The Need for Social Insulation
Why some of my clients loved lockdown.
I’d be willing to bet that I say “insulation” more than any other therapist on the planet. Judging by the puzzled looks of my clients, I should probably use a different word, maybe “buffer,” to explain what I mean. But the truth is that I am somewhat vain. I took Latin in high school, you see, which is how I know that the root of ‘insulation’ is insula, or island. An island is insulated from other land by water, just as a peninsula is almost insulated, from Latin paene.
For the life of me, I cannot pass up the opportunity to justify long hours poring over my Latin books, so I continue to use ‘insulation’ and then explain the etymology to perplexed clients (from plexere, to spin or weave).
Despite all this, the image that actually pops into my head when I think of insulation—and the one I share with clients, because it’s more relevant to their situation than some dumb island—is of a wire surrounded by rubber. I explain to my clients that the rubber is both good for the wire and whoever might touch it.1
I undertake this rigmarole so often because insulation is incredibly important for all forms of our health—and also something the modern world seems intent on taking away.
Sleep, Digestion, and Social Insulation
I started thinking seriously about social isolation during covid. As I adjusted to providing therapy via Zoom, over the phone, and without pants, I noticed that some of my clients had become happy overnight. These clients were hesitant to fully embrace what had allowed for the change. People were dying, after all, and the future of the world was uncertain. Nobody wanted to be caught dancing on that grave. But it was undeniable that a drastic shift had occurred, that some people were quietly having the best time of their lives.
To me, this newfound happiness was due to absence more than presence. To less rather than more. It was a “negative” happiness in the sense that certain stressful, overbearing things had been taken away. And yes, commutes were one of those things. As were pressures to spend money. But the main difference was the drastic reduction in social obligations. Social insulation, in other words, was powering these clients’ well-being.
We might not think of it that much, but our health relies on various forms of insulation. Sleep is one example. Researchers have discovered that sleep protects more aspects of our health than we imagined: from memory and cognitive performance to emotional intelligence and metabolism.2 Yet the modern world increasingly undermines sleep, mostly by flooding us with too much artificial, blue light. As Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, writes: “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health.”
Another buffer is the period between meals. Returning to Latin class (where all roads lead), I remember that many of the Roman authors we studied would take a “digestive break” after the mid-day meal, which often included a little nap. With Latin being right after my lunch period, I occasionally indulged in this ancient pastime.
Likewise, in many places throughout the world, food is not always available. Shops close between lunch and dinner and often shut down for the night around 8 or 9 pm. In some places, custom dictates that a break be taken after lunch, for napping and general digestion, similar to ancient Rome. But in other places—and particularly in America—food can be had at any time, in any season. No buffer is set aside for digestion. The American attitude, in fact, is to pound some coffee and get back to work.
In terms of mental health, I would argue that social insulation—the space between being social—is another critical aspect of our well-being, although the benefits might not be as straightforward as with sleeping and digestion. While we’re asleep, our brain is literally cleaning itself up.3 When we’re digesting, our stomach is clearing room for more. What happens when we’re alone? The answer isn’t as simple, and perhaps that is why we don’t talk about it enough. But the general idea is that solitude allows us to turn off what one of my clients calls “the self-monitoring self.” In other words, we get a break from the stress of being around others.
The Stress of Social Performance
Stress? you might say. But I love being around others. Well, I’m sure you do. And I bet you like eating, too.
All I mean by stress in this instance is that being social requires an elevated degree of awareness and effort that the human mind occasionally needs a break from, just as our brains need a break between days and our stomachs a break between meals.
Why an elevated degree of awareness? Because our social performance has serious implications.
Recall from Loneliness that being social is a bet. Every social interaction has the potential to go well or poorly, and the outcome can matter a great deal because, as a social species, so much of our success depends on reputation. That is why sociality is a performance requiring extra attention and energy. If it were not a performance, we wouldn’t fret over what to wear, recite our lines beforehand, or care about criticism and praise. But we do. Of course, being around those we know best hardly feels like a performance, and that’s what so nice about close relationships.4
How do humans pay “extra attention”? What mechanisms are activated by the stress of being around others? First, as Rob argues in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, each of us has a “press secretary” in our heads whose job is to monitor how we come across to others. Secondly, humans have emotional systems that help us navigate the social realm, from pity—which motivates us re-accept someone who is down-and-out—to guilt, which motivates us to capitulate to the group once we have done something wrong. These and other adaptations help us all get along, but it can be exhausting to have them running for long periods of time.
Basically, sociality is a multiplier on our experience because the stakes are high. If we’re social and things go well, we feel incredible—usually much better than if we had spent that time alone. If things don’t go well, we feel terrible—usually much worse than if we had spent that time alone.5 Spending time alone, then—i.e., socially insulating—offers a respite from the demands and risks of being social. This is what the covid years offered for many of my clients.
Technology’s Impact
As life has mostly returned to normal, I’ve watched many of my clients descend to their former levels of misery. But not everything has gone back to the way it was. Covid showed us that social norms can be changed drastically if need be, and that sometimes these changes stick, e.g. more flexible work schedules. I’m frustrated and disappointed that we seem to have learned nothing of the benefits of social insulation.
