An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Make a list of your family and friends that might be struggling. Start with someone that is not struggling too much, but enough where you’ll be able to fill up their emotional bank account with a small deposit. This could look like a 10-minute phone call, coffee, or texts one to two times per week.
As a part of my interview series about the ‘5 Things We Can Each Do Help Solve The Loneliness Epidemic’, I had the pleasure to interview Glen Moriarty, Psy.D.
Glen Moriarty is the founder and CEO of 7 Cups, an online support network for people in need of emotional or mental health support. 7 Cups has grown to be the world’s largest digital mental health platform, serving tens of millions of people. Glen is a licensed psychologist who is passionate about the Internet’s power to help people lead healthier lives. His first startup focused on scaling up online learning and free access to education. 7 Cups is his most recent endeavor, marrying his background in psychology with his love of technology.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your “backstory” with us? What was it that led you to your eventual career choice?
Support is essential during tough times, which is a lesson I learned throughout my challenging childhood. Although this experience was difficult to navigate, it inspired me to become a psychologist to learn how to help others find strength after suffering. Some might call this a wounded healer.
In parallel, I launched an educational technology service that taught me a lot about how to scale a technology company. Later on, I was lucky to marry psychology with technology by launching 7 Cups, a platform that scales compassion, and builds genuine connections.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
It has to be the ‘Hogwarts’ I went to for startup founders.
By attending Y Combinator in 2013, I was able to work with incredibly smart people that helped refine my thinking. Much of what they taught me continues to influence my thinking. Through this training and other experiences, my team was able to get a clear direction of what talent we hire, and specifically what characteristics could make an impact. We landed on HHA: Hungry, Humble, and Accountable.
Can you share a story about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or takeaway you learned from that?
Early on I thought I’d be able to recruit enough listeners for 7 Cups from universities across California.
Looking back on it now, I see why that was a really bad assumption. Nevertheless, I persisted in this approach for many weeks even though we could never meet the demand. It wasn’t until a listener, Robin Stepto, came along and said, “Why don’t you put a banner up over the online chat where people seek help that says, ‘The best way to help yourself is to help someone else.”
It worked. We finally had enough listeners. This is key to how Alcoholics Anonymous works and many other social impact organizations. I had just completely missed it.
The lesson is that there are obvious solutions right in front of us and shifting perception is all that is needed to ‘see’ the solution. Of course shifting perception can be quite difficult; but sometimes it can be easy!
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
It’s no surprise that social network feeds have been largely recognized as harmful spaces that keep people hooked and engaged for too long.
In response, we released a 7 Cups feed that weaves in forum posts, self-help exercises, and listener recommendations. Before we structured the feed, we thought carefully about each of our users, and their common issues. For instance, if we want to help a 25 year old person struggling with depression, we want each post, exercise, and listener to offer the most tailored support possible.
We think of it like a neutral medium — like a book or movie (which can be good, neutral or bad) — where what matters isn’t the mechanism, but the content or exercises in the medium. We are in the process of working with Carnegie Mellon University to use the feed as a mechanism to drive health outcomes. The key is to get the right dosage and sequence. Those are the sorts of questions we are now starting to answer and I’m excited about the possibilities.
Can you share with our readers a bit why you are an authority about the topic of the Loneliness Epidemic?
I’ll use my daughter as an example, who used to struggle with sharing as a child. My partner and I didn’t make a big deal out of it. We just thought, hey everyone has a generosity muscle, and we have to practice giving things to others to help build up that muscle. To start small, we asked her to try giving away one of her free ice cream coupons.
Now that she’s grown up, she’ll come home and say, “Hey Dad, I looked out for this person today by giving them X.” Yeah generosity muscle!
This small, but impactful, moment is exactly what 7 Cups is all about. People listen and care for one another via anonymous messaging. It works because we need one another. It isn’t a want. It is a need.
