Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle
Welcome to Rediscovering Connection, a Podcast where you'll hear from innovative leaders, researchers, community builders, and facilitators, on the frontier of connection.
Through soulful conversations, we explore new ways to connect, on-and-offline, to support our social and digital wellbeing.
I hope this podcast inspires you to rediscover connection in your own life!
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Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle
#31 - Dr. Kiffer Card - a Glimpse into the Upcoming Social Connection Guidelines for Canada
Dr. Kiffer Card is a dedicated researcher focused on the social and environmental factors that shape our human health and wellbeing.
Kiffer is the Scientific Director for the Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health, the Director of Research for GenWell and serves as an Assistant Professor within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
In this episode of Rediscovering Connection, we explore the genetic roots of loneliness and social connection, the potential of psychedelic medicine as a game-changer, rejection sensitivity, positive gossiping, the power of friendship groups, and self-determination theory for successful relationships.
Drawing on our personal experiences, and decades of research in the realm of social connection and relationships, we share practical strategies for combatting loneliness and enhancing connection with friends, neighbours and co-workers.
This was one of my favourite conversations so far on this Podcast and I am glad to be able to share it with you.
Find Dr. Kiffer Card on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiffercard/
https://casch.org/cscs
https://genwell.ca/
Discussed on the podcast:
Unveiling the 2022 Canadian Social Connection Survey: A Webinar with Dr. Kiffer Card https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWOEeCXl_4
Human Connection Conference, Vancouver November 4th - 6th, 2024
https://www.humanconnectionconference.org/speaker
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Episodes You Might Enjoy:
#6 - Dr. Robin Dunbar - The Science of Connection and Friendship
https://youtu.be/cPT5SyQ7OgA?si=DUYO7zZRSKwYPqcm
#7 - Dr Robin Dunbar - Building Community in the Modern Workplace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUsKHCNmfPA&t=0s
#5 – Richard Bartlett – Community Building On and Offline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Eu-r69YH0&t=0s
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I hope our conversation inspires you to rediscover connection in your personal or professional life.
Subscribe now and let the magic unfold.
Love & sparkles,
✨Shelley
About Your Host
Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach. I empower remote and nomadic founders and leaders who crave deeper connections to activate their social wealth, so they can feel trusted, supported, and truly connected—both online and offline—no matter where they are.
Discover More.
I combine cutting-edge research on social wealth, social wellbeing and social capital with two decades in corporate communications to deliver mind-shifting talks, workshops, and programs around the world.
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social connection is one of these interesting public health behaviors. If I want to go on a diet, I could. I could try to go on a diet on my own. It wouldn't take anyone else necessarily to make that decision. Certainly, if people help me I'll be much more successful. But I can do that on my own.
Speaker 1:Social connection isn't something you can do on your own. It takes the community, it takes people, and so so our community guidelines are there to recognize that this isn't something people are necessarily empowered to do, and so we give advice to communities that they need to help raise awareness about the importance of social connection. Most people, I think, intuitively, know that social connection is good for you. Most of us have relationships in which we think that relationship can ruin my day or make my day right. We know that social, but most of us don't know that it's worse. You know being lonely is worse than being obese, right, and every time I go to the doctor they weigh my weight. But how often will they ask me about my relationships and my connections and how I'm being fulfilled in that way?
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Rediscovering Connection. My name is Shelley Doyle and I'm here today with Dr Kifakad. Before I introduce Dr Kifakad, I'm just going to share a brief update on myself. I'm really excited to report that since my last podcast was filmed, I have secured a corporate research partner for my Royal Roads Masters research. I can't say much more than that at this time, but I'm super thrilled that an organization has really seen the value in my mission, my passion and and really seen that I am somebody that they believe can make a positive change to their remote and hybrid leaders. So really excited. I will be sharing more when I can, um, but for now that's where I'm at um.
Speaker 2:Dr K Kip Akad is someone this is our second attempt to podcast together. He is not an easy man to get hold of. He is someone who is at the forefront of social connection here in Canada. He is a professor at Simon Fraser University leading the way in social connection. Alongside Jen Well Cash, he's been working on the Canadian social connection guidelines. Not sure how much of this he's able to share with me here today before a big conference in Vancouver in a couple of weeks. So let's see. And I know there's also been a lot of research that Dr Kiff has been involved with in terms of psychedelics and psychoactive. Again, not sure how much you can share here, dr Kiff, but really welcome you to explore this space here today. So let's see Hello and welcome. How are you and what is really taking up most of your thought energy right now?
Speaker 1:Good to be with you, shelley. Yeah, I think definitely a lot of exciting stuff and happy to talk about some of the research topics you mentioned. My passion is really emotions and emotional distress in the context of public health, and why don't our social structures and institutions take emotions seriously when in fact they have a huge impact on our wealth and well-being? So that's what my research mostly focuses on. In my personal life, you know, I have a partner and a dog and they take up all the energy and emotions that those things do in life. And so you know I'm actually down in Bellingham, our dog is getting some cancer treatments and so we're here in Bellingham, washington, seeing a vet the only clinic in the whole world that offers this procedure. So that's probably taking up the most of my mind space these days. But you know, really grateful for you know really grateful for the time and space to talk about connection, because in my life connections really core to everything I believe in and do and and I'm very privileged to have it be my research and work in life.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. So last summer I had the privilege of interviewing Dr Robin Dunbar on my podcast and and, and his framework has really stuck in my mind. But the last few years, really just thinking about the spheres of intimacy in our, in our lives and just thinking about your dog, there you obviously, um, you is obviously this very deep connection that you have with your pet. So like thinking of those spheres of intimacy, like where would, where would they sit in your connection, in your connection circles?
