Living A Full Life

Loneliness, The Hidden Health Crisis

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 2

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The quiet ache so many of us carry isn’t just about being alone—it’s about feeling unseen in a hyper-digital world. We unpack loneliness as a full-on public health crisis, connecting the dots between social isolation, chronic stress, inflammation, sleep problems, and long-term risks like heart disease and dementia. With clear science and lived stories, we make the case that connection isn’t a luxury; it’s physiology.

We trace how remote work, social feeds, and constant screen time created the illusion of closeness while shrinking our circle of true confidants. Then we pivot to what actually heals: consistent, real-world rituals that release oxytocin, steady the nervous system, and make healthy habits easier. From blue zone lessons on multi-generational living to the simple power of showing up for a weekly class or dinner, we spotlight the routines that turn strangers into community and calm into a daily baseline.

You’ll hear practical, repeatable strategies—weekly family dinners, tech-free hours away from bedtime, group fitness for built-in accountability, and microconnections that retrain your brain to feel safe with people again. We also tackle the rise of AI companions and why simulated empathy can’t replace eye contact, touch, and shared presence. To make it stick, we end with a one-day challenge: text three people you’ve lost touch with, plan one local meetup, offer one act of kindness, and share a phone-free meal. Ready to treat connection like medicine? Follow the show, share this episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find tools to feel human again.

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Welcome back to Living a Full Life. Today we're talking about a topic that's becoming one of the biggest health conversations of our time. Loneliness. But we're not just talking about feeling lonely. We're talking about loneliness as a public health issue. We now know that emotional and social connection is medicine. As powerful as exercise, diet, sleep. So today we're going to be breaking down why loneliness is skyrocketing more than ever, how it affects your physical and mental health, why community connection may be the most important wellness tools you can practice, and simple, realistic steps to rebuild real life connection in a hyper digital world. Thanks for joining us on Living a Full Life. Each and every week, we bring to you content that you can use and digest for you and your families to live your life more full and more healthy. And loneliness is something that's been passed down from generations as perceived as just being isolated. But in a world where we have so many people and communities and neighbors that are literally five feet away from you, how can we feel lonely? It's almost perplexing to think how that can be, but it's the digital age and how engraved we are in the digital world that is making people lonelier than ever. The U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness and social isolation as a national epidemic. This is in 2025. Loneliness isn't about being alone, it's about feeling disconnected, even when surrounded by people. The rise of technology, remote work, and social media has created the illusion of connection without the real thing. The average person today has far fewer close friends than 20 years ago. Loneliness has become especially intense for parents, teens, new mothers, entrepreneurs, and people in transitional seasons, divorce, moving to a new city, or having a new baby. You can add a personal, you know, your personal story to this and find the times in your life when you felt lonely. It feels like these times of loneliness are more pervasive now than ever before. We had times. I remember moving my family from Canada to Florida, and there was a short segment of feeling lonely, but we surrounded ourselves with people very quickly. And for many reasons. One, for support, two, to create a village, three, to not be lonely and to be connected. And it's really important. And even though these people are newer and not as lifelong friends as our lifelong friends, and they're not our mothers, they're not our fathers, they're not our siblings, they are community. And it's really important to do that. Most people don't realize this, but loneliness doesn't just affect your mood, it changes your biology from the inside out in an epigenetic way. These effects are higher inflammation, increased cortisol, a weaker immune system, higher risk of heart disease, greater risk of anxiety and depression, increased risk of dementia, poorer sleep, less motivation and energy, and the list goes on and on. Loneliness can increase your risk of early death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This is the wake-up call that I think modern society needs. And you've heard it from not just this podcast, but you've heard it around. It started with the pandemic in 2020 when people were really forced to be isolated. I think that brought it to the surface of what the digital age is really doing. Introverts may be, you know, excited about working from home and being away from people, but even they will side on this, saying that connection is really important. So we're biologically designed for community. Connection regulates your nervous system, it stabilizes your hormones, it improves digestion, strengthens immunity, and even increases your pain tolerance. It's really important when we make these connections neurologically to in our overall well-being. Very important. We cannot ignore this. And if connection plays such a major role, we need to invigorate and be inclusive in that to solve it on our own. So the benefits that happen directly by being communal is that you get an oxytocin release. You get an boost of oxytocin. It's a small boost, but it works. And this helps connect hormones. It calms your stress response, it improves mental clarity, it strengthens resilience, it improves dietary discipline and health habits, and it helps you live longer, literally. The connections you