Let's Talk About Loneliness: The Search for Connection in a Lonely World

by Simone Heng

Overview

Winner of a silver Nautilus Book Award 2024
Finalist in the International Book Awards 2024

The true antidote to loneliness, this book will teach you the secret to building meaningful relationships and the importance of authentic connections in a lonely world.

Is it possible to have hundreds of followers on social media but still feel isolated? To live in a city of millions of people but find yourself alone? No one really wants to admit it, but the answer is certainly 'yes'.

So, let's talk about loneliness. Human connection specialist Simone Heng knows a lot about being lonely. She left an enviable career and social life to move back to her family home to care for her mother. All alone in a house filled with memories but devoid of people, she was faced with the realization that human connection is one of our most essential needs.

There's a global loneliness epidemic. Every one of us has experienced feeling lonely, even if we don't realize it. The modern world has changed how we live and the 'village' environment with spontaneous connection has been replaced by remote work and contrived relationships. Most importantly, the old stereotypes of what loneliness looks like no longer hold true — in a world where technology has made us more 'connected' than ever before, people of all ages are feeling alone.

Simone shares her journey to understanding the value of human connection and explains how to distinguish authentic relationships from fake substitutes. This definitive book on loneliness shows us how to build meaningful relationships with those that matter the most, forge new friendships, and create the genuine connections we all crave.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401974886
Publisher:	Hay House Inc.
Publication date:	06/27/2023
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Simone Heng is a human connection specialist and former international broadcaster for Virgin Radio Dubai, HBO Asia, and CNBC, among others. www.simoneheng.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 | Silence: The secret loneliness epidemic

Self-connection is defined by Tim Sitt, a child and family therapist and registered social worker, as ‘the process of being in touch with the worthiness and wholeness of your Self regardless of the form of experience you are having. These forms could be feelings, thoughts, expectations, beliefs, or attitudes.’ In a nutshell, self-connection is an awareness of your own experience. Without self-connection – effectively knowing ourselves deeply and intimately – we cannot connect well with others. Instead, we send an avatar of ourselves into the world, and people connect not with us authentically, but with behaviors born of our triggers and the lingering remnants of our trauma. In our increasingly busy and digitally distracted lives, it becomes easy to avoid the inner work of getting to know ourselves better, and avoidance means stunting our ability to connect well with others. The journey to getting to know ourselves better is a large part of what we’ll deal with in this book.

The 2018 Cigna Loneliness Index surveyed 20,000 Americans and discovered that loneliness had reached ‘epidemic’ proportions, with almost half of participants registering as feeling ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ alone. In 2018, the UK government appointed its first Minister for Loneliness, who was charged with tackling what former Prime Minister Theresa May called the ‘sad reality of modern life.’ As you’ll read throughout this book, a lack of human connection can lead to many different issues that you may not immediately link. Hoarding. Rage. Addiction. Depression. And because of the shame associated with saying ‘I’m lonely,’ we’ve been suffering silently for a lot longer than anyone wants to admit.

The Loneliness Epidemic
In 2003, I stood watching my father give the eulogy at my Chinese grandmother’s funeral. I’d just returned to Australia from studying in Switzerland for a year and, as a family, we’d made the trip to Singapore. My father had been away, a migrant in another country, for almost 20 years. His relationship with my Teochew grandmother consisted of peppered phone calls with months of silence in between, a tenuous link at best. Regardless, he had to give the eulogy because he was the eldest son in a Chinese family, and that was what was expected.

I looked up at my father, his slight paunch encased in a white polo shirt like a ripe Christmas pudding. I observed his humble demeanor, always head bowed, facing the mole on his hand that had been getting darker from time spent outside playing golf. He had only recently started taking one weekend day off each week from work at his newsagent’s. He still didn’t even know how to use sunscreen; that’s how rarely he took a break. He would come home from golf with arms like Cadbury’s Top Deck chocolate: white beneath his capped sleeves and deep brown on his forearms, then apply sunscreen, like an after-sun aloe vera treatment. Gosh, that made my sister and I giggle. My eyes became blurry as I shifted focus from his tanned forearms to his kind eyes.

I heard the sound of his voice paying tribute to a grandmother I barely knew and didn’t speak the same language as. I was out of my own body. A dangerous thought flashed in my mind like rogue lightning in a summer sky: Oh my gosh – I’ll have to do this for my father one day. I’ll have to get up at his funeral and grieve him and say all kinds of nice things about him in the past tense, and I never want that day to come. Little did I know, almost a year later, I’d be up there, on a pulpit, in a church, surrounded by a sea of sobs, paying premature tribute to Robert Heng.