Speaker 1:in your connection circles. Yeah, robin's work is really interesting. The the, the innermost layer, uh, he says, is 1.5 people, uh, large on average, and he, he says typically this is gendered and that men tend to have their wives filling that spot, or girlfriends or or other partners, uh, you know, and women tend to have their partner plus their best friend, and so on average it works out to 1.5. I always say that my dog is my best friend and so I'm a one. I'm part of the 1.5 crowd and maybe a dog gets to count as half. But there's been some research on these networks and how people feel them. Even a belief in God could occupy one of those layered networks, because it depends who you connect to. Yeah, I'm definitely a dog person, you know, an animal person in general, so I'm happy to have animals in my innermost circles.
Speaker 2:And I did watch the results from the 2022 Canadian Social Connection Survey that you presented. That is available on YouTube YouTube. I'll put a link to that below our podcast here and what I found intriguing was it was saying about the close friends that Canadians have, and 19% of close friends come from the workplace. So, bearing in mind, all of our work, lives and dynamics have had a shift of some respect over the last few years. I wonder how that's going to play into people's friendships. Anything on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point. I think one of the things that I think about a lot in my work is about our time and how we have time and how time is this one thing that really can't be taken away from us by someone else. We can only give our time, right. You can throw me in jail, you can take my freedom, my property, all of that, but I have to give you my time, and I think, when it comes to time, we spend a lot of time at work. I think something like a third of our waking hours are spent in the workplace, and so if we're not making strong, meaningful connections in the workplace, we're missing out on a huge opportunity for social connection. I think it's actually Robin Dunbar's work you mentioned at the beginning of our, where they talked about nomadic and pastoralist societies and people get, on average, 21 to 24 hours a week of socialization. I think in today's modern, fast-paced world, some of us would take 24 hours. Where would I find the time?
Speaker 2:and I think workplaces are one of those places you can find the time and do you think that we can make friends through the screen, like when we're, when we're just having digital interactions, or do you think that we need some physical to kind of embed those relationships?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think, uh, you know there's a lot of some sometimes people in in in this work talk. I mean, there's been a lot of talk around like social media and its influences on youth and that sort of thing. Certainly there are lots of things to be concerned or worried about that need further research and study and careful attention from parents and family members. But I think, on the whole, technology can be used as a tool for social connection.
Speaker 1:I think many communities, if you're living with a disability and you're homebound, the only way you might be able to connect with somebody is through Lifeline.
Speaker 1:If you're part of a marginalized community, the only connections you might have to other people in your community are through the internet. So I think they're vital to the way that we've structured ourselves in our lives socially, and we actually have some data that shows that the people who we're most connected to are not people we most often are not only people who are most connected to are not people. We most often are not only people who we most often see in person, but we most often interact with those people online and using technologies as well, and so those things aren't necessarily conflict, they're together. However, when technology supplants or replaces our social connections, then it's not good, because there is a good body of research that shows that in in-person, face-to-face social connection seems to offer things you know enhanced understanding, body language, better communication, better emotion recognition, um better synchronization that you don't get when you're interacting, say, on the phone or texting, or via zoom even yeah, totally, and I definitely feel like there's something in live.
Speaker 2:So, like I'm having a live conversation with you today and for me I this will fill me up for the day, like I won't necessarily need outside of my family that I'm blessed to have in my home. I won't necessarily feel the social need to have another big live interaction today because we've had this and I think there's definitely a difference between that live versus like social media, scrolling the passive. So live versus passive, that's what I'm really feeling and sensing in my own life and a little bit in the research that I've started started doing myself own life and a little bit in the research that I've started started doing myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this active versus passive use, I think, uh, you know, I think it's. It's a lot of things in life, when you're engaged actively, when you're acting with intention, that's when we see people really thrive. Uh, when, when people are passive and they passively cope with stress and those sort of things, that's when we see people not thriving. And so, you know, I think the same thing is with our technology is if you're being smart about how you use technology, even scrolling and finding memes so that you can share them with friends, so you can. You know, connect is a meaningful part of the way we connect today, and so I wouldn't discount it.
Speaker 1:But definitely, the more active and the more thoughtful you are about this is actually benefiting me. Is it benefiting my relationship? Are we growing together? That sort of intentionality is really what makes relationships work right. Relationships just don't work for no reason. They work because people put effort and time and thought into it, and that's something that all of us could be more thoughtful of, whether that's in our workplace relationships or, you know, any friendship, or, like you said today on today's zoom call and I love that word that you use the intention like how can we just take a breath and start being more intentional?
Speaker 2:and actually, this is the first part of the work that I'm going to be doing with this corporate group. The first step is disconnect disconnect from everything, to then reconnect with more intention. And one of the pieces in my research on social wealth, one of the foundational pillars of social wealth, is personal expression. And it's that moment of disconnecting. It's then questioning am I able to express myself authentically on this channel, that I use this channel, that I use this channel that I use and start to feel into.
