If you are paying total attention to someone,
you feel deeper connections. You feel love.
When we connect with other people,
that's where we get our power.
That's where we get our strength.
That's how we can grow and transform.
This is a really hard moment. Everyone is struggling.
We've got to not only be compassionate towards others,
but we've gotta be gentle with ourselves.
( theme music playing )
Hi, BookTube. I'm Lori Gottlieb.
I am a psychotherapist
with a clinical practice in Los Angeles.
I also write the weekly
"Dear Therapist" column in "The Atlantic."
This is my book,
"Maybe You Should Talk To Someone."
The book follows four
very seemingly different patients.
And then there's a fifth patient in the book,
and the fifth patient is me
as I go through my own struggle with my own therapist.
I'm Dr. Vivek Murthy.
I had the privilege of serving
as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States
during the Obama administration,
and I had the opportunity during that time
to go into people's living rooms
and sit with people and hear about their stories.
But what I didn't expect to hear
were the stories about loneliness.
My book is about the prevalence
and the incredible consequences
of loneliness to our health.
But it's also a book about hope,
about the power of social connections to help us heal.
My name is Haemin Sunim.
I am originally from South Korea. I am a Buddhist monk.
I am the author of
"The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down"
and "Love For Imperfect Things."
Both books are about how to find mindfulness
and how to find gratitude and balance in our lives.
Vivek and Haemin,
it is so nice to chat with you today.
- Thank you. - Vivek, how are you spending your days?
I start each day off just trying to get the kids,
you know, ready, brushing their teeth,
getting them fed, and then hoping that I haven't
missed a conference call in the process.
A lot of my patients can't find privacy
in their homes to have their sessions.
So often they're having them either from a closet,
but more often from the toilet.
And often they will put on, like, a blouse or a top.
And they don't realize that sometimes
they're angling the camera a little far down
and they're wearing, like, their pajama bottoms.
So there's been a lot of laughter
over wardrobe during quarantine.
My quarantine wardrobe usually consists
of a button-down shirt, plus or minus a tie.
but I'm always wearing scrub bottoms.
That's what's comfortable for me.
When I wrote my book "Together," people said,
"Wait, why is a Surgeon General talking about loneliness?
Shouldn't you be talking about smoking and obesity?
And it's 'cause I was finding that even before
I had the chance to serve in government,
when I was starting to practice medicine,
I remember how many patients would come in all alone
and having to deal with incredibly painful diagnoses.
And I would sometimes go up to them and say,
"Is there somebody that you'd would like me to call?"
And so often, the answer was,
"No, there's nobody else to bring in,
so I'll just figure it out myself."
I was finding that even though
we had never talked about loneliness
in our medical school classes,
even though we never studied it for an exam,
that it seemed to be all around us.
Yeah. You know, one of the reasons why we cannot--
you know, we are too afraid to reach out for help
is because we are afraid to become vulnerable
and talk about how you really feel.
I'm so glad that you mentioned vulnerability
because so many times when we feel disconnected,
we try to fill ourselves up with food or wine
or too much time on the internet.
A colleague of mine said that the internet
was the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller out there.
- I love that. - So, you know, we find all these ways-- right?
And we find all these ways to try to fill ourselves up,
and yet they don't fill us up.
We can connect at any moment with anybody.
And, you know, we have to define what is connection?
And it's not just texting somebody.
It's not just a "How are you?" and a brief response.
It's really, "I see you, I hear you, I understand you,"
- and the reciprocity of that. - Right.
Technology can bring us to feel closer,
but at the same time, it can alienate us.
Technology's ultimately a tool.
We can use it to deepen our connections,
or we can use it to dilute and weaken our connections.
It depends how we're using it.
In my research for the book, I came across
a really interesting term, "phubbing,"
and that's when we snub other people
in favor of our phone.
It's important for all of us to remember
there are some places that we should keep sacred,
some spaces that we should protect.
And those spaces in particular,
it should be those where we're having
face-to-face interactions with friends
and we're catching up with people over the phone.
Times where we need to give them our full attention.
Five or ten minutes of undistracted conversation
where you are listening deeply,
sharing openly,
and simply being with another person
can be more powerful than 30 minutes or a whole hour
of distracted conversation.
Absolutely. Your friend, you know,
listening to you, he or she will also open up,
and thereby you can have a much deeper relationship.
Kahlil Gibran is one of my favorite poets and writers.
While I was a teenager,
I was reading his books over and over again.
I was in love at the time.
I had this first experience of seeing the divine
through, you know, loving that person.
This particular passage really spoke to me.
If you had said months ago to any of us
you're going to be socially distanced from people.
You're going to be sheltering at home.
You're going to have all of this trauma
going on all around you,
I think that a lot of us would have said, you know,
"I don't know how I could cope with that."
And we also need to have some normalcy
to sit alongside everything else that has been disrupted.
There are certain things that we need to do
to have some structure to our days.
Go to sleep at the same time that you normally go to sleep.
Wake up the same time that you normally wake up.
Make sure that you shower and put on actual clothes every day.
And those clothes can be sweat pants, but at least it's not your pajamas.
And make your bed every day
because it just makes you feel human.
And that is enough.
I think you're doing great if you're doing that.
A lot of people feel like when we're in the middle
of something like a crisis or something very tragic,
that we can't also experience joy.
And it reminds me of a patient that I saw who had cancer.
And she was saying that people felt so worried
about laughing around her because they felt like
it would somehow minimize the pain of her experience.
And she said, "It's not like I'm going to forget
that I have cancer."
You know, it's not like any of us is going to forget
that we're going through this pandemic.
You know, given the circumstance,
I think we can carefully look at where my mind is.
If we are looking at the negatives,
then it feels like we are in a prison.
But if you actually look at the positive side,
this can be a great opportunity for you to learn.
Thanks to YouTube, you can learn to knit.
You can learn to cook.
It's very calming, and it is also
a very nice way to serve, you know?
Because you are making it not just for me,
but for my friends as well.
If we are doing things for other people,
then not only you feel good about ourselves
and then have much deeper connections,
but also you begin to see that your life is meaningful.
Haemin, I love what you just said
'cause I think what you're pointing to
is that as dark and as hard as this time is for so many people,
that we can actually draw a lot of meaning out of it.
And if we come out of all of this
with a greater focus on people,
with a greater commitment to relationships,
then I think that we will have responded to COVID-19
in a way that will ultimately leave us stronger.
One of the great things about humanity
is that we come together in moments of crisis.
On September 11th, 2001,
when the buildings were beginning to crumble,
people started fleeing.
But those who fled south
found themselves encountering the Hudson.
Now the Coast Guard recognized that this was happening,
so they issued an unprecedented call
to all civilian boats in the area.
Over 500,000 people were rescued
from the southern tip of Manhattan.
It was an extraordinary moment.
But if you think about what happened,
these men and women on these civilian boats
were running toward the fire, literally.
They didn't know what was going to happen.
They didn't know if they were putting themselves in harm's way.
But what they recognized
is that in those moments there's a human need,
a call to be together, to be there for each other,
that rises above everything else.
We are doing remarkably well,
even if we're experiencing anxiety and sadness
and so much loss.
We are being creative. We're being adaptable.
We're being flexible.
And so I think that what is--
what I found most surprising
is how strong we all are
when it comes down to it.
So I was looking at, this morning, you know,
how to make a burrito breakfast.
Lori, it sounds like when this quarantine is all over,
that you and I need to visit Haemin
and have a meal with him,
I'm getting hungry just listening to him talk.