get, the small, even the small connections of just asking people how they are and reciprocating and them asking you how you are, goes a long way. And we're not just talking about the quick grocery store, you know, cashier that asks you, how's your day going? It's those deeply connected, those deep connections when your neighbor actually says that extra sentence and just cares a little bit more. That's what we're talking about when it comes to connections. Uh, sometimes you just being able to talk and walk away and be like, man, I really splurged on that person. They didn't need to hear all that, is therapeutic. It is something that is biologically calming to your system. So isolation is leading to a lot uh of issues. We used to make, you know, 20, 30 years ago look at behavior strategically for uh isolation and in a psychology and psychiatry perspective was more about how people's behavior changed by being isolated. And they'd become not introverted, but more isolation, more isolated, lack of eye contact, um, quicker responses, maybe more mute, less talkative all around, and they were healthy. They didn't have any uh mental disease or mental illness relating to their decisions to talk less or be less social. It just naturally happened, and that's where research kind of fell through for decades on that. But now with the digital shift, it's happened so quickly where people are engraved in their monitors, their screens, and they're getting connection from digital, which is not real, it's not human. And now with AI, this is where I'm going with this whole podcast. If you're wondering where this came from, AI is creating digital avatars, not AI, people are creating AI tools of digital avatars that you can create and make friends with. It's getting so real that you can actually make them look like your dead mother, or I don't know. I mean, you can see where this is going. And that emotional connection can actually happen through AI responses. My question is: if we're having AI algorithms giving us the responses of what we want to hear, and it's not that human component, it's kind of like your dog or your pet. They're just perfect, aren't they? They they don't it's because they don't say anything, they're just always there for you. And that's the same thing with AI. Well, have that type of connection, you can have that kind of love, just like you do for your pet. You can do what am I trying to say here? You can um develop, develop is the word, develop a connection like that, which is false. Some may argue with me and say, How could that be false if that connection is there and you are already feeling it? Doesn't that all that matters? The human component is the key between all of this, and we can't forget that. We got to use examples of what we know, and I've done a lot of podcasts. I love the blue zone research. Um, and and when we look there with groups with high social cohesion or live together areas, like in Sicily, in the Mediterranean, in the Pacific Rim. When we look at these blue zones, they all had community. They all lived within a cohort, they all lived um and and communicated with each other. Um, families kind of live together. And so Sicily, it's very common for generations to live together. You have grandma, mom and dad, and the kids all living together. Sometimes it's separated like on the third floor, second floor, and first floor. You have three generations, but they're in the same home and they may cook meals every day together or they're they're there together. There's that tight cohort that's there. In America, we're all about separating, getting out of and being empty nesters and getting our freedom. But still, we want to keep connection with that. And we we think that texting, you know, once a week, our kids or our family is enough connection. It's really, it's really not. A lot of these people who even do some of that still suffer from loneliness. So we have group fitness communities outperform solo exercise. So people who are part of a group fitness that run together, go to a spin class together, go to a Zuma together, and they make that their thing. I'll say, hey Sandy, I'll see you next Tuesday, same time, 10 a.m. at the Zuma class. Yep, I'll see you there. And they and they do that each and every week, uh, or most weeks have the deeper connections that way. Families who eat together have better metabolic health, that as well. We just, you know, we don't just adjust the spine as chiropractors. That's where you know my specialty comes from. We support the whole person, and that includes emotional and social well-being. And that's what this podcast is for, is to touch on the things I can't touch, literally. Uh, if I can't get to your spine and your nervous system physically, we have to talk about the things we can do mentally, spiritually, chemically, uh, to help ourselves be well. And this is one of those things. Mental health is a big thing. And by no way, shape, or form am I an expert in mental health. I haven't written a book about loneliness. I'm researching and learning just like you. I'm just bringing you the facts each and every week so you can digest and make your own opinion about the information that you get. But mental health is uh is a very important thing. And I feel like in the Western world, we ignore it. And social pressors create a lot of isolation where just even our work and our careers can make us isolated unintentionally. Luckily for me, I'm a hands-on service provider. Um, so I get to work with people all the time, and there is connection there. I do get connection from that. I do feel whole and I feel like my cup fills. But for other, let's take my IT friends. They go, they go into the, they wake up from their bedroom, go to the kitchen, and go to their office, den in their home, and they are there for 10 hours. Uh, they may talk to people, they may not even talk to a human. They may just get a chat response or a ticket that opens up, and then they're they're logging into that software and they're fixing uh issues that are broken, and that's their job all day. And they do this in and out, each and every day, with little connection. You can see how the months