Speaker 2:Okay, maybe one of them is more aligned with where I'm at right now, like all the different social channels are going to be speaking to different audiences, different groups of people that you've collected along your way. So, starting to feel into okay, I'm expressing myself here, but actually it's not landing. It's not landing because this audience isn't, they're not professional connections, they're actually friends and actually they don't necessarily want to be hearing that side of my life. So how can I express myself more personally to this group that is going to land? So, yeah, that's part of the work that I'm going to be doing. And all of this I'm testing it in my own life and failing all the time to get it right. Finally one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think that's one of the big challenges with social media and technology is you know they talk about it in self-monitoring, and self-monitoring is one of the big things that underlies feelings of loneliness and isolation and disconnection, that sense that you aren't your authentic self, that you have to think about and how you perform. And technology asks us to do that because, like you've said, there's different platforms, there's different spaces, we are, in essence, different people and so I think, to really meet our psychological needs for autonomy, for competence and for belonging you know that's frustrated today by some of these channels and technology. So sometimes the best thing you can do with one is disconnect from it Because you know maybe it's not working for you and that's totally fine. And I think I think doing a you know some people call it like a technology audit Just think about how do you use technology, what's working for you, what's not?
Speaker 1:Most of us click on the Instagram app or the Facebook app or the LinkedIn app almost out of habit, right? We just go through our list on our phone and we just click on them out of habit, without second thought. Through our list on our phone and we just click on them out of habit without second thought, and I think taking that thought is really, really a smart move to take, even if you have to set a reminder in your phone to once a month. Just take five minutes. Think about how have I been using technology and is it working for me.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thank you for sharing. And, while we're in this space, I wonder if you'd be open to delving a bit into like psychoactive medicines and how they might help us to maybe reflect and reconnect with a bit more intention.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean this is obviously very exciting and cutting edge science. You know, over the past few years it's been increasingly recognized that psychedelics can be used in therapeutic contexts. You know, certainly this is not the first time there's been a lot of research in this area but it is something that's new. When it comes to our social well-being, I think there's a few key statistics to consider about social connection and development. One is that about 50% of the variation in loneliness, about half of it, really seems to be genetic or inherited from your parents and early family environment. So most of your vulnerability to loneliness is something that's not necessarily within your control or not necessarily within the environment's parents and early family environment. So most of your vulnerability to loneliness is something that's not necessarily within your control or not necessarily within the environment's influence. And so that emotional satisfaction is believed to really find its beginning in early childhood and what we call critical periods of development. And you actually see this. If you follow people over a long period of time and ask their loneliness over that time, you see that it has what we call trait like stability, and that just means that your personality we consider personality to have trait like stability, because your personality stays somewhat stable throughout most of your life and we see that with loneliness that it increases into young adulthood, into early childhood, and then is basically stable and flat. And I think that highlights this big conundrum or challenge about how do we intervene to address loneliness, because we know loneliness is associated with huge health effects. You know 30 to 50% increase in risk for mortality. So it's a very bad condition, worse than smoking, drinking, obesity, sedentary living, air pollution, all that. And so how do we change that in people, I think, is the question.
Speaker 1:And in psychedelic medicines they've been studying this idea of critical periods of development, and our critical period of social development is early in life and so it's hard to intervene on that early life period for a number of reasons. But so people have wondered well, can we reopen a critical period of development and do psychedelics give people the introspective opportunity to think about and to objectively evaluate themselves in ways that allow them to maybe do some tinkering in their experiences? And so that's our interest in psychedelic medicine. We see, for example, that people with adverse childhood experiences benefit quite a bit from these sort of things. Ptsd, other mental health conditions all seem to show fairly good improvements, and so our hope is that maybe broadening that a bit out from the traditional medical model to think about our broader social development and who we are as people and our attachment to others and how we love, can we actually moderate that.
Speaker 1:So I don't do the basic clinical science, I do observational natural experiments where people who naturally use these drugs throughout the course of their life or through seeking therapy, you know, because obviously it's not easy to do those big, large trials it costs about a million dollars to put 3040 people through a trial and of course the funding on this topic isn't necessarily the easiest because of so much stigma around drugs. So that's, that's the work and that's kind of my interest in that. That that I think shows a lot of promise and I think over the next few years I think we'll see that that it does pan out. Um, and I think over the next few years I think we'll see that that it does pan out um that there are like really good benefits of some of these, uh, some of these medicines like psilocybin and and mdma for example and there's.
Speaker 2:there's two different trains of thought that I've heard in this space, and one is that actually you don't need many, but you can have a few big experiences and they can really help to lift you beyond, whether that's PTSD or whatever you're really struggling with. But then the other train of thought is micro dosing and that's much more regular but small doses that you wouldn't necessarily feel, but it's really helping to rewire your brain yeah, and I think I think the jury is still a bit out on some of these things.
Speaker 1:Uh, there's. There's current great work going on by zach walsh at ubc around microdosing in particular. Microdosing has had a bit of controversy for the reason you mentioned as to whether or not you really need those profound psychedelic moments. Most what we call like protocols or therapies for psychedelic medicine usually involve a session where you use the drug and then several what we call integration sessions where you work with a therapist to reflect on that experience and that is believed that there are some neuroplasticity, there's some change possible even when you're not at the highest height of the drug. So basically, taking that a step further, it's that even at low doses there's some neuroplasticity and you might be able to work through. Don't think we know for sure yet, but I think both show promise and maybe both have different mechanisms of action. There might be a direct mechanism, say, for a micro dose, but maybe a different mechanism for that for those larger kind of doses.
