How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us
Episode 456 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Julia Hotz
How can we shift our mindset from what’s the matter with us to what matters to us?
In our modern world, where an already growing trend of isolation escalated in 2020 with the pandemic and digital conglomerates pursue a singular goal of coaxing us to spend more time on our phones, how do we fend off the feelings—and the medical symptoms—that plague such an outsized percentage of our species?
Journalist Julia Hotz’s new book, The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging, explores the phenomenon of social prescribing, a medicine-adjacent approach being adopted in the UK and across the globe that has the potential to alleviate not only the health burdens many of us face in our daily lives but also the pressures on the medical system and the heavy costs of medical care.
What is “social prescribing”?
Julia is a solutions journalist, which means she reports evidence-backed solutions just as rigorously as she does evidence-backed problems. When she, like so many of us, noticed the glaring proof of how poorly humans are collectively doing on the mental health and wellbeing front, particularly since 2020, Julia determined that “it can’t be a coincidence that we have cascading, overlapping epidemics of loneliness, depression, stress, anxiety, and ADHD.” Her research led her to discover social prescribing, a solution that originated in the UK.
Though it might sound a bit cringey, like just like my affinity for “mandated fun,” social prescribing goes beyond having a doctor scrawl you a prescription for one friend, taken with coffee twice a week. The concept is based on the concept that a lot of our health is socially determined—we can fulfill our basic health needs, but we still have psychological needs to account for, like finding meaning, coping with stress, and maintaining social support.
“Social prescribing is about addressing those very real social determinants that do affect our health, through non-medical community activities and resources,” Julia explains. Resources like the five ingredients baked into the subtitle of her book: movement, nature, art, service, and belonging. It’s about “shifting from what’s the matter with you to what matters to you.”
The origins of social prescribing
What comes across at first glance as metaphorical is literally being practiced by doctors in the UK’s medical system, the National Health Service (NHS). A supplement to traditional medicine and therapy, social prescriptions include scripts for joining a cycling club, or taking a pottery class or, in the case of one story featured in The Connection Cure, swimming in the sea. Many of these prescriptions are specially designed for groups diagnosed with conditions like depression and PTSD, but they aren’t talk therapy washed down with food. They are exactly what they sound like: social activities.
Julia reminds us that “the five ingredients in this very long [book] title…these are things that we used to revolve our whole lives around.” Being out in the sunshine, helping around the community—they were non-negotiables on which our ways of life relied until automation and single-family homes and office work started to supersede them. But there is no question that these ingredients were and are good for us, just like few people will argue that what replaced them—phones, computers, eight-hour desk jobs—are much less beneficial. The latter have pushed our support systems and active lifestyles to the side in lieu of actions that breed isolation, loneliness, and mental and physical pain.
Getting back to what matters
The social prescribing movement and Julia’s book aren’t advocating for eschewing modern medicine and replacing it with nature walks and throwing clay. Likewise, they aren’t suggesting everyone on antidepressants flush their pills and go for a bike ride. What they are doing is calling into question the modern belief that pharmaceuticals and medical care are the cure for all that ails us. After all, Eastern and Indigenous cultures and even our go-to diagnostic manual for mental health conditions once described mental illness as “a reaction to a stressful event.”
If doctor-prescribed social engagement can make inroads where medication alone has not or even promote the reduced use of pharmaceuticals for some people, it undoubtedly deserves a place in our future medical system. If, as the UK’s initiatives have proven, it can also take the strain off the dwindling medical staff population and entice insurance companies to cover such prescriptions in the interest of saving money in the long term—all the better.
Listen to this episode to hear even more about Julia’s research and The Connection Cure, including some touching stories from the people she interviewed, and discover even more about how social prescribing might just be able to transform the U.S. medical system.
Then, head over to our Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your thoughts on social prescribing. Which of Julia’s five ingredients have you incorporated into your life, and how has that all-natural, back-to-basic addition impacted your well-being?