Similar to its effect on sleep and digestion, the modern world has undermined our ability to socially insulate. This is mostly due to the technologies that have proliferated the ways in which we can be pseudosocial. We seem to be spending more and more of our time neither in complete solitude nor society, but rather in a permanent purgatory of a little of both. The younger generations, in particular, are spending less time alone and less time in person with others, whether by playing video games online, being on social media, or whatever else.6
Because these activities are still social—they still require us to monitor our behavior—they don’t provide the benefits of a social break, similar to how it’s not a real vacation if you bring your work computer.
Our modern ways of being pseudosocial might not provide the same benefits of social interaction, either. Perhaps, just as with fitful sleep or “empty calories,” there is such a thing as “empty sociality.” The danger of empty sociality is that we aren’t genuinely in the presence of others, reaping those social rewards, nor are we restoring ourselves. Instead, we’re doing a whole lot of nothing.
The foods that provide empty calories—soda, candy bars—are usually those that humans created recently. The same goes for pseudosociality. In our evolutionary past, we were either physically in the presence of other people, or we weren’t. There was no in-between. And while we’re aware of some of the downsides to distance communication—for example, that it’s harder to read someone’s emotional state without access to their body language—there are likely many more that remain unknown.
A simple solution would be to spend more time in either genuine solitude or face-to-face company. While I have some hope for face-to-face company—most of my clients are coming to the office because they are fed-up with phone or video calls—I have less hope for genuine solitude making a comeback. This is because technology has tampered with traditional boundaries, and not just the physical ones. Even as recently as 50 years ago, boundaries existed that presumably were enormously helpful in people’s ability to reset and recover. I mean, can you believe that people used to leave the office around five and be virtually unreachable until the next day? That people would spend entire weekends without access to work?
Meanwhile, a client just last week told me that his boss texted him at 5:30 in the morning. Talk about disintegrated boundaries.
That thing we carry around with us all the time—and touch, and fawn over, and wish we could spend less time on—has eroded the very meaning of presence. Our mental and physical lives are much more easily intruded upon. Even the possibility that we might be contacted by anyone at any time, or be in contact with the wider world, renders our solitude much different than it would have been in our not-so-distant past. A person sitting alone in their office, as I am now, is much less alone than they used to be.
To me, these disintegrated boundaries have had a detrimental effect on our ability to recuperate and restore along the many dimensions we need to, particularly the social one.
Factors That Matter
If I spend four hours exercising today, I’m going to need more sleep tonight than usual. If I’ve just finished two turkey legs by myself, I’m going to need a longer period of digestion (and maybe a nap, too). Likewise, if I’ve just had a session with an emotionally unregulated client, I’m going to want (although not necessarily get) a longer break before my next one. The need for recovery, in other words, depends on the intensity of the preceding event.
The need for social insulation will likewise depend on whether preceding social interactions were stressful, rendering what makes a social interaction stressful an important area of study. In my experience, there are at least five variables to the equation.
Individual temperament is more or less where a person falls on the introversion-extroversion spectrum. Susan Cain’s Quiet is an excellent exploration of how our society is set up to reward extroverts and how we can pay better attention to those who refill their cup in solitude.
Familiarity is how well we know the people we are interacting with. Keep in mind that throughout our ancestral past, it was probably quite uncommon for us to meet strangers. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that at many times and in many places, there were only two ways of meeting a stranger: 1) welcoming a child into the tribe and 2) waging war on a rival clan. So, not many meet-and-greets…
Emotional regulation is another incredibly important aspect to social interaction. There is a world of difference between communicating with someone who might fly off the handle at any moment and someone who, almost no matter what, will reflect before responding. Some studies even suggest that high expressed emotionality (EE) households are a risk factor for mental illness. Bottom line: being a good parent, manager, therapist, or friend depends on an ability to control emotions; someone who can do this is much less stressful to be around.
Group size, or how many people are present, also matters. We can think of this as another multiplier. As Rob mentioned in What To Do With Emotions, Part II, this explains why public speaking is so terrifying: you have the potential to lose face in front of a bunch of people at once, something that otherwise you could only accomplish through many repeated trials.
Finally, degree of performativity is a combination of what is on the line and the extent to which you must “act” to acquire it. (More details below).
In the end, the individual in question and the situation at hand will determine how these and others factors interact—and how much recuperation is needed afterward. But hopefully this provides readers with a basic framework for beginning to notice a bite more what empties and fills their cup.
Client Examples
A lack of social insulation affects my clients in two common ways. The first is when someone is aware of their need for a social buffer but cannot seem to get it. This describes Tiara, a client I’ve mentioned before, who constantly travels for work, family, and friends, and must wear a different mask in pretty much every social setting—often switching masks four or five times a day.7 Independent of everything else, then, Tiara scores high in unfamiliarity and degree of performativity, which is a pretty brutal combination.
