The Prescription for Loneliness with Julia Hotz

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:10)
All right, everybody, welcome to The Dr. Drew Podcast. Appreciate you all being here. Appreciate the support. And again, if you have any guests you'd like to see interviewed, contact drdrew.com, we'll look at all that there. Today, Julia Hotz, she's a Solutions-focused journalist, author of The Connection Cure, chronicling the science stories and spread of social connection and prescribing sociality. She works at the Solutions Journalism Network, where she helps other journalists rigorously report on what's working to solve today's biggest problems, of which I would argue loneliness and connection is amongst the biggest. Julia, welcome.

**Julia Hotz** (0:47)
Amen. Thank you so much, Dr. Drew. Such an honor to be here.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:51)
Tell us about how you got into this and what your thoughts are. There's a big territory to cover here.

**Julia Hotz** (0:56)
Yeah, a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of this builds on things I've been hearing you say for years. And it starts with this idea that social connection is fundamental to living well. And before I became a journalist, I was researching loneliness in graduate school. I was over in the UK where, as you know, their health care system very different. They actually established a minister of loneliness to really invest in this as a public health issue. This is coming off data suggesting that loneliness is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, you know, lowers, you know, increases our chance of cancer, anxiety, depression, all these things. So I was really interested in researching that. And basically I got a bunch of people who were lonely together and asked them, like, what do you want this minister to do? And a lot of them said, we need spaces that are not bars where we can actually meet people like us. Where, you know, in our 20s and 30s and 40s, some of them in their 50s and 60s as well. Where do people go actually to find friendship?
So that was my starting point. But to be honest with you, I found that loneliness was really just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the ways that we are living now do not support the ways we evolved to live. We evolved to move our bodies. We evolved to spend time in nature. We evolved to connect with art, to serve our neighbors, to have a sense of purpose. And so this book takes a look at the science supporting that, yes, we need to do these things if we want to be healthy. And there's actually a movement called social prescribing for doctors and therapists and other health workers to prescribe people opportunities to reconnect with these activities and reconnect with one another too.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (2:50)
So I sigh when I think about this topic because it's so massive. In reality, that I almost don't know where to start. You're kind of starting with the solution, right, which is great. And let's dig into a little bit the landscape of the problem. I would argue, you know, it's also where all the addictions are coming from too, right? This disconnectedness and the traumas and stuff.
Our families of origin are not healthy, speaking of where, you know, how we've evolved to be. We don't have neighborhoods, we don't have healthy families, we don't go to school with people that live in our neighborhoods. I mean, it's just all the foundational aspects of relating and connecting are sort of not there from the beginning. And in fact, when children, A, when they don't learn it, it doesn't come that naturally to them, although they want it, they just don't know how to navigate it. And it's traumatic. And so closeness becomes a source of distress. It's the thing that we are attached to also becomes the source of pain, misery, abandonment, neglect, all those horrible things, and maybe even abuse. Talk about that a little bit.

**Julia Hotz** (4:13)
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. And, you know, I've heard you often say, and I completely agree, that part of the reason why we're seeing these increasing rates of mental illness and lifestyle disease comes from, particularly in young people, comes from this. It comes from the way we live. It's not a coincidence, right, that anxiety, depression, loneliness, all of the ADHD, all of this shot up, right, in the last, you know, couple of decades. So you're right. I think part of it has to do with our families of origin. I also think, you know, the essential view that this book takes is like, the ways that we lived as hunter-gatherers. Yes, our families of origin were important, but we like kind of had the tribe. Like if our mom and dad had to go out and, you know, hunt and gather all day, we were raised in the community and this was very good for us. And for thousands of years, humans have been doing this. So I think you could also make the case that actually, you know, not only is it our families of origin, but the way that our culture no longer supports this kind of communal living is also part of the problem. Where do you go if you're...