of 55 there's relatively little on loneliness in younger people um and what they said was we desperately need more common measures so that we can every time someone does a study we can look at how it fits with other other studies and in welcome that's what we're going to be funding the other thing I think is really important is leadership and we've been talking in the you know in the the congress center uh with lots of workplace leaders with people who lead in education about what they will do to create workplaces schools hospitals that tackle mental health in an appropriate way and really make a difference for their own employees I really felt that when I went from school to university and there was a leadership at school who frankly sometimes said I don't like gay people and I was at an all-boys school that made me feel pretty rubbish I then went to university and it was a group of people who had collectively said these are the values we are going to have this is the way we are going to work and we are going to belong together and look after each other and acknowledge people for who they are and embrace identity they made a decision to lead in that way and I think when we look at loneliness when we look at mental health that sense of leadership of creating schools and workplaces where people do say that from the top and they say this is the culture we want it's not the the whole answer because we do need the scientific interventions to particularly as people get closer to more formal forms of depression anxiety but I think if we create those cultures we can make a big difference too so that this is this is great I want to pick a few threads that have come up in this last round and and weave them into another set of questions one of the picking up with what you just said at measurement and and uniformity across different approaches is is crucial if we're going to make progress at a larger scale and what goes hand in glove with measures is the concepts the conceptual framework of what and how we operationalize the construct and I I say that not because it matters about the words but if we don't have a clear agreement about what aspect of the phenomenon we're trying to measure or change then we can be spinning our wheels and so I want to now move to Kim's example that could seem counterintuitive that collectively people connected could feel something like lonely and I agree and the implication of that is feeling diminished or devalued as a group gives a feeling that many of us would say is a lot like loneliness even though you might be socially connected and one of my favorite examples which sounds a little silly is any town or region or country that is invested in their sports team knows what happens when they lose I mean and I have I have photos from when Brazil lost the world cup at home and you would think it was the most horrible truck people the tears and crying and and and weeks of impairment because they felt diminished in a domain that mattered and and and this idea do we matter do we matter as individuals do we matter as a group of people or marginalized do we matter in a world that's become tech heavy and exciting and changing at a rapid pace are we pushed peripherally left out is one of the items on the UCLA loneliness scale feeling left out what makes us feel left out that's very different than just feeling sad and so all of these aspects of loneliness are important to the larger domain but I want to push us as a panel to say if we were going to take a slice into this complexity to try to make change what aspect of this sadness loneliness social value mattering would you focus on go ahead lori hands up and she's the all of them you know now that we're going to get some fantastic funding from welcome all the researchers will be able to do no but I'll I'll focus on two of them I think I mean one is a thread that I think ed brought up which is this thread of belonging right yes and I think one thing that's exciting from the research is how really simple interventions like just simple things that leaders and and organizations can say can change how how much a person feels like they belong so there's some fantastic work coming out of Stanford this is from Greg Walton's group that does really simple interventions at the start of a university semester with students or right at the start of the semester they just have them write a quick essay of how much you feel like you matter like who who cares about you how do you feel like you belong here like what's a domain where you really feel integrated this is a short essay turns out these essays will predict whether or not a student feels like they belong in university months later even semesters later like a simple short essay and so that's why I think belonging could be so important in part because it's important for this whole phenomena but also that might be a spot where we can get really fast inroads to make change a second domain I think is just finding ways to feel more socially connected when we're around other people and this gets back to the thing I was mentioning Belinda talked about earlier that we like we do the wrong kind of stuff that we for when we really want to feel connected you know many of us are often in places with lots of other people where we can really feel isolated I see this in my college students firsthand one of the examples I often give is that back when I was in college the dining hall was like one of the loudest places on campus where everyone was eating and talking and so on the sad thing nowadays is sometimes I'll go into my dining hall and see you know a set of students all together you know Yale University where they're all smart all the same age headphones on like this with their phones and it's quiet right and so I think one another quick intervention we can use is finding ways to make the connections with the people who are around us it's one thing if you're lonely and you just aren't physically around other people