How to find the emotional support you need right now (with Guy Winch)
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Hey there, you're listening to the very first episode of How to Be a Better Human from TED. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and I'm hoping that together on this show, we can learn how to be better humans together. It's kind of a big promise, putting out a podcast called How to Be a Better Human. When TED first approached me about it, I was like, are you sure you actually have the right Chris Duffy? I'm a comedian and a TV writer. I'm not like a self-help guru slash psychologist. I'm a comedian and a TV writer.

But they told me that was kind of the point. I haven't learned all this. I don't know how to be a better human, but I want to learn. And hopefully you want to learn too. Let's try and learn together. We're coming off of this really challenging year. You know that. I don't have to tell you that. It has been a year though, where I feel like we've all been really faced with shortcomings, both societal and individual.

And it's a year when it has been very, very, very clear that there's a lot of work to be done. And we desperately need more people to be doing that work. So on every episode of the show, we're going to have a guest expert.

Someone from the TED universe who's full of ideas and information. Someone who's giving a talk. But instead of just letting them say their big ideas and then walk away, I'm going to be asking them questions to get at what the rest of us are actually supposed to do. Like, how do we take their big ideas and put them into practice? How do we change or improve our own lives? Over the course of the season, we're going to talk about everything from relationships to social media to grief to climate change to making the best choices when you go on a movie binge.

But for this first episode, we're going to start with a topic that is both timeless and universal. And yet it's a topic that so many of us have experienced much more acutely over the past few months. Loneliness.

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Hello, hello. I'm Malik. I'm Jamie. And this is World Gone Wrong, where we discuss the unprecedented times we're living through. Can your manager still schedule you for night shifts after that werewolf bit you? My ex-boyfriend was replaced by an alien body snatcher, but I think I like him better now. Who is this dude showing up in every episode?

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Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much. I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. There could be no better person to kick off this show than Guy Wench. He's a licensed psychologist whose TEDx talk is one of the most popular TED talks of all time, which really means it's one of the most popular talks of all time, period.

Here's what Guy had to say in that talk about emotional first aid. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene. Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can imagine.

Because that's the world I want to live in. There's a reason why Guy's talk resonates with so many people. Loneliness is universal. You can feel lonely when you're isolated, of course. But as Guy told me in our interview, sometimes you can feel just as lonely when you're surrounded by people. It's a scary feeling because it so often feels like you're the only one going through it. But you are not alone. Even if it feels that way, you are not alone. And personally, I found what Guy has to say has made a real immediate impact in my own life.

And I promise you that we are not just going to say, try meeting people. That's not the advice we're going to give you. So here we go. You're a human. I'm a human. Guy's a human. And we're going to try our best to be better humans together. What is loneliness?

So loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It is defined as a subjective feeling that you feel emotionally disconnected from the people around you, that they don't quite get you, that they don't quite see you, that they don't appreciate you fully, or that they take you for granted. And it's that feeling that, you know, people see me, but they don't get me. They don't really understand me. So loneliness is truly subjective. It's different from being alone. There are people who

whose emotional needs are such that they don't need a lot of people in their life. If they have one person they're really close to, they feel good. They don't feel lonely. And there are people that they can have like 10 friends, but they're not good enough or close enough. So even though they're seeing people and talking to people all the time, they still feel fundamentally alone. So it's truly about the subjective definition. We're recording this at a very unusual time when it comes to people's relationships and people's mental health.

And I wonder, as a psychologist and as someone who's famously studied loneliness, has anything about the pandemic changed the way that you think about what you've said in the past or what you've believed about loneliness in the past? Well, what the pandemic has changed for sure is people's readiness to listen to what I've been saying. So I just think that the pandemic has opened up people's awareness.

to emotional health and how it can be impacted and how it needs to be a priority in a way that nothing else has before. And one of the big things that you've really advocated for is framing it in this way as emotional health.

Why is that so important? It's a fine distinction. For me, the difference between mental health and emotional health is that mental health is about diagnosable conditions. The stuff that is actually diagnosable in the DSM, you know, clinical depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, etc.

I talk about emotional health because most of the things I talk about are not diagnosable. Loneliness does not carry a diagnosis. Neither does the experience of failure or guilt or rejection or lots of other kinds of things that impact our emotional health and even our physical health. Loneliness certainly impacts our physical health. So they have those impacts, but they are not considered in the mental health category because they're not diagnosable. So for me, emotional health is a much broader category.

that encompasses any kind of challenges to our emotional health, our productivity, our functioning, our relating, all of it. I think just individually as myself, one of the things that I so appreciate about that is I had a real struggle to try and think about taking care of myself and beginning therapy and doing all of that because I never felt like

it was bad enough, quote unquote. It was never bad enough to really need that. And then when I finally did start going, it was transformational and helped me to really work through things and to be better, happier, more realized as a person.