Related Links from today’s episode:
Episode 172, The Healing Power of Nature
Episode 440 - The Problem with Self-Help
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 456. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and today I am talking all about the connection cure.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
I'm sitting down with author Julia Hotz, a journalist who took an incredible approach to understanding and explaining the prescriptive power of movement, nature, art, service, and belonging in her forthcoming book, The Connection Cure, which is out in just one week. Julia is a solutions focused journalist based in New York, and her stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Time, and more. She helps other journalists report on the big new ideas changing the world at the Solutions Journalism Network, and The Connection Cure is her first book. She took a very journalistic approach to understanding the impacts of our environment and our social isolation that's been on the rise across the globe for years and particularly exacerbated by 2020 in the Covid-19 pandemic.
You know, as someone who studies burnout and gender equity in the workplace and also moved from a major east coast city like Washington, DC to Denver myself for the lifestyle changes that came with that, I've long been interested in the connection between our environment and our access to nature and our mental well being. Julia takes it to a whole other level in talking about the connectivity aspect, the social aspect of our health and well being as well.
I'm actually reminded of a related episode that I recorded way back in November of 2019 called The Healing Power of Nature, with author Florence Williams, who I will link to in today's show notes as well. But this conversation takes everything Florence wrote about in her book, The Nature Fix, and just takes it to a whole different level when it comes to the social aspects, the social determinants as they're known of health. So without further ado, let's jump right into my conversation with Julia. Julia, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
JULIA: Thank you so much, Emilie. So great to be here.
EMILIE: I'm really excited to dive into this book, The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power Of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, And Belonging, which comes out in just about a week's time. First of all, congratulations from one author to another, I know how much blood, sweat, and tears goes into something like this. How do you feel?
JULIA: Thank you so much. Yes, you get it. You know, and I love, it's been great to follow you in your many, many career journeys, and I feel awesome. It's so exciting when, as you say, the years of work and travel and research and passion you put into it gets to be shared to the public. So, I'm so happy to be here.
EMILIE: I'm so excited. And unlike some of the recent books I've read in this space around, like, wellness and belonging that were written from more of like a public health standpoint or a medical standpoint, you really bring a journalistic approach to this topic. So help my listeners understand, like, how you, of all people, came to this topic of wellness wellbeing and what's known as social prescribing, which we'll dive into further. But what called you to write this book?
JULIA: Yeah, that's a great question. I have a joke that, like, people will look at my lifestyle, and they'll be like, you wrote a health book? Like, full disclosure, I, like, wrote this book, you know, laying down on my bed like a seal. I was just telling you, I, like, guzzle cold brew. Like, my health habits are not the best. But I came to this topic as a journalist, and specifically as what I call a solutions journalist, which is a journalist who tries to rigorously report on evidence backed solutions the same way they'd report on problems.
I came to this as a person, in the pandemic, who was noticing that our collective health, mental health, and general well being was not doing so well. And specifically, you know, there were a lot of headlines about loneliness, which I come to this in the book later, spoiler alert, like, I think is something that I was deeply afraid of feeling as, you know, a woman who's just turned 31 is kind of, like, at this stage of life where things are changing.
EMILIE: And you went through a pretty big breakup right around that time, too, right?
JULIA: That's right. Yeah. All of these things, all of these environmental events. And, of course, like, the pandemic itself was, you know, sort of a s***storm for, for our collective mental health. So I was really curious at a systemic level, like, what is working to treat this? It can't be a coincidence, right, that we have cascading, overlapping epidemics of loneliness, depression, stress, anxiety, ADHD. And I came across this solution in the UK called social prescribing. And what that is when I say that sometimes people, like, flinch a little bit, because social prescribing kind of sounds like, forced friendship from your doctor.
EMILIE: Mandatory fun. Right?
[LAUGHTER]
JULIA: Right. And it's. It's really nothing like that really comes from this very old idea that a lot of our health is socially determined. Meaning, you know, we need, like, obvious things to get by, food, water, a job, a home. And we also have these psychological needs for meaning and ways to cope with our stress and people that we can call at 3 a.m. in a crisis.