it's another to be physically with a lot of people but just not making connections I think here again is a spot where our minds lie to us and it picks up on something Varun was saying earlier where you know there's attempts to make connections but we just don't do it very well how are you fine how are you fine you know then we're done because if I really asked you know what upset you today you know what were you really feeling like if I just try to penetrate a little bit deeper you can see a lot of effectiveness the problem is that people feel kind of like Varun was saying it'll feel weird right you feel if you admit no I'm not fine like actually I'm feeling terrible like the you know person will walk away or there'll be some stigma and so on I think again some of the research is suggesting that this is a lie of our mind that like when you admit fault when you admit insecurity when you admit vulnerability it actually does a lot to improve connections it's just not what we think and so I think that's another spot where we can have an inroad to kind of teach people better strategies to actually connect when you have the opportunity to do it to do it in the right way so that you really feel some closeness there rather than kind of feel worse when you're talking you're talking to people but you're kind of talking past them in a meaningful way you know because I think the connections have become so light haven't they and you know we we're very good at doing it I'm fine you know and so I think the connections have to be deeper and more meaningful and if we can use technology in that way because we know that people who feel most lonely have more Facebook friends you know how can that be because the connections that they've got are superficial and light and I think we are all wanting to have deep and meaningful connections and we need to use technology to find that couple of examples in the I'm just keep talking about the UK it must be Brexit we must be all really feeling insecure I don't know why but we're using is multi-generational where you put different generations together so you get you know nurseries in retirement homes they're starting a pilot scheme where you get the postal workers to check up on people you know and we can use technology to kind of you know and that's a really positive thing as opposed to the volume of friends I've got on Facebook the Instagram the glorified life the number of tweets I've done today because that to Laura's point their interactions but they're not deep they don't enrich our soul they're not really where we can be vulnerable and and that I think is where we've got to push technology and we've got to push the founders of technology to help us create a space where we can genuinely be ourselves I wanted to add to the the importance of the science and what I'm going to to cause the brain what we know from the brain and the way the brain might lie to us or looking at examples of technology that can either be be beneficial in terms of enriching one's meaningful relationships or work in the opposite way but I think something that's missing is the heart in this dialogue that a lot of this is is heart heart centered particularly in what it is that we value what it is that makes us feel worthy in ourselves to actually go picking up on one of your examples Laurie I would also I just to actually look at someone when you're talking to them but also in a heart centered way to see that person for who they are and in terms of the the the aspect of making more social connections I think that's extremely important I just want to point out that the socially isolated person who also I would argue lacks lacks agency may not even feel worthy to go out and make those connections so I think looking at the the root of it is important and I would just add one one idea that that my my students came up with actually so I need to give to give credit to to the students at McGill is is this creation of a of a charter of belonging a charter of belonging that can be done in a classroom that can be done in a company that can be done in an NGO that could be done in this room that could be done in the world economic forum is is to agree what it is that each individual in that group of however that group is constructed even if it's on the train for an hour yeah what it is that they value most in order to have that sense of well well-being and and to and to write it up and to co-create that is something that's pretty easily done and works great so I just just one quick idea about self-image as a thing to look at and think about so there's a thing called the millennium cohort study which rolls through and does conclusions about behavior and sort of what we see from that and they looked at self-image and they looked at screen time and they looked at how people are using technology they found there was a much greater correlation between hours of social media use and depressive symptoms in girls than boys and then when I put that together with a talk I went to two days ago in the forum called the female icon which talked about sources of self-image for teenage girls in a reported survey so these are reported opinions rather than anything else that social media was right at the top magazines were also there the mirror as a form as a route to self-image was right at the bottom this sense of what determines and conditions self-image particularly in adolescence but not exclusively and and how that is cultivated and how we as a society can push against it for our greater good is I think a really interesting area both to look at scientifically but also culturally and for us to be honest to start being honest about where the sources of self-image come from because the answers are not always very pleasant I actually look at it as a spectrum you know where there's a certain amount of loneliness which I also started realizing as healthy you know jitters before a big performance feeling like being the only representation from