Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We're here today with Simone Heng talking about loneliness.

Loneliness is an epidemic among teenagers today.

And it's only getting worse. Studies show that loneliness is a downward spiral.

As kids feel lonely they withdraw socially, which makes them feel more lonely. And they get caught in a negative feedback loop that can be really devastating.

How can we talk to our teens about this topic, and what can we do to help them pull themselves out of the downward spiral?

How can we raise teens who are equipped to foster meaningful connections with the people in their lives?

That's the topic of today's interview.

Simone Heng is a human connection specialist and a speaker on the topic. As a former broadcaster, she has worked for Virgin Radio Dubai, and HBO Asia, among others. And she's the author of the book, Let's Talk About Loneliness.

Simone, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Simone Heng: Thank you so much for having me.

Andy Earle: The book goes through a lot of your life and your relationship with your mom and your father's death and a lot of really deep content.

And I'm curious what inspired you to write it and how the book came to be.

Simone Heng: I wrote the book during the pandemic and it was meant to help aid my speaking career. I am a corporate speaker on the topic of human connection. And so the book was meant to be quite corporate, but when I started writing it, It was so deeply personal. So it's like part science. Part psychology, part personal story.

I think it's particularly relevant to your audience to Andy, because we know from the American and the Australian stats that Gen Z are the loneliest of all generations right now. So that's huge. There's stories about my mom. They're in a nursing home and to think that her generation has more connection or feels less lonely than people in their teens is mind blowing.

Andy Earle: Some really interesting stats in here about that. You talk about the Cigna loneliness index. It showed that Gen Z, those aged 18 to 22, were the loneliest of all generations. They registered 10 of the 11 feelings associated with loneliness.

Simone Heng: And that's pre pandemic. So you can only imagine what that's like now. So it's 2018.

Andy Earle: Something I found really interesting in here, you talk about how loneliness affects sleep and something called micro awakenings.

Simone Heng: Yeah. So this incredible woman, Dr. Louise Horkley, she uses micro awakenings as a marker for how lonely someone is. So that would be a symptom. Less than good sleep would be a symptom of loneliness. Things like outbursts, misreading of social cues. What a lot of the teens tell me on TikTok that they are socially anxious and so they self isolate. This is also part of it. You're socially anxious because your s ocial skills have atrophied because you isolate at home and you watch Netflix in your bedroom and you're on the computer and then this loops to then make you isolated and then not socially adept.

And then you don't want to go out and that's like the loneliness spiral that everyone in the loneliness field will tell you about. The lonely brain is not rational. It will continue to isolate you. So these are just some things to look out for. Which is hard, if you're the parent of teens, because they're having outbursts anyway because they're full of hormones. But, things to look out for are, and this is also difficult, because I think this is something that I remember saying as a teen, but this idea of no one understands me, you see this with lonely people a lot.

I would say, and I talk about this in the book, I would say who would want me at their dinner table? I'm the only 30 year old in the world with a father in the grave and a mother in a wheelchair. And it's all I can think about. Of course, people my age, they're getting engaged. Why would they want me at their dinner table? Of course, it's a fallacy, now that I'm a socially connected person, I look back at that and I use that as an excuse to flake on people, socially isolate, and that's absolutely not true.

Of course, there are people in the world that have been through far worse than me. And so these kinds of statements and things to look out for in your teenage child, knowing how bad loneliness is for that generation.

So if you could just imagine during the pandemic, that period of time when people are in young adolescence, they are learning--- do you remember at high school, Andy, where you're learning to assert your own identity? Juxtaposed with the identity of others. That's how you're working out how you're different, what your values are.

Now they were robbed of this for two and a half, three years. Okay. And the rest of us who grew up with an analog childhood, we had to just rework out our social muscles that atrophied. We just had to rework it out and then move back into that space of being . And we were rusty at the beginning and awkward, and then we got on with it.

