(light music) - You think you're lonely?

Try being a Sacramento Kings fan.

Ouch, that was kinda mean.

Hey everyone, Myles Bess here, journalist, host of "Above the Noise, and, occasionally, John Legend's stunt double.

You don't know that, it could definitely be true.

But anyway, a lot of people have been saying to me, "Damn, Myles, with this pandemic life has gotten so lonely."

Well, when I say lonely, I'm not talking about solitude or being alone.

I'm talking about that feeling that you don't have any real meaningful relationships with other people, that deep in your bones loneliness.

We are born alone, we die alone.

(Italian music) (sighing) But this is life during a pandemic, no?

But loneliness was an epidemic before the pandemic.

You see what I did there?

And not to brag, but I'm something of a loneliness expert myself.

But why?

You might be asking.

Why are we so lonely?

And what can we do about it?

(smooth music) All right, so quick personal story time.

One of the loneliest periods of my life was when I moved from Oakland to Texas for my freshman year of high school.

The transition to Texas life was just overwhelming and depressing.

I hardly made any friends, and I never really adjusted.

And as a result, I isolated myself.

So like even now to this day, whenever I'm feeling kind of down, I'll isolate myself, and just kind of go into like this deep funk and just be lonely.

(laughing) Like I have to physically remind myself like, hey, you have friends, you have family.

There's people that care about you.

And no matter how valid this feeling is of loneliness, it'll pass.

Which is nuts, right?

You know, it's like having to remind yourself to breathe, or to eat, or, you know, skipping the opening credits on whatever you're binging on Netflix.

For a long time, my generation, the millennials, was considered the loneliest.

- [Announcer] And the winner for loneliest generation goes to the millennials.

- Oh my gosh.

Oh my God.

I totally wasn't expecting this.

This is crazy.

Okay, so first off I want to shout out my parents for just never encouraging me to do much of anything.

Also, I want to shout out our wifi connection.

If it was any weaker than it was, I definitely would have been outside making friends, having the time of my life.

And last but not least, I just want to shout out just being very awkward in any social setting that I step into.

Without those three things, I'd definitely have way more friends.

So thank you so much.

I love you all.

Goodnight.

That is, until we were bumped off the podium by Gen Z.

Now research is saying they're the loneliest.

And again, this was published before the pandemic ever happened.

Now, check this out.

I found this huge survey that's been given to over a million 15 and 16 year old students across 37 countries every few years, since 2000.

And in this survey, there are six statements about loneliness at school.

Things like, I feel like an outsider, or left out at school, and I feel awkward and out of place in my school, and students have to rate each statement from one, strongly disagree, to four, strongly agree.

The higher the number, the higher the loneliness.

And guess what researchers found when they crunched the data.

Most of the students were not lonely.

And the subset that was stayed pretty much the same between 2000 and 2012.

The only thing more consistent in the 200s was racism.

But from 2012 to 2018, it was a different story.

While still in the minority, the number of the lonely students nearly doubled.

So in a span of six years, almost twice as many students felt lonely compared to the previous 12 years.

Now that's a pretty massive increase in a short period of time.

And again, this is years before the pandemic even hit.

And this same kind of trend is playing out on a generational level, too.

A lot of research is showing that each generation is lonelier than the one that came before it.

So Gen X is lonelier than the boomers.

Millennials are lonelier than Gen X, and Gen Z is lonelier than them all.

But don't worry, I'm sure the next generation, I'm pretty sure they're called generation alpha, will be lonelier than them all.

So count your days, 'cause it's coming.

I can feel it.

So the first thing that pops into my brain after reading all of this info is pretty obvious.

Why?

Why are we getting more and more lonely?

Now, if you're familiar with how this show works, you know there's no simple, easy answers as to why we feel lonely.

So to start answering them, I thought, why don't I ask Gen Z?

Why do you think you have this rep of being lonely?

- We grow up with the mentality that their problems are their own.

and that they'll just be an annoyance if they just tell their feelings to other people.

- We don't really like to go out and socialize with people we don't know.

We tend to just stick around with our friends that we've been with for years, or just mainly by our selves.

- With social media.

And like just being able to like communicate with someone like all the way across the world, it's fricking amazing.

But it's not the same as to like making a one-on-one interaction, and me having a conversation with someone.

- I don't really get to interact with the outside world, because I'm busy on social media in my room, instead of doing other productive things, like maybe my homework, or going outside for a walk, or even talking to my family.

And I've noticed that that makes us feel lonely.

- I loved these responses.

And they made me realize where I have to go next, the bathroom.

(toilet flushing) Okay, and then after that, TikTok.

That's where I found Justin Puder.

He talks about all things mental health, but he's also got a PhD in psychology, and has his own counseling practice.

So he's not just out here running his mouth without knowledge to back it up.

I'm kind of curious to know like what goes on in our brains, you know, when we're experiencing loneliness, like what are the long-term effects on our brain when we're experiencing that?

- So what we know is the same neural networks that fire when you are in physical pain fire when you're lonely.

So loneliness is painful.

And there's a real reason for this evolutionary speaking that we are a social species.

We have survived all these years, not because we just like were born and ran out into the wild on our own.

We're a tribal species.

We very much form communities with other people.

They help raise our young, they help protect us.

