We have group chats, social media, hundreds of contacts in our phones, and more ways to communicate than ever before. But seems like we don’t spend actual time together.
We know where everyone went for dinner, what workout they did this morning, what their kids wore to homecoming, and where they’re spending the weekend. We can keep up with people we haven’t seen in 20 years, and somehow it can feel like we’re still part of their lives.
But how often are we actually getting together, like in person?
I’m talking about sitting around someone’s kitchen table, meeting a friend for coffee, going out to dinner, having people over without making it a whole production, or spending an afternoon doing absolutely nothing productive together.
I think we’ve become really good at keeping up with people and not as good at spending time with them, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether we’ve confused being connected with actually having connection.
So being who I am and doing what I do best and researching this topic I found some pretty interesting stuff.
The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real, and the Research Is Pretty Eye-Opening
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory called Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, bringing attention to something that doesn’t always get discussed when we talk about health and wellness, our relationships.
Then, in June 2025, the World Health Organization released a major report on social connection, estimating that approximately 1 in 6 people worldwide experience loneliness.
That’s roughly 16% of the global population, based on data collected between 2014 and 2023. The report also linked loneliness and social isolation with increased risks of several physical and mental health problems, including cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety.
What I found interesting is that loneliness isn’t necessarily about how many people you have in your life. You can be married, have children, belong to several group chats, work with people all day, and still feel lonely. You can have a full calendar and a busy social life and still feel like something is missing.
Loneliness is more about the difference between the connection we have and the connection we actually need, and that difference matters, especially for women in midlife.
We’re raising teenagers, sending kids off to college, navigating careers, managing households, maintaining relationships, and trying to find time for ourselves somewhere in the middle of it all. Our days can be filled with conversations, responsibilities, and people needing something from us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting the kind of connection that fills us back up.
Sometimes I think we’re so busy being available to everyone else that we forget how much we need friendships and relationships that exist outside of our responsibilities.
Have you ever watch a TV sitcom and their neighbors just stop by or walk in their home? I remember watching Friends or Cougar Town and the their friends just walking in their door, I said to my husband oh I wish we had that, he laughted and said that I hide when the doorbell rings. ( another time another day for that rabbit hole to go down.) I will say both of my kids friends do this, so that is something gen x and alpha are doing is being comfortable and walking into friends homes. I actually love the fact that their friends just walk into our house and some even know our codes to get in our home too.
Maybe I’m dating myself here, but I remember when getting together with friends didn’t require four weeks of coordinating schedules, making reservations, arranging transportation, and figuring out whether everyone could squeeze it in between everything else they had going on.
People would come over, stand around the kitchen island, have a cocktail or wine, and talk. We would spend time just talking and catching up, and really that was the point.
I mean, I know once kids are older and if they’re in sports leagues and club sports that schedule is basically another full time job. So it really does become harder to get together when kids are older.
Also something I am super guilty of that I’ve noticed, there are weeks when I’m so focused on work, writing, recording podcasts, creating content, teaching, and keeping up with everything at home that I realize I’ve spent most of my time communicating with people through a screen.
I’ve answered emails, replied to comments, sent messages, and interacted with people online, but that isn’t always the same as sitting across from someone and having a real conversation. I genuinely love the online community I’ve built, some of the most supportive women in my life are women I’ve connected with through my work, many of whom I’ve never met in person.
I don’t think online friendships are somehow less meaningful, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when they connect us with people who understand parts of our lives that our immediate circle doesn’t.
I just think we need both. We need the convenience of staying connected, and we also need opportunities to actually be together.
The Blue Zones Have Been Showing Us Something Important All Along
If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know how interested I am in the Blue Zones, the regions of the world that researchers have studied for their unusually high numbers of people living into their 90s and 100s.
Places like Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica have become well known for their longevity.
Much of the conversation around these communities focuses on what people eat, how much they move, the daily habits that support healthy aging, and their emphasis on community. Here, I’ll say the last part again….. THEIR EMPHASIS ON COMMUNITY.
