Make a noise.

Hello.

Think it sounds good. Do that thing you just did.

I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie. To the hip, hip hop and you don't stop a rockin. To the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie. To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.

Did you just make that up?

No that's Sugarhill.

Oh, so you memorized it.

Every kid at that age knew about Sugarhill and Rapper's Delight.

I didn't.

Well, those are some other issues that we wont go into.

The man that is shaming me there for not knowing about the 1979 classic Rapper's Delight is Dr. Surjit Sharma. He's a pediatric emergency room doctor. But today, for the purposes of this podcast, he's just Sujit and he's my best friend of almost 40 years.

You've been there for, I think, all the big moments and most of the sort of medium sized ones as well, maybe even the minor ones. I think you've been there for all the moments, basically, which is kind of incredible. We were at the hospital for each other's children's births and usually, Sujit and I stealing off. Having a quick toast somewhere in celebration of the family expansion projects. And, you know obviously

And Nancy pizza.

Weddings. And then I think it was those moments, it was just the, hey, you want to get together and go get some Nancy's Pizza, you know, whatever it might be. I have a very clear memory of that first meeting for us when I walked to your room. And you showed me your.

You never failed to remind me about that.

Yeah, I'm good at, I'm a good reminder.

Thank you.

I was complimenting myself.

You're welcome then.

It is always fun talking to Sujit, whether we are joking with each other about small things like embarrassing moments in our lives, or for celebrating the big landmarks like the births of our children. And there's a real reason why I've decided to bring him on the podcast today. I wanted to have this conversation with Sujit in particular because as a general rule, I've started to really reevaluate and appreciate my friendships over the last couple of years. We've really seen rates of loneliness rise. The pandemic deepened those feelings, and it was true for everyone of all ages. In fact, according to a Harvard study, an estimated one in three Americans reported experiencing serious loneliness during the early days of the pandemic. One in three. But you see, the thing is, loneliness has actually been a growing problem for quite some time now. In fact, the problem is so alarming that the Surgeon General issued an advisory about it. The message was this The country is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and isolation and it is time to act. I agree with that. We have to find ways to increase and strengthen friendships. I used to think of friendships more like luxuries, things that were nice to have, but not necessary to have. Truth is, they are necessary. They are important to us as a society. But also maintaining strong relationships is simply good for our health, mental and physical.

The commonly cited statistic is loneliness is as toxic as smoking15 cigarets a day like actually sit with that smoking 15 cigaret like there's just not a day in my life where I would smoke 15 cigarets But people are chronically lonely for like months at a time.

It's why I wanted to talk about friendships on today's episode of the podcast. And yes, you're going to get a chance to hear from my best friend. But I also wondered what was the hardest or easiest time in life to make friends? And what about best friends? How does that happen? It's important because what we know now is that friendships could be the key to a longer and happier life. You know, by having someone, as Bill Withers says, to lean on,.

Lean on me. When you're not strong.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.

Look, I'm not lonely even when I'm alone. And I'm very grateful for that. I have people in my life. They reassure me. They check on me. And yes, they make fun of me a little. My best friends, they've known me since I was a teenager. Before I was a family man. Before I was a doctor. Before I was a TV guy. People like Sujit.

I hesitate to ask this question, but my producers suggest that I ask you this question, which is maybe you could tell the listeners a little bit about what I was like back then.

Interesting. You know, we kind of hit it off right away. You were extremely smart and there was a lot that I couldn't learn from you. Just the kind of questions you'd ask, the stuff that we'd talk about, you know, 3:00 in the morning after being at the law library and going to a White Castle, you know, the only place open. But, you know. I remember

Sanjay and Sujit go to White Castle.

Exactly, not now we know where that movie came from.

Right, it was based on us.

But, you know, not all the way like us.

Not everything, no.

No, not everything. Come on, now. So you struck me as, like, almost hard to believe that, like, wow, like one. And I think kind of seeing having seen the world in a different way, but at the same time, kind of mapping out like ways to kind of both kind of have influence at the same time, kind of provide other people with something beneficial, something good for society, too, as it was a kind of incredible and inspiring.