But what if you had a digital childhood, you were raised by an iPad. You never had such ease with which to be curious, to ask questions. Your curiosity has been quenched by Google from the time you were a little kid. Any question you had, why would I ask that human? I have the better answer here, right?

So I think Gen Z are fascinating. I think teenagers now are fascinating and I think it's going to be more fascinating. But I think if I was a parent, I think it's so much responsibility on parents now to mediate technology so that their kids can be socially adept.

And I note that the Singaporean experience is different. We don't live in suburbs. So isolation is also to do with how our cities are planned, right? Singapore is this tiny island where, I want you to imagine, we've got no land to ourselves. We're completely compressed. So we can walk every day.

Even if we want to be antisocial, we're seeing other humans. There's no land. We're bumping into other humans, learning eye contact. We're learning acknowledgement. But where I grew up in Australia was very suburban, as a parts of the U. S. Cause I spend a lot of time speaking in the U. S. You could just stay in your bedroom and order Uber Eats and completely go for days without seeing another human. Our cities are not built for connection. But the Singapore government's doing a lot to enable that.

And I was just at a connection symposium at Harvard in October with all the people in my field. And there were a lot of panels about how could spaces be reinterpreted in the states so that young people would come across each other. And then I raised my hand and argued, but if they're putting their AirPods in while using these spaces, it's very little you can do to draw them out.

You know, On TikTok, they're calling this taking your AirPods out. They call it silent walking. Whereas for my generation, it's just walking, right? But it's this idea that you would remove these and therefore be open to serendipitous connection within these spaces.

Andy Earle: And also when you see someone and they have their headphones in or they're looking down at their phone they're telegraphing that they don't want you to talk to them.

So you're much less likely to try to initiate a conversation .

Simone Heng: It's what Vanessa van Edwards calls loser body language. It's actually the, if you took away the phone, it's the, loser is not a great term, but it's the body language of someone who is depressed actually, and wants to be left alone and isolated. So we are looking now at the phone as the extension of a human, right? It's influencing our vibration, our way of being in the world. And it has for quite a while.

Let's talk about possible ways to do it better because with AI and other forms of really advanced technology, it's a huge concern. If AI is going to be taking a lot of jobs, then maybe the next generation's only chance of thriving is their human connection skills.

Anything to do with our humanity moves higher up the value chain. And I write about that in the book. So for the future of just survival and employment for that generation, being a great human connector is something that needs to be looked at.

Andy Earle: Something really interesting that you covered in the book is about the different kinds of connections, five different kinds of connections that we all need to feel not alone.

Where does this come from? Because I love this. You got micro connections. And self connection.

Simone Heng: That's the topic of my next book, actually, Andy. Which is a great one because it's exactly what we're talking about in the beginning of this podcast. How do I know if I'm feeling agitated at a friend?

For example, one of the symptoms of loneliness is you hold your friends to a higher standard than is reasonable. So for example, your friend says, Andy, we're going for dinner and then cancels because they have food poisoning, stomach flu. And Andy says that's a terrible friend who always lets me down.

And all my friends let me down and I'm canceling Andy. We're never meeting again. I'm cutting him off. And that's what the lonely brain will tell you to do, to hold your friends to a high standard than is necessary. But how does an individual know that's happening because they're lonely or because their friend actually has let them down.

And the only way you can tell the difference between what's happening is to have a connection with yourself, to really understand and know yourself. So that's the next arc of work.

But the five types. These were the five types that came up again and again. Three of the types are from a loneliness scale that Bruce A Austin at Rochester University of Technology came up with decades ago. Bruce A Austin talks about 3 forms of loneliness: relational loneliness, this is feeling that you don't belong to a social fabric. So there's no mutual care, no mutual dependency. Collective loneliness. This is, you don't have a group of people who are like minded that you have the same interests. And then intimate loneliness. So you don't have those five best buddies that you can talk to in a crisis. And actually study shows that one in three or one in four Americans feels that they don't have someone to call on when they want to be vulnerable, that they really need to be.