In Okinawa, there’s a tradition known as moai, where people form social support groups that can continue throughout their lives, these relationships provide companionship, support, and a sense of belonging.
In Sardinia, family and intergenerational relationships are deeply woven into daily life. In Ikaria, social gatherings and spending time with neighbors are part of the community culture.
Dan Buettner, who helped popularize the Blue Zones, identified strong social circles, family relationships, and belonging as recurring themes among the communities he studied.
In many of these communities, connection isn’t another wellness habit people have to schedule, it’s just part of how they live.
People gather for meals, maintain friendships, spend time with family, and participate in their communities. They aren’t thinking about how socializing might improve their longevity or reduce their stress levels, they aren’t checking boxes off either tracking everything and turning everything into a protocol.
They’re just living their lives with other people.
I honestly think we’ve made wellness insanely complicated. We’ve become so focused on the individual aspects of wellness, what we eat, how we exercise, how much we sleep, and which supplements we take, that we overlook the importance of the people we’re sharing our lives with.
Think about it, maybe you don’t need a new morning routine you just need to call a friend today and make dinner plans to go out.
* Harvard Has Been Studying Happiness for Decades, and Relationships Keep Coming Up
When Covid lockdown happened and throughout the past few years I have taken advantage of Harvards online courses they offer on Happiness, (they used to offer free courses, now they range from $150-$300.)
One of my favorite examples of research on happiness and well-being from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938. The study has followed participants and, eventually, their families across generations to better understand what contributes to a healthy and fulfilling life.
What makes this research so crazy to me is that it looks beyond the things we typically associate with success.
Career accomplishments, financial stability, physical health, and personal achievements all play roles in our lives, but the researchers have repeatedly found that the quality of our relationships is closely associated with happiness and health.
Robert Waldinger, the study’s director, has spent years discussing how meaningful relationships contribute to our well-being, and how maintaining those relationships requires attention and effort.
I love this because I think it’s something we intuitively understand, even if we don’t always prioritize it. Think about some of your happiest memories.
I know all of mine involve other people in them! Family vacations, dinners with friends, college weekends, holidays, weddings, birthday celebrations, or those completely ordinary evenings that somehow turn into the funniest stories.
When I think about the times that have brought me the most joy, they’re rarely the days when I crossed everything off my to-do list or followed my routine perfectly.
I love studies and appreciate the research, but i don’t think we need a scientific study to tell us how good these moments feel. We are actually living them and can tell and see how we feel. We just need to remember to make room for more of them and maybe seeing that there are actually studies and research on how important it is to have community might make us more likely to plan get togethers.
I Think Friendship Changes in Your 40s and 50s
There’s another part of this conversation that I think deserves more attention, and that’s how friendships change as we get older.
When we’re younger, socializing tends to happen naturally. We see friends at school, in college, at work, or through the activities we’re involved in. We’re surrounded by opportunities to meet people and spend time together without having to put much thought into it.
Then life gets busy. We get married, have kids, move, change careers, and develop different interests. Some friendships naturally evolve, while others become harder to maintain. When our kids are little, we spend years building friendships around playdates, school events, sports teams, and family activities. Then the kids get older. They start driving, spending more time with their own friends, going off to college, and building lives that don’t revolve around us as much, and suddenly, the social structure we’ve been part of for years begins to change.
I think this is an interesting stage of life because we’re starting to have more opportunities to focus on ourselves again, but we may also realize that some of our friendships have been built around convenience and shared responsibilities.
We spend so much time talking about maintaining our marriages, supporting our children, and advancing our careers, but how often do we talk about maintaining our friendships? Especially the friendships that remind us who we are outside of being someone’s mom, wife, or coworker.
I think those relationships become even more important as we move through different stages of life.
I wrote recently about spending a weekend visiting our oldest daughter at college, and how much fun we had with family and friends.
We went shopping, ate Italian food, had bagels and coffee, went to tailgates, watched football, and let our kids show us some of their favorite college hangouts. We laughed, stayed busy, ate really good food, and spent the weekend enjoying ourselves.
