These are some of the many things —and then there are, of course, many other initiatives that I’ve had the privilege of visiting in communities from the Men’s Sheds program to the Hi Neighbor program to an incredible group of individuals that my team just visited in Northwest Indianapolis — people who call themselves “roving listeners,” who actually go door to door and knock on neighbors’ doors. And they don’t ask them what they need; they ask them what they love, what brings them joy. And they help foster and build connection with their neighbors that way. So there’s a lot we can do to build this social infrastructure that’s very tangible that includes steps that local government, workplaces, and schools can take.
Krista, one last thing I’ll say, which is to a point you brought up earlier about how we think about mental health and despair, and are we really getting to the root cause of issues. I worry that the way we think about mental health and talk about it is, I think that seems almost to be a proxy for talking about severe depression and anxiety. And by extension, then, we think that all mental health problems just require having more psychiatrists and therapists and then we would solve it.
Now, I do think we need more therapists. We need more mental health professionals. I’ve been a big advocate for investing more in that area, and I’m very proud that President Biden has made that a priority as well. And there are more investments. But I do think that the way that you and I are talking about mental health is much broader. This is actually more in the realm of wellbeing, of understanding, as I think of it: is our tank full? Our mental health, in my mind, is the fuel that allows us to be and do what we do to show up for our family, for our friends, for our workplaces, for our communities. And if that tank is empty, we may not have a diagnosable mental illness, but we won’t be functioning anywhere near our full capacity. We lapse into sadness, into despair, into anger.
And so this is about more than diagnosable mental illness, as important as that is. This is about improving our overall level of wellbeing. And this is where social connection is one of the most powerful tools that we could foster. And it’s so — it seems so simple that just building relationships could contribute to those outcomes that we almost don’t believe it. And if I told you, Krista, if I said, “Hey, I went into my backyard and I made this pill and it’s pretty amazing and it’s free. And if you take it, it will actually improve your health. It’ll make you feel better. It will improve your performance at work. It will improve your grades…
Tippett:Boost your immunity.
Murthy:…Everyone will be happier.” Yeah. You’d be like, “Hey, sign me up. I’ll take that tomorrow.” It turns out that’s what social connection is, and we just have to make that a priority and build — rebuild, I should say — the social infrastructure in our country.
[music: “Basketliner” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:You and your wife, Alice Chen, who is also a physician, wrote this completely prescient article in — can this really be true? — in March 2020 in The Atlantic. When I read the date, I couldn’t really believe that it was March 2020. That must have been weeks into us understanding that we were in a pandemic, as lockdown had started.
So yes, that thing — because the idea that what we’re talking about is organic and elemental, and in fact, a lot of this, we know in our bodies how to do this even if we’ve become estranged from that knowledge. So one of the things you did in this article — so you said, “In the short term, the stress of loneliness serves as a natural signal that nudges us to seek out social connection — just as hunger and thirst remind us to eat and drink. But when loneliness lasts for a long time, it can become harmful by placing us in a state of chronic stress.” And then that has all this cascade of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual ripple effects. But you also offered four strategies in that article that anybody could do that move us individually towards this social reality. Do you remember what those were?
Murthy:I do. I do.
Tippett:Share them, please. And I’m also curious if you added any since.
Murthy:Sure. And they are four simple steps, because it turns out that because we are hardwired for connection, even just a little bit of time and a little bit of investment in human connection goes a long way toward us feeling better. The first is to spend 15 minutes a day connecting with somebody you care about. That could be calling them up. It could be video conferencing with them. It could be sending them a text just to say, “Hey, I’m thinking of you. I just wanted you to know that you’re on my mind.” The second—
Tippett:But hang on, you said, this seemed important to me, but you said communicating with people you love other than the people you live with — they don’t count in this, right?
[audience laughter]
Murthy:Yes.
Tippett:Okay.