whatever community you belong to to then feeling left out and that's where initiatives like the you know people coming together and doing an activity in whatever form that is you know could could come in and then coming a space where you know things like friendship bench or therapy spaces become important where you have you know you are realizing that this being dysfunctional and it's been dysfunctional far too long it's time I seek you know help seek seek out to an individual whom I can speak to and then is also a time when you know therapy or clinical intervention can be required so I look at it as a therapy I'm sorry as a spectrum and in terms of where can we get in I realize for each one of these places there is there is you know an intervention that is required for example some amount of normalization required in the first spectrum to realize some amount of loneliness is okay it's part of the process if you're doing anything creative if you're doing anything new there will be a time when nobody believes in the idea you know and for me that was a was a turning point middle of last year the other thing which is you know the mid spectrum is where things like what Laurie was talking about more spaces where kids can come together adolescents can come together and and even play without technology engage for longer conversations like the train ride con you know conversations and and so on so so I look at it as the spectrum so I want to shift a bit to think about life course and and that there are two areas of the lifespan that have already come up one is you know some between adolescence and early adulthood when mattering and identity and feeling valued meaning and purpose or that's part of the search of that period lifespan and rates of loneliness by a variety of measures are increasingly problematic and at a very high level and then in in elderly and middle-aged in adulthood again a big increase in both social isolation and and loneliness and I would I'd love to have people share some thoughts about particularly important aspects of of approaching loneliness in those in those windows of time as which could also create windows of opportunity for impact so and you could pick either or we could I just had a question on that I mean I think does it manifest itself differently loneliness amongst different generations but is it fundamentally the same things that you're talking about belonging mattering feeling important and getting your voice heard so would the solutions be different but fundamentally is it is it the same so again I think that's a that's an important question and I think there are people who would say there are some aspects that are different and there are probably some aspects that are similar but I'd love to hear the other people in the panel start so I you know typically when there's focus on youth and old age loneliness I often when I read it I laugh for the same thing because I think there's a focus on loneliness in the way we can perceive it when you are alone when or you are part of a community that has been say you know said discarded or you know removed and that is something which is happening to you so there's a there is a cause outside of you which has caused that loneliness which is easier to see but I have to agree in terms of for me the area of intervention is the most subtle loneliness which I think people across generations people across even social landscapes face so just knowing that distinction that one is much more easier to see and perceive but the second one is I think more intense other thoughts about maybe the unique aspects about a lesson and early adulthood loneliness but I think honestly I mean this gets back to kind of Ed's point that we we need more data you know we need more sociological data we need more public health data we need those folks to be talking to psychologists and neuroscientists who are looking at the mechanisms of this stuff because my sense from the data is like I don't know if it works the same if the mechanisms are the same if the cultural changes that have led to increases in all these populations are the same my guess is that one thing that is similar is that we've seen interesting cultural shifts that I think have affected these different demographics differently I think kind of the erosion of cultural and religious institutions has really negatively impacted the elderly who used to have communities around them that are kind of slowly going away particularly in the US so I think that that's one cause in older generations I think a cause in younger generations get back to the importance of everything that Belinda is saying which is that you know in many of our kids even very young kids you know they have devices in their pockets that the research suggests might be reducing loneliness to some really interesting extent and part of it is social media part of it's those apps and kind of the way they play out and all the things we've talked about but but scarily research is suggesting that some of it might be the very physical presence of these devices at all like the physical presence of your phone it turns out this is some lovely research by the researcher Liz Dunn at the University of British Columbia the physical presence of your phone and having around makes you smile less at people so if I code your smiling when you're sitting in a waiting room and you have your phone versus your phone is off somewhere else you'll smile less when your phone is around you and you get a sense of why that is right like it's just distracted you're looking at your phone you're not looking at other people having phones just the simple presence of a phone reduces your enjoyment of a social conversation at dinner so all of you who keep your phone out to check the time and you leave it on your dinner table turns out it's a really bad strategy it's actually reducing your enjoyment of the conversation again minds are lying right we don't think we're like that's not is