We need to tackle workplace loneliness

Simon Gilbody talks loneliness at work

Professor Simon Gilbody is a psychiatrist and clinical epidemiologist at the University of York. His work specialises in ‘taking a population approach to mental health’, trying to understand the aspects of modern life that contribute to how we feel.

I was impressed by a talk that Simon did with the Financial Times on the topic of workplace loneliness.

In our discussion Simon reflects on the toll of loneliness, how workplace loneliness can leave us with invasive thoughts, and what to do about it.

Some links we discuss:

Thank you to Mary Howarth at University of York for helping to arrange the discussion.

Transcript

Bruce Daisley: Simon, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.

Simon Gilbody: Oh, hi there Bruce. It’s great to see you. So I’m Simon Gill body and I am calling from Yorkshire, God’s own county. And in Yorkshire, I’m two things. So I’m a doctor and a professor. So the first of those, I’m a doctor in an NHS psychiatrist, a 30 year service in the NHS. And I also trained as a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Simon Gilbody: So I’ve got lots of experience in helping people with problems like anxiety, depression. Or stress. And so the psychiatrist be bit in me, would recognize the thing we’re gonna talk about today. Loneliness has been a really important driver of mental ill health and stress in broader society and in the NHS.

Simon Gilbody: But the other part of it, I guess the my academic discipline is that as a population scientist, so I’m a professor of epidemiology at the University of York. And I’ve got an international research program and in my own small way, I try to advance science to try and understand the causes of mental ill health, and the flip side of that mental wellbeing.

Simon Gilbody: So I’m deeply interested in what works. So we conduct large scale randomized control trials and I guess a bit like you, I’m a Yorkie and I’ve been deeply influenced by economics down the years. So health and welfare is a big thing that we do at York. So we’re very interested in value for money and during the pandemic, we conducted the largest ever clinical trial of a psychological intervention to try and mitigate the impacts of loneliness. And I also lead the behavioral therapeutics lab. And so I’m trying to deprogram myself a bit as an academic and be a bit entrepreneurial. There’s lots of us in universities trying to do that at the moment, and I’m trying to drive impact in the NHS and think about mental health, how that plays out in the broader economy, and I guess increasingly in the workplace.

Bruce Daisley: It’s too much of a tease for you, for me to not follow up with it, but talk us about that research into loneliness in COVID. Let’s use that as a jumping off point. So what did it set out to measure at what stage of COVID was it and what were the findings?

Simon Gilbody: Oh, that’s a, it’s a thing to be able to talk about this piece of research ’cause it’s the piece of research If I was knocked over by the number 63 bus that I’m perhaps most proud of. So are really interested in. Psychological health and physical health and how they might be on the same page and the threshold of the pandemic in 2020.

Simon Gilbody: We were feeling quite pleased with ourselves ’cause we’d got a big grant from the Nhss r and d program to conduct a large trial of how we might optimize the psychological health of people who are experiencing long-term health problems. So it’s a big pain point for the NHS just at the moment.

Simon Gilbody: And then we got. A letter from Professor Chris Witty, he of the next slide. And he told us that, the NHS was now on a war footing. And the, unless research that you were doing spoke directly to the challenges of the pandemic, then it was gonna have to be furloughed. So we got a big grant and we got a team in place and it seemed a shame to to pass over an opportunity.

Simon Gilbody: So we sat down as a team, we had a huddle. And we thought, what is it that we know about, the challenges of the mental health of the population just at the moment? What do we know personally? What do we know from research and epidemiology and what could we do during the pandemic? And it struck us that the mass imposition of lockdown and social distancing might be a cataclysmic black swan event for the mental health of the population. So at speed and with some agility. what we knew about what worked in psychological therapies. We took our manuals off the shelf and we repurposed them such that we made the focus of the psychological interventions that we deliver, how we can help people maintain and enhanced social contacts in order to prevent loneliness.

Simon Gilbody: And we knew from the research literature that loneliness is spectacularly bad for our physical health and our mental health. We wanted to see if we could prevent the deterioration in mental health of people who were had enforced social isolation. So we devised this quite neat telephone delivered intervention, very brief stuff over about eight sessions, 20, 30 minutes each session delivered in the comfort of people’s own homes.

Simon Gilbody: And we walked people through a manual. And we got some great results with that. So this in time came to be. The largest ever randomized control trial, proper experiment to demonstrate both the clinical effectiveness. So it prevented loneliness and it also prevented the onset of depression, but also the cost effectiveness, that York flavored thing where we can demonstrate the return on investment and the value from money from psychological interventions. So this is a great piece of research and normally. We park a piece of research as academics and then write the papers and we did all those. But then we’d normally move on to the next project. But this one stuck with us. So we’ve been thinking more deeply about how we might measure loneliness, how we might address loneliness in the broader population, and how we might take some of the learnings from the advancements that we made in science during the pandemic.

