My girl, Molly Maloof is on today's episode of Women of Impact. Guys, if you don't know who she is, she is broken. Her book, she studied a Stanford University and found what allows women to live long better lives. And her results were shocking. She saw that love. Yes, love and connection is actually the thing that indicates whether someone is going to live a long life. That just blew me away right from the get-go so we just dive in and talk about all the real freaking truths about how love and loneliness, the pain of breakups and all the messiness that goes with relationships and how it actually impacts your health and how long you live. She also took me into a whole new space for me, which I found fascinating guys. And we started talking about psychedelics and how they actually have had positive results on relationships. Now, I'm not saying that you should come and do it right away. I haven't tried them yet, but I am fascinated and I'm fascinated by the knowledge, I'm fascinated by the studies, and all the things that come in out in talking about the connection and the importance of love so that you can live longer. I'm just going to keep repeating guys, it's that you can live longer that's insane and so without further ado, I just want to get straight to the episode because I was so damn excited for this one. It was so fresh, it was so new, she comes at it at a completely different angle. And so you're actually going to learn about love, relationships and health all in one

episode.

So without further ado, let's just dive right in right now with my girl, Mwali Malouf.

We're mostly flying blind through life because love is not taught to us.

If we all understood the power of love and the power of loss of love, on our mental health

and our physical health, we would actually thrive. Dr. Mwale, welcome to Women of Impact Girl. Thank you so much for having me. I mean, don't forget to come on the show because I heard that while you were actually teaching at Stanford, you started looking to the importance of health. And you found that love was just as freakin' important as thirst and hunger. Yeah, I mean connection is vital for longevity, vital for long-term health and happiness. It's literally the greatest factor we know in long-term health and happiness. But when I was growing up, I was raised very Christian and I was raised with this idea of unconditional love and I had two really amazing great parents. So I was a bit sheltered, had this Disney view of love. I was like, love is this this beautiful thing. And then I got into the real world when I grew up and I realized that whoa, whoa, whoa, love is not always a Disney movie. In fact, there's a polarity to love that's almost a double-edged sword because there's the sex drive, right? There's the romantic love drive, there's the attachment, there's social connection, familial bonds, and of every facet of love, there's the benefits and the risks, and there's the sort of upside and the downside. So like the upside of sex drive is we have pleasure, we have desire. The downside of the sex drive is like, you know, if you experience sexual trauma, or let's say you go through a menop pause and you no longer have estrogen, right? You may have a tank tank sex drive or with romantic love, you get this beautiful addictive experience, right? You're like, high on life. And a lot of people get engaged while they're in romantic love. But romantic love is like a powerful high. And the loss of romantic love, right, can like a bad breakup, can deeply affect your health and it can cause depression, can cause literal, it can be a form of traumatic experience for people to go through. And then stalking and harassment can result from love. Dorestic abuse, believe it or not, can result from falling in love with somebody who's an abusive partner. And then there's attachment, right? So attachment is like so important for longevity because when we have healthy attachment, healthy secure attachment, it creates a safe haven for us to return to. It creates such a deep bond that we can better raise children. It creates familial bonds, which can enable us to have better longevity. But if you get divorced, you get really deep pain pain. A lot of people go through a real pain with divorce. It's considered an adverse childhood experience. It's considered one of the most stressful things a person can experience and go through. Feminable bonds are important because literally they're tied to longevity. So if you lose a parent, but you have siblings, you still have connectivity. You still have a family that can take care of you. But a lot of people have broken families. a lot of people have families that, let's say they had a parent that got divorced. So there may be co-parenting and raising children in two different households, which can cause stress. But divorce and even the death of a partner can cause really, or death of a parent can cause severe grief. And I've seen people go through serious health challenges after they lost a parent.

And then there's social bonds, right?

Which I'm like highly, highly encouraging people to create deep social networks of lots of friends. Because having lots of friends can make you feel safe in different cities and you travel and visit. It can make you feel supported when let's say maybe you're having a family conflict, which one of my friends came to me for last week. And but the downside of social bonding is that if you make a mistake in your