So social prescribing is about addressing those very real social determinants that do affect our health through non-medical community activities and resources. And the tagline is shifting from, what's the matter with you to, what matters to you.
EMILIE: I love that. And I love that you come back to that time and again throughout the book, because. And it's fair to start by saying, look, I am searching for evidence based solutions as a journalist. And then you get to social prescribing, which does, I think, cause an eyebrow to raise. Even when I was reading the book, I was like, is she for real? Like, at first I literally thought, Julia, that you were speaking metaphorically. Like, let me give you a prescription for, you know, movement or time in nature, and you're not speaking in metaphors here. This is very much entrenched in the national health system in the UK, right?
So give us a little sense of where the origin of social prescribing comes from and how. We're not saying to, like, hop off your meds, folks. We're not saying to, like, go cold turkey on your antidepressants, right? But you're saying, like, in addition to a, and frankly, don't even get me started on big pharma and our capitalist medical like conundrum in the United States, which we will probably dive into. But it's like, how can we, especially through the medical community, integrate less pharmaceutical only solutions to our epidemics around mental health? Right? So what did that look like? How did it get started?
JULIA: That is such a great question. And yes, you're so right. I want to flag from the outset that this book and this movement is not about replacing medicine. It's not about replacing other forms of therapy. It's about this being another option on the healthcare menu, which, yes, to your point, like, literally gets prescribed in healthcare.
And someone hearing that might think, really, is my doctor gonna write me a prescription to go join a cycling group or go take an art class? And the answer is yes, for a few reasons. You know, number one, the five ingredients in this very long title, movement, nature, art, service, belonging, these are things that we used to revolve our whole lives around. Like, it was not an option to move your body. It was not an option to pay attention to nature. It was not an option to seek belonging and serve your community. We evolved to live in groups.
And the way social prescribing these five ingredients comes about, I think, is because, number one, like, scientifically, these five ingredients are good for us. And number two, because they come from a place of what we've replaced those five activities with is actually pretty harmful for us. You know, more of us are spending time alone, more of us are, report feeling stressed, more of us report feeling burnt out. More of us report having nobody on whom we can rely, sort of, you know, a lot of your work in the workplace, all kinds of conflicts.
So social prescribing, I think, is about acknowledging that these five things are good for us. The health consequences you're feeling are not necessarily just things going wrong in your body. It's coming from environment that you haven't evolved to live in. And, you know, the book goes in three parts. The first part is patient stories of people who've been prescribed fishing clubs and art classes and one woman, you know, working on a farm. These, these social prescriptions, because they were tailored to their specific illness and something that they found interesting, something that mattered to them.
And then the healthcare perspective is really about addressing a very real pressure on the system and an acknowledgement that not everything a doctor can prescribe right now is going to help a woman who's chronically stressed at work, is going to help somebody who is, you know, dealing with these social determinants. And, uh, because doctors are seeing, and therapists are seeing such a caseload of people who really don't need medical support, the statistic is something like, in the UK, one in five doctors appointments are made for purely social reasons. Well, there's a real incentive, especially in a public health care system, to reduce those pressures and direct those people to non-medical support in the community.
EMILIE: Well, what I find so interesting about the difference between, like, taking yourself fishing versus joining a fishing club that's specifically focused on helping folks with, like, PTSD, you know, a program that's informed with, like, trauma backed care providers and focuses not on unpacking that trauma, but rather just focuses on fishing. Right? You're not there to talk about your ADHD, you're there to fish. It's like that takes it a step further than the self help world.
And so I'm so glad you were just talking about, before we hit record here, my episode with Sharon Podobnik, The Problem With Self Help, which is, you know, what this sounds like to me, and we'll talk about the international differences here, is America's Individualism has us all on our phones, has us all, maybe if we're even doing this well, if we are investing in our wellness. You're up at 5 a.m. running over the Manhattan bridge. Like one of those people. People, right? Or you're like, maybe you're meditating. And it's like, that's really different than taking an art class together. That's really different than investing in your well being, forest bathing with others.