Simon Gilbody: And I dunno my kids were quite proud of it as well.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah.

Simon Gilbody: that the

Bruce Daisley: Was it across all demographics? Because the interesting thing for me is that probably a lot of the interventions that we staged during the pandemic were overtly to protect older people and they’re the first group we often think about when it comes to loneliness.

Bruce Daisley: But it really strikes me that some of the most averse effects. Of the pandemic have been among school aged kids and kids who maybe got out the habit of going to school. I’d love your perspective on that. Did it look at the span of all of those things?

Simon Gilbody: So that’s a great question. So we tend to research older people or people with long-term health problems who do tend to be older people. So the people that took part in our trial were the people you described older people. But alongside that, what we did was we took stock of all the research that was happening

Bruce Daisley: I.

Simon Gilbody: right around the world and we brought those together using some fancy analytic techniques that we’ve got.

Simon Gilbody: We’re gonna take meta-analysis and we’ve shown the. Psychological strategies, cognitive or behavioral therapy. If you refocus that and focus on social isolation and social connection, you get really good impacts right across the age span, and you’re dead. Bruce? People. Archetypally think that it was older people that were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, but we now know that it was younger people and it was people whose schooling was disrupted and those young people are now coming into the workplace.

Simon Gilbody: So that, we might want to talk about that a bit

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Gilbody: Just really interesting that we think that there are some fundamental truths there about how you can use psychological approaches to try and mitigate the impacts of social isolation, to prevent loneliness, which is spectacularly toxic for your health and your wellbeing.

Bruce Daisley: Let’s go on and do that because one, one of the things that I, people might be interested to check out is the talk, which is in the show notes, the talk you gave recently, which was a collaboration with the Financial Times, looking at loneliness at work. And I guess, one of the reasons why we’re talking today is this intersection of the phenomenon of loneliness with the workplace and how it has an impact on those things.

Bruce Daisley: So let’s try and work our way through that. Maybe in the first instance. I’d love you just to, to mark our card by giving us a little definition of loneliness because I guess there are times when we all enjoy being alone and what is loneliness specifically?

Simon Gilbody: So I, I guess I’m one of those people. Bruce, I’ve got a bit of,

Bruce Daisley: I.

Simon Gilbody: fomo, but jomo joy of missing out. So I quite like solitude, but loneliness, if we take a dictionary definition, it’s it’s something that we all recognize and it’s part of the normal human condition, but the dictionary would tell us that it’s unpleasant. Unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. just to unpack that a bit further it’s really important to keep hold of the quality and the quantity of people’s social connections and. The fundamental thing that it’s important to get your head around is that this mismatch is important. So it’s a mismatch between the number and quality of relationships that we crave and the number and quality of relationships that we actually have.

Simon Gilbody: So if they mismatch, then you get loneliness. And there’s a couple of things that follow on from that. You can have very few connections, but you can also feel. Quite contented. People think about Greta Garbo, she said, I want to be alone. Some people are naturally lighthouse keepers and they crave solitude.

Simon Gilbody: And a bit like me, the jomo bit joy of missing out. But there are also people that can be alone in a crowd. So there’s something there about the quality of the relationships that you’ve had. Social connection’s really important, so that’s. definition. And that describes the proximal causes.

Simon Gilbody: But I’m deeply influenced by evolutionary thinking as well. And if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective you’d think not just about the proximal, but what we’d call the distal explanations, where loneliness comes from in our, ancient civilizations and in populations. There’s a really strong evolutionary understanding of why loneliness is important. So I’ve been deeply influenced by, a chap who’s no longer around. That’s Professor John Kapo from the University of Chicago, and he talks about loneliness being a basic human drive, and it’s a bit like hunger and it’s a bit like thirst.

Simon Gilbody: So when you’re hungry, your evolutionary is. is to go and scavenge for food. And and John Kapo would say that we are hardwired to be in groups and when we experience loneliness, it forces us to come together in groups. Loneliness confers an evolutionary advantage on us. ’cause if we hang around in groups, we’re more likely to be successful as haunted gatherers. We’re more likely to be able to pule attack from outside forces. And importantly from an evolutionary perspective, we’re more likely to reach that point in our lives where we can pass on our genes and be successful in in reproduction. So you can see that loneliness is a basic biological drive as evolved, and the problem is loneliness kicks in when it becomes chronic, and it becomes unresolved and unsatisfied.

Simon Gilbody: So chronic loneliness is the one that we ought to worry about.