So our brain has evolved in a way to tell us that if we are alone too long, this is painful and this is bad.

- Now, this totally makes sense to me.

I mean, think about it, for thousands of years, humans lived the hunter gatherer lifestyle in small groups.

Cooperation and communication were crucial to, you know, not dying.

And I've seen researchers refer to the feeling of loneliness as social pain.

It's the brain's warning system telling you like, hey bruh, get back with your tribe, you're too far.

Now I'm sure you can see the problem with this, just like I can.

We don't live that hunter gatherer lifestyle anymore.

Modern society has us moving away from family and friends to go to college and take jobs.

Ew.

A lot of us are working eight plus hour days in offices that leave us feeling disconnected.

Also, ew.

Now I don't know about y'all, but it's been years since I sat around an open flame talking about the wooly mammoth I just took down for dinner.

For me, it's more exchanging glances with my mom over take out while we're both on our phones.

I'm fluent in eyebrow now if you were curious.

So, when my brain is screaming, "Loneliness!"

It's not such an easy fix.

Modern society has been around for a couple of hundred years, but our brains are still designed for how we lived for thousands of years before that.

Remember that study I talked about earlier, the one saying that teens had this loneliness spike from 2012 to 2018?

Well, something big must have happened in the last 10 years to create that.

No, it wasn't Jay-Z cheating on Beyonce.

And that's where this whole social media slash smartphone explanation comes into play.

Basically, 2012 is the first year when the majority of people had access to a smartphone, social media, like Facebook, also hit critical mass.

So you had this perfect storm of two huge cultural things that constantly demanded our attention 24/7.

And it spread all over the globe.

And you know the story from there.

People, especially young people, started spending less time interacting in person, and more time using digital media.

And a lot of times that just doesn't satisfy the in-person connections that our brains are hungry for.

Like my brain is telling me that I'm hungry for a burrito right now, steak, extra cheese, yeah.

And even if you're gonna be like, you know what, I'm deleting all my social media accounts, and I'm never texting ever again, that doesn't automatically mean you're on your way to having friends in real life.

It just doesn't work like that.

Hi, I'd like to buy two best friends, please.

- [Man On Phone] I'm sorry, sir, that's not how life works.

- What?

Why?

- [Man On Phone] you can't just buy friends, sir.

- When has buying people ever been a problem, gosh.

I mean, there's research showing that at the group level, there's just less opportunities for face-to-face interactions as we spend more and more time in front of our screens.

So that's gonna affect you no matter how much or how little you're into using your phone, because literally everyone else is also using their phone.

Now I want to be clear, this is a theory on why Gen Z loneliness rates have gone up.

It's supported by data, but by no means, is it 100% the reason, case closed.

I say this a lot on this show, but isolating one single reason for why something is complicated as the emotion of loneliness is on the rise, it's just not gonna happen.

There are so many variables at play that you can never absolutely be certain, like let's look at the term social media.

Saying social media is causing loneliness is a tough sale because social media is not one thing.

Now we did a video on this that you should totally check out because you know, I love us, and I know you love us too.

But basically, when it comes to social media.

- What we know through the research is that it really depends how you use it.

Why you're using it, what kind of information you're absorbing on social media, or the internet at large, and how you're feeling through that process.

- Like, are you passively scrolling through your feed, getting more and more annoyed at people?

Like me.

Or are you actively using it to connect with other people?

So, using social media one way might make you feel more lonely.

But using it another way might help you feel less lonely.

Also another important thing Justin told me was that there's just way less stigma around talking about mental illness with young people compared to older people.

So like maybe the students on that survey felt more comfortable telling the truth about feeling lonely than people who took the survey before.

See, that's also a problem with survey data in general.

So keep that in the back of your mind.

So we've covered why we might be feeling more lonely, but how do we deal with loneliness?

Because if you've been feeling lonely for a while, it's not so easy to all of a sudden just, you know, connect with people.

Hi, I'd like to immediately connect with two best friends, please.

- [Man On Phone] I'm sorry, sir.

I think you have the wrong number.

This is a Wendy's.

- Why do you keep doing this to me?

Taking that first step to reach out can be daunting, and can bring up a lot of feels.

- What we know is that people who have been lonely for a long time, they can start developing symptoms that look a lot like anxiety and depression, and people can get depressed and become anxious.

When you first go reconnect with people after a bout of loneliness, likely you're gonna have more of this stress hormone, 'cause it feels threatening, it feels different.

But some people, when they feel the rise of stress, the rise of anxiety, they'll think avoid, like get me out of here.

But it's important to normalize that if we go into that avoidance, if we just move away from people chronically, we'll stay in the same state.

- But, Justin says we have to fight through it.

We can work on the connections we already have with the people around us.

Maybe that's a classmate, or a coworker, or a neighbor, or a family member.

Connecting with these people in a real authentic way is key to getting out of the loneliness trap.

And sometimes that requires us to connect with new people, people outside of our tribe.

So, you know, something like volunteering somewhere, or picking up a new sport, or starting a new hobby, anything that can get us in the room with people to connect with, with our mask.

(laughing) Trust me, your brain will thank you.

So, what do you think?

Would you describe yourself as lonely?

And if so, what do you think you can do to feel more connected with others?