Why Your Brain Needs (Other) Bodies
An anti-loneliness starter guide for men.
🎧 You can listen to this post using the Substack app. Here's a 15-second tutorial.All the best animated films begin with a lonely protagonist.
Belle (Beauty and the Beast) stuck in a town that doesn’t understand her. Carl (Up) living in a house surrounded by a world that no longer makes sense to him. Marlin (Finding Nemo) frantic after his son is taken.
My favorite, and the one I think best illustrates this week’s principle, is WALL-E.
If you haven’t seen the movie, the story follows a compactor robot tasked with cleaning up an environmentally ruined Earth.1 The setup is that, after hundreds of years, he is the only functioning robot left on the planet.
At night, after the work is done, he turns on a movie to relax and we see something we weren’t expecting. Longing. Sadness. Defeat. Not a single word of dialogue is spoken in the first 22 minutes of the movie and yet you intimately understand what the character is feeling.
He’s lonely.
And the reason you understand it so well is because you’ve felt exactly the same thing.
What is Loneliness?
By the end of this article, you’ll understand why getting your body around other bodies is one of the best things you can do for your brain.
But to get there, we have to clarify what we’re even talking about in the first place.
Loneliness is a signal, not an accusation.
Just as hunger and thirst are our body’s ways of telling us we need to eat and drink, loneliness is the natural signal that reminds us when we need to connect with other people.2
From an evolutionary perspective, being social meant survival. If you stayed in a group, you had food, protection, and procreation (aka baby-making). All in all, it was a good life. A safe one.
And, most importantly, a statistically longer one than the loners.
This biological imprint stayed with us, driving us to connect even though we can technically survive without much peopling in modern society. Except that now, without the threat of imminent death to drive it, loneliness shows up as shame.
Loneliness [is] often paired with self-blame and self-criticism: ‘I can’t find my place among these people, so it must be my fault or something wrong with me.’3
Unless you hate showering, this probably isn’t true for you. There’s nothing wrong with you and feeling lonely isn’t your fault.
It’s a call you can choose to answer.
Loneliness is unchosen separation.
One of the clearest illustrations of loneliness comes from psychologist Dr. Ami Rokach, who wrote the following after a flight delay left him isolated in a hotel room, staring down at the hustle below…
I suddenly had a perfect sense of how loneliness feels. I could see the world around me, but I was not part of it.4
Loneliness is involuntary exclusion from the world you want to be a part of.
Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. Solitude can actually be great for your physical and mental health. It gives you space to connect with yourself (something that's key to battling lonely feelings, but we'll get to that later).
Loneliness creeps up when you want to be included but can’t for some reason. Maybe it’s distance or values or responsibilities or resources. Sometimes, removing that obstacle is all it takes.
Other times, it's trickier.
Loneliness is painful, literally.
The sensory fibers that register emotional and physical pain overlap in the brain.5
This is the reason why feelings like disappointment hurt, exhaust us, and require time to recover from — the brain sees them as wounds.
Loneliness triggers these same pain points, stirring up fear and loss and sadness. Fueling a self-perpetuating cycle where we pull away from precisely the thing we most want: connection.
💡 This is also why painkillers, like Tylenol, can actually reduce the pain we feel in social situations. But that's a topic for another time!But is Feeling Lonely Really That Bad?
In 2009, Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad assembled a team to conduct the largest study on the relationship between loneliness and health outcomes that had ever been done.
For 12 months, they analyzed 148 studies with over 300,000 individual participants. It was messy. This was new, controversial work. And their findings were about to reframe the global health conversation.
Lacking social connection reduced life span to the same degree as “smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”
Self-identified lonely people lived shorter lives and experienced more health difficulties than obese patients and alcoholics.
Loneliness statistically increased the likelihood of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and dementia.6
Conservatively, loneliness adds approximately 8.1% to annual healthcare spending (or $360 Billion).7
If your first reaction to this data is that’s absolutely insane. You’re in good company.
We get how feeling lonely can lead to depression and anxiety. But heart disease? That seems so disconnected.
It’s not. And that’s precisely the story we’re trying to rewrite — that your physical, emotional, and mental health rely on one another.
Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Lieberman calls our brains “neural seesaws” because they’re constantly switching back and forth between social and nonsocial thinking networks.
Nonsocial thinking is everything work and task related. It’s what we turn on to get things done. Social thinking is the people stuff: talking, touching, laughing, loving. What Lieberman found is that our default, regardless of introverted or extroverted tendencies, is the social one.
Evolution has placed a bet that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready to see the world socially…We are built to be social creatures.8
When this seesaw breaks, when we neglect to satisfy our social needs, the cost is steep. The consequences show up first in how we think, and then in how we feel, and eventually in how long we live.
So, how do we fix it?
The Base and the Backdoor
Solitude, paradoxically, protects against loneliness.9
There’s two methods to jumpstart your connected self. These are the fastest and easiest ways to get unlonely in a positive way.
The first is solitude, or what I like to call productive aloneness. The following picture helps explain why it’s helpful.
Researchers classify relationships into three “dimensions”: intimate, relational, and collective. Each dimension expands the number of people included while also shallowing the depth of knowing.
For example, you marry one person who is your intimate partner, but you develop several friends who are your relational support, and on the collective level, there are many people who exist in your circles of influence, like coworkers, but who you know less about.
Our brains crave to be known at each one of these levels. But at the center of them all is our relationship with ourselves.
This self-knowing acts as a foundation, or base, for every other connection we form. It must be the deepest. And the way we build it is exactly the same process as developing any other relationship: we spend time with that person (us).
Solitude is aloneness “not burdened with shame.” It gives us room to understand how and why we think and feel like we do. The better we understand who we are, the more we can bring our true selves to every other relationship.
Service operates like a backdoor out of loneliness into social revival.10
One of the reasons loneliness can feel so exhausting is because it puts our brains on high alert. We become hypervigilant, “preoccupied with [our] own emotional safety,” and honestly, scared of the outside world.
The way to short-circuit this miswiring is to volunteer.
The reason this works so well is that it forces our internal stuckness to turn outward, triggering a neurobiological reward that lowers stress, calms the threat centers of the brain, and pushes feel-good hormones through our bodies. Volunteering is brain therapy.
Research shows it doesn’t matter what type (work with kids, animals, plants, etc.), and you only need as little as 2 hours per week to rebalance the brain’s chemistry.
It’s kind of insane, but after reading the stats, I’m convinced that every hour you spend volunteering adds an hour to your life. Jimmy Carter, known for his good deeds, hitting 100 years old might be the most convincing case study for this.
The Bodies Are Waiting
In the end, WALL-E found his people.
EVE, a ragtag group of robot friends, and a rescued shipload of humans make up his community. He has a place and purpose again. And the world has hope.
Your best self requires others. Your best ideas, memories, experiences, and opportunities are all grafted into their stories. Just as theirs are in yours.
Happy peopling.
WALL-E = Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class
From Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H. Murthy, MD. Page 11.
Page 189.
Page 60.
Page 50.
Pages 13-14.
Meisters, R., Westra, D., Putrik, P., Bosma, H., Ruwaard, D., & Jansen, M. (2021). Does Loneliness Have a Cost? A Population-Wide Study of the Association Between Loneliness and Healthcare Expenditure. International Journal of Public Health, 66. https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2021.581286
Page 33.
Page 9.
Page 168.
I have experienced THIS with YOU: Your best self requires others. Your best ideas, memories, experiences, and opportunities are all grafted into their stories. Just as theirs are in yours.
Forever grateful!
The gateway drug through loneliness is when you embrace: Loneliness is a signal, not an accusation. So good!