Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Join the Kindness Campaign With Dr. Michelle Robin and Bayleigh Petty
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 490 of Live Happy Now. We live in a world where we’re connected to our devices 24/7, but how connected are we to what really matters?
I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week I’m talking with Dr. Adam Dorsay, a licensed psychologist, executive coach, and host of the award-winning podcast, SuperPsyched. In his new book by the same name, Adam explores four types of essential connections that we all need but might not be getting in our busy, distracted lives.
In this episode, he breaks down why each type of connection is so important, and even better, he tells us what we can do to find each one. Let’s have a listen.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:47] PF: Adam, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[0:00:49] AD: I’m so happy to be with you, Paula. You are one of the people who just makes me immediately feel like talking all day.
[0:00:58] PF: Yes, because I’m going to make you do a lot of talking today, so this kind of works out.
[0:01:02] AD: Totally.
[0:01:03] PF: Oh, I love the topic that you’re talking about, because science tells us how important connections are. I’ve had so many people on the show who talk about loneliness and the importance of connections, but nobody has broken it down the way that you do. So, I want to know, first of all, what made you decide to write about this topic?
[0:01:21] AD: I’m so glad you asked that question. I had aimed to write several books and never continued. I just never was able to see it through. But this one, absolutely. To borrow from a term from Irvin Yalom at Stanford, it bit me in the ass. I had to write this book. I’ve done several podcast interviews, well over 100, probably close to 200 at that time, and I’d been doing therapy with individuals and couples for about 20,000 hours, and I’d read a lot of books, and everything. The common denominator between those three things was the word connection, but no one had really broken it down.
So, I wanted to look at connection through four basic lenses, the way we connect. We connect with ourselves first. That’s the primary one. Then we connect with others. It could be as we’re connecting right now. It could be with my wife or kids or my pets even. We connect with the world. We look at art perhaps as you and I were talking about comedy, music. We travel. We might go places. And of course, there’s for some of us, some connection with something greater. I think even the most ardent atheists would say that when they go to the Grand Canyon, they see something, that makes them say, “Wow.” So, they connect with awe. Even there, there’s something bigger than themselves in that moment. They don’t necessarily have to connect with God in the traditional sense.
Anyway, I had to write this book. It took me 20 months. It was absolutely both a labor of love and at times just, “Oh, can I please get this thing done?” But I really believed in it.
[0:02:56] PF: Well, that’s interesting because from the research point of view, as you said, this topic has not really been written about. So, how challenging was it to find the research and to find all the information about these different types of connections that we have?
[0:03:13] AD: It was surprisingly easy because people talk about it indirectly through research, or they describe a sense of aliveness. The thing that was missing, though, was a definition of connection. I consulted multiple mental health practitioners to co-create a definition of connection as I saw it. The bottom line, it’s a fairly long abstract but relatable, I believe, definition. It’s a working definition. I may have changed that definition in some way at some point, but I did the best I could for the book.
But when you feel plugged in and alive, like you come alive and I have my own podcast and basically the idea of SuperPsyched in that is to be super connected to our psyches. You might have a connection formula and I might have a connection formula that’s very different. You might need to connect with your bunny. You might need to connect with your honey in a particular way, because I know you have a bunny and I love the fact that you do. I might need to do something vastly different like skydiving. Low key. I don’t skydive. I would love to at some point.
[0:04:28] PF: But it sounds good.
[0:04:29] AD: But everybody has a different – yes, right, exactly. All eight billion of us are individuals and each of us has different needs, and boy, the research was actually surprisingly easy to find. It was connection adjacent, so to speak, but it was right on point at the same time.
[0:04:49] PF: That’s so interesting. Today, we live in a society we talk about being always connected. We’re hyperconnected in terms of social media and email and texts, but we’re completely disconnected. So, can you address that dichotomy?