Bruce Daisley: I’m glad you taught me how to pronounce John Cchi PO’s name ’cause I’ve read loads of his papers, but as a sort of auto did act I’ve never heard his name actually said out loud. So that’s helpful for me. The interesting thing there, they, a lot of people struggle. We can see why loneliness might historically have had a consequence for us, but we maybe struggle to understand why today it seems to have a measurable health impact on us, because, we’re not hunter-gatherers anymore.

Bruce Daisley: We’re going down to Greg’s to buy a sausage roll. We’re going to Sainsbury’s to buy a bag of shopping. Those things are not going to be enhanced by whether we’ve got other people next to us on the savanna. What, why does it still, what is the mechanism, what’s the reason why loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day?

Bruce Daisley: It can shorten our lifespan by 10 years. What, what happens? I don’t understand why we would go from one to the other.

Simon Gilbody: Yeah, I, great question. So we are no longer on the Savannah, but we’ll want to gather is down at Greg’s, aren’t we? And maybe that’s not great for our health and if you take a pause to think about how long Annu might drive that, lots of people talk about comfort eating when the psychological dis psychologically distressed and John it gives a lot of thought to this.

Simon Gilbody: So I. interested in loneliness for the reasons that we’d spoken about. So loneliness wasn’t a big theme in our research program until the pandemic, but one of the advantages of being a professor is that you get to hang out with really clever people. Clever much cleverer than myself, and sometimes those are younger people as well.

Simon Gilbody: So I had a brilliant PhD student about 10 years ago called. Nicole Val, to she was proper, clever. She’d been to Oxford and she’d been to the Sobon and what have you, but she was a social scientist and she encouraged me to think about loneliness. So she wanted to do a PhD on it. And so what she did, she pivoted to become an epidemiologist, and she pulled all the. Epidemiological studies that have been prospective studies. So they’ve measured people at baseline that established people’s social connection and their levels of loneliness, and they’d followed them up over time. And Nicole was really interested in whether loneliness was actually a risk factor of two important threats to human health.

Simon Gilbody: So that will be. Stroke and cardiovascular disease. And and at the beginning of the pandemic we started looking at what the epidemiological evidence was. And it’s, as you say, loneliness is the new smoking and there’s an increased recognition of the impacts of loneliness.

Simon Gilbody: And there are two important reports that are kicking around at the moment. So Juan is a very influential one from the US Surgeon General, and he described it as an epidemic of of. Gargantuan proportions and it’s right up there with smoking. And he mapped out the health impacts. And there’s recently been a WHO Commission on Social Connection that’s talked about the chronic inflammatory impacts of loneliness and how it impacts on both on our brain and on our bodies as well. And that pans out with what physical impacts those things that Dr. Nicole Val first described. So it increases your risk of cardiovascular disease. Heart disease and stroke by about 30%. And it drives the Gregs thing as well. It confers risk to developing obesity and then obesity drives. All the bad things that follow on from that.

Simon Gilbody: So Cardiometabolic syndrome, so it tips us into type two diabetes and might be biologically mediated by this chronic inflammation that we see in all stress related disorders. It also impacts on brain health as well, there’s an important commission that was published about five years ago, and then it was revisited earlier this year. It was called the Lancet Commission on the Prevention of Dementia. And professor Jill Livingston from University College London, she mapped out what the modifiable risk factors were for dementia, and she recognized that social isolation and loneliness probably conferred about five, 6% of your lifetime risk of dementia. So you know it that. Affects your brain health, but it also affects your brain health in other ways. So cognitive capacity’s a really important thing. So social isolation and loneliness works against normal age related cognitive decline. And, our brains are a bit like a muscle. I know that my neuropsychological. Colleagues will be cringing at this analogy, but you’ve gotta use it in order to keep your brain functioning and working. So there’s really good evidence to show that people who are socially isolated, their cognitive function isn’t as good as it would be if you’ve got good social connections. They’re not using that. muscle. We’ve seen some good examples just recently of of tech giants wanting to live forever. We overheard that conversation. So there’s no point in living forever if you’re gonna be ill and you’re gonna become cognitively impaired. So we know that loneliness works against healthy aging, so it does all the same things as these chronic inflammatory processes that John Kapo described.

Simon Gilbody: And it. It seems to amplify what happens later in life. And, I’m a psychiatrist as well, and it’s a risk factor for the common things that trouble the NHS, like depression or anxiety pretty much doubles your risk of developing depression or anxiety. Put together, these are real impacts on. The body and on the mind. So it’s, and that might be mediated through the trip to Greg’s as well, so like lots of health problems. They’ve got a deep evolutionary basis and I think this is a really useful perspective to think about health, how it was and how it came about. And the evolutionary perspective is helpful in this case.

