Getting students to teach about these lost connections and the ways to overcome them takes the focus off the students themselves, without depriving them of the benefit the more they teach them to others, the more they tend to learn them and become healthier themselves (Murphey, 2017a, 2017b). They create acronyms with a partner, to teach them to family and friends. I give handouts to my students and ask them to memorize the 9 causes and 7 solutions.

We could just give them information about the 9 causes of depression and 7 ways to overcome them, of course, but I have found it even more valuable to have them share these lists with their families and friends and to try to be aware of the Lost Connections we are all experiencing and how we might mitigate them. I am sure some students themselves also are having difficult times and are in need of re-connects. At times on Zoom, I feel exhausted by the social attention that I am giving to students on my screens-a different kind of disconnect and mental overload. His main focus is on:Īs I am writing, now in September 2020, we have been through approximately half a year of social distancing, which may in fact be causing many more people than normal to be depressed and lacking in connections (see the Time article on page 29). Hari does not just complain about the way we have been taught to view depression and its treatments he also includes a lot of hard data from a variety of researchers that can help us. “Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol level to absolutely soar-as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you” (p. He was measuring how stressful loneliness was and how much cortisol was in each person’s saliva sample. On the second day, they did the same and also spit into a tube, sealed it, and kept it to hand in to the lab. They wore a cardiovascular monitor to measure their heart rates. One story he tells is of John Cacioppo’s early study in the mid 1970s in which people were asked to rate themselves on loneliness 9 times a day in response to a beeper. Rather than depression being caused by an imbalance of hormones in our brain, it is mainly the loss of social connections in our lives that causes neuro-chemical imbalances that lead to depression and anxiety, which have nevertheless created the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it” (p. In his introduction, he says: “We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are…The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads.

Hari lost connections