And so I want to give an example specifically around the service element, because that one really stood out to me. I don't know if it's because I think so much about women and overwork, and so those stories really resonated. Or if it's cause my mom's a nurse who I wish, like, had time, or made time, rather, for self care, meant to take care for herself more. But, you chronicled the pain experience of a woman named Akeela. And I wonder if you just give a sense of, like, her journey and her battle with chronic pain and how, counter intuitively, finding a job was the solution for her chronic pain. And that really took me aback. So I wonder if you'll just give our listeners here a preview of what that example was all about.
JULIA: Definitely. I love Akeela's story, and I think your listeners will too, because this is fundamentally a story about a woman who was so passionate about her work and was also so passionate about her role as a mother. And when you meet Akeela, you sense this right away. She gave me a hug. She's so caring in nature, and her story is one of sort of having all of her caretaking responsibilities start to take a physical toll on her. So Akeela was working in healthcare. She absolutely loved it. She loved the feeling of helping patients. She is a mother to two beautiful children. She took care of her mother and her mother in law at the same time. And one day she starts to feel some back pain. You know, Akeela's healthcare job was in the hospital. She's pushing these carts, she's lifting patients. She's on her feet all day. And then she comes home and she's continuing the caregiving. But it was a little bit complicated for her because she loved this. So she kept on trudging on through the pain until finally, it becomes unbearable. Like, she is having a hard time even getting out of bed.
So she goes to the doctor, and the doctor has a very logical solution, which is to rest. Like, get off your feet and rest. Take a week off from work. And Akeela was so bummed by this news. You know, she didn't want to stop working. Like, this was in her nature. It's what mattered to her. But at the same time, it was the doctor's orders.
So she listens to him and eventually, you know, she doesn't feel better. Like a week of rest actually made her feeling worse. So she tried to go back to the hospital but she was still in this debilitating pain. Her boss eventually sends her home and says, I see how much pain you're in. I can't have you working like this. And this absolutely crushed her because what could she do with that? So she does what we all do and we try to seek other solutions. She goes to another doctor. That other doctor tells her to rest. Eventually her loved ones are saying, Akeela, uh, you have to rest. You're never going to get better if you don't address this. But then she starts to become really angry at them and say, don't tell me what to do. I know what I'm doing. I don't want your pity.
So she starts to isolate and then through that isolation and that anger, she starts to develop some symptoms of depression. Right? She starts having these dark thoughts. She goes to a counselor. The counselor prescribes her antidepressants, starts her on talk therapy. These are things I want to caution that work for a lot of people. For Akeela, it didn't help her because it kept her thinking about her pain and her suffering and she just couldn't shake this feeling like there was something wrong with her. So fast forward, Akeela finally meets a different kind of health worker. It's this woman named Joanne. And Joanne is actually a link worker, which is this position where you're sort of an in between, between like a doctor and a nurse, like your mom and the community, who really has time to get to know a patient and understand what kind of non medical community support might be of interest to them. This position was funded as part of the UK's social prescribing movement.
So Joanne meets Akeela, says, Akeela, you know, I see you. There's nothing wrong with you. You had something that you loved that was taken away from you and that's got to feel so painful. All these warnings to rest, all of this feeling like, you know, you are the problem. That's not it. You just need a job. And so what does Joanne do? Joanne prescribes Akeela a job that didn't have to tax her back. It was actually a volunteering gig at this children's charity where Akeela would be the one answering the phone, talking to the parents of all these kids with complex medical needs, basically bringing her all the joy that she got from her caretaking job, but without the physical pressure.
And so I know this is a long story, but what happens to Akeela is she starts to feel better. I mean, this was the only thing that really helped her feel better, you know? Of course, these are not like miracle cases. It's not like she woke up three days later, her back pain was totally gone. No, it was still a part of her life.