Bruce Daisley: Specifically then we’ve considered loneliness and it’s got this sort of wide ranging span of impact across so much of our health and wellbeing. I guess what a lot of people struggle with is the notion that especially in a in person work, that people could be lonely at work. I guess the first thing that people might say is that if you tell them the headline is about loneliness at work they immediately imagine a remote worker sitting on a laptop at home who’s having no social interaction.

Bruce Daisley: Interactions, maybe spending their whole time in a spreadsheet, but Loneliness at work doesn’t necessarily look at that. The data I’ve seen suggests that people who are remote as just about as lonely as the people who are in the office it doesn’t seem to be directly related. I wonder if you could just explain to us the phenomenon of loneliness at work and where we see its incidents Most, most strongly.

Simon Gilbody: Yeah, so the notion that it’s people sat at home on a laptop and that working from home is driving loneliness, I think it’s for the birds, the levels of loneliness in the workplace. Working from home are pretty much the same. But it’s changed the nature of work. You’ve spoken about this beautifully, Bruce, and it’s a talking point, sometimes takes us down a blind alley as well.

Simon Gilbody: But if you think about it in the workplace, again, think about that evolutionary perspective. Think about what John Kapo says about chronic loneliness. And he would say that people who are chronically lonely that. Chronically over aroused, they ruminate and they also withdraw from human contact when it becomes a chronic thing.

Simon Gilbody: So if we think about how that might play out in the workplace, there’s probably three ways in which it might play out. So the first is in, you would see people, your work colleagues, they’ve got reduced concentration, they’ve lost that. Cognitive flex and they might be ruminating disproportionately on micro interactions in the workplace.

Simon Gilbody: They might find it very hard to focus, and in terms of the cognitively challenging tasks, they’re not gonna be great. Problem solvers, they’re gonna find it difficult to solve tasks generally. People are gonna be present but absent at the same time. So it’s gonna drive this sort of presenteeism thing. and this phenomenon that it impacts on the way which you interact with others as well, that John describes. It takes me onto the. I guess the second area that you’d identify it impacts on the way in which we interact as teams. So chronic loneliness causes us to withdraw socially and to communicate less. And consequently, if you’ve got chronic loneliness, it’s really difficult to work in teams, so you might become quite isolated. So lonely people might not necessarily be team players and they fall to the back and their performance within the team. might diminish over time. So that’s another way in which it might play out in the workplace. I guess the third way, and this is the sort of psychiatrist in me speaking, so if it’s a risk factor for low mood and for depression and anxiety, so a lot of. People with depression that I meet are often quite profoundly demotivated. It impacts on your wellbeing. So chronic loneliness is linked to depression, it’s linked to fatigue.

Simon Gilbody: It’s re linked to satisfaction with your life in generally, and that might include job satisfaction. So this is a basic cognitive bias that might emerge. As a consequence of the experience of loneliness. So that’s gonna need to reduce, drive and reduce creativity and productivity in the workplace. So I guess those are the three ways in which, you might notice it playing out in the workplace.

Simon Gilbody: So reduced concentration, it’s impact on teamwork and this way in which people are demotivated and withdrawn. So those are the things to look out for. There are some reports that describe this out there. So the. Things that you might want to put in the notes. There was a super report by the British Red Cross. They reported to the all party parliamentary group on loneliness in the workplace, and this was commissioned during the pandemic, so it’s got a bit of a pandemic flavor to it, but. They would also say that it disproportionately impacts on certain sectors of the workforce. Working from home, as you say, it’s not caused some massive uptick in loneliness, but it has changed the nature of the workplace.

Simon Gilbody: And one of the things that this Red Cross Report highlights is. fact that it’s often managers and leaders who are disproportionately impact for loneliness. So leadership can be quite a lonely place, and it’s also worth bearing that in mind. Often leaders are asked to solve problems like loaners, and they might be the ones that are impacted themselves.

Bruce Daisley: There’s a couple of things I want to delve into there. I’ve included the Red Cross report in the show notes. There’s a couple of things I wanted to delve into there, and it’s that it’s the idea of rumination and the idea that rumination actually produces a adverse cycle a. Of interactions getting worse, that when people ruminate on the things that are going wrong or the conversation that they’ve had with a manager or with a colleague that wasn’t well that didn’t go well, and then they ruminate on that and it actually becomes a bigger deal in their head.

Bruce Daisley: The dysfunctional connection that they’ve got with people around them actually compounds. And it becomes a reason for that dysfunction going forward. I don’t think enough consideration is given to that by managers or by any of us really, that to some extent the loneliness can almost produce this catastrophization this sort of snowballing adverse effect.

Bruce Daisley: Is there any way for us to understand that rumination or to cut it off? Is there any way to help someone who finds themself in that, maybe a colleague or a friend who finds himself in that recursive loop of returning to conversations that they’ve had?

