Build and Cherish Relationships with Friends, Family and Loved Ones

What is the health impact of low social connection?

When most people look at risk factors for premature death, they intuitively think of risks like smoking, obesity, or physical inactivity. However, the data showing that social disconnection shortens life is staggering. A landmark, large-scale piece of meta-analysis research contextualised the risk of social isolation and found that it carries the same risk level as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and carries double the risk of premature death compared to obesity [1].

Thus, to put it bluntly, if you want as long and healthy a life as possible, it’s not enough to eat right, sleep right and train right – you need to work your ‘social muscles’ just as hard. Neglecting this aspect of your life will not only leave your life less full than it could be – but will also have a measurable impact on your lifespan.

It is crucial to differentiate between ‘being alone’ and ‘feeling lonely’. Spending time alone (including living alone by choice) to read, watch movies, work, meditate, enjoy the outdoors and so on is absolutely fine. What is detrimental to your mental wellbeing and health is craving the contact of other humans but not having enough of it.

The issue of social isolation impacts men more strongly than women with large-scale sociological and demographic data [2] [3] showing statistics like:

• Since 1990, the percentage of men who report having a robust social circle (at least six close friends) has dropped by half, plummeting from 55% down to just 27%.
• The percentage of men who report having absolutely no close friends at all has jumped fivefold, rising from 3% in 1990 to 15%. For single men, that number climbs to an alarming 20%.
• Even when men do have friends, they don’t maintain them. Longitudinal tracking shows that middle-aged adults devote only about 30 minutes a day to maintaining friendships. Sociologists note that men tend to “stash their friendships away,” often going years without contact, assuming they can “just pick up where they left off”—a strategy that leads to severe network fragility over time.
• Surveys that track where adults turn as their primary source of personal and emotional support show that 85% of married men name their partner. Women, by contrast, split their support networks far more evenly between their partner, sisters, mothers, and female friends.
• Female friendships are overwhelmingly structured around emotional disclosure, vulnerability, and direct verbal support. Women put significantly more active work into checking in on their friends’ emotional well-being. Whereas male friendships are more often transactional and activity-based—built around watching a match, playing a sport, drinking at a pub, or working a job. Men sit side-by-side looking at an external object rather than face-to-face looking at each other.

Why does good social connection have such a strong impact on healthspan?

The main biological and behavioural reasons explaining why being socially connected protects you are:

• Suppression of Chronic Inflammation: When you feel lonely or isolated, your brain perceives your environment as unsafe. This triggers an evolutionary “survival mode”. This shifts the body toward a pro-inflammatory state [4] In longitudinal human studies, individuals with low social integration demonstrate significantly higher levels of key chemical markers of chronic inflammation. Social isolation increases systemic inflammation just as physical inactivity does [4]. By maintaining strong ties, you naturally dampen this inflammatory response, protecting your cardiovascular lining and tissues from long-term damage.
• Cardiovascular Regulation: The stress of isolation keeps your sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”) on alert. Large-scale data shows a direct relationship between social connection and hypertension [4]. In older age, the damage that social isolation causes to your blood pressure exceeds the clinical impact of diabetes. Face-to-face interaction stimulates the vagus nerve, releasing chemicals that act as a brake pedal on your heart.
• Healthy Modelling: Being part of a tangible social group introduces healthy peer pressure and conformity [1]. For example, if your friends or running club members exercise, cook real meals, and avoid heavy drinking, you are statistically far more likely to do the same.
• Shared Purpose: Knowing that people rely on you—whether it’s your family, your training partner, or a local charity group—subconsciously increases your self-care. You become more vigilant about getting injuries and illnesses checked, eating well, and avoiding reckless behaviours, because your life is intertwined with others.

In Big10 #7 (Protect your brain health) we take a look at how social connection is a factor also in neurological health.

Why should you avoid short form social media?

I strongly believe that the effect of algorithm-based social media on us as individuals and society as a whole has been profoundly negative and wilfully exploitative by the companies running them. Nowhere is the evidence for this made more compelling than in Jonathan Haidt’s seminal book ‘The Anxious Generation’, which I have linked below. This book has been credited with influencing the Australian social media ban for children, which is also being considered in countries all over the world.

At the most basic level, spending hours passively scrolling through short form content is a drain on your valuable time which could be spent instead on training, enjoying face-to-face conversations, reading, watching movies or spending time outdoors (to name just a few!). However, the deeper effects are much more insidious [5] [6].