Speaker 1:My work is mostly focused on kind of the larger. You know my interests are mostly on those larger doses Because I think that you know, in terms of shaping your social development, that's going to take thinking. We know that loneliness and social isolation, of all the factors that drive into it, it's how you think your social cognition is what we call that, that that's the biggest factor in shaping your well being, and so so we think to alter social cognition you probably need a bit more intentionality going into that work, and so therapeutic systems that that involve kind of those large, larger doses tend to be the ones that allow for more of that. I guess introspection to take place.
Speaker 2:This summer I went up to Parksville and there's a little town close to that that actually has this little mushroom hut, so I got some micro doses. So I've been toying with my like very micro dosing since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, it's very. I think that's. One of the cool things about it is that they're widely accessible, particularly psilocybin, which is where I started some of my work in psychedelic medicine, and the reason I started with psilocybin was because it's so widely accessible that I think people are going to use it. So we should understand it, we should know how to give them the best advice we can. That, if you're going to use here's the best practices, best guidance we can give, and so somebody who's concerned with public health and making sure people are empowered with knowledge, you know, I think that's a, that's a really great, you know, a real great reason to focus on some of these because people are using them and they're trying to figure out for themselves. And wouldn't it be nice to just have some good guidance? And you know, in our current legal model that's made it too difficult. So we're lucky in academia to be able to like, think about and, to you know, publish about them, to share that no we actually you know.
Speaker 1:Here's what we know, at least yeah, amazing, amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been exploring the stamet stack, which, which is lion's mane, psilocybin and niacin, which kind of give this flushing effect, which is meant to really activate the um, lion's mane, I believe. Okay, let's bring us back. So in a couple of weeks, you will be leading the opening of the human connection conference in vancouver, and I believe this might be where you're shedding some insight into the new social connection guidelines for Canada. Is this so, and is there anything that you can share with us here ahead of that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we've been developing over the past few years through a variety of methods to develop these recommended national public health guidelines for social connection that we hope not only Canada but the US and every other country around the globe can adopt and hopefully that WHO and other global health organizations will also, you know, pay attention to our launch of our recommended guidelines. You know, through the development of these guidelines we've developed more than 49 evidence briefs and reviews. We've conducted more than 60 interviews with people from key populations, including from marginalized and equity-seeking groups, and we've conducted what's called a Delphi study, which is just an iterative back and forth kind of conversation but over, you know, interviews and focus groups and surveys with some of the globe's leading experts on social connection, mostly social psychologists, but also people in community design and that sort of thing. And from all this data, pulling together our survey data, our, you know data from the existing research and literature, our interview data with experts, we've developed 12 public health guidelines for social connection. Six of those are tailored to individuals. They address things about the structure of your social network, the function of it, the quality of your network, making sure you make social connection a priority, how to use technology wisely, and the six guidelines for communities are an acknowledgement that people can't do this alone. You know, social connection is one of these interesting public health behaviors.
Speaker 1:If I want to go on a diet, I could try to go on a diet on my own. It wouldn't take anyone else necessarily to make that decision. Certainly, if people help me I'll be much more successful. Anyone else necessarily to make that decision? Certainly, if people help me I'll be much more successful. But I can do that on my own. Social connection isn't something you can do on your own. It takes a community, it takes people, and so our community guidelines are there to recognize that this isn't something people are necessarily empowered to do, and so we give advice to communities that they need to help raise awareness about the importance of social connection. Most people, I think intuitively, know that social connection is good for you. Most of us have relationships in which we think that relationship can ruin my day or make my day right. We know that social, but most of us don't know that it's worse. You know being lonely is worse than being obese, right, and every time I go to the doctor they weigh my weight. But how often will they ask me about my relationships and my connections and how I'm being fulfilled in that way, and so our community guidelines.
Speaker 1:We want communities to raise awareness of the importance of this. We want policies to reflect this. You know, an example of policy is like your bus schedule. If your bus schedule doesn't match up with people's social lives, they're not going to be able to get to their friends' houses. Do those connections.
Speaker 1:So we want policy and practice to match our social needs and we want communities to really focus on inclusion and accessibility. We want them to focus on practices and building communities in ways. So do we build apartments that are big enough for people to have friends over, or do they at least have common areas in their buildings? Are our parks designed to walk through or sit in and do a company in? You know, thinking about these various things, about how we design environments for optimal social connection, that's something cities and municipalities and other forms of communities, even neighborhood groups, need to do, and so our public health guidelines really span the full spectrum of what you can do as an individual and what our society needs to do to really make social connections and relationships a priority in a meaningful way.
Speaker 2:Wow, thank you for sharing that. That just sounds so much more comprehensive than I could ever have imagined it was going to be. That sounds really, really exciting. I have been speaking with Paul Kahn, or the Honorable Paul Kahn OBE, at the GILC and, yeah, I wonder how much they are already aware of this and, if not, I wonder if there's any hybridized sessions at the Human Connection Conference in Vancouver that they could be looped in on.
Speaker 1:Certainly, members of the GILC are on the expert advisory committee, people like Joe Babcock and Gillian Holt-Lunstad. They're some of the global leading experts on social connections and public health responses to loneliness and isolation, and so they're certainly looped in as members of our expert advisory panel. And once we get the guidelines launched, one of our big efforts will be to work with these national organizations to figure out okay, here they are, here's what we've got. But also to start thinking, just like we update nutrition guidelines and we update alcohol guidelines, our kind of plan is to relook at these guidelines every five years to assess where is the evidence at now? Can we give better guidance now than we were able to give five years ago?
