The digital loneliness epidemic with Anthony Silard

In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore one of the defining health challenges of our time: loneliness. Joining us is Anthony Silard, professor of leadership and organizational psychology at Luiss Business School and director of its Center for Sustainable Leadership. As one of the world's leading researchers on loneliness in organizations, Anthony brings a research-backed perspective on how social disconnection affects our well-being and why the rise of digital technology has become such an important part of the conversation.

Drawing from his research, leadership coaching experience, and work as the author of Screened In and Love and Suffering, Anthony explores the links between loneliness, physical health, mental health, and modern technology. We discuss how smartphones and social media may influence our sense of connection, why loneliness increased during and after the pandemic, and what practical steps individuals can take to foster more meaningful relationships in their daily lives. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the difference between being connected online and feeling genuinely connected to others.

This conversation is shared for educational and reflective purposes, offering insight into social well-being and the role community can play in supporting overall health.

Key takeaways include:

•  Loneliness can have significant effects on both mental and physical well-being 
•  Technology may increase connection in some contexts while contributing to disconnection in others 
•  Meaningful relationships often require intentional time, attention, and presence 
•  Reducing screen time can create more opportunities for real-world connection 
•  Community and social support remain important foundations for long-term well-being

Get free digital copies of Anthony's two books through The Art of Living Free, where he shares additional research and reflections on loneliness, connection, and well-being. 

Visit Heallist.com - your portal to holistic healing, connecting seekers and thousands of practitioners across the globe.

Follow @heal_list on Instagram.

Watch video episodes on Spotify & Youtube.

Transcript

Yuli 0:00

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. If this content resonates, please hit subscribe or follow to support its independent content. Today is a big topic. Loneliness has quietly become one of the defining health conditions of our time, and a lot of the research now points to our screens as part of the story. My guest today is Anthony Silard, professor of leadership and organizational psychology at Louise Business School in Rome and the director of its Center for Sustainable Leadership. Anthony is one of the top two world researchers on loneliness in organizations. He has coached cabinet ministers and Fortune 500 CEOs and is the author of Screened In and Love and Suffering. Anthony, welcome to the podcast. So good to have you with us. Thank you, Yuli. I love your show. So I appreciate you inviting me on. Amazing. So big topic today, not the happiest topic, but I feel like we have to talk about those things. That's what we're here for, to dive into some of those trends and some of those conditions, things that we're seeing around us, and hopefully offer people some tools and at least some perspective, how to cope with some of those things we're experiencing. And what I noticed personally when you talk about some of those big kind of cultural trends, right, that are happening around us, it's so hard sometimes to navigate them when you are in the midst of it. Right. So what I hope today that we can offer people is kind of this perspective of like what is actually happening in our society and us personally. So can you frame this work for us? Okay. Yes. So let's do an initial framing. Like, what's how serious is this? So in January 2018, Cygna, the healthcare company, uh they did a study of over 20,000 US adults and found that 43% were lonely. This was based on the UCLA loneliness scale. Two years later, in January 2020, that percentage, same study, and it had leaped up to 61%. So over three in five adults in the United States. This was before the pandemic. So the pandemic happened, of course, two months after that in 2020. So this is a global phenomenon. In the UK, former Prime Minister Theresa May hired a minister for loneliness. This was after a study came out that found that over 8 million British people were lonely. And that, and I'm not making this up, British children spend less time outside than prison inmates. In Canada, Australia, Japan, France, also 50% or higher levels of loneliness. And so, really, this has really skyrocketed since the advent of the smartphone in 2007, when at the Macworld Convention in San Francisco, Steve Jobs came out in his black turtleneck and unveiled the first iPhone and then the first Android phone, which was released a year later. So it's actually kind of gotten to pretty devastating proportions. In Japan, for example, in the last 15 years, the well, before I share this, I would say that if you think about people that you think of as like dangerous to society, I don't know about you, Yuli, but I generally don't think about elderly Japanese people, 75 and over. Well, elderly Japanese people, 75 and over, in the last 15 years, their rate of incarceration has quadrupled. And a lot of people say, well, what? How could that happen? And it's because they're going to a local corner store and just stealing a small bag of rice or anything so they can go to jail, because at least in prison, there's a community, at least there's people you can talk to. So there was an 87-year-old Japanese man who put a sign on a bus stop and this went viral saying, I don't have any family. Would some family take me? And no family did, and he passed two months later. So loneliness has really just been growing exponentially. And I'm glad we're we're here to talk about it today because it's something we're all dealing with. Yeah,