that really true turns out if you look at the data it's really true and so so I think in the younger generations and this is younger and kids but also younger and you know 20 somethings right like we've like put technology in our pockets that could in ways we don't realize be reducing parts of our social interaction that we used to really value and this is a cultural shift that's happening pretty universally I think we don't know the consequences of it Belinda mentioned that we need to push the founders of technology to think more about what they've done I agree with that a lot like we might really start meaning to think about the potential for regulation of some of these devices because we don't really know what they're doing we at least need more science to understand how they work and how they're affecting us so it's also their purpose of the tech founders so the CEO of Netflix he said he's number one competition wasn't other broadcasters it was sleep and you know it's kind of funny but actually if you think about it deeply it's really not because ultimately how can a purpose of a tech company be to reduce our sleep like I've binge watched you know we've all binge watched our favorite shows and we enjoy that but it's that purpose has to change in line with what society needs and I think if we as a group can hold these technologies companies to account you know Steve Jobs didn't let his children play on iPads but they're very willing for us to have as many devices as we can so I do think we need to challenge them I don't know if regulation is the answer I have a different view and that's probably for a different panel but I do feel that actually we have to ask the right questions and say we're not going to accept it anymore Kim I wanted to to address older people which was I think the other part of your your question when when we think of older people I'm not putting an age an age on that and I think that one of the the reasons that we see so much othering and perhaps loneliness and isolation of older people is this tendency to devalue someone based on their birthday and as a friend of mine Bethany Brown who's in charge of older persons rights at Human Rights Watch says I call bullshit on that I think that with older people while we can look at the the valid points you made Laurie about the breakdown even even in families and I still I still think that that we have have an ethical issue to get over and one of the the ways to do that is to ask ourselves what do we value and also if that isn't enough or to underscore that is to come at it not only from the very important point of science and research but also human rights because where we see isolation we often see abuses of human rights and this could be in any age of course but since you'd asked about older people I would give that the example of older people in nursing homes who didn't choose to to be there and aren't treated very well or older people who are hungry and don't have enough food this is getting into rights not simply be nice to grandma or grandpa so I did a couple comments linking together parts of this and then we're going to shift to giving the audience a chance to ask some questions I do want to suggest this one of the themes that's emerging that connects to this idea of adolescence and the elderly is that when we we keep coming back to mattering and social value and and purpose I think that one of the things that we understand about adolescence and early adulthood it is that is the developmental task finding meaning purpose identity and being extra sensitive to social evaluation and then trying to manage that on your Instagram account so I think that the the idea that the process of finding meaning and connection and purpose which is the fundamental task of transitioning to adulthood and then losing value as we age having society be biased implicitly or explicitly and policies to feel less valued and so I think these are probably amplifying other factors that we we think are important and and and maybe suggest some targets so I I would love at this point to open up for the audience if you want to direct the question toward an individual panel member or just throw it out and we have microphones and I saw the first hand I see us back here on yes and say who you are and then just ask a question yeah thank you very much my name is Cristian Rajesh I'm coming from Croatia so just to address you also I was also crying when Croatia lost the final against France but somebody turned out into joy when they come when they came back the fervolers so a question to to miss Parmar or any of the other panelists who are really appreciate being here and listening to this so there's a lot of yeah talking about technology taking over people will lose their jobs because autonomy is gonna in a way take over so how do you see is is there a way that technology and happiness can coexist in five to ten years in a way that that not necessarily that it has a negative impact because technology is not going to stop developing and yeah it will have a big impact on taking over some of the processes which are done by humans so how do you see this unfolding and will it create even more loneliness and maybe what are the ways to address this thank you very much so so I think it's a great question about technology in the future and I am optimistic about technology I want to you know I love technology my former company was called Lady Geek so you know I am a geek at heart so in terms of the automation and the future of work I mean some industries you're right 25 percent in the finance industry of jobs will be automated but the question is when you look at what type of jobs will be automated is often they are the very monotonous skills and actually if you look at what machines can do it kind of goes back to what Kim said about heart you know the skills that we need in our future workforce are creativity judgment empathy innovation because no machine can do that so I think the