It's funny, and now that we all have children and our children are are of the age, at least some of them of when we first met.

Right.

Which is weird to me because I still think of that as being, I was much older, you know, and yet now I have kids that age. But I think, you know, I was talking to Soleil and I told her I was going to do this thing with you. And I said, what is it like that makes best friends, you know, that sort of thing. And she gave sort of an interesting response. I'm not going to get it verbatim, but she basically said people who people who are you're very willing to forgive their idiosyncrasies and sort of strange behavior. And like, her best friend is somebody who is this girl, no matter what this girl does, even if it's something that really would be irritating to most people, Soleil is just laughing. She just it's just like she's always willing to forgive. And I think there's little bit of that because I'm sure I had a lot of idiosyncrasies that you're willing to forgive. And that was, I think, in many ways, the genesis of our friendship.

Right, no absolutely. I think.

When you say absolutely, you mean, I had a lot of idiosyncrasies or.

You know, they were like idiosyncratic, like like everyone does like. Right. You know, and you get to know people.

What people call a best friend from our age when we were that age versus best friends. Now it's got to be different. And it's not to take away from the quality of a best friend now, but you're not typically getting that as much one on one contact as we did back then.

Yeah, I think I think the other thing, you know, with that we both had there was one mutual kind of interest. We kind of, I think conversations often centered around was just how to how to impress women.

I know I was teaching you a lot back then.

Oh, you know, it is is kind of funny.

Why'd you have to go and do that. I was having such a serious, nice conversation.

There was a but it's just the truth. It was like,.

This is me forgiving your idiocycrasy now.

No, we were nerds and like, you know, the way you can help.

Speak for yourself, buddy! I thought I was quite cool.

Ah, you know.

I was a nerd.

I think that we were. Yeah, we're all nerds.

You don't have to, like, soften it by saying we were nerds. I was a nerd?

Sure.

Okay. Well, that was kind of mean.

Not to me, like now, but. But nerdship is cool right now. So.

So we. We grew into this. We grew into the.

Destiny.

How how would you say that our friendship has evolved?

You know, I think it's evolved in that we we both call each other out for our idiosyncrasies when you know, it needs to be done. I think to the benefit of each other, that's a great thing. I think I also you know, I agree with Soleil's definition of friendship, but I also think that friends are also the ones who are willing to tell you things that you sometimes don't want to hear.

That's that's very true. That's very true. Although, I mean, do we do we do that?

Absolutely.

I dont think we do it much.

Not a lot. Maybe. I think maybe I did it more at a time when we were younger and pushing each other's buttons at different times, you know, in different ways. It still happens. But then I think I've got a lot of gray hair now. I'm like, you know, 55 years old. And, you know, you get to different parts. I look at the you know, I feel like there's an analogy to the way our medical training happened. You know, for me to do pediatrics, it was three years residency. And so each year I look back at like, know, I didn't know what I didn't know going in my first year, my second year, I kind of figured out I started understanding that there was this body of stuff I didn't know, and maybe I understood the difference between what I didn't I did know and what I didn't know. And by the third year, I definitely had a firm hold of what I did know and what I didn't know, and that there are two different camps of thing, right? And I feel like life is kind of like that in some ways, too. In some ways, you know, for some of us it's easier. Sometimes people are interns and they're just. Amazing right off the bat. Right. And they and they're ready there and there. You look at meet some of these people 30 years later and they're still the same person, you know, can I put it in a great way? They're great doctors who just seem to get it right from the beginning.

So what are you talking about right now? Because I asked you how our friendship evolved. I mean, it's a good thing that I know you don't do drugs, because I would assume at this point that you are.

You forgot about that part. A little tangential, our conversations, those walks, there a lot of tangentiality there.

I take drinks, I have a beer and he gets tangential. Let me ask you something. What was the easiest time in your life to make friends?

Interesting. Like. You know, I think the same around the same time that you and I met. You know, the first year of college. That first week of college. That's interesting. That kind of pops out to my head as a place where so excite everyone, that same state of excitement. Right.