Speaker 1:Our initial guidelines, you know they're flexible, they're tailored. They allow individuals to tailor the guidelines themselves. We don't tell you that you need five friends or you're going to like be lonely. We tell you to think about the number of friends you have and think about those relationships. We do think we have some evidence that shows three to five friends it seems to be somewhat of a minimum that if you have less than that, you're really vulnerable to loneliness and isolation. But we don't give people numbers per se. We give them tools to think about their social connections. But maybe one day we'll have better guidance and better evidence to support more specific and detailed responses and we would continue to need, you know, collaborations in the global public health community and global social connection community to kind of develop and refine those guidelines what's coming up for me, just also thinking the other way.
Speaker 2:Like people that have a very big job, they also have a lot of friends and connections and they're possibly just feeling overwhelmed with the number of people that they should be keeping in contact with and maybe some help to navigate how they can stay connected and feel like these people are in their lives, whilst not feeling the guilt that they're not there or they're not remembering people's birthdays and not doing this and that because there's just too many people to kind of facilitate in their busy lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's been some interesting research out of SFU in the UK around re-contacting friends and basically they find that it's really hard to get people to recontact old friends and I was talking with one of the lead authors of that and you know I kind of hypothesize that. One of the things is we feel very guilty when you've let a relationship die, when you've let it down. When you've let a relationship die, when you've let it down, you feel guilty like oh, I didn't invest in that, they don't think I value them, when I think it's important for us to recognize that that's not entirely the case. It's natural. It's a natural psychological process that we call it social emotional selectivity and we tend to get more selective as we age. But we tend to select relationships that offer the greatest meaning and fulfillment to our lives and that means that we do end up losing some contact with people who are and it's not because we don't like those body weight.
Speaker 1:Your brain is the most complex and most energy intensive thing and if you think about the whole development of the brain, it's built for social connection, right? This is one of Robin Dunbar's big points in his work is that you know you have a. Your neural architecture is all really social Ants. Ants can find food and go to war. You know. They can do everything with very small, simple nervous systems.
Speaker 1:Human beings have huge brains because we have complex social worlds and so I think that idea of, you know, having too big of a social network, it's a very real problem. We do see that there is actually rebounds in loneliness in our data that if people have very large social networks say 10 or more people that they identify as a close friend that those people actually start to feel more lonely. And again it comes back to the basic constraints that I've only got 24 hours a day. I got to spend eight hours of those sleeping, eight hours of those working. The time I have to give is going to be limited. So if I divide that time amongst more people, my average relational closeness or my average emotional connection to each person in my network is going to be lower and that's going to overall give me the sense of I'm disconnected, I don't have true meaningful relationships. So I think that like sense of burden and responsibility, like that's just a real natural part of being human and the natural constraints of our lives, and so I think it is something we've got to navigate carefully and with intentionality and thinking about.
Speaker 1:You know, how is my social network? How am I fulfilling these obligations? You know Robin Dunbar's work. Around you can have about 150 friends.
Speaker 1:Well, and sometimes some of us in our just our work lives alone have 150 people we have to keep track of, and so, adding on top of that, all these other domains of life can really be really be a challenge, and I think that's one of the big challenges of our modern life. You know, we evolved in tribes of 30 to 50 people. That's all our brains are really built for the same 30 to 50 people your whole life. And now we've got, you know, so many people strangers on the street that you know never see in in our evolved, uh, kind of environment, and so that evolutionary mismatch is sometimes used. The term for this is that how we evolved and what we're being asked to do now are incongruent, and so we've got to think a little carefully about how we lead our lives and making sure that we don't, you know, live too outside the boundaries of what a human being can do and what you said before about the guilt.
Speaker 2:I certainly had that and when I, when I moved to Canada, I I just felt like no one was. No one cared that we were moving. The reality was that I used to be a big instigator. I'd be the one to bring groups together. I was always kind of in the middle of it all. And then I got a proper job after being self-employed for many years and I had two children and I didn't have the capacity to be the facilitator that I once was and I also lived a few hours away from most of my friends and family. So before even moving to Canada, I'd already kind of steps aside from that instigator role.
Speaker 2:And then, when we moved here, I barely really told anyone that we were coming. I mean, we couldn't have a leaving party because of the restrictions. And then, you know, I kind of just came quietly and then feeling like people didn't care. It's like well, well, I wasn't posting anything on social media. It's like how could people care if I'm not letting them know that they matter to me? So, like after, after doing this work, I can see now there are so many things that I could have done to help people know that I cared enough to tell them directly personally that we were going and like what our intention was, but I wasn't inviting people to feel like they're on this journey with me, so they weren't. They weren't on board this journey with me. So I like, looking at Dunbar's number, I effectively just let everybody out. Like my bus was free to start inviting new people on board and yet we went back into lockdown.
Speaker 1:So there was like the pool of people to invite was very slim yeah, yeah, I think I think this is one of the reasons we're advancing our guidelines. Work is, I think that the norms and the permission structures around our social lives are not very good in contemporary society. I think there's a lot of social anxiety, a lot of desire. We're taught that we need to be independent and self-reliant and those are sometimes barriers. We're taught not to be a burden on somebody else. So I, as your friend might not want to express, I had a friend a couple of years ago. My best friend moved from Victoria to Vancouver just an hour and a half ferry ride, a 45-minute drive, and we could have seen each other and I was very saddened by the move. It was hard on me to see him leave, but I didn't necessarily want to express that. I didn't feel like I had the permission structures to say I really wish you weren't moving, I wish we did a better job of having community in a way that you didn't want to move type thing. But we don't want to be a burden, we don't want to tie anyone down, we don't want to feel any obligation to each other and I think that's a problem in our society, I think. I think we need to build the permission structures between friends and family and build the norms.