Murthy:And the reason for that is, like many people — and I’m happy to share some personal stories here later if you’d like, but — we sometimes think that the world of people who care about us is a lot smaller than it really is. And sometimes — well, maybe if you’ll indulge me, I’ll tell one quick story here, which is when I finished my first term as Surgeon General — and finished means it ended quite abruptly. And it was surprising to me. And what had happened during that time is that time I had spent as Surgeon General, I made one critical mistake, which is that I convinced myself that in order to really do well at this job and give everything I could, that I just needed to be a hundred percent focused on the job. And I neglected my relationships. I didn’t keep in touch with a lot of my friends. Even when I was with family, I was distracted, on my phone.
And when suddenly I no longer was serving as Surgeon General — the one community I did have was my community at work, and all of a sudden they were gone. And I felt profoundly alone. I actually sunk into this deep abyss of loneliness for a long time. And I remember seeing a friend once on a trip to Boston, and she said to me over breakfast, she said, “Vivek, you know what your problem is?” She said, “Your problem is not that you don’t have friends.” She said, “Your problem is you’re not experiencing friendships.” She said, “If you called any one of those people you had lost touch with, they’d be more than happy to talk to you, much happier than you realize.” So she said, “You have to get over your shame and your sense of embarrassment at not being in touch and just reach out. And you’ll find that people are also hungry for human connection.” So that’s why that 15 minutes with people you care about outside of those you live with can be powerful.
The other three I’ll mention quickly. So the second is to give people your full attention when you talk to them. This is something that I have been guilty of not doing at many points in my life because my hand somehow sneaks into my pocket, takes out my phone, [audience laughter] and before I know it, I’m refreshing my inbox, checking the scores on ESPN and God knows what else, while I’m catching up with a friend who I was looking forward to catching up to for so long. Where is that coming from? Well, it’s not just a failure of willpower, per se. These devices were designed specifically to pull you in and to keep you on them. But if you can take even one of those conversations, that 15 minutes that we talked about each day, and just give somebody the gift of your full attention, your attention has the power to stretch time. It can make five minutes feel like 30 minutes. And so that’s very powerful.
The third thing that’s important to do is to find opportunities to serve others. Now, this is also a bit counterintuitive. You might think, “If I’m lonely, don’t I need somebody to help me? Why am I helping somebody else?” Well, it turns out that when we help each other, we not only forge a connection with someone else, but we also reaffirm to ourselves that we have value to bring to the world. And that’s important because when we struggle with loneliness for a long period of time, it erodes our sense of self-esteem and self-worth. We begin to think we’re lonely because we’re not likable, that it’s our fault somehow. But service shortcuts that circuit and help us feel more connected to others and ourselves.
And the fourth and final one is around solitude. And this also is counterintuitive because you might think, “Solitude? If I’m lonely, do I really need more time alone?” But loneliness is not so much about how many people you have around you. It’s about whether you feel like you belong. It’s about whether you truly know your own value and feel like you are connected to other people. It’s about the quality of your relationships with others and yourself. The solitude is important because it’s in moments of solitude, when we allow the noise around us to settle, that we can truly reflect, that we can find moments in our life to be grateful for. But those moments of solitude have become increasingly rare because all of the white space in our life has been filled by our devices. Back in the day when I was waiting for a bus, that’s the time I would just sit down and I would think.
Tippett:You were actually waiting.
Murthy:I was actually waiting. Now, if I’m waiting for a bus or waiting for the subway, then I’m looking at my phone in between to either be efficient and clear out my inbox or to find something interesting. So our mind is constantly filled and we don’t have that silence that is so integral to growth. And you might think, “Well, yeah, I could do that, but I’d feel bored.” Boredom is not a bad thing.
Tippett:No.
Murthy:Boredom can be generative and creative. So anyway, these four simple steps are things that you can do. And that solitude, by the way, it can look different for each person. It can just be a few minutes. It could be a few minutes sitting on your front porch before the day begins. It could be a few minutes in nature, a few minutes in prayer, a few minutes in meditation, a few minutes listening to music that inspires you or stills you.
