Addressing Our Urgency Epidemic
Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, the current United States Surgeon General, rocked the healthcare community this year with an advisory entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. In this 70 page report, countless health experts across the U.S. warn us of the repercussions of growing social disconnection. The report states that “loneliness and social isolation increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29%, respectively,” (p. 8). The report makes a compelling case for companionship as a non-negotiable component to maintain our total health [1].
In sum: as a society, we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been. And the loneliness is making us sick.
At this point in my journey to become a licensed therapist, I’ve spent over 1500 hours with people seeking healing from relational pain. I wholeheartedly believe in the ability of healthy human connection to improve our overall quality of life. When we nurture relationships we can rely on, we have a greater chance at happiness. When we avoid fostering relational connection, we face near-certain misery. By highlighting the negative effects of loneliness Dr. Murthy is turning our collective attention not only towards a new epidemic, but to a new way of conceptualizing what illness really means.
Many of us still think of the word “epidemic” solely in terms of pathology: a sickness in the body or mind. But medical research is shifting towards a new understanding of illness with less interest in pathologizing symptoms. Illness can also be viewed as “a system the body puts in place to find again its lost balance” [2]. Fever, for example, is a system introduced by the body to combat viruses. And while I’ve yet to meet a person who enjoys the experience of having a fever, fevers offer a critically useful function for our immune system. They raise our internal body temperature to a degree beyond what a foreign virus could survive. Without a fever, viruses thrive.
Dr. Murthy’s announcement started turning my wheels about other societal problems we could address more fully if they were re-cast as an illness. If I had the chance to shine an enormous spotlight on any social woe in hopes of reigniting a conversation about its impact, I’d choose urgency.
Urgency is defined by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as “the quality of needing to be dealt with or handled immediately”.
When I use the term urgency, I’m referring to common cultural narratives idolizing a hustle-and-grind, more-is-more, work-hard play-hard, sleep-when-you’re-dead mentality. This chronic combination of stress, speed, and anxiety exploits our immune systems in order to produce extraordinary achievement. Sometimes urgency is an appropriate response to crisis, particularly when we look through the lens of illness, or “a system the body puts in place” to find equilibrium. But urgency is only right in certain situations for very brief periods of time. If we consistently operate from an urgent, “something needs to happen NOW” state of being, we risk jeopardizing our long-term health.
My favorite metaphor for the unreasonable nature of urgency comes from directly from my commuter experience. In Los Angeles, we take the top spots on lists entitled “Worst Places to Drive in the US”. Forget the United States-L.A. traffic on a Friday afternoon is some of the worst in the world.
So here’s a thought exercise: let’s pretend you’re jumping into your car and entering a gridlocked freeway at the end of the workday. As soon as get onto the freeway, you receive a text message from a loved one explaining there’s been an emergency and they need you home as soon as possible. As your own anxiety rises, would it make sense to accelerate your car’s engine to 80 miles per hour on the highway when the rest of the traffic is standing still?
No, of course it doesn’t. Accelerating beyond the reasonable limit would cause major damage to your car and to yourself. No matter how severe the emergency may be, the only safe way to get there requires accommodating to a slower traffic pattern.
In other words, you must slow down in order to survive.
Urgency, however, encourages us to do the opposite. Drunk on adrenaline, the importance we place on dealing with issues as quickly as possible blinds us to reality and demands a constant state of hyper-vigilance from our nervous systems. On this metaphorical highway, urgency is the passenger screaming “Ignore the traffic! Go ahead and crash!” When we’re overcome with the need to be fast, we lose grasp on a long-term perspective and rely on the most expedient measures available. Urgency thrives on stress hormones responsible for accelerating heart rates, increasing blood pressure, and escalating muscle tension. Increased hypervigilance can also cause us to behave in abrupt and hurtful ways to people around us.
The panic demanded by an urgent mind also creates a blinding effect on our emotional world. Joy, contentment, grief, gratitude, awe, and love are useless to urgency. Why? Because these emotions are experienced to their fullest potential when we slow down. And urgency demands speed.
When we prioritize urgency, we lose our ability to savor life. Slow burns and scenic views are quickly discarded in favor of quick satisfaction. When faced with a problem, we assume disaster and catastrophize the worst-case scenario. Fear takes center stage at the root of this shift.
Our society is becoming increasingly addicted to speed: fast meals, fast content, fast production. A poisonous byproduct of our need to move quickly is a steep tax on our nervous systems, mental health, emotional capacity, and healthy relationships. Dr. Murthy’s health advisory identifies the social isolation creeping into every corner of our wellbeing. And yet I’m left wondering: can we learn to slow down long enough to experience social connection? Before we can aid our loneliness, we need to address the dis-ease of urgency. Only then can we reflect long enough to recognize how essential social connection is to our wellbeing.
References
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
[2] link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816293/#ref3
Citation: Rovesti M, Fioranelli M, Petrelli P, Satolli F, Roccia MG, Gianfaldoni S, Tchernev G, Wollina U, Lotti J, Feliciani C, Lotti T. Health and Illness in History, Science and Society. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2018 Jan 20;6(1):163-165. doi: 10.3889/oamjms.2018.056. PMID: 29484018; PMCID: PMC5816293.
[3] Definition of urgency from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