But I think that I really was struggling with that kind of stigma. Which is unfortunate. I mean, that is the popular sentiment that people have, that, you know, I'll go if it's really, really bad, you know. But that's almost like saying, you know, I won't go to see a physical therapist when I'm limping. I'll

I'll go and I'm totally paralyzed. No, you kind of should have gone before. And I think it's the same kind of thing. In other words, there are challenges we experience to our emotional health, which tie directly to our functioning, to our productivity, to our happiness, to everything we do on a daily basis of which we're mostly unaware. But if we were to become aware and mindful, it could actually make a difference way before we get to areas in which it's bad enough.

And that's because what most people don't realize is that loneliness has a huge impact on our physical health. It contributes to an early death and is considered to be the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of the damage that does to our health and longevity. So truly it is a crisis of both psychological and physical manifestations, but there's not enough awareness about it. The difficulty with loneliness is really that it makes the person who's lonely feel

so emotionally raw and risk averse is that they really hesitate to reach out or even to respond when someone else is reaching out because they just don't want to be rejected again. They don't want to feel marginalized again. They're not sure if the person's sincere. It makes us perceive our relationships as less valuable as they are than they are. And it makes us think of the people who care about us as caring less than they actually do. So all of those things contribute to real hesitancy.

And that's why it's difficult for people to reach out when they're lonely, to really let people know, and even to respond to gestures from other people. That's one of the biggest problems. But when you feel really lonely, you start to doubt whether people care, even the closest people who clearly care. And that's the difficult thing. It makes you really hesitant.

In his talk, Guy has this really poignant story about how you can feel like that even with the person that you're closest to in the entire world. So we're going to play a clip of that story for you right now. It is time we close the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins. Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist, so he's not a real doctor either.

We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country.

We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then, and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together, we decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for 10 minutes. I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call, and waiting, and waiting, but the phone didn't ring.

Given the time difference, I assumed, "Okay, he's out with friends, he'll call later." There were no cell phones then, but he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning

I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later. And it was my brother. And boy, was he pissed. It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said, "I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?"

He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then, but I do today. And it's a simple one. We're going to hear Guy's answer to that and so much more right after this.

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Support for the show comes from Brooks. My friends at Brooks sent me amazing new Go 16s that I have been running with. The Go 16 has made me feel lighter and more energetic when I run out the door in the morning. They have soft cushioning through a technology called the Nitrogen Infused DNA Loft V3. It offers just the right softness.

There's also engineered air mesh on the upper side of the shoe that provides the right amount of stretch and structure. It'll turn everyday miles into everyday endorphins. That sounds good, right? Let's run there. Visit brooksrunning.com to learn more. In his talk, Guy talked a lot about his twin brother and how his twin was able to maintain his psychological health even while struggling through cancer treatments and being in a really tough spot physically. Guy also talked about how he spent a terrible night waiting for a call from his brother.

without it ever occurring to him that he could just pick up the phone and call himself. Does your brother feel vindicated by the fact that you've now told that story and apologized in a viral TED talk? I feel like the fact that millions of people have seen an apology gives it even more weight, maybe.

Look, about that TED Talk, his feelings about the TED Talk are different. One of them is that when I said to him, you know, there was a story there about him having cancer and going through treatment. And I said, I need a picture of you going through chemo. He goes, oh, no, I look horrific. I'm like, you know, look, it's a small talk. Who's going to see it? And so...

And so I convinced him and then it went viral and he's like, are you kidding me? And I'm like, well, but it's good news. It's good news for one of us. No, it's great news for both. Yeah, he's extremely supportive. In his professional work as a psychologist, Guy's been able to use his personal emotional experiences to inform his approach. Moments that he lives through like that night waiting for his brother's call. So what has that taught him about what the rest of us should be doing? Now what people have to do to be

be on top of their emotional health is first of all, pay attention to it. It starts with paying attention. Don't just pay attention when you're so depressed you can't wake up in the morning or you're so anxious you're crying outside your office because you can't go into the building. Don't wait till then.