[0:05:03] AD: Oh, my God, Paula. I mean, it’s just such a paradox because ever since 2007, when we got the iPhones, our sense of connectedness went up in so many ways. Then social media comes into the scene. I remember the first time MySpace, if you remember that, came into my office and somebody was talking about MySpace and I was like, “Gosh, what’s going on?” Lo and behold it has become like a third party in our lives and the idea is I’m not against social media I’m not against the iPhone, but we want to use it, not have it use us. It’s a really important thing and each of us has – it’s like salt like. We can salt our meals, but if we over salted it tastes like crap, and we are over-salting our use of these types of things that make us feel connected.
We believe that we’re connected because we’ve got these friends, over a thousand friends on Facebook. Would those people show up at 3am if something really went down? No, they would not. So, it’s a false sense. then we engage in social comparison. We see them in Hawaii while we’re at work. We see them loving their partner when we’re in distress in our own relationships. So, we experience social comparison, we experience FOMO, all of these toxic elements are coursing through our veins, and we wonder why we are more disconnected than ever and wonder why depression and anxiety are at the highest levels ever. These are not necessarily the only cause, but they certainly exacerbate these experiences.
So, if we’re able to use our social media, use our phones to the right amount and then connect with the bunny and the honey, our animals, our friends, the real people, the IRL, the going for a walk in the forest, we are far more likely to feel connected with ourselves, others, the world and something greater, which are the real money makers.
[0:07:08] PF: I want to dig into your connection formula. But before we do, can you talk about what the impacts or side effect of not having connections?
[0:07:17] AD: They’re profound. Let’s just bring it to the most dire state. We watch Tom Hanks on an island all by himself and his best friend in that movie. It was called Outcast. You’re smiling because you know the answer. It was Wilson. It was a volleyball. We are wired to need connection. Even the most introverted of us needs some form of connection sometimes. And just the realization that it’s out there is so important. So, when we don’t feel connected, one of the things we found, particularly around loneliness, is that it’s as bad for our health as smoking cigarettes. It’s a bigger predictor of our mortality than our cholesterol, certain cardiological functions. It is so important that we feel connected to others, that we feel connected to ourselves, that the absence of it makes us depressed, makes us angry, and actually could cause us to shove away the connections that would actually help us.
So, being connected in our own way, with our own formulas, with our own needs is so, so crucial. The outcome of not feeling connected is potentially deadly.
[0:08:41] PF: I’ve heard years ago, I remember growing up and having an aunt who lived alone and going to her house and she was sad and I asked her, and I’m a child and she goes, “It’s okay, honey. I’m just lonely.” I think the viewpoint of loneliness has changed because that used to be the mindset, don’t worry about it, I’m just lonely, or she’s just lonely. And now we’re starting to finally realize that it’s not being just lonely. That is a problem.
[0:09:08] AD: Absolutely. I’d love to contrast loneliness, which is something no one would ever choose like your aunt. She doesn’t want to be lonely versus solitude. Solitude is lovely. I’m going for a hike on my own. I’m in my man cave doing my thing. I’m doing some working on a project. That’s fantastic. That’s by choice. Your aunt did not choose to be lonely. Loneliness hurts badly. There’s almost a stigma against saying I feel lonely. It’s almost like saying I have leprosy or some other, an STI. But it’s something that it’s a signal that we need to change things. We need to find a way to feel less lonely.
One of the best ways to do that immediately, by the way, is to volunteer at a place, at a soup kitchen, or for some cause that means something to you, meet up groups. At least you’re doing something in parallel, perhaps even more, perhaps you’re having a conversation beyond just being in parallel. But Barbra Streisand got it partially right. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. I would alter it and say, people who are aware that they need people and do something about it are the luckiest people in the world.
[0:10:20] PF: We’ll reach out and have her team rewrite that song. Fix that a little bit.
[0:10:24] AD: Sorry, Babs. Yes, I love you. I love you. Yes, the lyric needs a little work.
[0:10:31] PF: So, what are some of the things that get in the way of us making connections with others? If we know they’re important and we crave those connections, what are our stumbling blocks?
[0:10:41] AD: There are too many to list, but one of the biggest ones is fear of rejection. One of the things we know through neuroimaging is that rejection hurts in the same way as physical pain. We see the same centers of our brain light up when we feel rejected as we do when we’re in abject physical pain. That’s a big one.