Simon Gilbody: it’s archetypally something we see amongst people who are depressed and anxious. So I guess the insights that I’ve got will be drawn from the clear. Nick about we how we help that. Often challenging the validity of people’s assumptions is one of the things that we do in clinical practice.

Simon Gilbody: So asking people to, recognize negative automatic ruminative cognitions. So it’s important that you encourage people to. To themselves challenge that. And I think it’s it could be helpful with your colleagues to not be afraid to challenge the validity of some people’s ruminants assumptions, but also be vigilant.

Simon Gilbody: There are things that we can do to help this. I. Trained as a cognitive behavioral therapist, and we can take lower intensity versions of CBT self-help interventions, and there are materials that we can perhaps point you towards in the show notes that might be helpful for people who are ruminating in that way, lots of people who are perhaps listening will recognize that downward spiral of ruminative.

Simon Gilbody: Anxiety and I guess we all experience that a bit at three o’clock in the morning when you start thinking about work or what’s gonna happen the next day. And it’s often quite ruminative and unproductive. And if you imagine that rip big and right across your working day, you can just begin to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has ruminative anxiety and low mood.

Bruce Daisley: Do you think loneliness at work and the right of loneliness is at work is. Is a reflection of the fact that we are less collectively minded now that we’re less focused on building a cohesive team, maybe because the responsibilities and managers have gone up, or the expectations of us to deliver have gone up.

Bruce Daisley: And so as a result, work has been crowded out. One of the things that we frequently see is that work intensity seems to be inversely correlated with work relationships There. As the demands upon you go up, or whether you’ve got all these back to back meetings and lots of emails to do or whatever your job is.

Bruce Daisley: As work intensity goes up we typically find the socialization of workplaces goes down. Do you have a perspective on that? Is this loneliness at work or reflection of the fact that we’ve made work now that is too busy and too intense?

Simon Gilbody: Yeah, it’s probably the latter, isn’t it? We’re forever firefighting with with tasks and we I see this on my own work and I’m sure you, you see this and hear stories amongst people. That’s you speak to that. With forever firefighting tasks, never get to the bottom of an email inbox. And it’s difficult to take time to do that, more strategic thinking in in the workplace these days.

Simon Gilbody: So I, I see that in academia. I see that in the NHS and I guess you’d also see that in, the more commercially driven workforce and workplace. So I think what you say there, Bruce, is ab absolutely right on the money.

Bruce Daisley: Before we delve into sort of interventions and thinking about what actions that any of us collectively or individually could take to deal with this I would like to reflect on how the world’s changing and not necessarily through the lens of thinking about hybrid working and remote working and what it’s contributed there, but, when you were talking about loneliness, you described it as an unwell as when you’re talking about loneliness, you described it as an unwelcome subjective feeling of lack of companionship, saying that humans are higher wide for connection. But I’d love to explore whether we are seeing a rewiring or a distance between what we want and what we need.

Bruce Daisley: Really unequivocally see the benefits of being around other people and, the, it’s just and this, every time you look for evidence. Being around other people, being connected to other people seems to be beneficial, but there is a rise. Derek Thompson in the Atlantic talks about the rise of this phenomenon of people being electively isolated, choosing to have more time in the house, spending a hundred minutes a day more alone than they ever did before and actually leaning into that and.

Bruce Daisley: I just wonder whether you perceive any of that, whether even if it’s bad for us, even if the data says this is the worst thing for us to do, we are choosing to spend more time alone.

Simon Gilbody: So we’re all becoming a bit more like Virginia Wolf or Greta Garbo. We’re all getting a bit more Jomo and we’re all becoming a bit more liked housekeepers. So that notion of elective isolation I think is really

Bruce Daisley: I.

Simon Gilbody: And I, I think Derek Thompson’s onto something there and so I think there is. A genuine rise of jomo and it’s gonna be complex. There’s not gonna be any single explanation for that, but I guess I’ve got a few thoughts on what it is that might drive that. First thing I’ll mention is social anxiety is it’s a real thing and it’s. Quite pervasive within society and even at quite low levels.

Simon Gilbody: And I’ve got some experience of that myself. So I sometimes for some people the workplace can be something that’s a socially anxious place. So we’ve now got the option to perhaps avoid some of the micro interactions that are inherent in everyday, workplace culture. So when people are anxious, the. Most logical thing their body tells ’em to do is to withdraw from that anxiety. And that’s how anxiety becomes deeply entrenched. The other thing is the, probably they’ve always been people who are natural lighthouse keepers and maybe now they’ve got the opportunity to live their lives as natural lighthouse keepers and have an existence away from some of the things. That, previously you might have found, just not particularly comfortable. think there’s also the. Rise in neurodivergence, or people believe in the neuro that neurodivergent traits are in fact sort of full blown clinical disorders. So I think this plays out in the workplace a little as well.