So, that's really concerning because the intimate connections are very important. And this is backed up by the work of evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who talks about your five intimates are most likely the five people you cohabitate with. But for people like me who are single and live alone, we cultivate these in close family and friends.

So different people name them different things in different studies, but they're all the same. Susan Pinker talks about those intimates are people you can call on in an existential crisis. You can call on for a loan if you need money, you can ask them in an emergency to drop you at the hospital.

If you really look at your friends, that is about five. That level of comfort. It's not a huge number of people that you would call for money in a crisis.

Self connection is for me the most important because you can't even make friends without self connection.

And then we move into relational, collective, and micro connections are something that everyone writes about and they call them different things. But I like micro connections because it really visibly says what it is. And we really missed those during the pandemic. These are small, positively polarized, seemingly banal moments of connection that we have during our day.

And in her book, Love 2.0, Barbara D. Fredrickson calls these small moments of love, because they actually release oxytocin, dopamine, those love hormones into us that we probably experience after sex, frankly, but we were getting them on just like a tiny scale.

Interestingly, the other day, I had a really negative micro connection. The converse can be true. There was a lady in a motorized buggy behind me and I was with my dog walking and she was coming right up to my heels, like when people drive and they're right up next to your bumper, and I was like, Oh my God, I'm just going to duck out of the way to let her pass.

But unfortunately, I ducked off the sidewalk at the exact place that she wanted to go off the sidewalk. And she started screaming and shouting at me and that I was in the way and this is where she wants to go. And I just said, why are you so angry? That set it off. But she was just a really cranky older woman, I think. But it was awful. It made me feel really bad. And so you could see how micro connections just by feeling how bad that made me feel, how important they actually are.

They're actually having an effect on our daily journey. And so if you have teenage kids, maybe ask them, could they practice silent walking for a bit? So that they can raise themselves to the eye contact and actually have those moments.

The eye contact is such a simple one. To learn what it is to be human, to get that oxytocin dopamine from eye contact, your child doesn't even have to say anything if they could just look up and nod and acknowledge. Because there's this idea when we were evolving as early humans and tribes, our worst fear would be to be cast out of the tribe, to be forgotten, left behind.

That's still wired into us. It's a terrible, worst fear. So when we look and give eye contact, we're just acknowledging, we're going, Oh, you're here. I see you. You're still part of the tribe. You're not left behind. And for a lonely person, that could be a life saving interaction. Imagine how many lonely people, particularly we're seeing in Japan and Korea, Korean government is paying young people to leave the house.

To leave the house. So you imagine if you leave the house and you're lonely and very isolated, the smile from the barista is like the one interaction that you get. You could be that for somebody else. And these things used to sound cheesy. We're now in a global loneliness epidemic. This is no longer cheesiness.

This is survival, right?

Andy Earle: Really hit me like those first days when we could first take our masks off after spending so long in COVID, like being forced to have our masks on. And then when we finally could take them off, It was like all of a sudden now you could smile at people and you could see their facial expressions so much better and just like the person, at the, in the checkout line at the supermarket or the, waiter that you're like, just talking to and having those like little conversations.

I don't know why, but it felt so much better. It felt like so much more connection. And it really struck me when you're talking about micro connections in the book, those little kind of interactions that we. Take for granted or something, but they're so vital to just our functioning, our wellbeing.

Simone Heng: Americans, you do this really well. Here in Asia, we're largely, and I'm making gross generalization, and I'm a bit of an outlier because I'm mixed and I was raised all over the world, but generally East Asians culturally, more introverted.

And so you don't have the banter so much. But I think Aussies do it quite well too, you have this bit of banter with people. I do hear a little bit of taxi drivers and things like that, but there are certain suburbs in Singapore where the eye contact and the acknowledgement would be like, people feel it's a bit weird.

Andy Earle: You mentioned earlier something that was just one of the most fascinating things I found in the book, which was this idea that the lonelier we get, the more our brain actually starts to get overly critical of the people who are trying to be our friend.

What's going on there? Why do we do that?

