More than anything, the key to feeling OK is belonging

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For most of my 20s, I bounced from city to city, chasing newspaper jobs and a graduate degree in pursuit of some kind of stability.

I moved between states every two years on average, making a handful of close friends in each place — some of whom I’m still close with, and others who have fallen away because of the distance. I’m so grateful for these relationships, especially during such a formative decade of my life. But my 20s were also characterized by a rootlessness; building community takes time, especially for an introvert like me, and I usually didn’t stick around enough to feel like I truly belonged.

I’d lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half when the pandemic hit. Once again, I’d made close friends, but I didn’t feel like I was part of a community, which is what I longed for in this city that can feel so vast, fractured and anonymous. And then our worlds shrunk to our households. It felt like being dissociated from such an integral part of what it means to be human, to be face-to-face with loved ones and acquaintances and even strangers.

As we emerge from the pandemic, there’s a lot of attention being paid to the scourge of loneliness, which has been named a public health crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many of us are trying to find community in a culture where it’s increasingly hard to do so.

We got a question about this topic that I imagine will resonate with a lot of you: “I consider myself a mentally healthy person, generally. However, I found myself thrown off-balance by the challenges of the pandemic and experiencing unwelcome mood swings. I think that one of the necessary components of a stable, productive and creative life is a robust engagement with others; a healthy social and working relationship. I want to examine that further.”

In this newsletter, we’ll look at the forces that cause social isolation, why social ties are so vital to our mental health, what it means to belong, and how you might find a greater sense of belonging.

The past and present of human belonging

Throughout most of human history, few communities — otherwise known as settlements, tribes or villages — could support populations greater than 150 people.

“Around 6000 B.C., the size of Neolithic villages from the Middle East was 120 to 150 people, judging by the number of dwellings. In 1086, the average size of most English villages recorded in the Domesday Book was 160 people,” Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, told the New York Times.

Dunbar is famous for his theory that humans can have no more than about 150 meaningful relationships. He’s described those relationships as the kind of people who’d attend your wedding or funeral. But within that pool of people are varying degrees of closeness; five or so shoulder-to-cry-on friends, the 15ish people you’d trust to care for your children, and the 50 people you’d invite to your weekend barbecue.

These are all averages, of course, and can vary a lot depending on how introverted and extroverted you are, your attachment style, and where you live in the world, said Richard Slatcher, psychology professor and director of the Close Relationships Laboratory at the University of Georgia.

“Humans evolved to navigate small to medium-sized groups,” Slatcher told me. “Now we have access to more people than at any other time in history. So why are we living in isolation?”

Social isolation and loneliness are related but distinct. Loneliness is the feeling of being alone, regardless of the amount of social contact. Social isolation is a lack of social connections. But both can negatively affect mental and physical health (we’ll get into that later).

A 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22% of American adults said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. A meta-analysis of 345 studies indicates that this problem has been worsening since the 1970s.

Social scientists cite a medley of factors for this worrying trend. For one, people are devoting more time to their jobs (either by choice or by necessity, thanks to ever-widening income equality), leaving less time to foster relationships and community.

And how we spend our free time has changed drastically. “Back in the 1970s, there wasn’t Netflix and all these video games and the kinds of things that we could be doing by ourselves to entertain ourselves,” Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist at Yale University, told PBS. In 2018, the average American spent 11 hours every day on solitary activities like watching TV and scrolling through apps. Oof.

Social media like Instagram and TikTok can make us feel like we’re connecting in meaningful ways with others. But Slatcher argues how our brains have been shaped evolutionarily isn’t well-suited to these kinds of interactions because they’re often (but not always) fleeting and distant.

“The problem is, tech tricks our brains into thinking tweets and TikToks are going to be incredibly rewarding because we’re responding to other people responding to us; it can feel like people are actively listening to us, valuing our opinions,” Slatcher said. “When you’re online you can interact with hundreds, thousands, even millions of people all at once, but it’s a shallow response.”

Some have also argued that the cultural centrality of the nuclear family since the 1950s has also shrunk our social circles, moving more of us away from big groups of extended kin, often living in the same household, to small and detached clusters of families.

Why belonging matters

We all get lonely sometimes. It’s a fact of life. The problem is when we’re pervasively lonely or isolated, which happens when the universal human need to belong isn’t met.

I asked this week’s experts what belonging means to them, and why we need it.

Kim Samuel, author, activist and founder of the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness in Montreal, wrote: “Belonging is a state of wholeness: the experience of being at home in the social, environmental, organizational, and cultural contexts of one’s life. Belonging is a beloved community, rootedness in a place, a feeling of ownership in shared outcomes, and a sense of shared mission.”

When Samuel met Nelson Mandela in 2002, she asked him if he’d ever felt isolated, knowing that he’d been incarcerated on Robben Island for 18 of the 27 years he was imprisoned before the fall of apartheid. Mandela responded emphatically: “No.”

“We were all brothers working together for a common purpose,” Mandela said of himself and his fellow prisoners on Robben Island. “I was never alone.”

In our culture of divisiveness and every-man-for-himself mentalities, I especially appreciated Samuel’s definition of belonging, which stresses a common sense of purpose among groups of people.