Speaker 1:You know, the norm now is that you move out when you're 18 and you go to college, right, and you leave your family and that you start work in a different city and you live there your whole life, away from your family, and you'll maybe see your parents 10 times more in your life. Right, that's not natural, um, and it's not necessarily the best, and so I think that that that's one of the big challenges of contemporary life is like knowing how to navigate those like complexities of like being the instigator, you know, but also not wanting to put pressure on people, and you know. Or feeling like you're not heard or seen, but also not letting yourself be heard or seen because you don't want to put pressure on people, and you know. Or feeling like you're not heard or seen, but also not letting yourself be heard or seen because you don't want to put obligations on other people. But I think that's one of the big things, that if we can make social connection a priority for everyone, then everyone would maybe be a bit more thoughtful and more willing to say you know, we're going to let those dumb social norms that aren't serving us well, we're going to let those dumb social norms that aren't serving us. Well, we're going to let those go and we're going to create new social norms around.
Speaker 1:You know it's okay to talk to somebody at the bus stop. You know it's okay to make yourself a bit of a burden on somebody else from a time to time. Right, it needs to be give or take, it needs to be reciprocal, and one of the things we know from relationship science is reciprocity, and reciprocal relationships are what's key. And so if you're always the one putting effort in and you're never getting any anything in return, sometimes that means that you need to reinvest. Right, because you need to make sure that those relationships are reciprocal in two ways, cause sometimes I'm not going to feel like going out and sometimes you're not going to feel like you know, putting the effort in, and so both of us are needed.
Speaker 2:And kind of thinking is a conversation needed? Like if you're feeling like you're giving, giving, giving in a relationship or inviting, inviting, inviting and then, but then they don't invite you, then it's like a reflection on maybe this relationship isn't where I think it is kind of in those spheres of intimacy. Maybe you think they're in your inner sphere but actually for them you're in an outer sphere. So is it worth a conversation or is that kind of deep reflection? Maybe that's when we need to leave psychedelics kind of get a grounding, look at where we're at and, um, yeah, it's like do we, should we be fighting for our friendships or should we just kind of appreciate them for what they are and not try to make them something they're not?
Speaker 1:I think there's a lot of inner work that needs to happen in these sort of situations as well, and we probably over um, you know, we, yeah, I, I I think that we probably underestimate how our own emotions, our own sense of self, our own belief of our relationships are shaping these sort of experiences, feel like they're, you know, might have very positive, might wish like heck that they could spend more time with you, but maybe they're afraid, maybe they've got an avoidant attachment style that causes them a lot of social anxiety around. You know, or you know, one of the things that underlies loneliness the most is what we call rejection sensitivity. And it's just that some people are very sensitive to the fear of rejection and it becomes this freeze on their life that if they have to do something and they're going to get rejected and I experienced this a little bit myself of that I hate. I hate inviting people to some something like I hate hosting a party or an event, not because I'm afraid of the effort I would gladly put an effort to host but it's the fear that, oh, people will say no, and then how will that make me feel? And being afraid of your own emotions is, I think, something a lot of us experience, if we experience loneliness or social isolation, and so I think sometimes there's inner work that needs to be done and then sometimes there's conversations that need to happen about you know where things at, and I think it's so difficult to know which of those things is going to be the best. I think one thing that hopefully anyone can do is that you could confide in somebody else and talk to them. So if you have a friend who you don't feel like is putting in the effort you know, talk to a partner, talk about the situation, see what they think, get more things.
Speaker 1:Because I think you know at our core, sometimes our thinking is untrustworthy. We have a whole host of cognitive biases, we call them, and our social cognition is highly biased. You know, we tend to think social connection is much more costly than it is. We tend to underestimate the values of social connection. But who hasn't gone to a party that they didn't want to go to? And then at the end of the night thought, oh boy, I had such a good time, I'm so glad I went right.
Speaker 1:We're often wrong. We call that effective forecasting. We're bad at forecasting how things will make us feel, and so getting other people's perspectives is like a real valuable thing, right. It's like you get somebody else to think about your problem too, and then at least you've got two brains going at it and you've, you know, once removed one of those brains from the situation. So you know, talk to somebody. It doesn't have to be the person who you're necessarily struggling with, but, um, sometimes it needs to be that person as well, especially if you think that you know you need something more from them than they're giving, and maybe they do want to give it.
Speaker 2:They just don't know they have the permission to, and in that sort of situation, a conversation can really change the whole nature of your relationship and I love that kind of invitation to discuss it because there's kind of a stigma about gossiping and I think some people are afraid to talk about their personal experience of a relationship with another because they feel like it's gossiping. So it's kind of allowing people know this isn't gossiping. So it's kind of allowing people know this isn't gossiping. This is your personal experience and, as a friend, I'm happy to help you through this and to give you my thoughts and feelings on this. If it can serve you, great. If it. If it doesn't help you, maybe it will just help you to identify what actually does feel true for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think we've all been in gossip where there's mean-spirited, you know, destructive gossip and then there's positive, uplifting and real, authentic. You know, I think there's a difference. Actually, one of the major coping skills that we use in our work is called the cope inventory, and it has two. One is highly associated with reduced loneliness and that's like emotional confiding in others is really good for reducing loneliness, but venting emotions is really bad and causes increased loneliness. So it depends Are you being constructive? Are you working actively towards a solution? Are you just venting and just being angry? Sometimes it's. Sometimes you need to vent. I'm not saying this is wrong, but sometimes you need to think about what type of emotional coping am I doing? What type of gossip is this? And then I think, remembering that gossip is also believed to be an evolved response, that there's evolutionary value to gossip. It's about information transmission and connection and it's about community, it's feeling like the people I know also know me and also know other people I know. In fact, I'll just tack on this.