There was no wellness agenda. I wasn’t trying to get ahead on work, create content, follow a some structured routine, or make the weekend productive.
We were just having fun and I came home feeling like I had some type of reset that I didn’t even realize I needed. Looking back, I think a huge part of that was the connection. It was being around people we love, having conversations, laughing about things, and stepping outside our everyday routines.
It also reminded me that we don’t always need another wellness routine, a new self-help book, or a weekend spent organizing our lives and checking off boxes.
We need a little spontaneity, a change of scenery, and people who make us laugh.
However don’t confuse being alone and being lonely. we don’t need to fill every weekend with plans. I actually love being home, I love quiet mornings, reading, walking, and having time to myself. I am an introvert and too much being in big groups really does overstimulate me and drains my energy.
So remember, being alone and feeling lonely are two very different things, and learning to enjoy our own company is important too. I just think we need to stop assuming that connection will somehow happen on its own.
Friendship deserves a place in our lives before everything else is finished, not just when we happen to have leftover time.
Social Connection Is Part of Our Health, Not Separate From It
Here’s something I think the wellness industry could spend a little more time talking about. We hear constantly about the importance of exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress management, but meaningful relationships deserve a place in that conversation too.
In 2010, researchers published a large analysis in the journal PLOS Medicine examining the relationship between social connections and mortality.
The analysis included 148 studies involving 308,849 participants. Researchers found that people with stronger social relationships had approximately 50% higher odds of survival during the periods studied compared with people who had weaker social relationships.
That’s an association, not proof that making more friends will increase your lifespan by a particular amount, but it demonstrates just how significant social relationships can be for our health, and I think this is worth paying attention to.
so what can we do this week?!?
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A walk with a friend.
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Coffee with someone you haven’t seen in a while.
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Having people over for dinner.
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Joining a book club, volunteering, taking a class, or becoming part of a community where you regularly see familiar faces.
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Maybe start a club, Mahjong, crafting, writing, IDK, something IRL.
Of course, meaningful connection isn’t always easy to find, and loneliness isn’t something we can just solve by telling people to get out more. I do know and realize some people are navigating grief, illness, caregiving responsibilities, financial challenges, or major life transitions that make building a community hard.
Wrapping this up, i’m 47, and yes I still care about my health, my work, my goals, and continuing to grow as a person, I’m becoming increasingly aware that I don’t want to spend this chapter of my life constantly rushing from one responsibility to the next.
I want more fun, more laughter, and more time with family and friends.
Leaving you with this!
Maybe the next big wellness trend shouldn’t be another supplement, workout, or morning routine, maybe it should be bringing back the simple art of spending time together.
Research referenced in this essay:
• World Health Organization, 2025: From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies. The report estimates that approximately one in six people worldwide experience loneliness.
• U.S. Surgeon General, 2023: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. A national advisory examining the relationship between social connection, community, and health.
• Harvard Study of Adult Development: Relationships Make Us Happy—and Healthy. Research examining the importance of meaningful relationships across adulthood.
• Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010: Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. An analysis of 148 studies involving 308,849 participants.
• Blue Zones: The Power 9 Longevity Principles. An overview of the social and lifestyle patterns identified by the Blue Zones project. The community examples are descriptive, rather than proof that any one practice causes exceptional longevity.
Nikki Lanigan
Nikki Lanigan is a yoga, HIIT, and Barre instructor, she is also a Holistic Health Coach through Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Nikki is trained in Yoga Shred, Yoga Psychology, meditation, chakra balancing, and EFT/Tapping. She has done trainings with Sadie Nardini and Ashley Turner. She got her 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2017 at the Carrie Treister School Of Yoga. Nikki takes a holistic view of health, helping her students and clients reach a place of self-love not just through movement, but with mindset and lifestyle guidance as well. Nikki is also show prep writer for The McVay Media Show Prep and host of the podcast Fit, Fun, and Frazzled. Connect with Nikki on Instagram. www.instagram.com/nikkilanigan.yogaandwellness www.instagram.com/fitfunandfrazzledpodcast