Another one is the idea that that person who I used to have a connection with probably doesn’t really want to see me anymore. It’s less about the rejection and more just about this perception that, am I really that relevant? In some cases, you will call somebody who was a good friend a long time ago and they have moved on and they aren’t a match at this stage in life. But so often, the people in our contacts with whom we had a connection at one point, those are our primary people that we should be reaching out to.
But the perception that now they probably won’t want to talk to me related to rejection. There are a host of others that just are when we feel depressed, the last thing we want to do is reach out. We may have it being experiencing something called anhedonia. We may not even experience pleasure for things that we once considered pleasurable, such as connection.
So, there are a host of things that get in our way, and the important thing is I call it the control-alt-delete for anything. What’s done on a PC to override the system’s defaults. Control-alt-delete on a Mac, it’s different. But I like thinking about there are so many brain bugs that we have. We still have the same brains that we had 35,000 to 100,000 years ago, but our outside realities have changed vastly. And one of the things we need to do is look at our negativity bias, for example. The idea that bad ways more than good because it meant our survival at one point. But now when bad ways more than good, it actually harms our survival in many ways.
[0:12:38] PF: That’s so true because when we aren’t functioning at our optimum, we don’t want those connections and we can’t even make the most of the connections that we do have. We kind of self-sabotage, getting that down on the spiral. Talk to us about the connection formula. Can you dig into what that is and how this works?
[0:12:57] AD: Yes. If we had a camera crew watching us how we allocate our time throughout the day and they gave us a graph at the end of a month, here’s how you’ve been using your time. We would be astonished. We are wasting our time. Oftentimes like Saturday rolls around and I’m brewing some coffee and I’m watching some Netflix, I’m folding some laundry, and I’m petting the dog and wanting to emails and texts. Am I really doing anything? The opposite would be what if I was intentional? What if I was doing the things that I knew actually fed me? What if I was willing to get up and go on that hike? Because I love that hike. I know for sure that hike actually feeds me.
So, the connection formula is looking at what are we doing versus what are the things that actually feed us and how can we do more of the things that feed us and less of the things that don’t. How can we be intentional? And a lot of things that actually feed us do require that activation energy like, “Oh, crap. I don’t really feel like getting up and doing something.” Because it takes too much like camping. Oh, my gosh, the activation energy for that, like packing and planning, and setting up the campsite, and blah, blah, blah, and buying the food. That’s a lot.
But for people who love camping, they know that they are going to get a massive hit of connection with a lot of different things, interpersonal connection, perhaps connecting with nature, just feeling that sound of birds chirping above them, which we actually know now is very good for our health.
Julian Treasure talks about it extensively, that bird song is one of the best things for our mental health, because our brains are used to hearing it and it tells us the world is safe. But the things that we really love doing, oftentimes we’re not actually doing those things. The question is, can we go through like a catalog of activities and choose some that we know on the other side of doing those activities? We will say that was a good use of my time.
[0:15:06] PF: So, do you advise people to make a list of things that help them find the connection? Or how do they start digging into that for themselves?
[0:15:15] AD: You bet you. So, I kind of go with a feed or bleed. Does this activity feed you or does it bleed you? The bleed ones, we try to do less of. And social media, actually, we think it feeds us, but it often bleeds us. On the other side of doing it, if we were to interview somebody before engaging in it, versus after, we’d find out that they’ve bled. But yes, I do advise people to take a look and just choose one or two things, because usually we can’t do much more, like if I say, “Let’s do 12 things,” like that’s shoving the entire pizza down your throat all at once, rather than taking it one slice at a time, one bite at a time. Let’s choose one or two things that you’d like to do more of over the next month. Let’s see if you can put them into play a little bit more often and see what happens to your mood, what happens to your anxiety? What happens to your quality of life? There are even ways that you can measure this There’s a satisfaction with life scale that was created by a guy named Ed Dean or he’s now sadly passed.