Speaker 1:One piece of data from the Canadian Social Connection Survey was that the more tight your social network is, so the more integrated and dense it is, the better sense of belonging and connection, you have the lower levels of loneliness. If all your relationships are just one-on-one relationships, you get a lot less out of your relationships than if you have just one tight, cohesive group of friends and they all know each other. They all connect. Now there's certainly complexity to it. You have to manage those relationships, but managing things isn't necessarily bad.
Speaker 1:I call that mutual obligation. Those sorts of environments create more obligation because if I offend a one-on-one relationship, that's the end of it. That relationship will likely end. If I offend somebody in my group, we're going to have to work it out because we've got all these other people that we're obliged to and I think that's a really. It can be a difficult social process to navigate but at the end of the day it's the healthiest social progress because some degree of accountability to each other is actually good for us and even though accountability restrains your autonomy a bit, I think that tension is well worth the trade off.
Speaker 2:I love this so much. I wonder if there's anything on the size of those groups, like the perfect size of group, because I come from, I've got a group of school friends, I've got a group of university friends, like, yes, I was, like often, the instigator, but you know, if someone is going to have a wedding and I'm not actually there, then that group will still come together for both of those. And I've tried here and I'm still in the process of trying to bring a group together. But the issue is that I have one-to-one relationships with everybody and when they come together I sense judgment and they don't see each other in the way that I see them. I have got an idea of how I'm gonna change that in the next couple of months, but but yeah, any thoughts on group size would be very welcome.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's a thing I think lots of people experience and challenges of bringing the worlds together. There's this idea of, like, the six pillars of friendship, you know, and this idea is that really degree of homophily or how similar you are really shapes your social network, and nowadays our social networks are so fragmented. We used to almost everybody met their spouse through family and friends Historically. Now almost everybody meets their spouses through the Internet. Nothing's wrong. I met my partner on the Internet. Nothing's wrong with Internet facilitated dating and relationships. That's fine, but one of the disadvantages of it, compared to this traditional model of meeting through friends and family, is it means it's harder to know when the match is going to be bringing people together. And I think we fix that when we bring friends together is like, do these friends, like I have maybe certain things in common with each of these friends and that allows us to be close to each other, but they might not have things to each other. So this is like the challenge of forming a community can be hard. There are tricks that you can use. You know, creating shared experiences is probably one of the best evidence-based things. Shared experiences seem to be really important to group formation, identity formation and so I think that it's not insurmountable but it's a common challenge that people face. In terms of how many people do bring together, I don't think we know with regards to overall size, but we do know from research that there is cognitive limits on how many people you can really entertain in a setting right, and that when you start to get too big, the group side of fracture, they break off and form smaller groups or it changes the style of the interaction. So I as a professor, I'm often in front of large style classrooms. You know, with anywhere from 20 to 150, some classrooms have like 2000 students in them, you can't really connect in a meaningful exchange way in that sort of setting. It becomes a I talk, you listen type kind of environment. So that can happen at parties as well.
Speaker 1:If you have eight to 10 people, you know it can be a one person talking at a time and everybody listening.
Speaker 1:Well, that doesn't fulfill people's needs, because people we call these self-determination theory, but people have three basic psychological needs. It's the need to have autonomy, your individuality, your competence, that's your contribution to the group and both of those things, how unique and individual, what your contribution is, those things both help you belong because it creates you value for the group. So if people can't demonstrate how they belong to the group, they're not going to be meeting their own psychological needs and they're not going to enjoy that social interaction as more as well. Your brain can only think about so many people in a, you know, in a room at a time, and so you can't give people the attention they need to making sure that relation, those psychological needs are met. And so four to five people seems to be the magic number of where you still maintain an interaction and be able to attach things. Or you can design your parties and design your environments in ways that can manage more groups.
Speaker 2:And so if you're doing a big, board game.
Speaker 1:You know, a big board game, four to five people is probably the max, but if you're doing like a soiree, then having tables where four to five people can gather around each table will probably meet the needs there. So there is some choice architecture around how you design sort of events that takes into account our social psychology and and I think for those friend groups probably you know, my guess would be that many of them this is actually a good idea for our next survey. Maybe I'll ask people about how satisfied they are with their groups and how large their groups are, because it's a good question.
Speaker 1:I don't know exactly what we'll find, but my guess is that we'd find something around five to six people, four to five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that magic five, I've definitely I've heard. I did a, I did an interview with a guy named Richard Bartlett who is brilliant and he talks about group, group formation and um and how different group sizes can serve different purposes and um. Then Robin Dunbar obviously talks about the 12 to 15 and and in my conversation with Robin he mentioned that in new group environments the idea of maybe having three, three hubs, so three individual three friends, and then bringing together, say, four of their friends, so you then have a group of 15 of you but there's like those three central hubs who they they all kind of know each other.
