Find Your Tribe, with Dr. Joy

(logo whooshing) (sparkly music) ♪ Headspace Studio ♪ (sparkly music) Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, your guest host for the week. Welcome back to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. This week I'm giving y'all some of my favorite tips as a psychologist on all things mental health related America is often referred to as an individualistic society. We value independence and personal freedom and well individuality. And of course I understand why that's something people want, but I think community is an essential part of the human experience, particularly as an adult. Making and maintaining healthy relationships outside of our family and significant others can be extremely daunting, but it's crucial to our wellbeing. You may have heard the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." But I don't think we ever stop needing a village. So today, we'll unpack just how much a good community of friends can positively impact your adult life and how to go about finding your people. Loneliness has become such an issue for us in the US that the Surgeon General has actually declared that there is a loneliness epidemic. So that means that it is something that we should be paying attention to that has risen to the level of concern because there are multiple impacts on both our mental and physical health related to loneliness. So there's some research that suggests that prolonged loneliness is actually equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So we definitely see impacts to our blood pressure. We see impacts to our heart rate. We see impacts to our ability to be able to cope with stressful situations when we are not actually actively engaged in a community. I have a story that I am sure is not unlike many other people's story. So when I took my first job outside of grad school, I was a psychologist in accounting center in a rural part of Georgia and didn't know anybody there, didn't have any friends there, only the people that I worked with. And so it was really, I think one of the first opportunities I had to be in a place where I was like completely new and didn't have any supports there. And so one of the things that was really helpful for me was getting to know my coworkers more. And I know people have varying ideas about like making friends with coworkers, but I really found friendship there, people that I am still in touch with. And so I think if you find yourself in a position where you are new to a space to look around and see if there are people in your setting that you could actually develop a friendship with. So introversion and extroversion is not just a pop psychology term, it is an thing. And the thing I think that people often get wrong, or there's a misconception about introversion and extroversion is that it is one or the other when introversion and...