future looks good as long as we practice those skills you know people think oh you're born with empathy or you're not actually 50 percent of your empathy skills are taught 50 percent they think is genetic but the rest is environment and practicing it so I would say I'm excited but do we have are we training for these skills are we valuing and then to Ed's point are we really measuring these skills because they will be the ones that people want in jobs I'm sorry I keep going on welcome we we're looking at this too so we're looking at technology enabling us to do more and more and we're looking at a world where people are then working more and more and their well-being is decreasing in welcome we're looking at whether the right answer for us is to move to having a four day week rather than a five day week for the organization because we know that the well-being well other organizations who've tried it well being tends to be higher people tend to be more focused with the time that they have in the office and then critically that fifth day people tend to develop new forms of empathy and new forms of cult cultivating their own empathy and practicing that one really interesting thing that we've had as we've been discussing it around welcome and we haven't decided it yet are a lot of people saying oh my goodness I love the idea but I am terrified about what I'm going to do on my day off I I feel that no one else is going to be working everyone else is going to be working I'm going to be sitting there alone what am I going to do and I think it's a challenge that we're throwing back to the organization and it feels to me a little bit like when you talk about retirement and all those days opening up this wonderful vista in front of you it is terrifying I talked to my parents about this they've just retired they they're doing well but it was scary and I think there is something about saying use time to cultivate empathy and practice empathy and think about how your workplace and the patterns of your workplace may enable others to do so and for me that's the answer of how we're going to coexist with technology that enables us to do more but a world in which we want to do things productively rather than just a lot. This is Alyssa Apple from UCSF really appreciate your having a panel on loneliness to highlight the the epidemic here and I appreciate these interesting perspectives from a cross sector panel from the research world which is very conservative with a high bar there are no interventions that work for loneliness that are validated and accepted I would love to hear from the panel how you think about big ways of changing both culture and changing human behavior through policy policy changes how can we have these big changes in this epidemic because as Lori said it's not going to come down to a clinical intervention. I mean one thing is to really think about the structure of how we interact right think about how we can create spaces for people to really have these conversations and I think one of the things that Ed just said I think is going to be important you know if I survey my college students my college students will say you know I want to meet up with my friends but I just don't have any time and I think another thing that's epidemic we're talking about the epidemic of loneliness but another thing that's an epidemic is our time famine right now you know we're literally starving for time I think that's true in young people even more so than it was just 10 years ago and so one of the things I would think to do in terms of policy would be the exactly the kind of thing Ed was suggesting which is like how can we give people more time so that they can actually have time to make connections you know if you think about the friends in your life that you might not have had a chance to call recently it might not necessarily because you know your mind lied to you you wouldn't get something out of that you just didn't have time right we're not prioritizing it so allowing people to feel less famished for time can potentially increase our social connection and there's actually some work on this in these experimental contexts if you give people a little sense of extra time you can actually do these little things where you prime them to think they have more time they spend that extra time being social and talking to people and so on and so it sounds like a kind of funny policy intervention for loneliness like give people more time but I actually think that that could have a much bigger effect than we think I'd like to to respond to that as well thank you very much for raising policy I think that that all of this comes down to what kind of policy interventions can be made and how and how can they be made I would say right across from interventions for policy to eradicate poverty for policies in terms of refugees policies in terms of environmental conservation and sustainability really just about anywhere you can think of and what needs to happen in my view is not to create a new silo where we say this is the the loneliness silo or this is the the we could even sub silo today this is the loneliness this is the isolation this is the stigma the shame the humiliation side or put them together and probably get nowhere but better to to prevail upon the the leaders at all levels I mean municipal levels regional national of and and certainly in terms of big global organizations and and come up with probably not one measures but but one measure but many I think there's more content around inclusion and exclusion where we could actually show numbers and to show the costs which can be demonstrated not only of smoking 30 cigarettes a day which is a although we shouldn't be smoking anyway so right but but to be able to look at what the costs are of not having policies that that are that are inclusive and to look at ones ones that work and ones and ones that don't work so I would say that policies that don't work there are many of those