But what we know about pain, and I love the psychologist, pain psychologist Rachel Zoffness, who talks about this, is the way that it is biopsychosocial. You know, nobody is in constant, debilitating pain. A hundred percent of the time, there are stressors that increase the pain and decrease the pain. She talks about it as turning the pain dial down. And so for Akeela, what turned the pain dial down for her was volunteering. And it's a really happy ending. Akeela, you know, came off her antidepressants, stopped therapy, reconnected with her loved ones, and is now working actually full time at, uh, this charity. They loved her so much that they gave her a job.
EMILIE: That's amazing. I feel like anyone who's ever been sick one day or stressed one day or just had a very bad mental health day and then finds some relief through the distraction of work, you know, can understand and relate to that experience. And yet, it really blew my mind because I believe it was in that chapter that you talked about, and this is such a millennial reference, so forgive me if this this doesn't resonate with everyone listening, but for my majority millennial audience who saw that Zoloft sad blob commercial, that commercial and a whole bunch of sort of medical narratives out there really had us believe that there is a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes depression.
And you kind of push back on that, right? And this is a narrative I've repeated many times before. And I'm not saying that anyone necessarily understands everyone's depression, but what is the science telling us around chemical interventions as compared to social interventions? Not that we're saying you have to choose, but that Zoloft commercial in particular was a little bit misleading, wasn't it?
JULIA: Definitely. And as a fellow millennial, I'm glad you can appreciate the experience of, you know, for me, that was the first time I learned about depression. And by the way, this is really interesting for me, you know, and your American listeners, like the United States and New Zealand, these are the only two countries in the world where that's legal, where it's legal for pharmaceuticals to directly advertise to their consumers in that way.
So this blew my mind. And of course, like, as an eight year old kid eating chips, watching this Zoloft sad blob, that's going to be how I understand depression. Why would I think otherwise? Well, I come to find out this was like such a jaw drop moment for me throughout the book, is that, that chemical imbalance theory has its origins in 1965, when researchers were trying to understand not depression, but how antidepressants work.
And antidepressants, the book talks about this, too. We're sort of an accidental invention. But even in that paper, that 1965 paper, the author says this is just a hypothesis. Clearly, there's something more complicated going on here. But because antidepressants seem to increase the presence of norepinephrine, serotonin, you know, these chemicals that are associated with improved mood, improved energy, well, maybe that's what depression is. Maybe depression is a deficiency of that.
And so I was like, yeah, that makes sense. But even I replayed that commercial as a 31 year old, and you can hear, you know how these pharmaceutical commercials are when they have, like, the very thing they say very quickly. You hear, even them say, we don't know what causes depression. And I'm like, what? You're showing me a very clear diagram here. Chemical A, Chemical B, there's an imbalance that feels dishonest. And so, sure enough, in 2022, Doctor Joanna Moncrieff published this really landmark paper that people have been sort of quiet. It's been quietly known for years that the chemical imbalance theory of depression is. There's no evidence behind it. And so Doctor Moncrieff publishes this landmark review of these other studies that say this. And, you know, it got a lot of backlash.
And I understand, because if you're someone who struggles with depression and you've been relying on antidepressants, and this has been your story, that's got to feel so frustrating. And she doesn't say, nor am I saying that antidepressants don't help some people. They do help some people. They literally increase your reuptake of serotonin. SSRI’s right?
What I like about including that study in the context of this movement is, first of all, again, it's not saying anyone should come off the antidepressants. This is not an aim to replace that. It is saying that there are other things we can do to increase our reuptake of care serotonin, a big one is moving. Another big one is spending time in the sunshine, in nature, and in a different chapter, I talk about a woman who gets a sea swimming prescription. So cool. Just swimming in the cold, open sea with a bunch of fellow 50 year old women.
EMILIE: Which you, you suited up and did yourself in pursuit of this book, right? I was like f***!
JULIA: Yes, I did.
EMILIE: You could not pay me.
[LAUGHTER]
JULIA: 100%. It was such a blast. And I'm so glad I did that because I got it. When I was in the water with them, people were literally, like, shouting yippee. And jumping for joy. The kind of scenes that we see on those Zoloft commercials, the happily ever after, that was happening. And so just real quick, that woman, Amanda's story is one of. She is still on her antidepressants, but she's able to reduce the dosage. And she relies, she says her real medicine is the swimming prescription. The antidepressants are just keeping her on repeal, but it helped her see that there was another solution.
