Thank you for joining us for episode 472 of Live Happy Now.

Loneliness is one of the major challenges facing our society today.

And since this is Loneliness Awareness Week, it's a great time to look at what's behind this loneliness epidemic.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm sitting down with physician, teacher,

innovator, and author Dr. Jeremy Nobel,

founder of the Foundation for Art and Healing and the Project Unloanly Initiative.

Jeremy, who is also on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H.

Chan School of Public Health

has published the book Project Unlone, Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection, and he's here to talk about

what loneliness is doing to us and what we should be doing about it. Let's have a listen.

Dr. Nobel, thank you so much for joining us on Live Happy Now. My pleasure to be with you.

It's so important to talk to you any time of the year, but right now we really are excited to talk to you because we have Loneliness Awareness Week.

And boy, loneliness is such a huge, huge issue for so many people today. And I was curious, first of all, where did your interest in

not just studying loneliness, but resolving the crisis begin? Well, actually, it really began

in an interesting way after 9-11. But I didn't know that I was really focused on loneliness.

I was actually very interested in the trauma of 9-11 as an experience for many people,

particularly children. And that's what got me started. And I started the foundation for art and

healing, 501C3 nonprofit. And the idea was to promote creative expression as a path to health and

well-being, really focusing on the power of the arts to really help us make

sense of the world in positive, healthy, stress-reducing trauma recovery-oriented ways.

So as we started doing this work with the arts, we quickly found that many people with trauma

and dealing with that stress were also quite lonely. And they told us that

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