It is a tragedy that people struggle to make genuine connections with their family and friends. Thankfully, human connection — or compassion, love etc. — is a practice that can be learned, just as my daughter did. Erich Fromm wrote a book called the Art of Loving, which showed me we can learn how to better care for one another. It just takes deliberate practice, and that is the key to responding to loneliness in a healthy way.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. According to this story in Time, loneliness is becoming an increasing health threat not just in the US , but across the world. Can you articulate for our readers 3 reasons why being lonely and isolated can harm one’s health?
We are social creatures. That is how we evolved. When people do not feel like they belong, their health starts to unravel. This causes them pain. They then start to medicate that pain in ways that are less helpful, such as drinking or eating too much, and consuming mindless media. These problems compound, and we end up losing the beauty, presence, and gifts of that person.
Sometimes, we have a hard time seeing our own value and the value of others. But the simple truth is, every single person matters. We all need to be treated with dignity and respect. And when we are, we flourish and are able to lift one another up.
Thankfully, these are relatively easy problems to solve. We know how to listen and communicate that another person is worthwhile. We can take measurable real steps each day to help one another out. Say something nice to the cashier, smile at a person you walk by, text a friend or family member and give them a compliment. All of these things are free, powerful, and they help you.
On a broader societal level, in which way is loneliness harming our communities and society?
Loneliness is a symptom. It is trying to tell us something important. We need to listen.
For instance, I am a runner. If my knee starts hurting, then I listen to that symptom and stretch or take a break. My body is telling me, “Hey Glen, there is something wrong that you need to address.”
Loneliness, suicide, depression, and truthfully, all human suffering, is telling us we have a major problem and we need to listen.
We can opt to keep ignoring it. Famous authors Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are prophetic in their concerns about people that rightfully do not feel okay because the societal structures are not healthy. Or people that are largely medicating themselves to go along by numbing the pain. The stats do not look good. The red lights are flashing. We need to listen because it is impacting all of us.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
We’ve got to look out for one another if we want to reverse these downward trends. It’s that simple. We need to start exercising our compassion muscles more deliberately. It’ll be hard at first, but like with all practice it gets easier with repetition. We have neuronal networks in our collective societal brain that have become hardened. It is time for us to stop fighting with each other, stop arguing, and just focus on caring for one another. I might not agree with you, but I can still be kind to you and help you rake your leaves.
It was not too long ago that neighbors looked out for one another, and people called to check in on one another. The art of friendship is there in our DNA. We’ve got it. We just have to turn it on again and start developing that muscle.
One idea I have is a sort of #LoveAmerica campaign where people that are “supposed” to not like each other take a picture of themselves working together to solve a problem they share. That is just one quick idea. There are many things we can do to start showing people that we love one another and want to work together to share common challenges.
The irony of having a loneliness epidemic is glaring. We are living in a time where more people are connected to each other than ever before in history. Our technology has the power to connect billions of people in one network, in a way that was never possible. Yet despite this, so many people are lonely. Why is this? Can you share 3 of the main reasons why we are facing a loneliness epidemic today? Please give a story or an example for each.
We are quickly losing the art of loving one another. Think about this on a global, national, regional, group, and individual level. All of these levels are organisms or ecosystems in and of themselves. These are practices that operate through brain connections on an individual level and on parallel cultural brain connections in larger groups. If we do not exercise these practices, they will fade. And what is happening right now is they are fading in an accelerated manner across our societies.
Think about a baby. A baby does not know how to walk. They have to learn by standing up, falling, and then standing up again and taking a step. The baby builds brain connections on how to walk. In short order, the toddler is zipping all over the place. The brain connections have become strong. It is unconscious. The baby doesn’t have to think about walking, they just walk.
Now think about our collective brain as a society. We once had much stronger cultural brain connections on how to care for one another. We are now building VERY strong brain connections on how to argue, disagree, and fight with one another. Those pathways are becoming very strong,and unconscious. We need to stop fighting, stop being divided, and start finding common ground so we can increase the strength of our collective brain.