or years go by where a sense of loneliness can develop. So we have to take active responsibility for building connection. It doesn't happen automatically anymore, unfortunately. Uh, with the digital world, it's distracted everyone, not just you. So people are distracted in the digital world. Before, before phones, before the internet, you had to go down to the pub or go down to the restaurant or go down to the cafe or wake up in the morning, go to the cafe, and see the people, your neighbors, your friends, or whatever it is, or get together with the the end, you know, a Friday night block party with the kids and watch them play. Um, there used to be more of that where you just naturally had to go do that. I mean, a week or two would go by, you're like, man, we gotta go see somebody, we gotta go do something, right? People don't need that anymore. You're gonna say, why? Is it because the entertainment's worse, the restaurants are worse, the cafes are worse, the neighborhoods are worse, the neighbors are worse. Uh, it's not. It's everyone's still great. It's what's happening is we're getting fulfilled by digital media, and it's leaving us that disconnect hormonally and in the biology of our bodies, where we're missing something, and the sense of loneliness is escalating in a lot of people. So, here are some practical real world stuff we can do and strategies that we can take for you and your families that you might want to implement. Even if you take one of these things, it may be like something you're like, wow, this is a great idea. We got to do this. Weekly family dinners. If you got kids in college or in high school and they're just super busy, I know how it is. They go they go to school after school, they're doing practice, they're hanging out with their friends, you barely see them. They may be missing the dinner time, or you got to work, or whatever it is, you work late. Weekly family dinners, Sunday nights, or whatever it is, is a must and has to be a ritual that happens each and every week. If you have a family that's like that, coffee with a friend every Thursday that's outside of your family. My father's 82 years old and he lives in Canada and winter is now, and it can dip down to negative 20 sometimes. And what he'll do is make sure he gets in his car and he'll go to the local mall, which is about 15, 20 minute drive. He'll go 15 minutes, drive to a nice indoor mall so he can do his walk. He does a five-kilometer walk every day, and um, and then he'll sit down, have a coffee, and usually run into somebody he knows and they'll chat. They'll chat for like two hours. Those guys, those old guys will talk forever. But uh, I don't know what they talk about, but they talk about that stuff and he comes vigorated. He comes back home vigorated. He does his 5K, so he's a little tired, but keeps him moving. He's on no prescription medication, and uh he's from Italy. I mean, he's from one of those blue zones. It's just ingrained in his DNA that you gotta go do this stuff. He doesn't even know how to use digital media. So I think that's a blessing for him as well. A Friday night walk with your spouse, just gotta make rituals, make connections, and make these automatic. Uh, and then you what you can do for yourself is join something consistent, be part of something, join a fitness group, join the local church that's around the corner that you've always been meaning to, join maybe a pro, maybe you don't want to go to church every week. Maybe join the programs that they offer on the side. Go into men's or women's groups that are non-uh non-uh spiritual or non-religious. Uh, parenting groups, lots of them all around there. Ask other parents. Sports leagues, pick up that college sport they used to do before, but play with the people your age. Pick up the beer league hockey or whatever it is that you enjoy doing that every you know, Thursday night at nine o'clock, you go play a game of hockey and you be part of a team. Those things are really important. Show up repeatedly. That's how we make bonds. That's how bonds are formed in our human psychology is repetitiveness. It's the constant constantly showing up. If you ever played for a sports team, you know what that means. You show up to every practice, you show up to every game, and you give it 100%. That's connection, that's community, right? Initiate more than you think you should. I think this is the biggest tip out of this whole podcast is if you think you're doing enough, you're not, initiate more than you think. For extroverts like myself, pretty easy to initiate stuff. Hey, how are you doing? What are you doing this week? Hey, you want it? I'm always like, I'm always saying yes. Hey, do you want to go play golf? You want? And I can't. They can't fit in my schedule. But I'm always open to opportunities to hang out with people, whether it's golfing or whatever it may be. Uh, most people are really lonely today. So even though you're initiating and you're trying to get out there and take care of your own health, you just don't know who you may be helping. Everyone is waiting for someone else to initiate. That's our society. And be the person who reaches out. Replace screen time with human time. One hour tech-free windows each and every day. Eat meals without a phone. Now, the one hour tech-free windows, this doesn't mean right before bedtime. We you have to do that before bedtime. Remember about blue screens or blue light. We don't want to be exposing ourselves to light one hour before bedtime. So you cannot use that as your as your free downtime. This is one hour free tech window some other time during the day where there's just no tech. You're doing something else, writing or reading, something else. Eat meals without a phone. Please don't have any phones at the dinner table. For many other, we could spin off on two other podcasts on behavior and mental health on what happens when you bring this to the table. Teaches your family that the connection of the family at a at a very important time, which is dinner time, is not important. If something on your phone is more important than that, then our priorities are inversed. Put the phone away during