Simone Heng: Yeah. So the incredible Dr. James Cohn, who I interviewed on my YouTube, he's that, he's the guy that advised on this, but it's backed up by all of the big people in the loneliness field. It's so scary. And this is why self connection is the next thing in the book.

So the lonely brain spirals. And when people are lonely, you hold people to crazy, unreasonable standards, like we talked about before. You become really critical of others. Because then it's a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy to allow you to continue to self isolate.

And the reason that it happens is your body's trying to preserve its bioenergetic resources. So it's trying not to expel more energy. So similar, to depression, there's this kind of retreating that happens. And obviously when we retreat, you need less of your cognitive abilities because you're not interacting with people.

So then loneliness makes you dumber essentially, because you don't need to mentally pivot, to interact with people, you're just by yourself. And so you get dumber just at the point where you should not get dumber. So where you need problem solving, abstract thinking, because let's talk about when for survival reasons, we would have been lonely.

We're alone on the Savannah. So we need to solve problems to survive, to escape saber tooth tigers, to find our tribe again. But ironically, it makes us even more lonely and destroys that cognitive abilities because we're alone. So it's the most scary thing for me when I'm on Tik TOK and I'm trying to tell these kids, like you're not necessarily having social anxiety, you might just be lonely. But some of the symptoms are overlapping and it's telling you that, oh, I feel nervous around other people because your cognitive abilities for socializing have not had to been used for a while because you've been in the room playing video games for a month and now you're anxious.

Of course you are to accept an invitation. Because you haven't been practicing those things. And you don't feel as smart, you don't feel as agile. This definitely happened to me after cleaning my mom's hoard, which I talk about in the book. Six months of complete isolation, cleaning my mom's house after she'd been put into the nursing home facility and completely isolated from anyone my own age.

I'd never felt so dumb as I did at that time in my life. I wasn't fast. And also loneliness makes us deeply unhappy.

So a lot of your bio energetic resources are going to just sustaining you. They're not there to give cream on top. They're just trying to sustain you. So it's a really scary topic, but deeply human, universal commonality that we have. We all have experienced what it feels like to be lonely once in a while.

And what's really scary as well is it's not just what it does to your brain. It's what it does to the rest of your body too. Chronic loneliness is where a fight or flight response is happening ongoing in the body that saying it starts as go out and connect, go out and connect. And then soon it becomes nobody likes me. I want to stay at home. I don't have the energy. It reduces that energy. So I don't have the energy to socialize. I want to self isolate.

And when we've got that alarm going off chronically, it reduces the cortisol and the stress hormones reduce our immunity. So they make us prone to lots of life shortening diseases, which is the link between why loneliness is more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and alcohol use disorder or obesity.

And that just all comes from, we were on the tribe on the Savannah together. You were cast out of the tribe for something you did, Andy, and then your body goes, Ooh, fight or flight. Sabertooth tiger running after me, no one else in the tribe to help save me, or I don't have food, or I'm lost, and I have nobody else to help me.

Dr. James Coan's work shows us that when we're with a high quality, trusted friend, our brain counts their biogenic resources, so their energy, their ability to survive, their resources, as part of our own. It literally gives us a perception of more support. I am going to survive longer in a two or a three or in a 10 safety in numbers that I will as a one.

So everything you feel emotionally with loneliness, if you're watching this is backed up by science. You're not alone. It's all linked. And there's nothing to be ashamed of. Absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Andy Earle: And that I think ties back to what we were talking about earlier with the micro awakenings, because you allude to this in the book that it's like it back on the Savannah when we're in a group of 10 people or tribe, then I can sleep comfortably because I know, Hey, someone else's is up standing watch right now. And so I can totally relax and I can sleep. Whereas if I'm cast out of the tribe and I'm on my own I'm waking up all the time. Oh my gosh. What was that?

Simone Heng: Is there a tiger in the tree looking over me while I sleep, or am I sleeping in the tree and scared to fall out of the tree? So I'm, waking up.