How would you rate your level of happiness now compared to other times in your life?

Well, you know, I. That's just a loaded question, I feel like. You know, here I am in my fifties and I would say that. I'm extremely happy, you know, with the life I have and all the things that have happened, despite COVID. You know, I've got a beautiful wife, incredible two children, a daughter and a son. And watching their journey.

It's like a Talking Heads song right now. "You are not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful house."

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

How do you look at aging overall? Like are you looking forward to aging the next, you know, 20 or 25 years?

Absolutely.

Because, I mean, you know, the conventional wisdom is you you know, you get older, there's wear and tear on your body. You may have more aches and pains. You may have difficulty sleeping, mood disturbances, you know, all these things. And we've seen this with our own parents, although, again, I have to admit, I was really amazed at how well my dad's doing, at least with regard to his mental approach. That's the conventional wisdom. You don't see it that way?

No, you know, I say it in how you go into the aging process, right? If we look at if if our definition of, you know what how we should be happy is, you know, being active, being productive, you know, solid. And then, you know, that's understandable how people might look at aging as sort of a negative thing. What I've liked about the aging process so far and I think know the gray hair to prove it is that, you know, I do like the idea of being at a step back and reflect a bit on like some of those, you know, the way I would approach things. As you know, when I was 20, you know, 20 years ago and as younger has changed and evolved a bit where I am kind of, you know, realizing that. That there are more moments to be happy about and to be cheerful about.

I mean, you have a really good attitude. You have a very good perspective on things. What is the secret to getting there? For people who are. Maybe in their twenties, early twenties, thinking, Hey, these guys have been friends for like 35 years. I want to have friendships for 35 years. What's the secret?

I think there's some luck to it for sure. Like, you know, coming across people that you connect with and that you like feel like, oh, like, you know, it turns out like, I can always connect with this person, right? So there's there's some luck to it. But I think I think we live in a world that gets so divided and we forget that, you know, in the most random circumstances, you know, people that you would otherwise think externally that you, you know, look at just in terms of the way they might look, the way they might dress their style, their hair, Like there's something like at first you of were quick to judge, you know people. But.

Says the man who sported a Flock of Seagulls haircut.

You know you don't know the Flock of Seagulls hairstyle. It's so different.

You run, you run so far away.

We're coming up on 40 years, I take here's why I take great pride in saying that my best friend is someone I've known since I was 16 years old. I think that's uncommon. I think that's uncommon. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's uncommon. And I take great pride in it because we've changed so much during that time.

Yeah.

But really we haven't because we're fundamentally still the same people, which is why we're still friends. Lives have changed. But we haven't.

We have fun for the same reasons and kind of.

All right, man. Anything else? Last chance.

Nothing else. That's been great.

So we're going to hit record now. We're going to do this. Okay. .

Oh, good thing about friendship, right?

When we come back, a conversation with a friendship expert, Professor Marisa Franco. We're going to talk about what has been dubbed a loneliness epidemic and how friendships can be part of the cure.

How hard is it, do you think, for adults to make friends?

I actually think it's harder now than it's been in human history.

We'll be right back.

And now back to Chasing Life.

You know, the pandemic didn't just interrupt life as we knew it. It upended routines and relationships. And the trauma that we all experienced is still being processed by many of us today. For some, that means a reassessment of what is and what is not so important in our lives. What is worth giving our time to and what we should ignore instead? For me, I got to say, the pandemic really felt like a turning point, as I've said before. I never really thought about relationships as being necessary. I thought of them as being luxuries. I was never that social a person. But then during the pandemic, when suddenly I didn't have the capacity to have those connections as regularly, when I didn't have the capacity to get the context of life from people around me, the pandemic sort of became like a turning point. Before that, I always assumed that any friendships I had had for decades would always be there. But since the pandemic, I've worked really hard to make sure not to take those relationships for granted. They are like plants. They are like flowers. They need to be nurtured. They need to be cared for. And in a lot of ways, my post-pandemic thinking about friendships. Was inspired by a conversation with my next guest.

