Loneliness is as bad for us as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Finding connection in lonely times.

Does this matter more than we ever realized?

Ultimately, social connection really needs to be our bottom line in terms of public health.

I'm Naila Boodoo from Axios. This is one big thing. A few weeks ago on the podcast I talked with Surgeon General Dr.

Vivek Murthy about how social media is contributing to the declining

mental health of young people across the U.S.

Thanks to many of you who reached out to us about grappling with this as parents.

That got us thinking about an overlapping crisis that affects a huge swath of us regardless of age and one that's

also been front and center for public health experts especially in the last few

years. That's loneliness. Nearly 40% of Americans rated their mental health as only

fair or poor toward the end of last year. That's according to the American

psychiatric association. And according to the Surgeon General, about one in two American adults

report experiencing loneliness.

Not surprisingly, one result of all of this is even more self-help voices emerging from every corner of the internet,

from Tik-talk to Instagram to podcasts and beyond, talking about staving off loneliness and finding

happiness. Well, one of those voices is rooted in science and has been around for years.

Dr. Lorry Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of the happiness lab

podcast.

We're pretty bad at predicting what makes us feel good.

A lot of us are putting a lot of work into feeling better and feeling happier,

but we're going about it the wrong way

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