Loneliness is associated with not only an increased risk of heart disease but also an increased risk of dementia, depression, anxiety, premature death, and sleep disturbances.

If you look at the mortality impact of loneliness—the amount by which our life is shortened when we're lonely, it seems to be similar to the mortality impact associated with smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than the mortality impact we see with obesity and sedentary living.

All of us, regardless of what stage of life we’re at, we have three basic needs: We all want to know that we matter, we all want to be seen for who we are, and we want to know that we’re loved.

If you're lonely, you're not alone. All of us experience loneliness at some point in our lives. We don't talk about it because we're often ashamed. We've come to believe that if we're lonely, we're not likeable, or we're broken in some way. The truth is that all of us experience loneliness.

Love is the greatest source of strength that we have. I, as a doctor, have written many prescriptions for powerful medicines and antibiotics, but there is no medicine that's more powerful than love.

Loneliness is more than a bad feeling; it has real consequences for our health ... Loneliness is associated with a shorter lifespan. You find that it's associated with an increased risk of heart disease and dementia and depression and anxiety. The mortality impact, if you will, of loneliness is similar to the mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day—it's greater than the mortality impact of obesity or sedentary living.

The times in my life where I have felt anxious and worried, the times where I felt just lost… Those moments were often when I've lost touch with the people in my life—the people who know me almost better than I know myself, the people who can remind me of who I am even in those moments when I forget … That, to me, is a true definition of a true friend.

Love is our greatest source of power. It's our greatest source of healing ... There are few things more powerful than love and its ability to help us through difficult times and help mend the wounds, seen and unseen, that we all carry with us.

We really do need each other. And as much as we live in a world—and in a country, I should say—that’s built on an ethic of individual responsibility and that's built on a narrative of the single entrepreneur who builds the company or the single scientist who solves a major disease and finds a cure, the reality is that we are far more interdependent and interconnected than perhaps those narratives might suggest. I think that this experience of COVID-19 is a powerful reminder of that.

As human beings, across cultures, we all have a few core needs: We all want to be seen for who we are, we all want to know that we matter, and we all want to be loved.

A real friend is somebody who reminds you of who you are even when you forget.

On a biological level, loneliness puts us in a stress state, and in the short-term, that stress can be good. It can motivate us to go and seek out other friends and family members and to hopefully feel more connected. But we run into problems when that loneliness is prolonged and when the stress state that it causes is prolonged as well. We know that chronic stress is associated with higher levels of inflammation in the body, which can lead to an increased incidence of heart disease and other chronic illnesses.

Social media makes it easy to spend a little bit of time with a lot of people. It's easier for me to wish happy birthday to 100 friends on Facebook by typing 'HBD!' on their walls than to actually pick up the phone and have a half-hour in-depth conversation with a friend on his or her birthday. We've lowered the barrier to having shorter and less intimate interactions with people we barely know.

There is great power in simply showing up, witnessing, and listening to someone deeply. While it feels passive, when you're listening deeply to someone, you're telling them, 'I see you, you matter, and you are loved.'

Loneliness is exceedingly common with 1 in 2 adults in America reporting measurable levels of loneliness ... The numbers among youth, actually, depending on the surveys you look at, are between 70 to 80% who say that there are struggling with loneliness.

I think that we have become a pill for every problem society. We look for a quick fix of a medicine for every challenge that we may incur.

We know that when people pursue wealth, power, and fame, defining their worth by those things, they rarely end up happy. The world is filled with rich, powerful, and famous people who are profoundly unhappy.

Every now and then, there’s a moment in the world’s history where we are faced with a challenge that’s far bigger than any one of us or that any one country can solve on its own—and COVID-19 has presented us with one of those challenges.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

We know that loneliness is exceedingly common ... 22% of adults in America struggle with loneliness.

The foundation for connecting with other people is our connection with our self, which is marked by how comfortable we feel with who we are, how grounded and centered we feel, and how aware we are of our worth & value.

In those most important moments in life—birth, death, and the critical moments in between... you hope that there will be people there for you and you'll be surrounded by those you love, but for so many of [my patients], there was nobody at the end.

The data seems to indicate that men and women have similar rates of loneliness, but it also suggests that men have a harder time admitting it.

I think an important principle for us in public health communication has to be that we're clear, that were transparent about what we know and what we don't know, and that we explain the why to people.