Loneliness As A Serious Health Risk

Yuli 4:15

I feel like, you know, it's one of those conditions that it doesn't have a very defined like health risk. So it's often deprioritized almost, right? Everyone is like fighting cancer, fighting someone's big diseases. And why do you think we kind of underestimate this condition? I think it's because we don't tend to think about our socialization as a health concern, which is a huge mistake. In fact, a recent meta-analysis discovered that loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day for your health. So people who are lonely actually die younger. There's a there's a higher mortality rate. There's also physical health conditions associated with loneliness from breakdown of the immune endocrine systems, also uh heart rate, uh, heart attacks. People lonely have heart attacks more often. If you cut yourself, the wound actually takes longer to heal if you're lonely. So there's a lot of physical health detriments, then also psychological health. People who are lonely are more easy to become anxious and depressed, more easy to feel a sense of burnout, their self-esteem plummet. So we we really need each other. And when we don't learn behaviors to really enrich the relationships in our lives, then we we become sick, like physically, psychologically. Yeah, and to echo that from the other side of things and the longevity industry, the conversation is now also shifting towards a more of like a social wellness, is big, right? And the same research says that number one contributor to longevity is actually community. So I think finally we're starting to hear this recognition, but it's still in the very early stages. Well, that was the primary finding of the longest-standing longitudinal study of adults in that we know of in history, which was Robert Waldinger at Harvard, their study of adult development, really starting in the mid 9 19s, like 197, 17, and going all the way until today. And what they found is that the seniors who are the healthiest and the happiest are the ones who had the closest relationships with others. And there's been a lot of studies over the last 30, 40 years pointing to what you just described, that social connection is really the most important ingredient for long-term health. In fact, also, if you look at the psychological literature, one of the only things that psychologists, almost all of them agree on, is that close relationships is as close as you get to a panacea for long-term well-being. The people who have close relationships are are happier. And they also tend to be healthier because uh, for example, they have people that check in on them. And this can be important in terms of ensuring that they go to doctor's appointments, that they engage in in healthy behaviors, because other people tend to call us out when we stop taking care of ourselves well, if there are kind of close others in our lives. So let's look back to what we said in the earlier part of this conversation about the connection to the screens and and to this iPhone invention, right? Because a lot of people argue that those phones made us more connected and they expanded our networks exponentially and allowing us to keep in touch and keep those connections alive even through distances. How do you tackle that argument? Well, this is the popular belief that never in human history have we been so connected with so many people as we are today. And well, let's take a little bit of a look at what the research actually has found. The the research has found that actually we've never been this depressed, we've never been this anxious, that there's a number of studies that show that the longer you spend on your phone, the more depressed you become, the lonelier you become. There's what's been identified as a displacement effect, that the more time you're on your screens, that it's kind of like taking a bowling ball and dropping it into a bathtub full of water, which for your listeners, I'm sure you do every day. So you know exactly what kind of splash that is. But uh yeah, don't try that at home. But it's a big splash. And that all the water that comes out of the bathtub, that's that's the time with people in real life that you no longer spend with them because instead you're interacting with them online and on your screens. When I did my doctorate in Barcelona, I had a good friend from Scotland and he was doing an MBA in the same at ESA Business School where I did my doctorate. And he told me in the two years of his MBA, he never once actually made a phone call with anyone. He never made a phone call to anyone or received a phone call. Everything was by texting. It was, you know, in Europe it's WhatsApp text more than the texting on your phones, which is more common in the US. And so really we're seeing that this displacement effect that screen-mediated communication is replacing face-to-face communication.