EMILIE: Well, I like that what we're really saying here is, as opposed to this, like, diagnose, treat, repeat cycle, of treating the symptoms, frankly, of illness or a lack of well being, what are the root causes? Like, what is going on environmentally, in our lives, temporally, that are triggering these feelings, mental or physical forms of pain? And is there a way to treat the root cause? And it's like, look, in America, if our entire healthcare system and the research part of it is funded by the pharmaceutical companies, it's like, when your only tool is a hammer, everything's gonna look like a nail.
JULIA: Oh, I love that. Yes.
EMILIE: Right? And so it's just like our whole system here is so full funded by drug companies that a lot of the research that would inform the evidence based non pharmaceutical interventions never get funded. And so I'm really thrilled that this has become a public interest because it's, frankly, an overdue public health crisis.
So where do you, do you see hope for this happening in a mainstream way in America? If yes or no? Like, how might it look different than other parts of the world where a more collective public health approach is already kind of the norm?
JULIA: Yeah, I'm so glad you picked up on that. And, you know, I will say I had my own biases coming into this. Like, I watched Dopesick, I read, you know, Beth Macy's book Dopesick, and I could not believe that the Sackler families exist and got away with all that. And it just made me so pessimistic about the state of big pharma in the United States. And then I started doing more research and finding out all of these other sort of breaches and integrity, as I call it. And I was so angry and ready to blame everything on Big Pharma.
And, you know, I had to, like, check that at the door a little bit. I have, one of my best friends is a doctor who read this and said, listen, I get it. You're angry. I get it. There are some really s***** people out there who are profiting off of people's pain, no doubt, but big pharma, I mean, who even is big pharma? And there are probably a lot of interventions that you and me have used. You know, by someone got Covid recently, they took Paxlovid. My dad had cancer. You know, needed a rare chemotherapy, like in those instances. I love pharma.
EMILIE: Yeah, fair.
JULIA: So. But I hear you and I am with you.
EMILIE: Well, this is why you're a journalist and I'm an activist and very much not a journalist, not to be confused for one another. I love that.
JULIA: Right. And I think that frustration is so warranted, especially, you know, with a lot of pharmaceutical prescriptions. Some can help, but some can really harm people. And I, but again, what I like about this framing of social prescribing is it's saying, you know, there's room for both of those stories here. And to your question of, like, is there hope in the United States? I think yes. And, uh, this is coming from someone who's very cynical about this. Like, was ready to storm a big pharma conference just to get, like, the trees spoken for. But I think there is. I think it's coming from a couple of angles.
One, you mentioned this, diagnose, treat, repeat. Even if you have a public health care system or if you have a private healthcare system, that is not working for a lot of different countries, for a lot of reasons. One is what we started to talk about, you know, the intense pressure on doctors and therapists. I think the most recent stat is like 40% of psychologists in the US right now have a 40 month of a, 40 month,[LAUGHTER] a 6 month waitlist. You know, fewer and fewer doctors are going into the field. More of them are reporting burnout, so they cannot handle this pressure.
And then, of course, there's the whole access and equity issues of people who can't afford a therapist or live in a community where there's shortages, right? So there's a lot of pressures saying healthcare needs to change. So why should that change be social prescribing? I think there's a couple of reasons. One will come from that incentive, right, for doctors who are seeing an influx of patients with non medical issues or non medical root causes who can really be best helped by non medical, community based support, like social prescriptions. I think that insurance companies, this is also a big question. I get like how is an insurance company, who, you know, who the heck even knows what they cover, how are they going to invest in this?
EMILIE: Are they going to cover my art class prescription? Yeah. For real? Yeah.
