Vivek Murthy
I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.Collection: Jealousy
If you use that time where you're alone in ways that bring you joy and peace, then that solitude can have a really positive effect on your life.Collection: Alone
We know that chronic loneliness has consequences. It certainly depresses our mood. And in terms of our health, people who struggle with loneliness also have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Loneliness is also associated with a shorter lifespan.Collection: Health
Science tells us more and more now that there is a strong connection between emotional well-being and health outcomes, and that you can proactively cultivate emotional well-being through relatively simple practices like sleep, social connection and meditation.Collection: Science
Empathy has the power to bring together people who would otherwise never meet. It has the power to teach us and to reach us in moments of isolation when we think nobody understands.Collection: Power
Loneliness is different than isolation and solitude. Loneliness is a subjective feeling where the connections we need are greater than the connections we have. In the gap, we experience loneliness. It's distinct from the objective state of isolation, which is determined by the number of people around you.Collection: Experience
I think of emotional well-being as a resource within each of us that allows us to do more and to perform better. That doesn't mean just the absence of mental illness. It's the presence of positive emotions that allows us to be resilient in the face of adversity.Collection: Positive
The amount of sleep you get has an impact, not just on how you feel the next day, but it has an impact on your long-term health as well.Collection: Health
If you're very introverted, you prefer to spend much of your time alone, and when you do connect, you'd rather get together with one or two close friends than face a crowd.Collection: Alone
Empathy is choosing to see ourselves in another despite our differences. It's recognizing that the same humanity - the same desire for meaning, fulfillment and security - exists in each of us, even if it's expressed uniquely.
While loneliness has the potential to kill, connection has even more potential to heal.
Emotional well-being is more than the absence of a mental illness. It's that resource within each of us which allows us to reach ever closer to our full potential, and which also enables us to be resilient in the face of adversity.
Giving and receiving kindness are easy ways to feel good and to help others feel good too. People, organizations, and societies thrive when they are grounded in a culture of kindness.
Unlike many other illnesses, what I find profoundly empowering about addressing loneliness is that the ultimate solution to loneliness lies in each of us. We can be the medicine that each other needs. We can be the solution other people crave. We are all doctors and we are all healers.
It turns out that our ability to connect with other people is driven by our ability to connect deeply with ourselves. And that can be just a few minutes sitting on your porch feeling the breeze against your face. That can be a few moments spent in meditation or in prayer or remembering three things you're grateful for.
Part of the reason people don't talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.
Loneliness can become a downward spiral.
We have to recognize that we can help increase happiness of other people by reaching out, and building connections. People have done that for me in my life. There have been many times that my family and friends have reached out to help support me and contributed to my emotional wellbeing, and ultimately to my health.
Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain and it's one that we have to treat the way we would any other chronic illness: with skill, with compassion and with urgency.
Kindness is more than a virtue. It is a source of strength.
As prevalent as loneliness is, many people don't recognize that people that they know may very well be suffering from loneliness. It's important for many reasons, one of which is that it has a profound impact on health.
I want to work with faith-based leaders to address the negative attitudes that are still too often associated with mental illness, attitudes that hold people back from getting the help that they need.
We can't underestimate the power that we have as individuals to provide the support that people need to provide that transition from a place of pain to a place of possibility.
In the short term if I feel loneliness, it's like any other biological signals. It's like hunger or thirst. It's alerting me that something that's critical for my survival is missing.
I do not intend to use the Surgeon General's Office as a bully pulpit for gun control.
We forget some of the oldest medicines we have are love and compassion, and they can be deployed by everyone.
Well, the responsibility of the surgeon general is to make sure that the public has access to science and access to it in a way that is understandable and that is applicable to their everyday lives.
I am a big basketball fan. I have been watching basketball ever since I was a young boy.
I firmly believe that everybody in America needs a safe place to walk or to wheelchair roll.
My father grew up quite poor actually in a small farming village in South India. His grandfather was a farmer, his father was a farmer, and he was expected to be a farmer as well - his life took a different path.
When I began my tenure as surgeon general, I did not intend to focus on emotional well-being.
When I was training in medicine for example, there was a culture in medicine that strong people didn't need sleep, that the less you slept, the more you just powered through a tough call not on no sleep, the stronger you were. That is not helpful to have a culture that supports healthy practices like that.
One of the things that happens in our regular lives is that when we're in moments of pain or feeling alone, we may hesitate to reach out to others because we may think - they're not going through the same experiences I am.
I have come to believe that America is a promise we have made to one another.
I grew up in Miami, Florida and the Miami Heat were my favourite team growing up. In fact, the franchise started when I was here in high school, I believe. My favourite player, growing up at that time on the Miami Heat, was Rony Seikaly but in the years since, Dwyane Wade, also an icon for the Miami Heat, has become my favourite player.
What defines loneliness is our internal comfort level.
I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn't expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.
I'm calling for a cultural change in how we think about addiction. For far too long people have thought about addiction as a character flaw or a moral failing.
When you help someone else, not only do they benefit, but you reaffirm to yourself that you have something of value to give them, and you help to strengthen and nurture a bond with an individual that you're helping.
Climate change poses a serious, immediate and global threat to health.
I think that if we want to create a healthier country, we need to empower more people to make changes in their lives. But we also have to empower them to help change their environment.
We live in a society where individual effort and progress is valued, and that's absolutely correct and is as it should be. But we also are interdependent creatures. We can't succeed solely on our own.
When it comes to creating emotional wellbeing, we are only going to achieve this, I believe, if we help each other in that effort. Part of that is reaching out and building social connections in people who may not always have the social connections or the support that they need.
We don't just want to eradicate illness. We want people to achieve their full potential.
We can work on sharpening our prescribing practices, working with clinicians to ensure we're treating pain safely and effectively.
It turns out the most powerful way we can turn the tide on chronic disease is something we have been doing for millennia: That is walking.
For far too many people, the stigma around addiction prevents them from stepping forward for help.
Gun violence is a problem that this country should be addressing.
Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.
In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it's important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.