Why Texting Turns Colder Fast

Yuli 9:17

And the challenge with that is that there's been many studies on, for example, dehumanization, you know, Nick Epley at University of Chicago and Juliana Schroeder at Berkeley, they found that if, for example, if you're reading a message from someone from with a different political persuasion than you have, that when you're reading the message, you're more likely to dehumanize them. Whereas if you hear the message or even or see the message, then you the dehumanization is much less. So there's all these studies also that found that have found that there's what's called a negative effective bias of electronic communication. This is Chris Byron, Georgia State, her research, where if you send an electronic message, a text, an email, whichever, and you send an electronic message intending it to be emotionally positive, it's usually received as being emotionally neutral. Now, if you send an electronic message intending it to be emotionally neutral, it's usually received by the recipient as being emotionally negative. So there's this downward pull over our relationships when we choose to communicate through our phones or screens rather than in person. And then what about social media? Well, there's a study from University of Cambridge that's found that whenever a politician uploads a message that's emotionally negative and is disparaging the outgroup versus a message that's emotionally positive or neutral and is not disparaging anyone, that those negative messages are forwarded and liked at 2.7 times the rate of those emotionally neutral or positive messages, which essentially means that if we look at the business model of these technology companies, is to keep us on our screens for as much time as is humanly possible. That's what my book Screened In, The Art of Living Free in the Digital Age, was really going through all of that research and trying to come up with some strategies because what's happening now is we're essentially allowing ourselves to buy into this business model by becoming the product. Like we, what we share is the product of these technology companies, and they're essentially accentuating the worst parts of ourselves, the the parts, it's kind of like taking the journalistic mantra, if it bleeds, it leads, and putting it on steroids. And that's what's becoming our everyday lives. This is a pretty dark picture that you're painting. Right. Is there any psychological reason behind? I know you mentioned some really scary stats about the sentiment of those messages. What is the psych psychological reason behind it? Because I do believe I come from a positive school of thought, I guess, that believes in the good inside each person until you prove me wrong, right? So why is this negativity coming out so much in the in the recent years? You know, I like you believe in fundamental human goodness and decency and kindness. And I think what it is is that really our phones are just a communication modality. And when people are in person, they tend to be kind. They tend to usually be decent human beings. I just interviewed Juliana Schroeder, who I mentioned earlier, and and also Nick Epley, who do this research on talking to strangers. And they found, for example, they did this in Chicago and they did this in London on the tube. Someone's about to get on the on the subway or the train, and you ask them, would you rather talk with someone you don't know, or would you rather ride alone? They'll say, Well, I'd rather I'd rather ride alone. Thank you. Would you enjoy it more in which, you know, in which in which instance? Would you learn more in which instance? Okay, I'd enjoy it more alone. I'd learn more alone. I'll be on my phone. I'm fine. Thank you very much. Okay, so then we're gonna give a Starbucks gift card if you go and talk with someone you don't know, and then we do this survey and let us know how it went, right? So no one wants to do that. And almost everyone who who who who participates in their experiments in the survey says, I was totally surprised. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I learned much more than I thought I would. And then they ask, Well, why don't why don't you do that more? And it's really this fear of rejection, it's this social anxiety. But what they found is that almost no one gets rejected because most people tend to be relatively kind and decent human beings. And so I think if we want to shift more into that positive inner personal space you're referring to, it's very simple. Just just use your phone as a phone, call people. You know, the voice, you know, go and visit people, spend time with people. The the actual what's really interesting is that there's other research that's found that that it's the human voice which is really the purveyor of human connection. So I find this really, really useful in that the in that when we decide are we going to, for example, are we gonna do a video conference with someone or talk with someone on the phone? A lot of us have this idea the video conference is gonna be more connected because we see each other. It's not true. There's actually no difference. The actual video has no additive effect over the voice in terms of bringing people closer, feeling more connected. I mean, I would say there are exceptions to that. So you know that for grandparents, grandchildren are basically like crack, right? I mean, it's it's what they're looking forward to all day long. And there's no question, like we've had some golden moments where our kids and our parents, so grand grandchildren, grandkids, they're spending some time and they're looking at each other and talking. I think what happens is that after the first few minutes, that wears off. And then it's again, it's really the voice that's connecting people. So I think I think we can move more into that space. We just have to use the technology differently.