JULIA: Good news? Increasingly. Well, so let's, let's back up a sec. You know, insurance companies have a basic incentive, right? They don't want a patient's health care to be too expensive. That's why, like, when you go to the doctor in America and you're like, it's, does insurance cover this? The doctors are like, I don't know. So. Right. They're motivated by not spending too much on individual patients. And if there is evidence, which, spoiler there is, that social prescribing can help prevent health problems before they become these costly burdens for insurance companies, well, that's a reason for them to invest.
And there's a lot of data in the UK especially, that does show social prescribing is an effective form of preventative health care. It saves money, it reduces people's reliance through long term conditions, which are actually, like, really expensive. So this is why a lot of insurance companies have started to sponsor gym memberships, for example. Their logic is, okay, if this patient could be a little bit more active, then maybe, you know, they, we won't have to pay for their medication for high blood pressure, for example.
So I think social prescribing will win if and when that logic gets extended beyond just gym memberships, but to groups, movement groups in the community, which is probably cheaper for these insurance companies. Number one. And here's the exciting little hope bit. They are piloting this. In New Jersey, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield has teamed up with an arts institution, NJPAC, to, as you said, your dreams come true. Sponsor art class prescriptions, you know, glass blowing workshops, museum visits, concerts for people who are at risk of overspending on their insurance. And I can't share yet, but there's some really exciting results to come out of that pilot and hope that it will be expanded.
EMILIE: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of wild that we've arrived at this point, but given where we're at with technology, which is, it's like, incredibly addictive for me to just stay at home on my couch, scrolling my endless Instagram reels feed. And then it makes somebody money, right? It makes somebody else and their advertisers happy. There's so many kind of capitalist incentives for me to isolate. And then you put a global pandemic on top of everything. It's no wonder this isolation epidemic has already pre Covid been exploding. And now what we're essentially trying to do is bring back the social institutions that our lives used to revolve around. And if it takes a doctor's orders to get us to do that, by all means, I'm all for it.
JULIA: 100%. And that really brings me to the third thing I wanted to say about, can this work in America? Should we be hopeful? I think the third thing that will need to happen is people like you and me. Patients will need to believe in this, too. And that's the last part of the book. I don't know if you had this experience when you were writing your book, but I think in the experience of writing it, you come to find out the deeper reason. And I think mine was that I needed better ways to cope with my stress and anxiety and sadness and frustration and occasional feelings of loneliness. And so I start prescribing myself these things, really inspired by the science and the patients to try to do this.
EMILIE: Well, that was going to be my last question for you, actually, because, you know, they always say you write the book you need, whether you know it or not, and you describe yourself by describing sort of the difference between illness versus unwellness. Right. And so you're like, look, I don't want to compare myself to the patients who you chronicled who are dealing with, like, trauma and are dealing with physical and mental, like, full on illness, but you were perhaps experiencing what's more common among a lot of us, which, you know, kind of went viral in 2020, that term languishing, which is just like an unsettled unwellness.
And so what did your journey look like when you prescribe this to yourself as the cold brew loving Manhattanite? Or I don't know if you're in Manhattan, but New Yorker that you are. You know, I feel like there's a very specific type of person who lives in New York City who's a journalist, and I don't exactly envision the epitome of health when I think of those things. So what was that journey like for you?
JULIA: That is correct. That is a great insight. And you're right. Like, I think I did try to write the book that I needed to do and that I needed to hear. And, you know, even as I was reporting on people who have been diagnosed by this mental health care system as having depression disorder, anxiety disorder. And I was reading through the symptoms, like, what does the DSM, which is sort of our bible of psychiatry, consider someone who meets this criteria?
And I read some of those symptoms, and I was like, depending on the day of the week, I resonate with some of this. Like, you know, I talk about my breakup, and of course, that is not comparable to somebody who has experienced a real loss, like a death or some really awful loss. But, I mean, we evolved to respond to a loss of connections, so some of it feels similar. And again, I think the distinction is like, are these symptoms really chronic? Do they interfere with your daily functioning in significant ways?