friend group, like one of my friends did to me for last week. But the downside of social bonding is that if you make a mistake in your friend group, like one of my friends did, you can become ostracized. And so love is powerful, right? Because when it's good, it makes our life enriched, it makes our life heavenly and happy, and filled with more information, more resources, more sexuality, more comfort, more safety, more trust, and more love, more protection. And even feeling like someone will take care of you and protect you if you're being attacked. Like I had someone try to extort me once. And I had my family pull out their lawyers and I had so many friends, you know, pull out their connections. And I was able to like move through that situation with grace because I had so much support. But not everybody has that, right? So like to me love should be taught in schools. Love should be educated for our education. And yet we're mostly flying blind through life because love is not taught to us. We're kind of taught, I mean, I was taught about love through my religion growing up, but I really feel like if we all understood the power of love and the power of loss of love on our mental health and our physical health, we would actually thrive. We would thrive more because we'd be equipped with the knowledge we would need to survive in this crazy chaotic world. But as I think we've all noticed that like, you know, we've went through this major social experiment of socialization during the pandemic. And that was a really great example of how disconnection can cause serious diseases of despair. We have more, more suicidality, more homicides. And I think isolation has done a lot of damage to our society. And we really need to re-examine social connectivity in the context of medicine and psychology if we want to transform the health of our country. Holy fuck. Dude, holy fuck. Right? You just blew my mind. I've never heard of love being dissected the way you just did and put so beautiful words to it. And it explains everything. It explains everything. The thing that you have said before that I heard that was so profound coming with the word with love is the loneliness piece because when you're looking for love, when you're searching for love, when you have love, you've just laid out all these ways that can really impact you. And now I think the opposite, right, if you're feeling lonely, what do you do? How that knock on effect of how you can spiral and how it really impacts your health. The reason why this is so important girl is the constant denominator that every time someone recognizes me, they say, I've saved their lives because of relationship episodes. All the episodes that I've done on here about rel, I'm like, oh, they must be talking about something. And it always goes back to relationships. Yes. All the episodes that I've done on here about I'm like, oh, they must be talking about something and it always goes back to relationships. Yeah. There's a reason. But I didn't expect it to be the thing that people said, I've saved their lives over. So when I heard you and when I heard your connection between love and the severe impact of how we feel and then how long we live was so mind blowing that I would love for you to break down the word loneliness. What that actually means. Because I'm in the place right now that people are listening, they're looking for a solution. I know. And I never want to be like, take this pill, right? I've suffered from health issues. The last thing you do is just take a pill, but the exploration of what you're saying is so powerful.

Yeah, let's talk about loneliness. Okay, so loneliness we evolved because in primitive times, it would have been unsafe for you to be at the outskirts of your community, because you would be easily attacked by neighboring tribes, easily attacked by animals, like people who lived on the savannah in tribes. So like if you are on the outskirts, you are at risk.

So we literally evolved this as a pain signal.

It's like a hunger or a pain signal.

And it's like, it's supposed to send you... Like people lived on the savanna in tribe. So like if you are on the outskirts, you were at risk So we literally evolved this as a pain signal

It's like a hunger or a pain signal and it's like supposed to send you and reconnect you to those you love But what happens if people don't have a tribe? Now this is the issue, right now you're alone now you're having this painful experience of feeling alone and you're not connected you're disconnected. And like, if you think about the body, like, you can't take an organ

out of the body for very long. If it's not connected, it won't survive. It needs flow and needs energy. It needs to feel connected and plugged in. Similar to like, you know, if you cut the power of a house, the freezer's going to melt. Like stuff's going to break, right? So like, we need this, we literally, when we're plugged in to a community, there's energy flow. There's shared information, there's shared resources, there's shared support. I've had friends that have taken off the ledge of suicide. And they were like, you, because you were there for me, I'm still here today. Like that is real life, you know? And I, I've really valued building community over like the last, you know, 20 years of my life. But really in the last 10 years in particular, when I moved out of my hometown and I moved to the Bay Area and I like built a whole network of new friends. I chose the Bay Area because I had a small community there from Burning Man. I'd gone to Burning Man with one friend and I left with 50. And that was really special. I mean, like Burning Man is a really special because you really make deep bonds with people. One of the most interesting things is if you meet people

in a context that feels slightly

dangerous, which is actually Burning Man feels kind of like you're exposed to the elements,

it feels dangerous, it's not dangerous, but it's not dangerous unless you do stupid things.

But generally speaking, Burning Man's pretty safe. But it feels because you're exposed to the elements,

there's like this weird element of uncertainty and danger. So you get these deeper social bonds.

It's really interesting. And what I find really fascinating is like, you know, if you have one friend, you can have 10 friends. And so I had, especially if you make friends with like the one friend who's social, you can ask them, Hey, will you introduce me to more people? I could use more help making friends. Like, that's one of my biggest hacks to making friends, especially if you're in a new city.

Like, meet a few people and then ask me to more people. I could use more help making friends. Like, that's one of my biggest hacks to making friends, especially if you're in a new city.

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