Building A Screen Use Vision

Yuli 14:53

Now, throwing our phones under the bus is not an option anymore. Like that's we just we use them. What why are we on our phones so much? Because we can do things we never could have dreamed of a few decades ago on our phones. Right? You know, the the list is endless. So the real challenge for today is not about using your phones, not using your phones. It's about self-regulation. It's about coming up with your vision for how often you want to use your phone, and then trying to realize that from day to day. So if you think about it, when you're 80 years old looking back at your life, do you want to say, hey, you know, Anthony was a great email replier? Wow, Anthony really knew how to reply to a text. Like that's not what I want to be thinking when I'm 80. I want to think I I developed really close relationships with people I love and care about, and I had the courage to talk with people I didn't know and build new friendships. And that for that reason, I'm 80 and I'm surrounded by people I really care about and that that are really meaningful to me. So I think it's a question for each of your listeners to develop your own vision, your own values around how often you want to use your screens and then find ways to stick to that vision you have. Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think we all lost our agency with a lot of those devices because, like you said, they're built, unfortunately, but people that a lot of times come from like gaming industry or um they use this psychology of manipulation to uh basically control your time. And I think getting back that agency and that being in control of your time and space, I think this is what we're all missing, and it's hard. It's like you have to work in that, right? It's something you have to do proactively because you're fighting basically against a technology that sets you up for failure. I mean, it's even worse than that. And this this this visual, I've coached a lot of people and taught a lot of people where this his visual has has been, you know, the one thing when you're a coach or or or a professor or teacher where people come, and I know you got a lot of healers out there, where people always bring it back and say, Hey, when you said that, that really it clicked for me. So I'm gonna share that here with your listeners, which is the next time you're on your screen, imagine that it's you against thousands of programmers, predominantly men, whose bonuses and incentives are tied to their keeping you on that screen as long as possible. Grab them short and keep them long. That's how they get their raises, that's how they make their money, that's the business model. So you really think you're gonna win that battle? Like, good luck with that. You got to have some really innovative strategies to be able to stick to that vision that we talked about, those long-term values you have about how you want to live your life. Because in the moment, it's like you're in the middle of the casino and getting out is gonna be really, really difficult. Yeah, that's a great analogy. Do you have any examples from your work and organizations or as a coach of like different maybe habit changes or how certain strategies kind of help create a real shift and what that shift really looked like? Yeah, so these actually, based on hundreds of interviews, that's how the strategies that I included and screened in the art of living free in the digital age, that's where the strategies came from. I'll share a few with you and your listeners. One of them that I think is a really good idea is identify your poison of choice, right? So what is it, which are the apps that you get addicted to? So it it could be it's WhatsApp, or it, or maybe it's a gambling app, or maybe it's a porn app, or maybe a URL, whatever it is, is it Facebook or Instagram? There's a quote I love a lot by Spinoza. He once said, emotion which is suffering, ceases to be suffering when we form a clear and precise picture of it. So form that clear and precise picture of why are you going to these apps or to these websites? And I think when you do that, what you'll find is that there really is no digital addiction. You're addicted to all the same things that that you used to be addicted in an analog life or in your previous analog life, if you're older like me. And so you're still addicted to recogn recognition, to feeling worthy, to feeling competent, to feeling safe, to to to experiencing variety. Think about the things that really the reason you go on these sites, what you're really looking for. And then what I recommend doing is to take that poison of choice that kind of keep you coming back over and over again. And on your on your, I'm sure you are aware that you've got multiple screens, right? So you've got your first screen and you can get a flick and you can go to your second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth screen. So I call it the heart of darkness in screened in, which is you got like the outer station, the middle station, the inner station. So put those apps that are particularly addictive on like six screens away. And then say to yourself, how many times a day are you gonna go to those apps and check them out? And you know, maybe you're going right now. I mean, we touch our phones on average over 2,500 times each day. So maybe you're going to those apps 30 times a day right now. Maybe it's 80, maybe it's 10. Again, go like project yourself to you with white hair at 80 years old, looking back at you right now, and ask that person, how many times a day should I be checking those apps? And how should I be spending my time now so that when I become you and I'm 80, you're gonna feel content with the decisions we have made. Because that 80-year-old self is just your higher self, it's your deeper values. And when you do that, you may say, Well, you know what? Okay, I want to check those apps twice a day, right? Or I want to check them three or four times, whatever it is. It's gonna be a lot less, probably, than the number of times you're checking them now. And this is how you move your actual life in the direction of your desired life. And so that's one way to do it. Some other ideas are really relatively simple, but hard to do. Like turn off notifications. That's the first one. No sounds that are like dings telling you, kind of like telling a pigeon that it needs to peck more to get the pellet. So get that out of your life. Take off those notifications. And then here's one which is a bit radical. And but I will promise you, those who I know who followed my advice and have used it, are the ones that thank me the most. Take your phone and put it in grayscale. Like they actually use the colors on your phone to manipulate you, those thousands of predominantly male programmers. So there's research that shows if you show single men a photo of a woman in a blue dress versus a photo in a red dress and ask them, like, how much do you want to take her out? How much would you spend on a date with her and so forth? They want to spend much more and they they're much more eager to take out the woman in the red dress. If you keep her in a brown dress, but make the frame of the photo of the of the photo red versus blue, same thing. And so they want to they want to spend more when it's when it's red. So these technology companies use colors to manipulate you. And when you put your phone in grayscale, and it's very easy to do, just you can even Google it for your phone. How do I put it in grayscale? Super simple. And what happens is it becomes very boring very fast because you start saying, okay, this is a slab of black and white. And here in front of me. The real world in Technicolor. And that's where I want to be focusing. And some of your listeners may be thinking, okay, but it was a date. Maybe I'll get in an accident if I'm using Google Maps or Waze with in black and white. So with accessibility options, you literally with my phone, you just flick like this with your two fingers, and I and I switch my phone from grayscale back to color when I'm driving. Or I want to see a photo of my kids or something like that. So those those are a few strategies that your listeners could use. Thank you. That is super useful. I never thought about grayscale, and I agree. Since you mentioned kids, I mean, this is something that is really close to my heart because I feel like our kids are probably suffering the most in this digital loneliness epidemic and someone who has two young children and watching their addiction is real, no matter how much I, as a person who works in tech and aware of the dangers. And I try to do my best to limit the exposure, but addiction is there. How any strategy I know it's a big topic on its own, but if we can give like a quick snapshot and how some of those strategies can work with children, I think that would be really useful. Sure, sure.