Here are three examples:
1. Dating
People have an impulse to mate. I’ve been married for over 25 years. I can’t imagine trying to date now. With dating apps, our society is being reduced to a swipe right or left. Further, our physical appearances are constantly being algorithmically ordered and evaluated. Yikes.
2. Friendships
People want to have friends, but it comes with a series of daunting questions.
How do I become friends with someone? Where do I go? How do I start a conversation?
These are basic skills that can be easily taught and learned. We have to know we can still be friends with one another even if we have different views or opinions. It is very normal to not agree with everything about another person and still care for them. We need to overcome our tribal instincts.
If I am trying to become friends with someone and they say something that puts them in another tribe, then I need to be able to be okay with it and continue the conversation. I need to build bridges past our differences so I can see you and enable you to see me.
One side effect of social media is that people are quickly reduced to being seen as X. When we look at others we can fall into the fundamental attribution error, which occurs when we judge a person and then say they are behaving that way because they are X. We attribute the behavior to their personality.
Interestingly, we do not do this to ourselves! When we make a mistake or do something we are not proud of, we say, “Oh I did that because I was tired or hungry.”
We have grace for ourselves. We need to get better at extending that same grace to others. Ideally, we’d have mechanisms baked in that would give us pause and help us learn how to better see and appreciate one another as nuanced and complicated beings.
3. Belonging to a group that shares a bigger purpose
I’m a big believer in taking a personality test like 16personalities.com, which helps you better understand your strengths and natural way of navigating the world, or the Big 5.
Find your interests and your strengths. There are problems you care about. There are thousands of other people that share your strengths and also care about solving those same problems. They are in nonprofits, shelters, food pantries, faith communities or in online groups like 7 Cups. Find those folks and help make the world a better place.
Ok. It is not enough to talk about problems without offering possible solutions. In your experience, what are the 5 things each of us can do to help solve the Loneliness Epidemic. Please give a story or an example for each.
- Learn how to be a good listener. You can do that for free on 7 Cups in under an hour. Or take other free courses to learn how to better support people at our online 7 Cups academy.
- Make a list of your family and friends that might be struggling. Start with someone that is not struggling too much, but enough where you’ll be able to fill up their emotional bank account with a small deposit. This could look like a 10-minute phone call, coffee, or texts one to two times per week.
- Build that compassion muscle! Even when you are tired or want to zone out. Tell yourself, “Okay, this is a super small ask. I’m going to reach out to my person and check on them.”
- Realize how good it makes you feel when you reach out. Amazing right? You can have that little hit all the time. Just keep doing it.
5. Convert someone else to the same process above. If we start doing this we will solve the loneliness epidemic. It’ll be fun and not even that hard to accomplish. Wild, right?
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’ve been working hard on 7 Cups for nearly nine years. I think we have another six years until we start to see massive impact. We have 500,000 volunteer listeners in 189 countries providing support in 140 languages. I love all of these people and I’m honored to be working alongside them. For me, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing with hope beyond reason that it’ll all work out and we can make a major difference in reducing human suffering. We would welcome all the help we can get!
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
A lot of people would like to talk to Elon Musk right now and I would too. He cares about the brain and is trying via neuralink to help people out.
We need people that are radical in their thinking to help solve these bigger issues. I’d like to sit with him and discuss these challenges via a social technology perspective because his ideas may light things up.
To callback to the point above about very obvious mental health solutions that we cannot yet quite see, we often can’t see them due to a lack of insight or courage. I think Elon’s got a lot of insight and courage, so we could use the help!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can follow 7 Cups on Instagram @7Cups, Twitter @7Cups and Facebook @7CupsofTea. I post routinely in the 7 Cups online community, and people can find my nook there. Drop me a message and I’ll respond!
Thank you so much for these insights. This was so inspiring, and so important!
Thank you for asking some hard questions and for taking the time to share thoughts and ideas. I very much appreciate it and let me know if I can do anything to help support your work!
Glen Moriarty of 7 Cups: 5 Things We Can Each Do To Help Solve The Loneliness Epidemic was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