I have to tell you, I was so fascinated by the hour, by our last conversation. I guess about a year ago and two years ago now, the pandemic has just blurred time together.

Seriously?

Right.

That's Professor Marisa Franco. She's a friendship expert. She's also author of the book Platonic How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. I first spoke to Professor Franco a couple of years ago. It was for the very first season of the podcast. The conversation was about maintaining friendships during the pandemic.

Take it slow. Do not expect yourself to be the social butterfly that you were before this pandemic.

Her take on friendship during a time when we had to sort of isolate was pretty insightful, and I knew then that she'd be the perfect person to talk to about friendships as we age.

It seems like as you as you get older, it can be harder to make friends. And I don't. I don't know. That's true. But I just look at my own parents versus my kids. You talk about this second friendship renaissance that people experience when they retire. What? What is that? How does that happen?

We kind of have this very false, I think, harmful assumption that friendship just happens organically, which is linked to being lonelier over time. Because if you think friendship happens organically, you're not trying. But part of the reason we have this assumption is because when we were young, it sometimes did. And there's this sociologist Rebecca Adams, and she identifies why it happened when we were young, and that's because we had repeated unplanned interaction like school. We saw people every day and vulnerability. We let our guard down, which was gym, which was, you know, recess. But as we move into the adult world, we might have repeated unplanned interaction through work. And now a lot of us white collar workers were doing it more virtually. So it's a little bit different. But a lot of us don't have vulnerability. We don't let our guard down with our colleagues professionally. And what that means is that you can't rely on the same assumptions that you had when you were a kid for how friendship is going to happen when you are fundamentally in a different environment in adulthood, you don't have that same infrastructure that you once had. And so part of putting yourself in a place to make friends that I think you can do when you retire because you have more time and you're thinking about your hobbies and your interests and the passions you want to reengage in is that you can create more of this infrastructure in your life. Right? And that just looks like I'm going to join a sports league. I'm going to join an art class right where I get that repeated unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. I will also say, so I teach this class on loneliness and I try to create community for the students. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I try to analyze why is this working in one of my classes but not the other? What do I see? One of my classes. I have literally one student who says to the whole class, Anyone want to get lunch after class? And because of her, she's someone I call the Igniter an igniter. Ten other people now have more community, and they didn't have to try, right? Because this one person was willing to ignite, create that group. And now all of these other people have community. And so I think if we want to find friendships, too, we can be ignite ers, which means we create groups of friends. Now, at my workplace, I created the Social committee, so we set up weekly lunches. I have a lesson group where we would meet up every month to practice Spanish and speak dinner together. When I wrote my book, I had a book. He group where I'd meet up with other authors and we would critique each other's writing. Literally, any goal that you have for your life, how can you do it in community? Can you create a group around that? I know it's intimidating and it's scary. So one tip that I would have for people that are like, Oh, maybe I could ignite. First of all, you need to remember that people are a lot lonelier than you think. So I think a big barriers. We think everyone has their lives and they're so busy and they already have their friends. No, the average person is actually more lonely than they are very fulfilled with their group of friends. So people are more likely to say yes. And you think? The other thing I would suggest to make it a little easier is to start with one person and be like, Oh, I'm thinking of doing this like weekly walking group. Do you have like maybe one other friend who might be interested? Like, is that something you'd be interested in doing with me to kind of co-lead it? And then one, each of you brings one other friend, and while you already have a group before you've already ignited a group. So part of like, my goal in my loneliness class is like, if we had more insiders in a society, I think it would be so powerful for all of these people that struggle with forming connection. They would get swept up by the ignite or stew. And there's fascinating science that if someone that you're connected to is lonely, you're 52% more likely to be lonely, which is wild. But I think it's because, you know, when you're lonely, you tend to display all these behaviors that are quite rejecting toward others. But then I think about the opposite. And I haven't seen the science that if we create more insiders in our society, everyone around us would be less likely to be lonely.

How hard is it, do you think, for adults to make friends?