You’re smiling because you know this guy. He was one of you one of the pioneers and in happy science and positive psychology. What you can do is just answer the seven-question inventory. It takes like two minutes to fill out. You rate these seven questions from like one to seven. One to five, maybe I forget off the top of my head. One to five, yes. You do it before engaging in these activities and two weeks into, and you will probably notice that they go up. Another way of doing that, by the way, just a simple way for everybody is noticing what’s good, noticing three good things throughout the day for those two weeks. What ends up happening, which is really funny, is not only does your score go up, but if you have a significant other who’s not doing that same practice of noticing three good things, because you’re happier, it becomes infectious.
[0:17:07] PF: That’s interesting.
[0:17:09] AD: Yes. If they do it, their scores will go up, even though they had not done the intervention. They hadn’t done the three good things thing. If your partner is feeling more connected, you may actually begin to start doing those things as well. It’s kind of a monkey see, monkey do. We tend to copy what’s around us. We all think we’re so original. We all think that we’re not influenced by our external lives. We are entirely influenced by those things. There is no such thing as an original.
Anyway, just really do need to be surrounded by good stuff and one of the best ways to be surrounded by good stuff and one of the best things you can do for your partner if you are connected to someone in a significant way is take care of those connection needs. It will
bleed into the relationship in a good way, in all likelihood.
[0:17:55] LF: Well, that’s really interesting. You had mentioned earlier the four ways that we connect. I wondered if we could talk about those. You talked about the others, the world, spiritual, and ourselves. So, can you talk about what each one means? And then, can you also tell me is one more important than the others?
[0:18:16] AD: Yes. I would say that the connection to ourselves is the starting point. Am I being true to myself? If I’m not being true to myself, it’s as if I’m walking through life with a rock in my shoe or maybe several rocks in my shoe. We’re not going to get the best version. We are weaker. If you try to exert energy and bench-press your max, when you say something that is entirely untrue, you will not be able to exert your max in all likelihood. For most of us, that is the case. And that’s true with life.
So, connection to ourselves, that’s where we start. Sometimes I see a man who is gay and he’s married in a traditional way because his family said, “Hey, you’re a man, marry a woman.” So, he did. But he’s not authentically connected to his partner. We become weaker in that sense. So, we need to know thyself. What’s the Shakespeare quote, “This above all, to thine own self be true?”
[0:19:18] PF: “To thine own self be true,” yes.
[0:19:20] AD: Yes.
[0:19:20] PF: So, how do we connect with ourselves? Where do we start? I think sometimes we get so caught up in our day-to-day lives and I know I’ve been guilty of this, where you’re just, you’re going, you’re on your treadmill, you’re working, and just doing all the things that have to be done. When you finally stop and take a breath, you realize it’s been weeks or longer since you’ve really connected with yourself. You don’t even know how you feel anymore. So, how do we connect with ourselves and how do we maintain that connection?
[0:19:50] AD: It can be dizzying, all of the have-tos, just like you said. When we finally get off the treadmill, it’s like, now what? Back in the day, Netflix used to have these things called DVDs. Perhaps you remember them.
[0:20:03] PF: I do.
[0:20:03] AD: There was a queue that you would have of like, “Here’s what I want to watch and here’s the order of the 30 things I want to watch.” I would recommend in a notes app, on your phone, perhaps that you write down the things that you want to do when you’re off the
treadmill. It’s very hard to think when you get off the treadmill. Sometimes the things that you will write down do require that activation energy. And part of you is like, “No, I’m not feeling that tonight.”
I’m going to say, “Break through it. Do it.” Because we are dizzy when we get off those things. It’s hard to recognize what those things are, but having them written down and having the awareness that on the other side of doing this, if I break through the initial five minutes of resistance. Around minute six, I’m going to be totally into it. It could be working out. It could be riding my bike. It could be calling a friend and doesn’t matter. It just matters that it’s true for you. You’ll know what they are on the other side.
One of the things I say about friendships are there’s like a driveaway test and you can use this on that as well. A driveway test is when you’re driving away after having hung out with a friend, how do you feel? And this kind of goes into the next stage of connection to others. Do you feel taller? Do you feel happier? Do you feel stronger? Do you feel heard? Or do you feel exhausted? Do you feel like you were just kind of used as kind of a verbal like garbage can for the other person? We can use that driveway test for almost any activity. How do I feel after I did it? We need to mind ourselves, how we felt, because it will cause us to break through the resistance to the activation the next time we do that thing.