It's so Amazing that we live in such a technological world. Like I'm with you, Andy, on the other side of the world, we are connecting. But yet down to our wiring at a cellular level, we're meant to be doing connection in person, like that, those rules for connections still live in us from how we evolved.

So it's all about actually on a larger spiritual scale, calling back to like our baseline as humans. And this is why I have all these social media rules for myself. I'm very active online. But I have such set social media rules that help me retain my humanity.

I'll give you an example. This might be helpful for parents with kids. On the weekend, I got invited to two Christmas parties and they were beautiful and my friends were there and there was amazing food. But I refuse to interrupt the flow of conversation to make us pose for photos. I refuse. I spent my 20s doing that.

I can't even remember where my time in Dubai when I lived there where did it go? I was so busy capturing it. I don't remember being in it. I remember being in constant fight or flight. Because this kind of superficial connection that you photograph yourself with, it doesn't satiate, doesn't make you feel less lonely.

And so now I'll take a photo of the food. Like a plate of pretty food while it's a break. And then maybe a day later I'll put the food in my Insta story, I went to a beautiful Christmas party on the weekend and I'll tag the person in it, but I will never stop the flow of conversation. When I'm with my nieces and my nephews and my family, I will not stop our connection and impede that with photo taking. That's one of my rules.

Only if it's a very special occasion, like it's Christmas day or a birthday and we have something to commemorate and we need to have a family photo. Yeah, I get it, but not everyday stuff. I also post and ghost. You're not meant to do that. All the social media coaches for your business will be like, no, you have to post and then you have to interact.

And then you have to like other people's photos. I do it if I'm not around other people. And as I'm posting, I'm seeing other people's posts, I will interact. But I'm a total non Scroller. I just don't scroll. And that is, I think, a superpower in the era we live in.

I'm a non scroller because the comparisonitis that comes with scrolling takes us away from the beautiful everyday moments. Like you could be out trying to interact with those micro connections, but your mind could be running because you saw something of your ex boyfriend that triggered you or whatever on the internet.

Then you're not present for that micro connection. You completely miss it. So I have a rule that I don't scroll. I don't know how you impart that for children or for teens. But if you can start to have it early, Ooh, it's going to change their life.

Andy Earle: Simone, thank you so much for coming on the show today and speaking with us about your book and about loneliness.

It's been really a lively conversation covered so many topics and I think some really valuable takeaways for parents.

Simone Heng: Thank you so much. This is really a great read for late teens. And also it's available all over the U. S. at all your, your Barnes and Nobles and all your stores.

And if you can't find it at the one near you it's on Amazon.

Andy Earle: The book is called Let's Talk About Loneliness. Where else can we also send people to follow you to know what you're working on next maybe?

Simone Heng: Yeah, absolutely. I'm very active on LinkedIn and also on Instagram. So just search Simone Heng and it will come up. And if your kid is on TikTok, I'm also there and I give away human connection tips. So if they're interested.

Andy Earle: Perfect. Awesome. Thanks again. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Simone Heng: Thank you so much, Andy.

Andy Earle: We're here with Simone Heng talking about loneliness and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Simone Heng: And it was such a learning lesson for me at 19 years old. As a teen to look out and see all these people that my father had connected with and entranced with his human connection skills, while essentially pinned, behind the shop counter.

Andy Earle: I think as a parent, it's really hard to admit that we did something wrong or made a mistake. And it takes so much humility to be able to go back to our kids and say, I didn't handle that very well. I'm sorry.

Simone Heng: I want to start with a young kid that I saw at a Christmas party on the weekend.

It was a very adult party. And a family had brought the only teenage child to this party. And he just skulked off into the corner and opened his phone and sat on his own, watching stuff on the phone. And I just sat wondering how long it would take for him to be curious, to ask me something. And I thought, how could a parent foster that curiosity? Cause he never did.

Simone Heng: He never looked up from the phone. But what if they would just stand there? And listen, like my dad did, they could learn something. Curious, right? You're inviting that in.

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Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.