There are certain practices that we can do on a daily basis that have proven to be extraordinarily useful psychologically and in every possible way. So one of them, for example, is gratitude exercises. That's something I do on a daily basis. I start the day, you know, you write a journal or you think about or you talk about three things for which you're really, truly grateful daily.

that day. And, you know, as I did this with patients many times, one woman came back and she said, Okay, here's my list, the sun. And I'm like, No, no, no, no, that's not how that works. You can't just say the sun, you can say you're grateful because it's a sunny day. And you like the feeling of the warmth on your skin when you walk outside. That's good. But not just the sun, the sun is there, whether you're grateful for it or not. So it's got to be something that you truly connect to or something that you appreciate.

And I mentioned the sun because I'm one of those people who, you know, gets light deprived in the winter. And so when it's a sunny day, I really appreciate the feeling of the sun on my face. And I'm grateful for that. Absolutely the same. Oh, yes. So, so, so, so much. Well, you moved to LA. Yes, I moved to a place where I get to write that down almost every day. Well, what do you do on the days when things are...

When you're feeling a little beaten down or things are feeling challenging, how do you still find the three things to write down in a gratitude journal? How do you how do you find the practice of doing that even on the challenging days?

It's useful to sit with those feelings a little bit, A, to make the point to yourself that they're tolerable, because one thing that we should always remind ourselves is that difficult feelings are tolerable. They're not pleasant, but we can tolerate them. We don't have to run from them. And they can give us valuable information. So first of all, extract information from that. But it's a two-step process. It's like you want to go in there, get the information, but you don't want to get lost in there. So you want to kind of bump yourself out of it at some point.

And then to do that, it would be useful to focus on what are the things that you can be grateful for. You can be grateful for the potential that you have to search and to create a bench of new support system if you're lacking.

So there are always things you can point to in terms of, yes, things could be worse. So I'm grateful that this is the case, right? I mean, there's a lot of us that thought things were absolutely terrible before the pandemic. And now they're like, I wish I could just go back to that terrible place because it's still a better place than the one I'm in now. So it's always possible to get a larger, broader perspective and then see the ways in which you are fortunate.

Do all groups of people experience loneliness the same? Is it equally spread across age groups and ethnicities? But since you have dealt with these hard numbers, I'm curious. Right. So it's an interesting thing, actually, because my belief is

is that our underlying emotional experience of feeling loneliness is going to be very similar across ages, cultures, race, etc. We tend to have a similar emotional visceral experience to certain phenomenon. What we display toward the outside, what we manifest, what we show can be very, very different. And how we respond, what our emotional response to that loneliness is,

can be very different in certain, like in collectivistic societies, it's going to have a different response. Somebody feeling lonely will have a different response than somebody who does in individualistic societies, for example. But in terms of ages, we tend to associate or we used to associate loneliness with the elderly, right? So here's somebody in their 80s or 90s living alone, etc. But we find now that the loneliest group of people are actually the youngest. They come out and

How do we make the connections so that you don't feel like you're just lost in the crowd? You're just a face in the crowd that no one knows.

In other words, how do we connect more deeply to other people? It's a skill set, in fact. And a lot of people are not that clear how to do it. They may be clear to do it how I do it in the dating sphere. It's a one-on-one. I know what to do that. But as an adult, how do I go and just make friends?

friends. It's something that you do so much more easily as a young adult, as a college student, just to go and start just making friends. I had a woman I spoke with who's, you know, has two young, young, young kids. And she was like, she's trying to make friends. And she felt like she was asking another mother out on a date when she was saying, do you want our kids to have a play date? She felt like, oh, please don't reject me. Please don't reject me. And I'm like, it was a play date with toddlers. But you know, it feels that way because she felt so lonely. She was desperate for the

for the connection. So it's about reaching out. And once we reach out, it's about creating meaningful connections, having meaningful conversations. Connection happens by sharing an experience or by connecting verbally through conversation. And to connect through conversation, you have to be able to share your hopes, your dreams, your emotions. You have to be open. You have to get the other person to be open. You have to kind of forge this connective tissue between you.

I can 100% relate to that feeling of it feels like you have to ask someone on a date to become friends as an adult. I've thought that one of the things that's so beautiful about making friends in high school or college is if you're in a place with a campus, you tend to run into people, the same people over and over. And so there's just this natural progression of, oh, I know you a little bit and then I know your name and then we know each other. And then by the time you're actually asking them to do something, you're already friends. But now I have to be like,

Like this was a good first meeting. And I think that this could be a thing, but if I don't get your phone number, I don't get your email. We're never going to see each other again. So I do have to do that. Like,

friend pickup almost. And it's always so uncomfortable. But then you just know that if you don't do it, you'll you will miss out on the reward. So I have to force myself to do it. But I and even for me as a huge extrovert, it is such a struggle. It's really difficult because it feels even a little foolish and childish because we so associated with those younger years. Right. So, you know, and and, you know, to to

You know, you're still a very young guy, I think. But when two 40-year-old men are, you know, chatting with each other in the locker room and, you know, and they're getting along and they want to suggest, hey, let's grab a beer or something, it feels so awkward to do. And, you know, and it's funny that it does because this is something that's so much part of human society.