But I think that an unchecked unwellness could develop into an illness. Right? So I think that this was sort of preventative health care for me when I felt these very evolutionary rooted responses. I call them to environmental stressors, which, by the way, is what Eastern medicine, Indigenous wisdom, holistic medical experts, positive psychology, even our own DSM, used to consider what mental illness was. It was a reaction to a stressful event.
So in my journey, you know, I really, and I'm a journalist, so I am like, you know, no bulls*** allowed here. I really found myself feeling these science backed benefits. And maybe part of the point of social prescribing is, you know, it sort of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Like, you are committed to get well. So that's why you're investing time in this. That's why you're getting up at five in the morning to go on these runs, or joining a bird watching group like I did, or trekking out to the Bronx for community gardening day.
But when you invest that time, you really do feel better. And I think part of it is like, the science backed benefits of movement, art, nature, service, belonging, like the chemical level benefits. And I think part of it is, to your point of it's taking you out of that environment where you're scrolling on your phone, you're checking your email, you're ruminating on conversations.
Social prescribing is an antidote to that is it helps you be more present with people, and it gives you some perspective on those feelings of suffering, which feels so intense and so real in that moment. But when you do an environmental shift, you can better understand what they are, where they're coming from, and that they're not going to last forever.
EMILIE: Yeah, I love that. If you had, like, one thing, you hope people listening to this podcast would do differently or would consider doing differently moving forward. And I know you've got five things in your subtitle. But if you had one, one behavior, one offering that you would leave listeners with, like, what would you challenge us to consider doing differently?
JULIA: Wow, that's a great question. I think it would come back to the call to action of social prescribing in healthcare. But I think we can take it down to the self care level, which is shifting from what's the matter with you, to what matters to you. So on a practical basis, you know, let's say I feel this might be a realistic scenario for some of your listeners. Like, it's Friday afternoon, you finally cleared that inbox, and then you get like ten more emails. Something's gone wrong. The friend you were supposed to see that night cancels. You have all these kind of stressors build up and you're going into the weekend feeling really down and angry or stressed or anxious, whatever it might be. It's very tempting to, like, ruminate on that, right? And to have all these imaginary conversations about what you'd say to that email or that friends or maybe had a fight with your partner.
Whatever it is, it's very tempting to ruminate on the what's the matter with you? But I would say, pause. Those feelings are real and they're temporary. And instead, think about what can I do right now that I enjoy, that brings me joy, that brings me meaning, that might connect me with other people that can help me reframe this. What can I do that matters to me? And I think you will go in to your Monday feeling so much better if you ask that and then commit to do it.
EMILIE: I love it. Thank you so much for that. I love the intentionality behind that. And you've left us with some really great questions to think about. Julia, where can our listeners keep. Keep up with you and get their hands on their copy of The Connection Cure?
JULIA: Well, thank you so much. It was so great to be here. And if listeners actually do that thing, they ask themselves, what matters to me? And then. And then what do I do? Like, what can I prescribe myself? I would encourage them to go to my currently under construction website called socialprescribing.co. What that aims to eventually be is a resource for people to find those sources of non medical support in their communities, to learn about the prescriptive power of movement, nature, art, service, and belonging.
We're doing some mini docs showing, like, you know, the stories of people who prescribe themselves these things, and that's also where they can order a copy of The Connection Cure also at all the usual places, their local bookstore, Book Shop, Amazon, Simon and Schuster website. Yeah, that's what I'd say.
EMILIE: And I will drop links to all of those places and your awesome instagram feed in today's show notes. Julia, thank you so much for being here. It has been such a pleasure speaking with you. Congrats again on the publication.
JULIA: Thank you so much, Emilie You are so warm, and I loved all the thoughtful questions you asked. And I'm so grateful.
EMILIE: For more information, including an entire shareable blog post, transcript, and links to everything Julie and I just talked about. Head to bossedup.org/episode456. That's bossedup.org/episode456. And now I want to hear from you.
What do you make of this concept of social prescribing? How has the power of movement, nature, art, service, and belonging impacted your health and well being?
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As always, let's keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up group on LinkedIn, both of which I link to in today's show notes. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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