Simon Gilbody: And maybe it’s also a generational thing, gen Z’s now making contact with the workplace and, I guess also thinking a bit further on in the the life course, people in their middle and later years. We’ve seen her quietly quitting and for reasons that are often quite complex.

Simon Gilbody: I dunno, just to pick up on a couple of those things. The social anxiety one I think is really interesting. So I know a bit about this. We tend to avoid things that make us anxious and one of the things that we logically do when we’ve got a place or a situation based anxiety is to.

Simon Gilbody: Keep ourselves well and stay away from that source of adversity. That’s how anxiety disorders become very quickly entrenched. And my own experience of a bit of social anxiety myself is that the way in we, you cure that is to do something quite counterintuitive. And that’s to force yourself into situations where you’re challenged, where you make yourself a bit anxious and things get better over time.

Simon Gilbody: So that’s inherent in the main. Therapeutic response that we have to anxiety disorders, so exposure based therapy and that’s where the magic happens. So it’s quite easy to retreat into our comfort zone and eliminate the sources of our anxiety. And, if you think about the. Thought experiment’s, acrophobia.

Simon Gilbody: So I’ll meet lots of people in the clinic who have been successfully treated for acrophobia, but they don’t necessarily come to the clinic and that’s because they manage their acrophobia by never leaving the house. And they often have quite functional lives, often quite well until they leave the house.

Simon Gilbody: You wouldn’t treat agoraphobia by telling people to stay in the house for the rest of their lives. You’ve gotta get ’em to challenge themselves. There’s a really interesting person at the University of Oxford, so Dr. Lucy fau, she’s written a great book on the the purported rise of anxiety disorders amongst young people.

Simon Gilbody: And she thinks that they might well be on the rise, but what’s changed is the way in which we respond as a society to, to low grade anxiety. She’s a great writer. She’s written about it in the academic, in, in the Guardian, just recently. It was quite a challenging area to write in. She’s not implying that everyone has snowflakes. She’s implying that the way in which we respond to anxiety at a societal level has changed. And I wonder whether that’s driving the the elective isolation that we see. There’s that generational thing as well. We’ve got people coming into the workforce who experienced the pandemic and it became normalized that you might spend time in your bedroom or on tech and that’s not necessarily conducive to to a productive and successful and happy working life.

Simon Gilbody: So see people who struggle when they get to their first job, and that’s a real shame. They might become anxious and then they might. Drop outta the workforce and they’re missing out on the important rituals at the foundation of our careers. And once they fall outta the workplace, they don’t get back in.

Simon Gilbody: And and the, these, young people sometimes become what sometimes called needs. So not in employment education and training. And it’s a big social problem just at the moment. And finally the quiet quitting thing, it’s people. Whose social batteries perhaps run low. And people sometimes with caring commitments, they might have emerging health concerns themselves.

Simon Gilbody: And and it’s very easy for that group of people to become the the elective isolates in lots of ways. It cuts right across the age span. Yeah, it’s I would say that Derek Thompson’s onto something.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, it’s interesting because we do see it manifested, there was some data published in the ft by Jumbo Murdoch, which sort of showed the same at a aggregate level. It looked at all demographics actually, and it suggested that there was a rising or there, there was a decline in extroversion.

Bruce Daisley: There was a. Dec decline in conscientiousness. And a system level, it does make those things happen. I’m just really. Intrigued because if you describe the people who are showing the extremes of this and they’re instructed to get back on the horse, initiate more interactions, if you perceive everyone broadly as being on a spectrum of every attribute, rather than the notion that you are suddenly in this.

Bruce Daisley: Box that you’ve got an issue with social anxiety, there’s probably a whole load of people who are somewhere on the scale of that. And it’s sometimes why the notion of introversion and extroversion isn’t necessarily that helpful, because I think you can find yourself in different places on that scale, on different days and in different situations.

Bruce Daisley: But if the notion that all of us. My at times benefit with doing a bit more social interaction and explaining that, and younger people aren’t necessarily seeing that. It raises a really interesting. Societal question. The thing I put it adjacent to is the, I read recently and I think all the time about the idea that our first ever group as an individual is typically our family from in most functioning organizations.

Bruce Daisley: Our first group is our family, and the way that families operated historically is rather different to how they operate Now. Most families with teenagers now don’t necessarily sit on the sofa and watch the same show with each other every night. They don’t necessarily sit down and eat meals together, and so as a result, being in a family now typically cohabiting with each other, occasionally with friction points, with siblings or with parents, but it’s not necessarily a place where you’d say, it’s my happy place.