it's hard to find national policies that do work but on the don't I would say I would ask all of us to look at what could be changed in terms of forced migrants and and coming into two countries with quotas and then being told actually we'd like to to send you away or to an island or or you can bring in families but not your young men and to and to look at to look at what happens when policies like those are made in terms of creating in my view much more populism othering anger and and and consider the cost of not not doing what I would say is the right thing I mean I think we need to be impatient I think we need some intentionality for change so yeah we don't yes we don't have the research we don't have the causalities and all of these things but we have common sense you know so whether I would say let's do stuff whether it's a minister of loneliness or whether you think that would never work in your own country I don't know the friendship bench it's such a lovely idea it's been a real focal point here let's get out let's do it let's talk but we need some intentionality I think we've got to stop talking about these problems and actually start experimenting experimenting as Laurie said with these small things because who knows you know some 10 small actions could change someone's life I'd absolutely second that I think especially on this platform Davos we focus on the big things wait for the results to come and then create a policy and then work for the implementation and then we'll look at the problems that that created yeah exactly I think this is this is something which all of us at some point in our lives have faced and you know all of us for a problem like this all of us have the power in our own capacity to do something it's not climate change it's something more personal good another question over here don't go to the other side yet hi my name is Jeremy Allaire I'm a tech entrepreneur in Boston, Massachusetts I'm interested to hear you comment on the relationship between loneliness and addiction and both how addiction both behavioral and chemical and others lead people into places of isolation and loneliness and so are kind of mutually reinforcing but but also how feelings of you know self-worth or isolation actually heighten and grow addiction issues which I think when we talk about like the cascading long-term health issues and the correlations with things like cardiovascular issues and death and the like addiction actually magnifies that pretty dramatically and so how do you think about the relationship between those and and as we think about interventions as well are we often seeing loneliness and highly correlated with addiction behaviors and should they be treated in an integrated way I can speak to the isolation part of it where there's there's quite a bit of of research and over a lot of time about the the linkage between addiction and isolation uh suggesting that the isolation comes before the the addiction which which kind of makes sense you know when you think about it if you if you if you are experiencing some some big gaps somewhere or more darkness than light metaphorically or the bottom of of the well where are you going to to to reach to and it can also it can often be places that take you away even if you can't really get away same there's also I don't know if this would be of interest but there's also quite quite a lot done of research done about recruiting for violent violent extremism where tends tends to go to to appeal to and often the way we advertising attracts us to something that we maybe wouldn't have even been attracted to anyway to go to to young people who may feel for one reason or another that they don't belong they don't fit in they're not worthy and they're right for this other questions hello my name is Natalie um I live in Egypt and I have a six-year-old and unfortunately I've been noticing that the technology addiction starts much earlier than I've hoped um my six-year-old prefers the iPad over going out for play I host play dates where kids come with their iPads and I'm always faced with this question where why is it bad for me and I never know what to really answer because they're so young but um I was hoping to get some answers I mean that so the the real answer for like is it bad for them I mean I think the answer is like we don't actually know yet right like you know to study how long how like the long-term effects of smartphone technology and swiping as a six-year-old we need to go back when your son is 30 you know and see what what his loneliness looks like then or his empathy and so on and I think sadly like these technologies have not been around long enough for us to have the real research on how they're affecting us which is scary because we don't know how these things are affecting us but they're literally in the pockets of six billion people so the real answer research-wise is like realistically we don't know there have not been that many studies but anecdotally what a lot of folks suggest is the kind of thing that you're seeing which is like these things are really attractive they're built to be attractive they're built to get our attention in a way that like human interaction is not you know I would like to think that I'm more interesting than every cat video on YouTube and every little game out there but you know I try to be interesting but I'm not and so I think there's a real there's even though we don't have the research I should share this worry that we've created technology that works in part because it drags our attention and it's going to drag our attention more than the other people around us and I think it's scary thought to think what would it look like for kids growing up with this that said we don't have any research and this is the same thing that folks said about television in my generation they said oh you know and I was a four-year-old watching television I was never going to be built to connect with other people and so on and that