Speaker 1:They know each other and they know each other and then you bring those three groups together and that could be a really effective localized group yeah, I, I think I think that anything you can do to maximize somebody's sense of inclusion like, oh, I may not know everyone here, but I know two people here that's a lot better than knowing one person there, right, because it gives them it's that same principle, like a group that is more densely interconnected has more belonging in it. And so, yeah, I think I think, planning things in ways that allow people, um, to to have their own, because, right, just like people just need to get over themselves first in a social encounter, and so if I can let my stress go of oh, oh, I don't know any of these people, if I can even just have one person, it's going to make interacting with everyone else so easier, because that stress is just going to melt away. And I think that that connection is worth noting is that, you know, the reason social connection has such a profound impact on our health is because loneliness is a stressful experience. It triggers your entire stress response. Stressful experience that triggers your entire stress response, the hypothalamic pituitary axis, which is how your body regulates stress, and so the interconnection between your social connections, stress and your well-being is really a kind of a powerful triad there, and so resolving stress is really critical.
Speaker 1:One of the worst things for people's social connections is to be really stressed. What does stressed people do? You know they're a little angry, they're a little dismissive, they don't have time right, they just want to get things done. You know stress is kind of a toxic thing and so doing anything you can to make somebody feel comfortable, like there's genuine, it's not just a, you know, it's not just something you read in the how to win friends and influence people.
Speaker 2:Actually creating genuine comfort is really important for how people regulate their emotions and regulate their connections to others, beautiful. So I know we are coming up to time, but I feel like I've got so many more like bubbles of questions that I could be asking you. But I'm wanting to honor your time and also honor the time of listeners here, so maybe we can do a part two sometime, but is there anything that we haven't yet got to today that you think? I cannot leave this conversation without touching on this piece, because it's just so important to me right now to let people know about this.
Speaker 1:I think just the one thing that maybe comes to mind is this idea of effort and risk of burnout and, just in general, the striving that is often when we raise something to be a public health priority, people then strive for it, and we've seen this in the mental health epidemic more broadly is that people become obsessed with achieving mental health and that those people seem to have the worst outcomes. And I think that this is a really interesting challenge of what we call inward attentional focus that when people are turned inward, inward attentional focus, that when people are turned inward when they're self-evaluating, that creates a really toxic state for their social cognitions and they don't get as much out of their social relationships. They have more fear, they have more sense that they have to be well-regulated and controlled rather than being authentic, and that is what we actually need to do is take a moment to have more outward attentional focus, and so interventions that we're seeing have a lot of promise for people with loneliness and isolation are things that ask people to do random acts of kindness for other people or to express gratitude to other people or to give support for other people. When you turn outward, some magic of turning outward solves the inward problems, and so you know, that's something I'm very thoughtful of as we try to make social connection of public health and a priority on people's mind is that we don't create more anxiety and stress and feeling like, oh, I'm not doing enough, right, that shouldn't be the message that people take home from our work, but rather it should be.
Speaker 1:We collectively need to do more, and I think, not to mention that people who provide support often benefit more than people who receive support, right? So there's maybe this magic ingredient that, by focusing on other people, instead of thinking how can I feel included? It's how can I make my friends feel more included? Right, and that might be the more magic remedy, and so so that's something I would suggest is that helping people turn outward. You know there's risks there as well for burnout and that sort of thing. You know, if you've always feel like you're the one who has to, you know organize and make things happen, that that's good. That can be hard, but we shouldn't we shouldn't, I guess stress too much about all this, and so that would be my closing plea as we kind of percolate like how does this stuff apply to my life?
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I do have one last question, which is what can workplaces do? Is there a quick win that workplaces could do to support this work, to really help their employees, who might only be coming into the office, say, once a week? What could they do to help them connect more?
Speaker 1:I think just making time and space for that connection to take place and giving the permission structures in place for it to happen connection to take place and giving the permission structures in place for it to happen. I think you know, because you mentioned hybrid, I'll maybe we've done some work around hybrid work kind of environments, and we actually find hybrid is better than completely in person. You know, for a lot of different reasons stress reduction, being able to manage your life, having the autonomy and control but we find that what's worse is the completely online control. But we find that what's worse is the completely online, and I think a lot of workplaces have turned to this. We'll do one or two days a week in person, but everybody picks their own one or two days, and so then nobody's actually connecting the workplace because you're the only one there on Tuesday, right? And so I think if you're doing these sort of policies, you need to really be intentional.
Speaker 1:Are my policies actually creating meaningful connection between people or are they just creating more burdens for my employees? And so I think the best thing to do if I were a manager or in a workplace is work with your employees to figure out, you know, when is the pizza party the right solution. And when is the pizza party? Feel like it's too little, too late, right, and so having those meaningful relationships with your employees and the psychological safety for them to say listen, I don't think this is like I don't need another social obligation after working hours. You know I need a longer lunch break that I'm allowed to take at the same time as my coworkers are taking their lunch breaks. So those sorts of solutions that are community-based but in the workplace, I think, really stand the most chance of being successful.
Speaker 2:The lunchtime pizza party on a specific day regularly could be the answer for workplaces.
Speaker 1:For some of them, I'm sure yeah.
Speaker 2:Dr Kivakad, it's been such a pleasure to connect with you here. I can't wait to see you in person in Vancouver in a couple of weeks. Thank you from my heart to yours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. It was great having a chat with you today and definitely would come back again.
