Name: What matters to you? A new way to heal | Chasing Life
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T17:16:24.000Z
Duration: 26 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'll give you an example of a patient I spoke with named Frank.

Frank had been dealing with type 2 diabetes.

He was a truck driver and he was told he was going to be on insulin for the rest of his life.

But then when he went to this doctor who really believed in social prescribing, he found out that Frank used to love cycling.

He prescribed Frank a spot in a 10 week cycling course.

He creates a WhatsApp group to keep on cycling with the people in the group.

He's come off his insulin, but more importantly, he's not lonely anymore.

I was really looking forward to talking to you because I am fascinated with this idea that, you know, as a doc, we think of prescribing things and they think a pill, they think a procedure, but you're, you're talking about something else here.

This is literally, Dr. Gupta, a social prescription.

The idea of your doctor, your social worker prescribing you something social in your community, like in art class, like bicycling lessons, the same way they would prescribe a pill.

And the idea here is, you know, we know that connecting with others is good for us, moving our bodies, paying attention to nature.

What's new here is the idea of connecting that to how we do medicine in the form of, let's say a 10 week nature workshop to address a specific symptom within us.

You know, I don't think anyone questions that these things have value, but I think the thing about prescribing something that's a medicine is that it has data behind it.

You do these trials, you see who works, what works best for who, all of that work.

I mean, exercise is pretty non controversial.

For 50 years doctors have been saying exercise for social connection increasingly is part of that.

We are understanding the way that strong social relationships is one of our greatest predictors of longevity.

Now there have been art therapists and nature therapists who've also long known the health benefits of nature and art.

But the idea is here to have all kinds of disciplines, from your family doctor to your mental health counselor, actually being able to prescribe you something that encompasses those things because we know that these are effective and they require more than just a doctor's recommendation.

We need that accountability and we need that sort of built in intrinsic idea.

The catchphrase of social prescribing is shifting from what's the matter with you?

I love that everyone should just let that settle in for a second.

Not what's the matter with you, but what matters to you.

I have been sort of fascinated by this idea that when they do these, these images of people who identify as lonely or as isolated, and I say identify as because people may be surrounded by other humans and still identify as feeling lonely or isol.

But what I found really interesting was that the same areas in the brain that are responsible for physical pain overlap heavily in those people who say that they have feelings of isolation.

So the idea that that feeling of isolation can physically hurt gives people the sense of the fact that there's measurable things that happen in your brain when you are not socially connected.

I mean, isolation and loneliness is some of the greatest social pain we can experience.

And it's not just in our heads, because if you think about it evolutionarily, we needed to have a people, a tribe around us.

There's a great evolutionary psychologist I love, Dr. Arthur Aaron, who talks about our evolutionarily rooted need to connect as being a function of knowing ourselves.

So we know that when we have a really good friend, someone really close to us, they actually help us understand ourselves better.

And this is evidenced by things like Harvard study of Adult development, which found that social relationships were the greatest predictor of health and longevity.

So just as it's true that isolation, feeling, a lack of companionship, we think of it, we could think of that as hunger.

The opposite is also true, that when we feel a strong sense of belonging, we are protected from physical and mental ailments in ways that we wouldn't be had we not had those connections.

How do you know if you're somebody who is in that position?

I mean, a lot of people may sort of say, yeah, I get, you know, I'm lonely from time to time.

Is there a point where you say, yes, this person needs a social prescription?

I would say that for most of the rollout of social prescribing, which, by the way, is now happening in 32 countries, including the U.S. it starts with what we recognize as more clinical symptoms.

He was a truck driver, and he was told he was going to be on insulin for the rest of his life.

And when he went to doctors, oftentimes they told him, you have to exercise more, you have to eat better, and that's where the conversation stopped.

But then when he went to this doctor who really believed in social prescribing and asked that what matters to you?

He found out that Frank used to love cycling when he was a kid.

And he also found out that by virtue of his job being a truck driver, Frank was really lonely.

They also gave him a free bike because he hadn't had a bike.

He goes through this 10 week course, he falls in love with cycling.

They've been cycling every week together for four years now.

And so that just illustrates that, you know, Frank might not have, you know, really resonated with the idea that he was lonely and needed a social prescription.

He went in there for help with his type 2 diabetes and obesity, but because the loneliness had coexisted with that, the other side of that, I think, was that, you know, in order for Frank to exercise better, to have some motivation, he needed social connections as well.

And so I think for a lot of people, loneliness is grouped in with these other things.

What are some of the other other health conditions I imagine for really acute problems, you know, strep throat or something like that.

We're not talking about social prescriptions there.

If anything, maybe you don't want to be social if you get a potentially contagious virus, but what are other things besides diabetes?

But we do know that our recovery time for things like strep throat or the common cold are influenced by our inflammation.

And so, you know, maybe next time you have strep throat, if you want to do a little drawing workshop with YouTube, have some buddies onto Zoom, that could really help with that.

But in the book, you know, I mainly talk about, you're right, chronic conditions, everything from lifestyleness like type 2 diabetes to depression and anxiety.

I talk about how it supports people with addiction, people dealing with dementia.

Up to 80% of our health is impacted by social and environmental factors.

And particularly as we're seeing higher and higher rates of chronic illness, of lifestyle illness, of mental illness.

You know, there is a need for more solutions other than the ones we've been given, because clearly if the rates are going up, they're not Doing their job fully.

So, you know, I talk about, for example, the story of this woman, Amanda, dealing with major depressive disorder.

She ends up getting prescribed a spot in this 10 week sea swimming course.

And, you know, she had never been swimming before, especially in the cold conditions in which she does it.

Which, you know, if you're here in New York today, it's a cold day, it's hard to imagine anyone swimming today.

She does this 10 week sea swimming course.

She's moving her body, she's enjoying the natural, you know, settings of being in the sea.

Most importantly, though, is she's connecting with her, her people.

And she went from the maximum dose of her antidepressant to the minimum.

So that's just an example of, you know, this can help with so many different conditions.

And more than just kind of self reports, this is in some ways lowering our reliance on medication and, you know, having those clinical outcomes that we would want for other forms of medication.

Why does it, you know, some of these things seem pretty basic in the sense that, you know, we know we should have connection with other humans, we recognize the benefits of it, and yet we're talking about prescriptions here.

We're talking about a doctor writing a prescription for this sort of thing.

Why is it different coming from a doctor versus just what you should intuitively know?

You know, number one is that people tend to trust their doctor.

And so when your doctor is telling you, hey, you know, 20 minutes in nature and your doctor is then citing all of the clinical benefits, such as reduced blood pressure, less cortisol production, better attention, benefits, that sort of clinical value is going to hit a little bit harder.

So one is about the authority, but the second part of that, I think is about the prescription.

So it's not just your doctor telling you you need to exercise more, you need to spend time in nature, but it's your doctor and their team actually referring you to a specific time and place that does that thing that you're a little bit interested in, and they're gonna follow up with you to see how it goes.

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What matters to you? A new way to heal | Chasing Life

anxiety

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chronic

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