didn't seem to be the case I think it would just be great and we just need more research to know what's really going on so just just a lot of this discussion is echoing what my partner shouts at me at home all the time so this is great put down the phones put down the ipad so thank you for channeling my home life I think the thing that I'm told at home a lot which is not scientific but resonates for me is the difference between mindless and mindful activity and how technology brings us closer to mindless activity the idea that and it must be more damaging for children the idea that you spend time on a screen just flicking around cat videos is a great example youtube is a great example click click click click click click click click and you're not really thinking about what you're doing you're allowing time to pass and before you know it an hour has gone by and that's the way a lot of us I know I do sometimes use technology in that way that is very different to the mindful activity of saying I am going to build this train set or build a block of stone or whatever it might be and you have a goal you have a purpose you have a thing that you're doing I think for me that is something that technology does disrupt more than other things I think it is possible to have mindful engagement with technology but I think it's quite hard and in a way I would say not based on any science if if you can make sure you engage mind fully with technology you probably stand a better chance of having a healthier relationship with it is technology good or bad I don't I think the point is it's neither it's not neutral you know it's objective is to get your son my son you know so enthralled that it becomes so powerful and I find as a mom as my children have got older they're 11 and 12 now so when they're six you can actually remove a device quite easily what happens if we've all talked about with the phone is it's it's part of the belonging and what Ron talks about which is about feeling that you matter it's part of your identity and for a lot of people here a lot of people that we spoke to this morning you know the removal of the device is where the conflict happens and and one of the mums this morning she said removing her daughter's phone was like literally taking her lung out that's how her daughter felt so when they're smaller I think you have a lot more it's so much easier but as Laurie said the dopamine hit you know it's so powerful so I think the fact that you're asking the question is great there are no answers but I'm not going to wait for the science because I could be waiting 40 years I don't want our children to be the guinea pigs the experiments and actually the smoking thing is important because when you went to the doctors in the 50s and 60s and said you know I'm feeling a bit stressed the doctor would say have a cigarette and calm down so I'm not going to wait for the research the fact we're having this debate is wonderful I think you're doing brilliantly and I think it's an ongoing challenge for every single parent so um I and I will add that I think that um I think it's very important that we recognize that the quality of and the and the particular rather than say technology or screen really to think about what are the better or worse ways that promote the kind of learning because again we we may be faced with horrendous influences we don't recognize we need to be thoughtful of that and and there were people that worried that reading was a mindless activity it was going to interfere with memory and so I think it's not like reading it is it's compelling attention and yet I think there are ways that could be promoting learning and and we and we need to think about the better ways to introduce technology as well as just to say that's the problem so but I want to have time for a few more questions um back back in the back well my name is Nadine back and I I'm Swiss and I live in the States and I'm a mom and I'm the youngest of five and by quite a bit and my siblings have been older so I was kind of my mom had done it all and I was kind of lonely in a big family because everybody else was already going right going their way and I was home alone and playing in the basement with lots of toys and being lonely and the thing is not if I think if your kids are on the iPad it's if you share the iPads with your kids it's pretty it's painful to watch Family Guy with my 15 year old but I do it and then you watch Family Guy and you laugh and then you can maybe have a conversation about something else the problem is if you leave those kids alone and you don't interact with them with what they like to do and then you can't you can't just come in and say now done with your iPad it just you have to be a little clever and think and watch Family Guy and laugh even though it's painful or whatever and then get your kid to two different subjects and sometimes we watch very interesting things that I didn't know and I learned a lot so technology doesn't have to be bad you just have to use it the right way. Hi I'm Emiliana Simon Thomas from the Greater Good Science Center UC Berkeley thank you for your distinguished perspectives and stories I wanted to follow up on the idea of empathy and Mr. Gupta I was really struck by your description of loneliness being about not being able to really name your own emotional experience and and I and many people have used the word empathy and empathy is sort of housed in this space of what many people call emotional intelligence do you think that emotional intelligence in some way is something of an antidote to loneliness there's ways that training your emotional intelligence could be a way to be less vulnerable to loneliness both as the person who is lonely or the person who is treating others in a way that would leave them lonely I could share absolutely I think for me just that feeling of it's okay was such a big relief and now in my work as I'm creating that those spaces you know I think there is this