conversations. Otherwise, you your spouses or people will directly tell you, I don't feel like you're listening to me when you have a phone in your hand. Right? You've probably heard that before, right? It's important and it is. It's not infuriating to the person that that's being it done to, but it's also psychological. It's like if you're not making eye contact with me, I have no connection. Hence why an AI avatar will never be able to replace a human, no matter how integrated the conversation becomes and how deeply involved we become emotionally. Emotion is only one component of the human biology. Human-to-human interaction is the full component of human biology. We got to rebuild our microconnections. What are those? Um, the little things. I brought up the cashier. These are powerful. Talk to the barista, compliment someone at the gym. Thank the cashier. Microconnections, rewire the brain to feel safer, more social, and more open to deeper relationships. I remember this is a couple weeks ago, and I was at the gym, and I'm doing my uh squats on the squat rack, and there's a lady using the extension, uh, the back extenders, and as a chiropractor, boy, do I hate that thing. Um, and she was definitely overextending as she was coming. Sorry, she was doing it reverse, so like a crunch, like doing an ab sit-up on it. So, and she was way overextending. And then I go up to her, I'm like, I hope you don't mind me chiming in and interrupting you. She's like, No, absolutely not. I'm like, the way you're overextending is gonna cause a lot of lumbar facet issues. And I actually use the words and it's gonna shear it. She's like, Oh, I'm a dancer. We were taught, we were taught to do that. I'm like, Yeah, and your your flexibility is so high, you're gonna have even more. And and she was like, Thank you so much. I'm like, try it again, watch this. And I stopped her at a certain moment, like, stop there and come back up. She's like, Oh, that's so much more difficult. I'm like, Yes, not only is it more difficult, you're gonna develop more strength and you're gonna avoid injury. And she was, I think she was okay with it. And as I was walking away, I'm like, she's probably 20 years old. I'm this 40-year-old creep. Um, so I I immediately was like, Oh, was that the wrong thing? But after thinking about it, I'm like, I went and gave her advice and she received it, and there was a connection there. There was advice, there was uh a connection, there was reciprocation from her, whether she liked it or not. Maybe she walked, you know, maybe she did think I was a creep after it. Doesn't matter. But that connection, it was goodwilled on my part. Was like, I'm really worried about her back. And uh no, I didn't give her my business card, but uh that's how that's how we did there. And that was a small interaction, just as an example of something out of my comfort zone or outside of my norm that I did. And then create opportunities together. Microconnections rewire the brain to feel safer, more social, and more open to deeper relationships. So, how do you create more? Pop-up dinners, game nights, neighborhood walks, community events, simple gatherings, build roots. Do you have to host a barbecue each and every week? No. Can you go for a walk in your neighborhood and just talk to the neighbors that are out? Absolutely. We love bringing our dog, and when there's other dogs out, immediate connection there because the dogs want to sniff and then you get to talk to the owner. Some of them are really isolated. You can tell who's isolated. They don't want to make conversation, they don't care. You take it personally because you think maybe they don't like you, but it's really not that. It's that they're isolated people and they just when you're trying to make a connection, they're just not open to it. And these by doing those things and asking them how they are can really change their overall health. It's amazing the the longevity of doing these micro things human to human. So if you want to live full life, one of the most important things you can do is surround yourself with people who help you feel alive. This is this has to be a thing you do selfishly for yourself, because the outcome is not only better health for yourself, you're also spreading good health to other people with connection. That's what the human component is all about. So I'm gonna give you a one-day challenge. I want you to text three people you've lost touch touch with, schedule a coffee or a walk with one of them if they're local, do one small act of kindness for someone today or tomorrow, and eat a meal with someone, just not your screen. Connection doesn't have to be a big and dramatic, it just it just needs to be consistent. So loneliness is real, but it's it but so is the cure. I mean, the the cure to loneliness is connection, and it almost seems simple, but you have to go out of your comfort zone. The reason why it's not comfortable now is because of the digital world. It used to be comfortable 20 years ago to go out and go to the go to the pub, hear somebody talking about the local sports team, and chime and be like, the coach sucks, man. And then that's all a guy got uh guys had to do. I'd sit there like that coach absolutely sucks. And then boom, now now we're best friends and we're having another beer together, right? So that's how this stuff works. Connection is medicine, community is medicine, presence is medicine. If you want to change your health, change your relationships, or just rebuild them. And if this episode helped you, share it with someone who might be struggling silently. You might be the connection that they need. And keep living a healthy life. These things play a huge role. Thanks for listening. Tune in next week with another topic we're going to be talking about. And if you love this one, share it with somebody so they can uh listen to the podcast as well. And make sure to leave a comment or a review on there. It pumps us up in Spotify and Apple Podcasts and ranks us higher so more people can find us. And that'd be super helpful. Have a healthy week, stay well, stay healthy, take care.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host