I actually think it's harder now than it's been in human history. You know, loneliness is kind of like at an all time high. We saw spikes in 2012. What happened in 2012 was this The smartphone became more and more widespread. This has happened globally. You know, we've been spending less and less time with friends than we used to historically. This has affected the younger generations a lot more. And so I think what happens with technology is it gives us an alternative to hanging out with people. And we get this sort of pseudo interaction where we see people on social media. So it feels like we get a snack but not a meal. But also that snack tides is over enough so that we don't feel like we're starving for connection. But the other thing that happens, other people might have used to reach out to us. It's not just affecting us. It's affecting the networks that we're around. And so it's not only that we might be reaching out to people less because we're relying on their phones, but everyone around us who might have asked to create community with us is doing the same things.

Are there other factors? I mean, what do you think's going on?

I teach a whole class on this loneliness crisis, origins and solutions. Meet me at University of Maryland.

Is that the name of the class?

Yeah.

I love it. Okay. Come to the right person.

Yes. So. Okay, so the technology thing actually started in the 1950s. The book Bowling Alone. Hmm. Robert Putnam looks at all the factors that predict our disengagement from civic life, and he finds that the most significant one is the television. Before the television, we would spend our leisure time with other people. Now people start to spend it in their four walls and.

Plop down on the couch and. You know, hours-

Don't get off.

Yeah. I remember that

Yeah. That's another thing. I call it the plop effect that you plop down on the couch and don't get off that. When you start watching TV, you feel lethargic and you need energy to reach out to other people. So 1950s, we saw these trends towards disengagement, which have obviously gotten a lot worse with, you know, smartphone and stuff. But there's there's other factors like I want to factor that I talk about in platonic is, you know, how we saw friendship in the early 1800s than before in the Western world was very different. Friends were a lot more intimate. You got married for practical reasons because someone had resources or their name was really honorable. And the idea was you can only really deeply connect with people that are the same gender as you. So people would have these deep relationships with their friends where they would cuddle with their friends, hold hands, friends would come on your honeymoon. You'd write them love letters. All of these things. Now, people would see that as homo erotic, but at the time it was taboo. Yes, to have sex with someone of the same sex, but sexual orientation as an identity didn't exist. Then comes Freud. And Freud is like, yes, if you, you know, when I have sex, some of the same sex, you that's part of your identity. You have this disordered identity. You know, he goes in this whole edible theory getting dislodged. And so now that sexual orientation is an identity, it's not just taboo to engage in sex with someone of the same sex. There's an entire gamut of behaviors with people of the same sex that are stigmatized, including, you know, being too loving, including being vulnerable, including for some people hugging, like I talked to some men that were like, I can't ask another guy to let to dinner because he might think that I'm hitting on him. Right. And so we see, like this rapid and very tragic change in what people thought was appropriate levels of intimacy for them to engage with, with friends. And I think it's part of why we trivialize community. We trivialize friendships so much more because of homophobia and the weird ways that homophobia has manifested as fear of same sex intimacy more generally. And I think that this has hit men even harder and is part of the reason why we do see men reporting fewer friends, less intimacy in their friendships, less likely to share deep affection with their friends.

I think that that is fascinating. I have a best friend, and it's interesting because I've known him since I was six years old and we have really maintained that. But it is I'm sort of struck by the fact that when I describe that to other people, it sounds unusual. Like in some of that, I never really thought about it in the way that you just frame that. How unusual is it for an adult to say, I have a best friend, someone who's not a a romantic relationship?

Yeah. Well, I would say I do feel like there's a gender split in that, you know, it's people have different assumptions about men's friendships versus women, like what I see in my students. Right. Because I make them explore their friendships is that women tend to have a lot of overlap between how they treat a romantic partner and a friend. Like, there can be physical intimacy. I can say, I love you. I can be so deeply vulnerable. Whereas with men, a trend that we see is that there tends to be a different box for romance versus friendship a lot of the time, like, Oh, I talk to my romantic partner, but. With them. I tell them I love them with my friends. They just hang out and we we shoot the proverbial shit. I don't know if I could say that.

You can.