otherization that these even naming these sigmas do because there is this normalization and anyone who's outside this is you know whatever different one of the things I realized is even this research on these different attributes like calling loneliness also as a mental health is very new maybe few years back this was normalized I'm someone who is nostalgic of the older times and I feel some some of it was better because at least if I was feeling that way maybe I was not another and there was no term for my condition yes having a term helps because then there can be concepts like empathy that can come into treated but even sometimes not having that because then I feel just I feel normal so absolutely I think empathy is a big one for receiving treatment and giving treatment so we have five minutes left and I want to wrap up by I'm going to ask each of the panelists to answer a very practical action-oriented question and that is that if you had control over the 260 million dollars that the welcome trust is going to devote to impacting mental health and you had the and you had the freedom to focus on this set of issues around loneliness in the Broadway and the impairment epidemic related issues what would you focus on as your priority and why very briefly and we'll go the other direction this time if that's okay well thank you welcome trust I think we're all very grateful here I think I would look at a couple of things I think one is tech related is about having much more deep and meaningful connections as opposed to the volume of that I think the second thing is the emotional intelligence and empathy kind of you know talking about empathy labeling the emotions talking with our children about empathy and teaching it is really important and then I do love this idea of the multi-generational kind of bringing loneliness it is actually bringing diverse groups of people together so that they can then you know create their own strategies and and ways to think about loneliness so that for me is an exciting space to explore thank you for me starting with education I think some of these subjects of play time and art time used to be part of the curriculum but never looked at these were pretty much times when kids were on their own I think bringing these could be spaces where these kind of conversations come in very naturally and they are taught imagine our time where we are making something and then we are talking about it could be the start of checking in on the emotional could be the start of also building that empathy space and I would invest that money I would begin by saying to to everybody listening that you are not alone we all feel this way at some point we all belong and it does get better I would quote Maya Angelou one of my favorite poets who who wrote none of us but none of us can make it out here alone so coming from that to to the the awareness and what you shared I wouldn't focus so much about the money I'd focus on what I've learned from you more which is through your own story and the deep listening that you are doing and I'm sure that your colleagues are doing around the world and just as we saw and are seeing and can actually sit in the friendship bench and hopefully that that idea of having something that's low-hanging fruit and practical where both the carer designated carer and the designated recipient of that care understand the reciprocity between both of them and all of us to increase our resilience would be for me come down to one word education so I would encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and to reach as many local communities and listen to their solutions and implement them thank you so thank you I have a free pass in this because we already made out so I'm gonna put an invitation to the room to take part in rigorous peer-reviewed scientific experiment and investigation in about two minutes time so we are all quite a mixed community here we come from lots of backgrounds some people with badges some people not you can blame us for being five minutes late to the thing you have next whatever it might be lunch lessons for activities why not just turn to someone sitting next to you that you don't know and why don't you ask them one question what do you think what do you think about loneliness what do you think about mental health what matters to you and maybe let's take five minutes just to listen to each other you can do it sitting in your seat you can do it as you walk out I urge you to take five minutes not one minute over it and to genuinely listen and also to talk to the person next to you who you've never met before hopefully you can find one language to work in but it's an invitation to come with us to do something we've been talking about and we think this will make a difference to the belonging that we feel in this room I love that but before we do that could we get the last comment because there's a time sensitive issue for her I love that and empirically even if you're forecasting that it's going to be weird it's going to be great that's what the research says but I think in my approach I think we both need empirical science on what's working we need to understand the mechanisms to come up with solutions but I think Belinda is also right we just need to try stuff we need to try different kinds of interventions but I would hope that all of those if I had a lot of money all of those would be interventions that we were doing randomized control testing on they'd be evidence-based we want to try something but test it at the same time to make sure it's working great so I think this is a perfect time to do two things number one we're going to close the session officially and thank this amazing panel and the audience and then everyone should take the five minutes and have a meaningful connection with someone you don't know as Ed invited us to do thinking about what you would want to do in your own lives or in someone else's life to address this issue thank you very much