Bruce Daisley: You’ve just got a room in a building where you go back and scroll through your phone. So it’s really interesting that when we then ask those people to perceive the benefits of being part of a group later in life, they might not have the mental model of what the benefit to this is. It just represents conflict, it just represents our compromise a sense that I’m not gonna get what I wanted.

Bruce Daisley: Compromise is where we both get what we didn’t ask for. And, so the idea that. Maybe the selling point of groups, the selling point of connection with other people has never been less clearly articulated. That’s what I’m interested from a societal level, ’cause that has direct bearing on how we seek to try and build teams at work.

Simon Gilbody: Yeah, that’s really great reflections. I think in another life you would’ve been a great family therapist, Bruce. Understanding the family dynamics I think would be something that comes quite naturally to you. And thinking about those formative experiences when we’re younger is absolutely fascinating.

Simon Gilbody: And I think I saw the same data that perhaps you’re alluding to as well. John Murdoch. He he put something in the Financial Times and I was alerted to it by my wife, who, does a very different job from myself. And it became one of those sort of cross the table talking points about how people’s personalities seemed to be changing over time.

Simon Gilbody: And this was a. Quite a phenomenon. I, a big shout out to John by Murdoch as well because a picture’s worth a thousand words. I always show his work to my PhD students and say, try to aspire to this, try and tell your story in this visual way. So it’s it’s a lovely thing.

Simon Gilbody: So he very clearly mapped out what we saw, which is an increase in neuroticism from the big five. Personality survey and he also saw this reduced introversion, so especially amongst younger people. And so I think he’s picking up a real phenomenon there. These were US data. And I think it was describing the things that I mentioned earlier, that would perhaps capture. This shift and rise in entrenchment of social anxiety and withdrawal from a lot of the micro social interactions that are normalized and I guess are required in the workplace. And guess the other thing to say about that work is, as an epidemiologist it’s always nice to see the power of cohorts.

Simon Gilbody: So it just shows that doing the grunt work and getting large groups of people and following them up over time allows you to. Capture temporal trends and that was a, it was a US study and we do about that in this country. So there’s the millennium cohort study, which is a great resource for trying to understand these things.

Simon Gilbody: So we might want to go back and look at how that plays out there. I’m currently in Yorkshire, so I never waste an opportunity to, run the tourist board for God’s own county. So I’m in Leeds, but close to here is the 2025 City of Culture. So it’s the city of Bradford and Bradford’s home to the world’s largest multi-ethnic birth cohort.

Simon Gilbody: Something called the Born in Bradford cohort. And, we’ve been following tens of thousands of young Brad Ians of all ethnicities and levels of social and economic advantage and disadvantage time since they were born about 12, 13 years ago. And we’ve recently expanded the cohort.

Simon Gilbody: So we actually were able to capture the scarring, the psychological scarring of the of the. pandemic on those young people. And at my behest we started recording loneliness and we also record lots and lots of things around people’s social connections and experience of family interaction, and also lots of things around their academic performance and a time when they leave school. We’ll track them as they move into the workforce. So we’ve set up a natural experiment and we’re gonna follow ’em up over time. So next time John Burn. Murdoch wants to draw some graphs. We might have some data that we can show him

Bruce Daisley: I like it.

Simon Gilbody: to understand the long term impacts of

Bruce Daisley: I.

Simon Gilbody: On young people.

Bruce Daisley: I like it. So let’s all come to the now What part the sense of, trying to stage intervention. So look, if we’ve got loneliness at work, or actually maybe if we just witnessed people who are lonely in our lives, where would you as a, from your clinician perspective where would you see.

Bruce Daisley: The where should we start? What should we be doing to try to reduce loneliness in others to, help loneliness in ourselves?

Simon Gilbody: Yeah. Yeah. We can think a bit about how we do that in the workplace, but thinking about it as a broader. Societal problem. The report from the WHO on social connection was quite helpful in this. And they would encourage us to think about it in, in quite a connected level. You’ve gotta think a societal level.

Simon Gilbody: We’ve got to think about how it is that society’s become atomized, create. Opportunities for people to socially interact. We could think within local communities about why it is that, for example, older people or younger people are spending proportionate amounts of time in their own homes. I’ve witnessed in my lifetime the the death of of youth clubs and youth services.

Simon Gilbody: And, that’s a real problem. These are the first thing to go when budgets get cut. I’ve also witnessed positive things. So down the road we’ve got part run. Lots of people participate in that, and I’ve noticed the opportunities that are afforded through volunteering. So these are great community initiatives that we can think about. I guess in organizations, the challenge of trying to maintain good psychological health within the workforce or in your organization. It’s that’s a difficult one. And, the challenge for for managers is to think about how they might facilitate more socially inclusive. Workplaces and environments, and I think some things that you shouldn’t do. Don’t encourage forced socializing. Forced fun is something that people can smell from a thousand yards and it turns people right off. what you might do is try to, promote psychological safety within the workplace, but also try to enable everyday connections and, spend some time thinking about how you run your meetings, how you workplace. It helps include people. So I found it useful trying to get people to check in at the start of meetings or have huddles and check-ins at the start of the day. That’s a really good way of bringing people together. Always acknowledge people’s effort, pair people up in projects and what have you.