You know, I've heard a lot about the ways that loneliness can impact our health and our mental health generally. But as a doctor, I wanted to ask the professor if there was a way that we could quantify this. How much does it actually impact our health, especially as compared to other things?

In medicine, I think we we tend to treat things as more important if they're measurable. Cholesterol for heart disease becomes really important, in part because it's measurable. But we also know stress is very important when it comes to heart health, diet and exercise. We can kind of measure those things. We have a pretty good sense of how much movement we should be getting, how we nourish our bodies. But this idea of social connection, the idea that friendships are also very important, perhaps even more important than things like diet or exercise. There was a recent study that basically intimated that what do you what do you think our friendships would you put them on the same level in terms of impact on health, mental health, physical health as diet and exercise?

Absolutely. But the research that we do have, the meta analyzes, the commonly cited statistic is loneliness is as toxic as smoking. 15 cigarets a day like actually sit with that smoking 15 cigaret like there's just not a day in my life where I would smoke 15 Cigarets But people are chronically lonely for like months at a time.

I'm not telling you, but I'll tell you one thing that I did see along those lines was there were these studies that I saw where they were putting people into these functional MRI machines which can can figure out what parts of your brain are lighting up to two different things and physical pain. And there's areas of the brain that light up when someone is experiencing physical pain. And what they found was that people who were isolated, who had been either removed from a social group or were on the fringes of the social group oftentimes lit up the brain in the same areas where you had physical pain. And that really struck me the idea that loneliness, this subjective, emotional sort of thing, could, could, could hurt in very much the same way that physical pain hurts, that that really left an impression on me.

It I mean, absolutely. I see loneliness as a state of chronic stress, honestly, in terms of how it affects our bodies and our minds. Lonely people are, for example, hyper vigilant for signs of rejection. They see rejection in places where it might not be. They think everybody's out to get them and hurt them. They like other people less. Like when you interact with a lonely person, they report liking you less. After the interaction, they report having less compassion for humanity. They report wanting to be more hostile. If someone slights them and you know all this, this is a lot of John Cacioppo research. It's really interesting because I think we think of loneliness as just a feeling. But for me, understanding it as loneliness changes the way we see the world in so many ways. And for me that's helpful to know because sometimes I'm like, I'm kind of resentful about that friend. Like, I can't believe they did that one thing to me. And I get a little bit bitter and now I'm like, Oh, this might just be a passing stage because I'm like lonely in this period of time. And then later on in the day, I'm like, Oh yeah, like they're kind of cool, you know? As my mood changes and I'm less lonely, I fundamentally notice how I really perceive things differently, or knowing the impact of loneliness on basically all negative moods. It's anxiety, anger, sadness, like it increases all of that. And so when I'm like in a bad mood and I'm like, I don't understand why I'm in a bad mood, there's no trigger. I'm like, Oh, I must be lonely. And, you know, loneliness also impacts really important other biological markers like our sleep, like because you're in that hyper vigilant state where you're looking around for signs of threat, you tend to engage in these micro wakes where you kind of wake up, check around to make sure that you're safe and go back to sleep. And so not only is it disruptive in itself, but it also disrupts other really important biological processes.

Going back to this notion that if you are lonely, you tend to be more suspicious, maybe critical of things less likely to let things into your life. You say to just to start with the assumption that people actually like you.

Yeah.

I it's such a simple statement. When I first read this by you, I wrote it down. I put two Asterix around it, and I just tried to internalize that. I think when you are a suspicious person, you think the opposite. You think people are out to get you are not going to like you, whatever it might be. If you walk in with open heart as some people like you let them prove otherwise as opposed to vice versa. I think it makes a huge difference.