What really stands out to me about Tiara’s life is that the outcomes of her social performances matter a great deal. This is what I mean by “degree of performativity.” In one day, she might have to give a presentation to investors, tell her mom she’s dating someone, talk her brother off a suicidal ledge, and navigate a three-way conversation between her ex-husband and their divorce attorney. Each of these conversations has major repercussions. If she does not perform well, she might not secure the investment, gain her mother’s approval, save her brother’s life, or maintain her hard-earned assets. Just as importantly, each conversation requires her to be a vastly different version of herself. There is no uniform Tiara.
The requirement to constantly perform anew leaves Tiara an anxious mess. What eventually deteriorates is nothing less than her sense of self. She describes feeling “ungrounded,” depersonalized, and unsure of what her “gut” is telling her. “I just don’t know how I feel about him anymore, Josh,” she’ll say to me of her romantic partner. “But then again, I don’t know how I feel about anything—him, my job, where I live, all of it.”
Amazingly, everything returns to normal once Tiara is back home for a few weeks. A big piece of her restoration is being surrounded by her things, sleeping in her bed, and re-establishing a routine. But another part is being far less social. She’s still working, but between her coworkers and the few friends in her neighborhood, the need to socially perform is drastically reduced. And—no surprise—she soon feels like herself again.
The second way too much sociality rears its head is when a client notices they are worn down in some way but hasn’t isolated social interaction as the main cause. This describes Len, a mid-twenties project manager who spends long hours at work in constant communication with his team and clients, and then spends his evenings trying to date, which involves actually going on a date or texting potential partners.8
Len describes feeling thin, “like butter stretched over too much bread,”9 and when I mentioned that the problem might be not enough time alone, he sullenly agreed. He did not want to agree, he told me next, because there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to succeed at work and he wanted to settle down. But he had been noticing “emptiness inside.”
What would more social insulation do for Len? First, he feels that if he doesn’t get enough time alone to process his experience, life moves too fast. Even if he’s having fun, he can’t “capture” it in a way that feels meaningful. It doesn’t “sink in.”10 Second, Len has many hobbies that give him something to “bring to the potluck of life.” That is, his value in a social setting is partially defined by what he does alone: a round-trip bike ride to Lancaster, the book he just finished reading, etc. Without these experiences in his back pocket, he finds that he has nothing to say—no value to add.
Len and I are similar in that we repair to solitude to gain something which we can then “show and tell” the group later. Without it, we feel identity-less.
Conclusion
Sleep isn’t just a few hours during which we aren’t expending energy; it’s an active process of improvement. Social insulation should be thought of in the same way. As AtHome says in his blog about hiking the Continental Divide Trail: “Hiking is good for the mind, hard on the body. Town is good for the body, hard on the mind.” Town is hard on the mind for many reasons—I mean, I pass a Popeye’s every day on my walk home from work—but one of the main ones is the stressor of other people.
My argument isn’t that sociality is the problem per se, only its modern version. Humans have been social throughout their history, but over time, sociality has changed. We interact with far more strangers now than we would have then. We spend time with “parts” of people—just their voice, or their thoughts expressed through text—and not the whole of them. We interact with much larger groups than was customary and often this interaction is asynchronous. And so on. On the flip side, it is harder in the modern world to be genuinely alone.
Put yourself in the bare feet of our ancestors. Think of an instance which mimics their life as much as possible, of waking up among people you know extremely well. Maybe for some readers this will be especially poignant amidst the holidays. (Personally, I get this feeling every Thanksgiving when my extended family comes to visit and we basically just have fun for four straight days.) Given that that was the world in which we evolved, maybe it’s not that we have too much sociality; it’s that we don’t have enough of the right kind. Maybe it is the bad forms of sociality—the junk food—that we need a break from, not food itself.
Anyway, if anyone has thoughts about this, I’d be curious to hear them.
From Latin cura, care.
REFERENCES
Komaroff, A. L. (2021). Does sleep flush wastes from the brain? Journal of the American Medical Association, 325(21), 2153-2155.
And pray they don’t respond with: “That’s what she said.”
Komaroff, 2021.
Familiarity can also breed contempt, as the saying goes, and this is largely because we can “get away” with being a jerk to those whose approval we have already secured. We’re on much better behavior around those whose approval we have yet to secure. As I tell my wife all the time: “There’s no turning back now.” (But I also try to be nice.)
For another way of looking at this, multiply the sociality and see what happens. If we nail a presentation with 100 people in attendance, we’re going to feel much better than if we made a good impression on a new potential friend. If we flop a presentation with 100 people in attendance, we’re going to feel much worse than if we made a bad impression on a new potential friend.
See Jean Twenge’s Substack for more on this.
This is exacerbated, often to the point of absurdity, by modern technology, which allows everyone in her life to call her at all hours of the day. The phone doesn’t allow her to “be” in one place, but instead forces her to be everywhere all at once.
Of course Len is also texting these people throughout the day, which is par for the course now and yet another way technology has disintegrated boundaries.
Yes, he knows this is a Tolkien reference, I checked.
This reminds me of sleep’s ability to improve memory. In a very real way, one does not have access to their prior experiences if they do not sleep well enough to remember them.
I identified with like every sentence in this post 😂