But there's the formality of actually, let's exchange numbers, let's get our contact information without an excuse such as, oh, we can meet at the next group meeting or committee on that or something. Like when you're literally taking it out of whatever the official thing is, it's uncomfortable. People need to understand is that as adults, the repetition really matters. You can go to the gym, but if you go to the gym at different times and you keep seeing different people, you're not going to meet a lot of people.

But if you go at the same time and keep meeting the same people, if you go to the same 12-step meeting or the same Tai Chi class or whatever it is, and you keep seeing the same faces of the same yoga class, at some point, you just go like, oh, hey, hey, because you've seen each other a while. And then it's just much easier to start chatting. That repetition, the consistency, being a familiar face is an important aspect of any kind of integration into a new group, even with individual people.

You've said previously that multiple public health experts have described loneliness as this public health epidemic even before the current pandemic. And you talked about how the Minister of Loneliness was appointed by Britain in 2018. But many of the solutions that people were working on to address that pandemic are

They involve things like walking clubs and art groups, these in-person activities. And now I think a lot of people are struggling because those may cause us greater anxiety or actually put us in risk during the pandemic. So with that in mind, I wonder how can we rethink solutions around loneliness at this time?

But it is obviously a little bit more challenging when you're not meeting people in person, on the one hand. On the other hand, you have more flexibility in terms of being able to meet them virtually. So it's not like you wouldn't set up a Zoom meeting with somebody. You wouldn't have done that a year ago. If you just meet a stranger on the playground, you know, you wouldn't say, oh, we should grab a beer and talk about our kids. You wouldn't grab coffee and talk about our kids. You wouldn't say, and let's do it virtually. That would be like, okay.

But but but it's actually a little bit easier because we can choose the time better and you actually have more undivided attention that way. You already named a few of these, but I'm wondering, do you have any other great examples of virtual interventions that you think have worked?

interventions in terms of loneliness. Or just making connections. Oh, yeah. But the thing is that, you know, you have to pay attention to what the conversation is about. Our tendency is to do small talk and chit chat because it's less stressful, right? Like, hot enough for you, you know, what do you think about the election or whatever? I mean, it's just, it's a simple thing to throw out. So it's actually a little bit more difficult to get personal. And that's how you get to connect to someone more emotionally. You have to get a little bit personal. And the

Tip there is several things. First of all, ask open-ended questions, not closed-ended questions. Share something of yourself before you ask. And so then you're giving the modeling of, you know, I've had such a, for me, May was a much harder month than April this year because of blah, blah, blah. What about you? Which was the hardest part of the pandemic for you? Like, so you state something that's a little personal and then you toss it to the other person in an open-ended way.

kind of way. That's an important thing to do. Active listening is important. So when somebody says something, you can comment or reflect, you can do it verbally or non-verbally, like, oh, wow, that sounds so difficult, what you went through, would be an important thing to say, as opposed to like, oh, bummer, which doesn't convey as much, right? So there are ways to communicate and to go a little bit deeper in conversation. If you're reconnecting with somebody you haven't spoken to for a while, you're

reminisce about some of the fun times, reminisce about some of the old times, reminisce about the way it was when you met, however long ago that was. That's always a connective kind of thing. So you actually have to be mindful of looking to create, to forge that connection. Otherwise, you can just get swept away into this casual chitchat or arguing about politics, religion, or what have you. And that just didn't get personal at all, and it didn't feel connective.

And obviously it depends on the person, but it is fascinating that the more that we make ourselves vulnerable with people we trust, that you're able to actually connect more, not less. Yeah. Now, the thing is, it's scary. It's risky because when you make yourself vulnerable, you're opening yourself up to get really hurt feelings if the other person doesn't.

rejects, rebuffs, criticizes, doesn't respond in a way that feels supportive, compassionate, understanding, what have you. So it's risky, and that's why people don't like to do it. People don't like to own their vulnerability, especially, even though it's actually quite an empowering thing to do, because by owning it,

You take control of it. You know, like when I speak with people who do stand up, one of the first things they say is whenever something really crappy happens in their life, their first thought is, where's the material? No, absolutely. And it's interesting because there is this part of vulnerability, right? If I if I take something that happened that I feel really embarrassed or ashamed of or that was painful and I tell it to an audience and they laugh.

there's that connection, right? Generally, that laughter means I understand and I relate to that. Not like that's weird. I've never even heard of that. So that just makes me feel like, oh, I'm not alone. Other people get this too. Yeah, but audiences are...