Parenting Without Digital Babysitters

Yuli 23:11

So as it turns out, I've been doing a number of conferences at schools with parents about parenting in the age of distraction. It's a big topic. And the way I do these is I interview the parents and I interview the kids and and the teenagers. And I ask them what's working for them, whether they see this as a problem. And the really unsettling part about all this, Yuli, is that the kids are aware of it. They know it's a problem, and they see their parents doing the same thing. So when we when we point our finger at the at our children, you know, we've got three fingers pointed back at ourselves because they because we're not modeling well for them. In Screened In, I interviewed Jenny Redeski, who uh developed the screen use guidelines for children for the American Academy of Pediatrics. And I asked her these questions. And she talks about what she calls a conversational duet. And a conversational duet is the back and forth, call and response conversation and discussion that really begins when children are infants and continues into their 30s, 40s, and beyond. And really the conversational duet is how we as parents, how we execute our primary responsibility as parents, which in my eyes is to help our children learn how to assimilate into social groups. That's really the most important thing. If social connection, as we talked about, is the most important ingredient for long-term well-being, and it also is for long-term success, that's another discussion we could have. Then we as parents, by helping our children learn to develop social relationships that are healthy, then we're really preparing them more than anything, even more important than their schoolwork for their long-term success and happiness. Now, I mean, schoolwork is very important too, but if you let me share with you from my leadership work as a leadership professor and coach and trainer, that regardless of the types of positions, people that are extremely intelligent and book smart but don't develop relationships well, go nowhere in organizations. They don't get promoted and they're the first fired. So especially in the age of AI, we need to help our children lean into relationships and understand the importance of finding people in their lives that they don't only like, they also want to be like. Right. So I really believe a friendship, for it to really be sustainable over time, each person has to be better than the other in some dimension of life. And we gravitate towards others where we feel that they're better than us. For example, maybe I'm really good at choosing where to go for dinners and someone else is really good, or maybe I'm really good at like talking about career goals and staying focused. And a good friend of mine, she's really good at, for example, at planning where we're gonna go travel. And another friend is really good at just being like more relaxed and getting us to not take ourselves so seriously. So we form these constellations of relationships, each of us. And I think it's one of the most important things we do for kids. And in these interviews, what I have children saying and teens saying, it's it's just so poignant and sad. They're saying, I wish I could spend more time with my dad, but the power of his phone is just too strong. I have these quotes. Other kids are saying, I'm lonely, I'm depressed, I love my phone. Like this is the context, this is the environment we are allowing our kids to really grow up in. And I don't want to sound like the doomsayer, but let's go back to the positive, right, Yuli, which is we don't have to make those choices. We don't have to outsource our children and teens to the electronic babysitters. We can make time for those conversational duets and develop healthy children. It's so easy to say, okay, good, I've got two hours, they're on their tablet, but there's nothing wrong with depending on the age, you know, an hour, hour and a half a day on screen, half an hour for really younger children. But once we go beyond that and we allow it, then yeah, we're kind of setting up a really poor situation for the future. Well, I love your message of focusing on what we can actually do for them, right? Because I think fighting screens in general, there's only so much we can restrict. But if we focus on developing their social skills, and as a parent, I feel like this is one area that we really can control. Um, you know, we can make an effort to to put them more in social situations and and make sure their those connections are thriving. So I like that message of, you know, picking at least this area that you can control and doing your contribution there.