I’ll tell you for me, one of the things I do toward the end of the day is I have a list of videos and speeches and guided meditations that I’ve collected over the years that are sometimes just a couple minutes long. Some of them are longer, half an hour. But I’ll usually dip into those every night before I go to bed, sometimes even more than one if I’m having a particularly tough day. But that’s part of what is in my toolbox to help me reconnect with myself and remember what I have to be grateful for. These are almost disarmingly simple, these four tools I mentioned, but they can be very powerful in helping us feel more connected to ourselves and others.
Tippett:Wonderful. So I was going to ask you what love has to do with public health, but you’ve answered the question already so beautifully. If we imagine a world that is oriented towards human wholeness and mental and emotional flourishing, where that is part of the formation and education of our young, what would the Surgeon General spend his days doing?
Murthy:To both build a world that’s oriented around healing, around supporting our young, supporting everyone, but also to maintain that world means that we have to make sure that we’re talking about it, that we’re keeping it in our hearts and raising it up as a priority, that we’re continuing to focus on it. Because if we take something for granted, it starts to disappear, right? There was a time, perhaps, in parts of society where we were far more connected than we are now, but I suspect we may have taken that for granted and allowed the forces of change and technology to sweep in and then sweep out many of those connections that we had.
Look, I think that for every generation there’s a moment where they face a moment of existential change, where there are forces that are visited upon society that threaten our way of life and our way of being. And it’s up to that generation to figure out how to respond. To me, this is that moment and we are those people who have to take it upon ourselves to stitch together the social fabric of our country once again because it is the foundation on which we build everything else. If you want effective policy to address climate change, if you want effective policy that ensures that we have more support for people so they can be with their families when they’re ill, if you want effective policies to help strengthen education in our schools, you need social connection. Because it is only when people care about and are vested in one another that they advocate together, that they move together in the same direction, recognizing that a solution to someone’s problem, even if it’s not my problem, is a solution that we all need because we are one people and we are united.
And so how do we build that broader movement? Well, it starts with the actions that we take in our day-to-day lives. How do we choose to treat other people? Is it with reflex indignation, or is it with respect and a desire to understand where they’re coming from? How do we prioritize relationships in our own life with our attention as well as with our time? Do we choose to speak up for other people in the public square even if their concerns aren’t the same as ours, but because we care about them? And do we choose to support leaders who reflect our values? These are the decisions we can make as individuals that can shape the world that we live in and the world that our children inherit.
This is, to me, very personal because to me, this is about my children, too. Before my son was born six years ago, I still very distinctly remember that moment of sitting on the bed next to my wife and looking at the pregnancy test indicator that indicated that we were going to have a child. And I was incredibly excited. I was just thrilled. I was also incredibly scared [laughs] that whether I’d be able to do what this child needed, be the father that he needed.
But what also worried me in the days ahead was wondering about what kind of world my son was coming into. Was this going to be a world where people would be kind to him, where if he stumbled and made a mistake, people would forgive him and give him another chance? Where he would do the same for other people? Was it going to be a world that was driven by and informed by the core values of love, of kindness and compassion and generosity? Or was he going to be in a world that was driven by fear, where people were pitted against each other, where everyone was looking out for themselves? I know what kind of world I want for him. It’s the former. That’s the same world that I want for all of our children and for all of us.
But that won’t happen by itself. It will only happen if we make a conscious decision that this is the world that we want to live in and that fundamentally this is who we are. That we are not mean, angry, bitter people. But in our hearts we are kind, we are good, we are decent. And our capacity to love and to be generous and to serve has no limit, and it’s a muscle that the more we use it, the stronger it gets. So that’s what we have to recenter on in this moment. All fundamental change begins with identity, with a question of, who are we and what are our values? And so this is the time to get real clear on our values. And if we do that, then we will be the generation that this time needs. The generation not defined by age, but really defined by spirit, by vision, and by values. The generation that years from now, people will look back on and say, that’s when things changed. That’s when we turned the corner and built the world that all of us deserve.