Simon Gilbody: So I guess those would be some of my top tips about how you do it in the workplace. but,

Bruce Daisley: you are warning note you’re warning note about forced fund will probably have a few people on red alert. So that means no team social events in your mind or where would you draw the line on that?

Simon Gilbody: Team social events tend to be funner when they happen in work time. So

Simon Gilbody: To interact outside of work time, I think is really important. So telling everyone you’re gonna go down the pub for drinks that might be the pe something that people do spontaneously, but it’s not an inclusive activity.

Bruce Daisley: right.

Simon Gilbody: And forcing that as your only response to team cohesion in your organization. You might want to do other things. So doing things in the workplace might be more inclusive. Allow people to keep the weekends. I see lots of people sign up just for the one for something called Tough Mudder.

Simon Gilbody: Have you heard about that

Bruce Daisley: A half. Yeah. Big phenomenon.

Simon Gilbody: It’s a huge phenomenon, good luck to them. But forcing everyone to sign up to their tough mother and give up a whole of their weekend doing this perhaps isn’t a route to to an inclusive workplace. But people might still want to do it, but that’s perhaps not the only response that your organization might make to improve social cohesion. So events that are baked into the the working week and, there was a great podcast a few weeks ago that was that was that that you wanna talk. It was looking at the psychology and the anthropology of the physical presence of the workplace. I think there’s probably a bit more that we can do to think about how we could re-engineer the workplace to make it more inclusive and to facilitate good social interaction. So again, we’re thinking at a systems level and how we might do those sorts of things, but,

Bruce Daisley: You.

Simon Gilbody: yeah.

Bruce Daisley: You mentioned along the way. I know the one thing I wanted to finish, aren’t you mentioned the fact that it’s often never discussed, which is that managers and leaders are often lonely. And obviously that is a somewhat different nut to crack because, you, you can’t just force interactions with colleagues because often colleagues might not want that sort of relationship.

Bruce Daisley: What would your suggestion be if a leader, if a manager is feeling isolated or lonely at work?

Simon Gilbody: It’s difficult ’cause one of the things that you lose on your way up the greasy pole, we see this in universities, we see the NHS, is that you move from being a colleague to being someone who has managerial responsibility of the people that you formally rec. Called friends. So the social networks that you used to have sometimes disappear as you move further up the organization. So it’s really important to recognize that and also recognize that’s something that’s no longer in your life, and try to ways in which you deal with those, change relationships with colleagues in work, but also find ways in which you might maintain connections and support perhaps outside of the organization.

Simon Gilbody: There’s quite a lot of thoughts about how coaching might support leadership and social connection might be something that gets brought into the conversation around coaching. Maybe that’s, I’m thinking on my feet a little. But also, the ability to reflect on your own social networks, really important part of maturity and leadership.

Simon Gilbody: I think it’s really important to give people permission to. Think about that and bring it into the conversation. Also normalize it. So there was the report from the US Surgeon General, the most senior doctor in the whole of the us and he did a bit of oversharing, and I think in a good way that’s facilitated a conversation amongst quite senior people in leadership roles.

Simon Gilbody: So he talked about his ex own experience of loneliness when he was, a junior hospital resident and how that had impacted on his own physical and mental health. A few more people sharing their experience of loneliness might go a long way to shifting the culture in management and in leadership.

Bruce Daisley: It’s interesting, isn’t it? ’cause quite often managers will be, will lean into needing to work harder and might, I certainly know from my experience of management that friendships often get deprioritized. ’cause you just haven’t got time to get anything done. So you don’t meet mate for a drink.

Bruce Daisley: You don’t have lunch with anyone ’cause. How could you’d be failing everyone you work with if you if you took time out to do those things. And it’s an interesting one that we often deprioritize the things that ultimately are gonna be most beneficial for us.

Simon Gilbody: Yeah. Amen to that.

Bruce Daisley: Simon, I’m so grateful for the conversation. I’ve included a lot of the things you talked about from your FT webinar to the re, the Red Cross report in the show notes. Anyone who’s interested could check you out there. And you’ve also got a whole load of a huge amount of Google citations on the papers that you’ve published.

Bruce Daisley: So I’m immensely grateful on you giving us that lens on, and loneliness at work. ’cause I think it’s probably one of the big issues we don’t talk about.Simon Gilbody: Super conversation. Really nice to speak to you today, Bruce.