• Concentration & Attention Span: The human brain is optimised to focus on tasks through a system called directed attention (the ability to deliberately focus on a specific task or stimulus while actively suppressing distractions). Short-form video algorithms are explicitly engineered to bypass this system and hijack your brain’s reward centres. They use the exact same psychological mechanism as slot machines: variable ratio reinforcement. When you swipe up, you don’t know if the next video will be boring, hilarious, or shocking. This unpredictability triggers a massive spike of dopamine in anticipation of a reward. Because the reward arrives in just 15 to 30 seconds, the brain becomes conditioned to expect constant, effortless micro-doses of dopamine. Neuroimaging studies show that heavy consumption of short-form media actively trains the prefrontal cortex not to engage in deep, sustained focus. Over time, tasks that require sustained cognitive effort (like reading a book, writing an entry, or listening to a loved one) feel physically painful because they do not offer an immediate dopamine payload.
• Anxiety and Mental Health: When you endlessly scroll through highly stimulating, emotionally charged, hyper-edited clips, your amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection centre) is kept on constant high alert. The rapid shift from a sad video to an aggressive video, to a funny video, prevents the nervous system from resetting, keeping your baseline cortisol and adrenaline elevated. This physiological state mimics the sensation of generalised anxiety. Psychologists note that human well-being relies heavily on entering “flow states” — periods of deep absorption in an activity. Short-form media fragments your day into 15-second intervals. This structural fragmentation prevents you from entering flow, leading to a state called continuous partial attention, which is highly correlated with chronic low-grade anxiety and a sense of overwhelm. A major study [5] tracked the psychological profiles of short-form video users and found a direct dose-response relationship: higher daily usage was tightly correlated with elevated depression, severe anxiety, and lower psychological resilience.

Although I have specifically focussed on short-form video (which is a very contemporary issue), these effects can be seen and traced back directly to the vast social changes between 2010 and 2015 as the lives of many people both young and old (but with the greatest impact on young people) moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, video games and internet based activities.

I would urge you to ditch the apps and replace the time spent on them with building, growing or renewing your real, human, face-to-face social network.

How can you improve your social connection?

Some of us, depending on your stage in life, are already blessed with some or all of:

• Being in a relationship
• Having friends
• Having family members above (e.g. parents)
• Having family members below (e.g. children)
• Having hobbies, sports and interests that we do with other people

However, if you do at times feel lonely or would like more social interaction (of if you tend to rely heavily on only your partner for your emotional support or as the ‘social secretary’), it is important to take some action in this area. We are all different and have different needs, and this will very likely involve going a bit out of your comfort zone (or adopting some new habits), but some things to try could include:

• Re-connecting with friendships or family members you’ve let languish. Make time to check in with them and plan activities, trips and social occasions.
• Taking up a new sport (or re-kindle one you used to play) such as joining a running club, a yoga class, a sports team, a hiking club and so on.
• Take up a new hobby where you’ll meet other people such as an art class or a language class
• Volunteering with a local charity or community organisation
• If you are religious, then get more involved with your local faith community
• If you are in a relationship, whilst not relying only on your partner, don’t take that relationship for granted either. Plan dates and activities to do together and be spontaneously kind, loving and interested.

Ultimately, what you are trying to get to is deeper friendships and relationships where you support them, they support you, and you share your emotions and feelings. But, practically, you have to start somewhere, and if, right now, you don’t have that network, finding in-person activities is a great way to meet people that you know have at least one thing in common with you. Who knows what friendships might grow from that! It can take a bit of courage, but it is worth taking the plunge!

If you think about it, the most important skill when it comes to building and maintaining relationships is conversation. Below, I’ve linked to Alison Wood Brook’s amazing book ‘Talk’. I think we can all be better at what we tend to think of as an obvious human skill, and holding good conversations is the cornerstone of having great relationships.

Further sources of information

Talk by Alison Wood Brooks

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

References

[1] Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.

[2] Cox, D. (2021). The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. Survey Center on American Life.

[3] Pew Research Center. (2025). Men, Women and Social Connections. Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends.

[4] Yang, Y. C., Boen, C., Gerken, K., Li, T., Schorpp, K., & Harris, K. M. (2016). Social relationships and physiological determinants of longevity across the human life span. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3), 578-583.

[5] Su, C., et al. (2021). Usage of short-form video applications, cognitive overload, and anxiety in the digital age. Frontiers in Public Health, 9, 706240.

[6] Wang, J., et al. (2023). The impact of short-form video addiction on attention spans and academic burnout: A structural equation modeling approach. Behavioral Sciences, 13(4), 312.