Because at that very moment, as he was speaking, eulogizing my grandmother, a cancer was growing inside him. A cancer which, by the time it was discovered, would overwhelm his small body and kill him. It would be so painful that they would have to infuse him with morphine like I infuse my morning tea with chamomile. Fast, strong, and so pervasive that his color would change to jaundiced yellow just like the hot water in my tea. It wasn’t like global warming. Here, there were no warning signs. It just happened, and our world ended. Like the cancer growing in my father, there’s a cancer secretly growing in the body of the human race. It isn’t COVID-19, and it isn’t global warming. It is a cancer that poses huge threats to our mental and physical health and our entire way of functioning as a species. It’s shrouded in shame and whispered about in communities. It befuddles TikTok-using teens with high anxiety. It exists behind keyboards and Messenger texts, between friends on social media. This secret illness is an epidemic of loneliness. The ill effects of loneliness have long been well supported by research.

According to one meta-analysis, a lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or having an alcohol use disorder. Loneliness and social isolation are twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity. Even sadder is that it took a contagious virus for us to see how badly a lack of human connection affects us because, like the cancer inside my dad, loneliness has been killing us softly long before we had a clue.

Defining Human Connection

What is human connection? What is this term, so often thrown around, but seemingly intangible? It is so much easier to explain why we need it than what it is. From my conversations with digitally reared teens, I think knowing how to define human connection may be vital for Gen Z, who emerged as the loneliest of all generations in the Cigna Loneliness Index. How do we know when we’re making, or are in the presence of, a genuine human connection?

We have all experienced that moment where, when we meet someone for the first time, we’re on the exact same wavelength. Our opinions, morals, values, and worldviews are in sync. We see so much of ourselves in the other person that energy starts to spark off as the conversation flows and flows, and by the end of the meeting, we’re inspired to hug, shake hands, or, in some way, physically touch our new friend. The connection feels right in our gut. It feels almost safe for us to disclose our vulnerabilities to this new person because we see so much of them in ourselves. I think we can agree that these connections feel distinctly different from shallow conversations shared over drinks at some business networking event. Finding new authentic connections can sometimes feel like walking around a barren desert and stumbling upon a member of your tribe that you’ve been stranded from!

By surveying people online, I got some incredible definitions, and they are worth featuring because of certain trends that recur. Here are some of my favorites:

• ‘No one lives, or is meant to live, on their own. For me, this is powerful and humbling because it gives everyone a clue that we’re all bound in a deeper sense.’
• ‘Human connection is the transfer of message, thought, or emotion to another.’
• ‘Human connection, to me, is the sharing or exchange of experience, either through emotions or messages.’
• ‘We might not see eye to eye, but the ability to connect to something beyond ourselves is an intrinsic part of being human.’
• ‘[Human connection is] the experience of feeling close and connected to others. It involves feeling loved, cared for, and valued.’
• ‘Human connection is about communicating with another person heart to heart. Without heart, there is no human connection!’
• ‘Human connection is communication between one another.’
• ‘[Human connection is about] soulful conversations.’
• ‘To me, human connection is when a human actively listens to understand and empathize with another human’s existence, truth, and situation.’
• ‘[Human connection is] understanding each other.’
• ‘Human connection is touch.’
• ‘[It’s] deep interconnection of the mind, heart, and soul.’
• ‘It’s the bond we make with other people.’
• ‘Human connection is an energy exchange between people who are paying attention to one another. It has the power to deepen the moment, inspire change, and build trust.’
• ‘[Human connection is] vulnerability.’
• ‘It means, for me, a sense of belonging.’
• ‘[Human connection happens] when two people can relate to each other through their commonalities and want to continue relating to each other, despite their differences.’
• ‘Human connection is showing empathy, compassion, kindness, and lifting one another despite differences. [It’s] great understanding and acceptance of different views.’
• ‘Human connection, to me, is our ability to share emotion, to relate to others, to rely on others, and to be relied upon by others.’
• ‘To go beyond the surface and have a heart-to-heart talk. Things that matter to our soul and heart. Of what hurts, what breaks, what lifts, what matters.’

My personal definition of human connection? It is the energetic exchange we experience with another human when we’re able to see, feel, and discover ourselves mirrored in them.

Wired for Connection

For me to really explain the extent to which we need human connection, we have to turn back the clock to our days in prehistoric tribes. Like most aspects of the way our brains are wired, our innate need for human connection happened when we were still in hunter-gatherer societies, running away from saber-toothed tigers. Everything about the way we operated during this time was wired to keep us safe. If we were pregnant and couldn’t gather food for our family, the other tribeswomen would share their harvest with us. If we were injured and couldn’t keep up with the rest of the hunt, the other tribesmen would hunt game to feed our families. And at night, when we settled down to sleep around that fire, the other tribespeople would take turns keeping watch for predators while we slept. In fact, evidence suggests that people in the past devoted significant time and scarce resources to caring for those in need. As far back as the Neanderthal era, humans have cared for their vulnerable and sick. We realized there was safety in numbers, and at our core, we’re still tribal creatures who crave connection. We need to have human connection, and when we’re disconnected from the tribe, some really dark and scary things can start to happen.