So, the next level, after we connect with ourselves, is connecting others. Others are significant others, our romantic partners. Perhaps, it could be our children. For the pet lovers like you and me, it’s our pets, it’s our friends, and friends are the profoundly neglected area of others. Esther Perel talks about it. We tend to lean on our significant other for all relationships and friendships help dissipate that so that we can appropriately lean on our significant other so that my wife doesn’t have to watch the Golden State Warriors with me, and instead I can watch them with a friend. She does not want to watch the Golden State Warriors at all. She’ll tolerate it, but she doesn’t want to do it. I know I do, and some of my friends will be more than happy to meet me at a sports bar in Yale, and that’s not her thing.
[0:22:40] PF: As we get older, we’re in our 20s, we can’t even imagine not having like a billion friends around us because it was easy. It was just everywhere you turn, there’s someone who’s up for doing something and you can go places and it was life was much simpler. As we go through life, it gets harder and harder to make those connections. Is that because we’re out of practice? Is it because the availability isn’t there? Is it a combination of all that?
[0:23:07] AD: I think back to the nineties. There were fewer options. Very early nineties, there wasn’t even email. You had get a phone. It wasn’t like we had a cajillion and 12 stations on cable TV. It wasn’t as if we had a ton of stuff on the Internet. No. Instead, if you wanted to go do something, you’d go, like, to the bookstore and say, “Hey, what do I want to read in a physical book?” If I wanted to hang out with a friend, it was like, “Man, I’m not just going to text you. I’m going to, because I couldn’t text. I’m going to go meet you for you for a cup of coffee or beer and it’s going to be great.”
So, I think there were fewer distractions. These days, it’s always in our pocket. If I don’t need to feel bored if I’m waiting in line and I don’t need to talk to the person next to me. So, it’s unusual for people to talk to people in line at the grocery store. I recommend that as a very low starting point. But yes, I think there were fewer options back in the day. That would be my contention. Actually, that was better because now we have too many options. We’re just like, “What am I missing out on? We experienced FOMO.”
[0:24:18] PF: Yes. It’s easy to not make deep friendships because we have all these casual connections that are very superficial and we are missing out then on that actual engagement with someone at a deeper level. Actually, friendship in adulthood is a big part of your work. So, can we go in a little deeper like why is it difficult and how can we approach it differently to make it work? It is so important.
[0:24:48] AD: Paula, I’m so glad you asked. Many of us don’t live in the city we were born and raised in. Many of us moved multiple times. We were born in a place. Went to college in a place. We moved to another place. In each time, our friends kind of fell by the wayside. Also, when we were children, there was one common denominator. The person lived nearby and you knock on their door and say, “Hey, do you want to play?” It didn’t really matter that you guys really weren’t a good match. If he had a baseball glove and I had a baseball glove, we were throwing a ball. That was the deal. And we were throwing the ball until sundown. That was all we had.
As we get older, we tend to filter and sort. Are you into the same kind of music I’m into? Are you into the same kind of activities I’m into? In high school, are you going to help me feel popular? Are you part of my clique in the breakfast club? We saw five very different people, I believe it was, trying to connect. But generally, they had their cliques, and it was all based on those criteria.
Then in college, maybe you live in the same dorm, maybe you’re in the same major. And then when you’re at work, you have these, as you said, oftentimes, superficial relationships that fall by the wayside for the second you leave the company and say, “I will be in touch.” And you don’t stay in touch. It fizzles very often.
So, due to the superficiality of that, and the non-commitment to maintenance, like, so many potentially great friends fall by the wayside. I do believe that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, so it’d behooves us to find good friends who have similar values, who make us feel heard, who are willing to be as vulnerable as we are so that the depth can occur. There’s some friends who probably you don’t want to be vulnerable with, but you would love to watch a sporting event or a musical event with.