Loneliness For Solo Practitioners

Yuli 27:49

Um, so thank you for sharing that. I also wanted to bring up our audience of practitioners who listen a lot to this podcast. And I can't help but think that they are one of the those audiences that is really subjected to loneliness because of the nature of their practice. A lot of them are a lot of the holistic practitioners, they work solo. They're not part of a large organization. We don't have in holistic health those kind of, you know, like the hospitals and the networks of medical professionals. Um, this is something we at healists are building to create that ideal network and closer connections between practitioners. But I know it's a it's a big issue because anytime we do any community activation or event, even if it's virtual, there's just so much, you know, appreciation and gratitude for that because those things just don't exist. And I think in this profession, when people are helping others and they're guiding others out of depression and anxiety, all those things that we talked about, but yet what I'm seeing in this practice, a lot of them personally suffering from that loneliness that you're describing. Any advice there, any uh thoughts? Sure. Well, a couple things. One is, you know, we talked earlier about this belief many of us have accepted that never in human history have we been so connected with so many people. Well, I hope most of your listeners will agree with me after our discussion today that that's just not happening. That actually what's happening is that never in human history have we been in contact with so many people and connected with so few. And that's why we become so lonely, because it's not just being in contact with someone, it's having more than a superficial conversation, it's having deeper conversations. Recent studies have borne this out that when we have more meaningful conversations, that really reduces loneliness. And what tends to happen is that we're kind of having these shallower conversations, and we don't feel we're really being ourselves with others. We don't feel witnessed. And I think feeling witnessed is one of the number one ways to reduce loneliness, feeling like there's other people who are going through this life with you and they see you and they they understand you. And if you're not feeling so well, they catch it and you're like, hey, are you okay? You look like you've had a rough night. We need that as human beings. And I think if you're working in a healing profession and you're working on your own, then, well, first of all, there's a few positive notes here. One is that there's the research on social support has found that giving social support to others is actually leads much more to long-term happiness than receiving it. So you each of you is a healer, you're helping others. Now, recognizing that if you, in fact, are are working in this profession and helping others to heal, well, what's led you down this path? Perhaps there's been some trauma in your own life that has made you want to really help others. I could that's another conversation, Yuli, but I can say in my case, that's that's 100% true. And being able to say, well, through your healing profession, you're able to also heal some of this trauma. And yet if you look at the literature on trauma, one of the most important ways to heal trauma is also through social connection. It's sharing it with others, having others that you can share where you are on your journey, how it's, you know, how it's going, and getting feedback from others. So one thing to think about is that it's not being alone that causes you to feel lonely. So if you're working alone, that in and of itself does not cause loneliness. So being alone, or what we could call aloneness, is objective isolation. Like if you're sleeping in a bed tonight alone, you're objectively isolated. But what's interesting is that loneliness is subjective isolation. It's not being alone, it's feeling alone. And how do we become lonely? Because when we're alone, we associate it with something negative. And so we have this negative, distressing emotion because we're alone, and that's called loneliness. But we have to recognize that there's also a positive, strengthening emotion associated with being alone, and that's what we call solitude. So just as one person's trash is another person's treasure, being alone for some people is that trash, and for other people, it's that treasure. When we're able to do that and we're spending sufficient amount of time with others that is meaningful, and yet we're also spending sufficient amount of time alone so we can process how we interact with others and show up in a better way with others. That's really the the exit strategy from loneliness. Amazing. I love that you mentioned the deep connections and hopefully this conversation was deep. This is why I love doing this podcast. This is for me an opportunity to truly connect with the speaker and and with the listeners and bring up some of those topics that are that go beyond that surface conversation. So thank you for reinforcing that and acknowledging. And uh, yes, we're running out of time. I feel like I have still so many questions for you. Perhaps another conversation is due, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to share anything else that you would like with our listeners. And we're gonna put in show notes your incredible free offerings. Thank you for that. Well, of course. And and I also feel very connected with you. And I have to say, I launched a podcast also because of the same reason. Because there's a saying I really like, which is while most people go through life, some people grow through life. And I think that's what we're doing here together. And I hope your listeners will agree that and they're also feeling that they're growing from our conversation. For your listeners, I have two free books I want to give to each of you. Uh they're called The Myth of Happiness, How Your Definition of Happiness Creates Your Unhappiness. And the myth of friendship, how your misunderstandings about friendship keep you lonely. A lot of the conversation we've had here today, there there are a lot of these studies are in those in those books. So again, Yuli, thanks so much for for having me here. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you for those generous offers and for being here and spreading this very important message. I really enjoy this conversation. Please come back. Okay. Thank you. I will.