Totally. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see in the research that people that tend to think they'll be rejected, they reject people they are. Older, they are more withdrawn and then they get rejected back and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. And we don't always realize, oh, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, not just because everybody's mean and cruel, but because I have this lens on the world. It's altering how I behave and I'm actually rejecting people. Whereas, you know, research also finds this is called the acceptance prophecy, that when people assume that they will be accepted, they're told to make this assumption. Even when it's not necessarily true. They become warmer, they become more open, they become friendlier toward others, and they show that they like people. Theory of Invert Attraction is this theory that basically people like people that they think like them. So if you assume people like you, you show people you like them, they like you back. It's a really great self-reinforcing cycle. That being said, I think I've gotten some helpful pushback on the assumed people like you idea from people that have been through a lot of trauma because it feels very threatening to assume people like you because what that does is it opens up to you for you to experience exploitation similar to what you might have experienced in the past. So I would suggest maybe for people that have gone through trauma, they might have to first like understand and have compassion and listen to and hear out the fear that might come with making that assumption before they're able to get there.

You've talked a lot about the fact that, you know, friends, this these types of friend relationships that you're describing, a breakup, if you will, with a friend like that can even be harder than a romantic relationship breakup. And what why why is that? And what can people do to get through that?

Well, you know, when you grieve, it's really helpful to have people be like, I'm sorry, that's so hard. I'm here for you. You know, here's the casserole. People don't do that when you break up with a friend. Because we trivialize friendships so much, they're like, kind of like, why are you so upset about this? Right? And that disrupts our grieving process. We heal in community. So when our community is telling us this isn't a legitimate loss for you to have it create something called disenfranchized grief, where it's now very hard for me to process this. You told me this was a legitimate I think my feelings are legitimate. Grief is about fueling my feelings and releasing them. And so we end up in a really difficult place. I think the other thing is we don't know how to break up with friends. So a lot of times people's friends break up with them indirectly. They just kind of ghost or back away or are perpetually busy. And then we experience something called ambiguous loss, which means we don't have any closure about why the friendship ended. So we're ruminating on it because the hardest emotion for us to process is really this uncertainty. So we're just kind of spinning and spinning and spinning and trying to understand why, why, why. And then also we think we shouldn't be thinking about this at all because friendship should matter as much. And that's why friendship, grief can be super duper complicated. And I think it's I want to normalize that. It can affect us just as deeply as any other type of relationship.

I will sort of end this podcast a little bit, kind of where we started. But but if you listen to this now and you've appreciated that one and two Americans have talked about the fact that they are lonely now or they've been lonely at some point recently, they now want to create these really good relationships, friendships in their life. They recognize the importance of that. What are what are some of the the strategies, the tips that you would give them?

Oh, so many Don't assume it happens organically. Assume people like you. Research finds that people are less likely to reject you than you think. This is called the liking gap, which when strangers interact, they underestimate how like they are by other people, join something repeated over time because that's going to give you familiarity with others. And we unconsciously like people that are more familiar to us, even if we don't talk to them just from seeing their face over time, and then ask someone in that community to hang out one on one, you have to take so much initiative in this lonely society that we in don't, you know, don't just wait, don't be passive about it. Reconnect with friends. Research finds that when you reconnect with people, they appreciate it more than you might predict. My niece read my book, and one thing she said was that for friendship to happen, someone has to be brave. So let us be brave.

Let us be brave. I love that. It's true. It takes courage. It takes initiative for us to make friends to try and form these new connections. But here's the thing. They are so worth it in the end. It is part of why we live to have these connections. I know that personally. Sujit and I have always been there for each other through thick and thin, and it's always been that way since we were sixteen years old. I want to do what I can to never take that relationship for granted. And I think what I've learned is that he's added so much to my life. And you know what? I'm probably going to work even harder to connect with friends and become an igniter in order to foster that community, foster new friendships, and let's be honest, to get some better health for me and those around me. And I'm excited about the next stage of my friendship with Sujit as well. I can't wait to see what the future holds for us.

And next week on Chasing Life, I'm going to talk to someone that I've known even longer than Sujit. That's my little brother, Suneel. We're going to be talking about a lot of things, including the infamous midlife.

First of all, do you think of yourself as middle aged?

I didn't until your producer reached out to me and said, "we would like to talk to you about middle age lifestyle."

We'll be back next Tuesday. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by David Rind, Xavier Lopez and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. Also, a special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealey and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health.