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Home » Emma Seppälä on The Power & Science of Social Connection (Full Transcript)

Emma Seppälä on The Power & Science of Social Connection (Full Transcript)

Emma Seppälä

Full text of Emma Seppälä on The Power & Science of Social Connection at TEDx Hayward May 2013 conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: The Power & Science of Social Connection by Emma Seppälä @ TEDx

TRANSCRIPT: 

I’d like to start with a question for you: just think about how many people in your life you feel close enough to, to share a personal problem with? You can just think for yourself what that number is.

A representative national survey was done where this question was asked to hundreds of people across the United States. And what they found was – this was done in 2004 – what they found was that the mean number of close others that people have, that they feel close enough to share a personal problem with, is two. And the mode, which is the greatest number of people, said zero. That was over 25% of Americans who said zero. That’s one in four people that you meet everyday doesn’t feel that connection.

So what I’m going to share with you today, is the science behind social connection and the secret to how we can improve that in our lives.

So let’s talk about what happens when there’s no social connection, or low social connection in our lives. So what the data is showing is that people with low social connection have more anxiety, depression, it’s been linked to suicide and also to violence, so a lot of perpetrators of violence acts that we hear about in the news, are people who were severely isolated. It impacts us even at the cellular level where we find greater inflammation for people who are very lonely.

And when we take care of our health, we often think about going to the gym and eating a proper diet.