Tippett:I watched a speech you gave to the, I think, U.S. [Conference] of Mayors — and I meant to warn you about this and I didn’t — but you gave them a little bit of a benediction, a short meditation, invitation as they went back out into the world. And I wondered if you might do that in this room, too. We’re in a room full of audio makers and storytellers and podcasters, and I do think of, well, first of all, I think of podcasting as a new form of radio and a new fireside.
Murthy:Yes.
Tippett:And of course, around the fireside, from time immemorial, we also told true crime stories to each other. [laughter] It’s not all sweetness and light. But it is a human space and it’s a place also where we remind ourselves what it means to be human and that we’re not alone in this. So for the people in this room, as we go out with this craft that we have, and also for people who will listen later, would you offer just a little bit of a reflection, meditation, just—
Murthy:Sure, sure. So I’ll share with you something that I do in my own life, a tool that I reach for when I’m having those moments where I feel alone or I’m starting to feel the despair creeping in. And it’s very simple. It takes about 15 seconds.
So just raise your right hand and place it over your heart and close your eyes. And I want you to think about the people who have loved you over the years, the people who have been there for you during difficult times, who have supported you without judging you, and who stood by your side even when it was hard. Think about the people who have celebrated your moments of greatest joy with you, the people who saw your successes as theirs, the people who derived such pleasure and fulfillment from seeing you happy. Just feel their love flowing through you, lifting you up, brightening your mood, and filling your heart. And know that that love is always there, even if they are not physically with you, because you carry that love in your heart. And know that you are and always will be worthy of that love. It came to you because you deserved it.
And now open your eyes.
What you felt in that brief meditation, that was the power of love. That is the power of social connection. That is our birthright. It’s who we were designed to be and what we were designed to experience. All of us, regardless of what walk of life we’re in, we have the ability to shine a light on the bright spots. Whether those are relationships that bring joy or movements in our community that are helping grow connection — it’s where we choose to focus our attention, it’s where we use our power to focus the attention of others that ultimately determines whether or not we create more light in the world or more darkness.
But I just want all of you to know, just as I want my own children to know, just as I remind myself as well, that we are all worthy of love and connection. Even in those moments where we feel that we perhaps aren’t. Even those moments where we feel like we’re the only one who might be struggling. The truth is we are not alone. There are others out there who want what we want. A world that is more connected. A world where we can actually be there for one another. A world that’s actually powered by love. And that is within our grasp. We only have to see it, to name it, and to start taking actions in our day-to-day lives to build that world and reflect those values.
And when we do, we will experience what one of my mentors in medical school told me years ago, which is, she said: Vivek, when you stand in strength, you allow others to find you. And every time you act out of love, whether that’s to a member of your own family or a moment of kindness you express to a stranger, you are telling people around you that it’s okay to give and receive love as well. You are inspiring people to be a new way and to be a new person in the world that constantly seems dark. And in a world that is full of despair, small acts of kindness are radical acts of defiance, and they’re the force that we need to ultimately build the world that we all need.
Tippett:What a joy to be back at On Air Fest and what an honor to bring Vivek Murthy with me.
[applause]
Murthy: Thank you so much, Krista. Thanks, everyone.
[music: “Eventide” by Gautam Srikishan]
Tippett:Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he’s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.
Special thanks this week to Jemma Rose Brown, Jenny Mills, Scott Newman, Brooke Jones, and Tom Tierney — and the entire team at On Air Fest.
The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Gautam Srikishan, April Adamson, Ashley Her, Amy Chatelaine, Romy Nehme, Cameron Mussar, Kayla Edwards, Juliana Lewis, and Tiffany Champion.
On Being is an independent nonprofit production of The On Being Project. We are located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.
Our funding partners include:
The Hearthland Foundation. Helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America — one creative act at a time.
The Fetzer Institute, supporting a movement of organizations applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Find them at fetzer.org.
Kalliopeia Foundation. Dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org.
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And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community development, and education.
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Thank you another inspiring interview ♡