Fickle Mistresses, indeed, for stand-ups because they can laugh their guts out one minute and the next line doesn't land and now they hate you. So that's a very unstable relationship to be in. You've been to my shows. I used to do stand-up for a few years. Oh, really? Wow. On the side. Yeah, just like open mics kind of stuff. But I did it long enough and hard enough that I'm highly familiar with how...

You know, you think you have them in your pocket. Oh, no, no, you don't at all. No. Oh, my gosh. I love I love that. You're like, I decided to go for emotional to deal with emotional health and help people with that because I have now experienced the rawest type of emotional health in the world, which is the green room of a stand up comedy show.

So that's amazing. But the first joke I wrote was usually my opening joke because I have a bit of an accent in standup. The rule is if there's anything different about you whatsoever, you must address it right away. Either the audience sits there and goes, does he know he has an accent? This is like such a deep masterclass on not just emotional health, but also comedy. That is exactly the best advice that you have to start with the thing that people always think about you. One of the things that I talk about that I think is really interesting

is that when a lot of people are giving advice about what you should do in a certain situation, right? Go and have the confrontation. Go and have the discussion. Go and change the habit.

it is actually really, really, really, really difficult. You have to put yourself through significant emotional discomfort often to do the healthier thing than the unhealthier thing emotionally. It's much less comfortable. It's very uncomfortable for someone who's lonely to go to put themselves out there and be vulnerable, as we're saying you need to be. It is extremely uncomfortable and it feels risky. And people don't,

Let other people know that it's going to be really difficult. This is gonna be uncomfortable This is gonna freak you out at first. This is gonna make you feel like oh my god What am I doing or this is the wrong thing or I did the wrong thing? And if you don't know that Then you'll stop doing it and think you are doing something or if you don't know that it's gonna be painful and feel very risky And you're gonna have moments in which you feel why did I do this? Then you will run away when you experience them as opposed to oh, yeah, I knew this was coming now I'll just take a deep breath and stay. Hmm

The show's called How to Be a Better Human. So what is one thing that you have seen or heard or read that's made you a better human?

Okay, so first of all, I have to say there are probably a thousand because of what I do when I read something important or something useful, I immediately will try it out myself. I'll try and incorporate it into my own life because if it's useful, then why wouldn't I? So there are just so many. Maybe just because it's top of mind because of a recent conversation I had just an hour ago. I'll follow on your...

on your therapy example there. So I just spoke with a patient an hour ago about something which I think is top of mind, just because I just think it's so important. And that is self-compassion. Self-compassion means treating yourself the same way you would treat a friend. And it goes against the idea of self-criticism and having a self-critical negative self-talk. Because the way we treat ourselves, like when we get rejected or heartbroken, one of our first instinctual responses is to become extremely self-critical.

Yes, because I wasn't tall enough. I wasn't rich enough. I was too this or too that or not enough of this, not enough of that. If only I were different, if only. And it just becomes so self-critical. Whereas if a friend said to you, I'm heartbroken, I just got broken up with, the last thing you would do would be let's review your shortcomings.

Wouldn't that be the right thing to do in the moment? You would never. You would immediately start to remind them of the opposite, of what they have to offer, what they bring to the table. That's what we should be doing. That's what we should be doing for ourselves. That's the self-compassionate approach to, oh my goodness, you just got your heart broken. Let's remind you why you're a good human being rather than review why you're an inadequate one. And so the idea of self-compassion and replacing negative self-talk with self-compassion

to me is a very, very important idea that is not getting near as enough attention and is not well known enough and applied enough as it really should be.

Well, Guy Winch, thank you so much. We've talked about vulnerability. We've talked about loneliness. We've talked about joy. We've even gotten stand-up comedy. I mean, it was the whole emotional gambit here. I love the whole thing. We've run the gambit on emotions. Thank you so much for being with us. And thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom with us today. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. And thanks for the fun conversation. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That's our show for today. Thanks to our guest, Guy Winch. You can read more advice from him in his column on TED's Ideas blog that's called Dear Guy, or you can listen to him on his podcast, Dear Therapists. Special thanks to the organizers of TEDxLinnaeus University who curated Guy's talk.

I'm your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Pedro Rafael Rosado from PRX Productions. For more on how to be a better human, visit ideas.ted.com. We'll see you next week. PR.