Defining Disconnection

Interestingly, the antithesis of human connection, disconnection, is a much easier term to define. I think that could be a marker that we all have tasted disconnection: it’s palpable. Dictionary.com defines disconnection as a ‘lack of connection.’ This is a term that will come up again and again in this book. Disconnection. Detachment. Isolation. They are all very dangerous for human beings. Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections, defines disconnection as being ‘cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.’

Our brains imprint the feeling of that discomfort strongly for us in the hope we avoid it and stay together with our tribe at all costs.

In his book, Social, Matthew D. Lieberman further explains that the pain of disconnection we experience when we’re cast out of the tribe has enabled our survival as a species. It’s also led to our dominance and enabled humans to thrive: ‘By activating the same neural circuitry that causes physical pain, our experience of social pain helps ensure the survival of our children by helping keep them close to their parents.’

In a modern world, where we don’t live in tribes that we can be expelled from, how do we know when we’re disconnected? The red flag of disconnection can start with our sleep. Without that person keeping watch over the tribe, on your own, cast out, you’d have to rouse many times in the night to look out for predators yourself. According to Dr. Louise Hawkley from the University of Chicago, people who feel lonely will have reduced quality of sleep and experience what are called ‘micro-awakenings.’ Like an amputee missing a phantom leg, your brain is missing the tribe it was meant to be attached to. These micro-awakenings are used to study how lonely people are.

When I was serving two weeks’ quarantine in Perth, Australia during the pandemic, the regular calls to my hotel room to check on my mental health would always include the question: ‘How are you sleeping?’ for this very reason. If you experienced less-than-optimal sleep during COVID-19, you’re not alone, and disconnection could well be why.

To help us identify the different rungs of connection we need to feel fully socially connected, we can turn to the work of Bruce A. Austin at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology for help. He created a scale to measure loneliness, and states that there are three different categories of loneliness: intimate loneliness (a yearning for a person you can truly be vulnerable with), relational loneliness (a yearning to be part of a social fabric on whom you can rely), and collective loneliness (a yearning for a group that shares common interests).

Editorial Reviews

We’ve spent the last few years growing further and further away from each other due to lockdowns, quarantines and the crippling fear of a pandemic. Simone Heng’s essential read offers the tools you need to reconnect once again and build authentic and meaningful relationships. - Vex King, bestselling author of Good Vibes, Good Life

The world has been silent on a problem that has been brewing since well before the pandemic. Let’s Talk About Loneliness is a much-needed invitation to be more open – to be more connected. - Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Brigham Young University Scientific Chair, Foundation for Social Connection

Simone is a force to be reckoned with. Her understanding of human connection comes from a place of genuine curiosity. - Shelly Tygielski, author of Sit Down to Rise Up

A timely read for the era of separation we are living in—especially if you want to truly nurture the relationships in your life. - Vogue Singapore

The book is emotional and practical at the same time and the author deserves credit for her vulnerability and honesty. Loneliness and a lack of human connection is a real issue and we need more books like this that get their message across through the type of emotional connection that we are lacking. - Andy Lopata, author, professional speaker and professional relationships strategist

I couldn't put this book down! Heng strikes a beautiful balance between vulnerable, raw personal storytelling with interesting research and practical strategies people can adopt immediately to create better relationships. [This] is the book the world needs right now. It's the perfect antidote for anyone feeling lonely, wanting to reach those who are lonely, or just be a more connected member of the human race. Highly recommend adding this one to cart! - Amazon Reviewer

The book does a good job of making itself relevant by demonstrating the depth of the global problem of loneliness, and the author's international perspective brings some variety to an often America-centric genre. Heng has a talent for vivid imagery… which makes the volume an easy and engaging read. - Kirkus Reviews

Simone Heng has nailed down the real issues facing humanity as the world continuously struggle with the recovery from Covid. Her stories touch the core of people's hearts as she shares her personal experiences and research as a Human Connection expert. An awesome read that will leave you wanting more! - Amazon Reviewer

This book is one that touches the heart. It lays out the truths many of us are able to relate to when it comes to human connection. The pandemic may have brought out the loneliness of many of us - with many being isolated in lockdown. But this is a problem that has always been inherent.

Simone tackles loneliness and isolation in profound ways, laying out her explanations for these issues. She shares her most personal experiences and shows her vulnerability through this book, all to help guide us through this journey of learning to connect with others.

This book is for the person who wants to be be better and wants to connect properly with the people around them. Great read! - Amazon Reviewer

A feminist pioneer. - South China Morning Post

…What an amazing person… sometimes people come in here and it's like I've met a soulmate… [Simone's] energy and her life, her take on life: amazing, absolutely amazing. - Jo Good, BBC Radio London

From the Publisher