Thank you for joining us for episode 519 of Live Happy Now.

By now, we've all heard how important friendships and connections are for our well-being,

but sometimes we're just not sure where to find those connections.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by Dr. Lori Watley,

a clinical psychologist

and author who specializes in the effects of digital usage on our relationships.

Her newest book, Happier Together, How to Find Your People and Make Friends at Last,

walks us through how we can identify what we need in a friend, how to intentionally

seek out friends, and she'll

also tell us the exact number of close friends we need for our well-being. Let's have a listen.

Lori, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. Well, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here today

and share with you. You've written this fun, fun book called Happier Together,

and we're going to really dive into that. I've really enjoyed it. And first of all, I wanted to

know what made you interested in exploring the topic of friendship in this book. Well, that is a

great question. And I'll tell you exactly what caused me to become interested in this is I started looking around our world.

And I started realizing we are really lonely.

We are more connected than ever, but we're lonelier than ever because our connections are not in-person connections. And ages ago,

I did my doctorate thesis on how we're affected by our digital devices and our screens.

And one thing just leads to another. And so this is my third book. And this one is not talking so

much about the problem, which I believe is, you know,

the disconnect that we have because we're connecting online, but we're not connecting in person.

So this book doesn't really talk about that. My book before did, disconnected and engaged.

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