The number one thing that decreases your mortality rates over and above those things exercise and diet that we focus on so much for wellness is your level of social connection.

Welcome to the Drupal at Podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness medicine and mindset.

This week's guest is Dr. Marissa G. Franco and we're talking all things loneliness, friendship, connection.

Did you know that one of the most important predictors of longevity is connection relationships but so many people feel that they don't have the right relationships in their life.

They feel that they have shitty friends. They feel that they don't have a community or a group of friends that truly understands them or has their back.

Well if you want to create all those things today's episode is for you. A little bit more about Dr. Marissa G. Franco. She works as a professor at the University of Maryland and is the author of the newly released book Platonic.

How the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends. Dr. Franco writes about friendship for psychology today and has been a featured connection expert on major publications including the New York Times, the telegraph and vice.

She speaks on belonging at corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and universities across the country.

One personal anecdote that I want to share before we jump into today's interview. Having better quality friends and making friendships a priority in my life has been a game changer for me.

It's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about this topic when I focused on up leveling my friendships and also focused on looking at how I could be a better friend to those friendships in my life.

Every aspect of my life improved. My health and wellness got better. My finances and my income increased.

My sense of joy and contentment in life. My sense of fun and the amount of experiences that I got a chance. All these things that improved my life directly came back to having better quality relationships.

This is why I want this for you. So even though a lot of people don't necessarily think that they have a friendship problem or even though a lot of people don't necessarily think that they have a loneliness problem.

I encourage you to listen to today's conversation because it might inspire you to take your relationships to the next level.

Dr. Marissa G. Franco, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in. And there's something super important that you talk about in your book.

And it's not something that people would normally associate with a topic of friendship, which is what is the connection between friendships and relationships and longevity. I'd love to start there.

This is a good question. Funny. I'm teaching a class on loneliness and sharing all this data that's really blowing their minds.

Like for example, meta analyses that summarize all the existing research out there. Look at the impact of something like exercise, like running on your mortality over the long term or eating healthy, like vegetable eating vegetables over the long term.

And they find that, you know, obviously these very important things do decrease our mortality rates.

Somewhere in the like 20 to 30% mark, but actually the number one thing that decreases your mortality rates over and above those things, exercise and diet that we focus on so much for wellness is your level of social connection.

Social connection influences your mortality also more than just our common public health priorities, like obesity, smoking, right, the things we tend to focus on and create policies about they don't impact mortality as much as your level of social connection.

When you hear that, what does it make you think? What's so special? Because I feel like if you go back, let's say even like 10 years ago, and you would tell people, look, sleep is so important for your health.

...