Each friend has his or her or their places. Some of them, I like thinking of them as superheroes. Spider-Man is awesome. Can do web and Batman is awesome and Wonder Woman, but none of them can fly like Superman. Each of them has their – each of my friends have their strong suits. They’re people with whom I would talk about intellectual material, stuff that I’ve read that blew my mind. They’re people that will help me do hard tasks, like figure out IT stuff, and we’ll have a beer and it’s great. But I also know that with those friends, I probably can’t talk about my deepest, most vulnerable stuff. And then there’s friends for that.
So, I like the idea of seeing friends for their strengths, as well as their limitations and appreciating them. Unless they are toxic, sometimes you actually have to opt out of a friendship and break up, which is a really hard thing. If they are not kind, if they are not cheering for you to become their best because they fear that you will leave them if you ascend to a particular level. So, there are just so many components to friendship and it’s something I’ve geeked out to. As you know, I gave a TEDx talk on it. I have a whole chapter in my book on friendship and adulthood because I see in my own office very, very, very friendable people with whom I could possibly be friends if it wasn’t illegal or unethical because as a therapist, I’m not allowed to do that. They all want friends and it’s kind of scary in your 40s, 30s, or 50s to say, “Hey, will you come out and play with me?” That’s basically what we’re asking.
[0:28:25] PF: And the other person is oftentimes waiting for it. So, how do we do that? That should be like our takeaway of the day is how do we go out and make friends and keep those friends and deepen those connections.
[0:28:38] AD: There are infinite ways, but some of the top hits in my point of view is looking through your contacts and asking yourselves, who have I love in the past with whom I dropped the ball or they dropped the ball or we dropped the ball? Could we find a way to renew that friendship? That’s the top hit.
Second one is engaging in an activity that you know you’re going to like where there will be people there. Worst case scenario, you drive home, you say, I enjoy the activity. Best case scenario, you hit it off with somebody and it’s up to you to reach out. Don’t wait for them to reach out. If it doesn’t work and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you had a great first connection and you find out the other person is not who you thought they were and for some reason you can opt out. The third place that I really love and this is for us pet people is walking a dog. If you have a dog, you’re far more likely to be engaged. Now, there’s some non-dog people out there who’s never going to use this.
But when my dog Mozi died in 2009, one of the things I did when I was grieving him was I recognized all the people he brokered introductions to. There were some really good friends in there who he actually introduced me to. There’s science behind this. People are more likely to engage you if you have a dog. There are so many ways of doing this, but be willing to be rejected and realize it’s a numbers game.
One of the things I just recently heard from Jack Canfield on a presentation was when he was rejected for a book, by a publishing company, one of his elders said to him, “If they reject your book, just think of it as having been sent to the wrong address.”
[0:30:27] PF: I love that.
[0:30:27] AD: It takes all the piss out of it, doesn’t it? So good. So, if you get rejected by somebody, wrong address, not the right person, not my place.
[0:30:37] PF: I love it. That keeps us from taking it so personally and feeling like, “I’m not going to try that again, because that person didn’t want to connect with me. So, I’m probably worthless.”
[0:30:48] AD: We tend to go there with the negativity. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, and I’m worthless.” Not true.
[0:30:55] PF: Yes. So, this is great. You have so much to teach us in your book. I’m really excited about it. I’m going to tell our listeners how they can find it, how they can find you, they can watch your TED Talk. We’re going to give them all the atom they can handle. I appreciate what you’ve written here, and I also appreciate you coming on the show and talking about it.
[0:31:13] AD: Paula, you are so unbelievably cool. I really do hope we get to meet IRL at some point.
[0:31:21] PF: We’ll make it happen.
[0:31:22] AD: You are just fantastic.
[0:31:24] PF: Well, I thank you. I have so enjoyed this time with you.
[0:31:27] AD: Right back at you.
[OUTRO]
[0:31:31] PF: That was Dr. Adam Dorsay, talking about the power of connections. If you’d like to learn more about Adam, watch his TED Talks, follow him on social media, or discover his book, Super Psyched: Unleash the Power of the 4 Types of Connection and Live the Life You Love, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Live Happy Now and if you aren’t already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think.
That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