Slatcher gave me an even simpler take: “To me, belonging means that people really get where I’m coming from, that I’m really accepted by the group I’m in.” He distinguishes this from the one-on-one relationship he has with his wife. While he feels accepted in that relationship, it alone doesn’t give him the feeling of belonging, which is a function of community.

For me, this fundamental need to be accepted brings to mind the historical and ongoing exclusion of people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ+ folks from not only formal institutions but baseline respect from their fellow citizens in the U.S. While many people in these groups have cultivated a rich sense of belonging with those who share their identities, there’s an insidious barrier to belonging in a much broader sense. “A community of belonging welcomes diversity,” Samuel told me. “It doesn’t just tolerate it.”

Psychologist Abraham Maslow placed belonging at a central position in his hierarchy of needs, between basic requirements for survival like shelter, food and water and more social needs like self-esteem. A recent MIT study found we crave interactions in the same region of our brains that causes us to crave food; likewise, social exclusion lights up the same region of our brains where we experience physical pain.

In her question, our reader made a connection between her emotional instability and the pandemic’s interruption of our ability to be with people outside of our households. If belonging is a basic human need, it makes intuitive sense that if we lack it, our mental well-being will suffer.

Lots of research bears this out, but one of the most influential studies in this area was the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the world’s longest studies of adult life. The study revealed that close relationships, more than money or basically anything else, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. “Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes,” according to the Harvard Gazette.

The inverse is true, too. Loneliness and social isolation have been tied to increased risk for depression, anxiety, stroke and dementia, and higher blood pressure, poor sleep, weakened immune function and shorter lives.

It’s natural (and important!) to wonder whether you have a healthy social network or enough close relationships. The truth is, there’s no magic number, because our needs are all so different in that regard. But Slatcher recommends asking yourself these questions: “Do you feel lonely? Do you feel like you have friends that you can count on? Do you have people that, if you had some sort of emotional crisis, you could talk to? If not, things need to change a bit.”

How to find belonging

OK, that totally makes sense. But, like… what do we do about it? How do we find belonging in a society that’s not exactly conducive to community-building?

Here are some suggestions from our experts:

• Find people with aligned values: Think about what you care about. What interests you? What are your values? “That’s a really good place to start,” Samuel said. Join personal or professional groups where you might meet people with a common sense of purpose and solidarity. Get involved with an organizing effort in your community, like a mutual aid network. Or if you’re interested in spirituality or religious practices, visiting a place of worship could also be a great place to find community.

• Look for opportunities for repeated interactions: According to the “mere exposure effect,” the more we see someone, the more we like them. This suggests that “having continuous interaction with another person makes us more likely to form friendships,” writes psychologist and belonging expert Marisa G. Franco. One way I did this when I first moved to L.A. was to join a queer kickball team that played a game every Sunday. Shared, regular activities like this take the pressure off one-to-one interactions and ensure we’ll see the same folks repeatedly. And you have fun while doing it!

• Take risks: Even if you’re in the ideal setting, where you’re seeing the same people regularly with whom you have shared identities or values and you really like them, it won’t amount to much if you don’t take risks. “Put yourself out there. Strike up conversations,” Slatcher said. As a shy person, I know that this can be much easier for some folks than others. But initiating really does make all the difference; people who initiate are less lonely, and new acquaintances are more satisfied in their relationships with someone who is willing to initiate, Franco writes.

. . . . . . .

Unless you’re really fortunate, none of this belonging business is easy. But I can say that on my end, the more I’ve intentionally tried to make this reality in my life, the closer I’ve gotten. Wishing you all the same.

Until next week,

Laura

If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email GroupTherapy@latimes.com gets right to our team. As always, find us on Instagram at @latimesforyourmind, where we’ll continue this conversation.

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More perspectives on today’s topic and other resources

Making friends is easy when you’re young, but it can become harder as you age. In this interview with NPR, psychologist Marisa Franco gives tips on building friendships when you’re an adult and what can get in the way. I also highly recommend Franco’s book, “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — And Keep — Friends.”

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. In his book “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis,” organizer and lawyer Dean Spade breaks down how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice; how to work in groups; how to foster a collective decision-making process; and how to prevent and address conflict.

Other interesting stuff

Renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel thinks all this amateur therapy-speak is just making us lonelier. In this interview with Vanity Fair, Perel discusses the pros and cons of our more therapized culture (and the reason we still can’t stop thinking about Taylor Swift’s dating life). “There is such an emphasis on the ‘self-care’ aspect of it that is actually making us more isolated and more alone, because the focus is just on the self,” she said. “The focus is not about the mutuality of relationships — the reciprocity, the way that you weave fabric, you know, between people who are relying on each other.”

If you stop by L.A.’s Oeno Vino wine shop and lounge on a Saturday afternoon, you’ll find a group of adults doing a three-hour wellness activity rooted in being present. “The weekly Collage Club classes are led and created by artist Crista Quintos and have become a chill activity that helps people in Los Angeles unwind, bond with others while in a creative flow and reimagine how meditation can take shape in their lives,” writes Martine Thompson for The Times.