The loneliest she’d ever felt was surrounded by people

What a connection researcher’s own burnout taught her — and why the workplace is where connection breaks first.

I sat down with Cher Knebel, a researcher and speaker who has spent about fifteen years studying connection. She’s the author of Withering to Flourishing and Your Social Connection Guidebook, and she has a framework called Connect for better conversations and deeper relationships.

But the reason I wanted her on wasn’t the credentials. It was that a woman who studies connection for a living went through her own stretch of real loneliness. And that’s where we started.

How the snowball starts

Cher isn’t someone who’s struggled with loneliness much. She’s a people person, married, with friends she adores. Which is exactly what makes her story worth hearing.

It was 2021, about a year into COVID. Everyone was remote. Her workplace was going through mergers, new management, the great resignation — her boss and several coworkers left, and the work piled up. So instead of keeping her usual rhythm of social health, she said the thing so many of us say: I’m too busy. And she buried her head in her work.

Here’s what she watched happen. The book study group, gone, no time. The regular walks with close girlfriends, gone. The steady check-ins with her best friend, off-cadence. Movies, the park, happy hour — all of it dropped off, one small thing at a time.

Then came a Memorial Day weekend. Her husband was at a tennis tournament, her daughters grown and out of the house. Her one plan was to leave work early and check out a new gym opening down the street. She got there, and they’d postponed it. And standing outside that gym, it hit her — tears, loneliness from top to bottom. She’s married. She sees people. But in that moment she had no one to call. Not one plan with anyone.

And then the second wave: guilt about everyone she’d canceled on. I can’t exactly reach out now and ask them to get together, they’re probably mad at me. Her confidence dropped. And you’d think Monday morning she’d have said, something has to give. But work stayed busy for another year before she changed jobs. She just kept telling herself, I’ll be a good worker, it’ll figure itself out. It didn’t. She got sadder and lonelier.

We talked about how the snowball works both directions. Start working out two or three days a week and the good spreads — you eat a little better, your energy lifts, other things fall into place. But stop doing the things you love, stop connecting, and that spreads too. Because you tell yourself it doesn’t matter. So what if I skip my weekly call with my bestie? Life gets busy. But it’s never just the one thing.

Nothing is too small to matter

Cher’s way back was small on purpose. She talks about Atomic Habits by James Clear — the little habits that compound. So she attached a connection habit to something she already does: her morning coffee. That quiet, high-energy time became, who can I text today? A friend going through a job transition — how’s the search going? Another friend she hadn’t seen in a while — we should get together. Just picking up the phone and asking, who are a few people I could send a micro message to?

I told her I have my own name for this. I call them micro opportunities. Let me look for my micro opportunities to improve the quality of my life today.

And the trap is right there in the size of them. You look at something that small and think, that’s too little to matter. But each one builds on the last, and then it starts to snowball. We push it away because we think it’s too small. Nothing is too small.

We’re in a connection crisis

I believe we’re in a connection crisis. We’ve grown so deep into this separateness, this you-versus-me, constantly scanning for who we feel safe enough to be ourselves around, at home and at work. So I asked Cher what her research says about why connection breaks.

A few things came up. First, in America especially, we’ve put a premium on independence — the lone rider, the self-sufficient one. But the 85-year Harvard study followed men across their whole lives, and the ones who did best were the ones who, at fifty, had the most positive relationships. Prioritize connection at fifty, and you’re more likely to live longer and be well at eighty-five.

Second, our phones and social media. Cher was clear she’s not preaching from above it — she’s on it too, working on being a better model for her daughters. But if we could reclaim some of that time and put boundaries on it, that’s time we could spend connecting.

Third, mental health. She was dealing with it herself — anxiety that turned into depression, because she was overworked and disconnected. And here’s what struck me: friends aren’t a replacement for a therapist, but they catch things. If she’d been around her girlfriends back in 2021, saying, I keep taking on more and more work and I’m being overlooked and I won’t speak up to my manager — they’d have said, no, Cher, let’s talk about this, let’s come up with a strategy. That’s what friends do.

And underneath all of it, she named the quiet one: nobody wants to admit they’re lonely, because they’re afraid of being judged for it. If we could just be a little more open — I’m missing some connection here, what can I do — everything shifts.

The research keeps pointing at one thing

There’s so much research on this we could do three episodes and not finish. And what I keep noticing is that when you ask people what they want in life, so much of it lands on money and things. I’m not against any of that. But I challenge clients who are chasing success: okay, once you have the money, the house, the career, the car — then what? What’s the emotional outcome you’re actually after?

Because a career in itself, money in itself, has to point to some meaning. And almost always, connection is sitting right there inside the goal. To be seen. To be accepted. To belong. It’s connected to nearly everything.

Cher mentioned a book called Mattering, about showing people they matter to you. And it clicked with something we both feel as parents. When you ask a parent what they want for their kids, they say: I want them to be happy. Not just able to take care of themselves — happy. And happiness, over and over, comes back to relationships.

We also landed on curiosity, which might be the most underrated ingredient of all. People say, I want to connect with people I have things in common with. But there’s so much life in connecting with people you don’t have things in common with. Why not get curious? Not curious like an opponent — oh, you don’t like this, so you’re against me — that mindset just breeds more disconnection. Just genuinely curious.

Cher put it in practice beautifully. She and a friend were at a community event and went to sit with two women in their seventies and eighties. A year later, they’ve been to the movies together, into each other’s homes. Younger friends, older friends — she says the different perspectives are the whole gift. One of her closest friends is fourteen years younger.

Where connection breaks at work

Then we got to the workplace, because that’s where I see this play out most. I asked Cher: have you seen people who believe they’re connecting — running the meetings, doing everything “right” — while the person across from them still feels completely unseen?

Her answer was about nonverbal awareness, one of the skills in her Connect framework. Have you ever talked with someone who went on and on and never once said, so tell me about you? Connection is back and forth. No one wants a monologue. The person often isn’t connecting because they’re not looking the other person in the eyes, not asking questions, not offering a follow-up. If you’re not asking enough questions, it reads as, I’m not interested.

And here’s a number that stopped me. Research shows that when we try to guess what someone else is thinking, we get it right about 20% of the time — even though we feel like we’re nailing it 70% of the time. It’s only a little higher with a spouse or best friend. So instead of assuming, you ask. Your face lit up when you mentioned your grandma — tell me about her. And they light up: let me tell you about my grandma Sydney. That’s connection. Versus, nice to meet you, and you’re already back on your phone.

What leaders keep getting wrong

For leaders watching turnover climb, meetings go quiet, complaints rise without anyone bringing them forward, Cher gave three things.

Take real advantage of one-on-ones. Start with, how are you doing? Person to person, not robot to robot. The managers who genuinely care open that way. Know the small things — the tenth work anniversary, the second week on the job, the birthday. Write them down. These are human beings, and you matter to us is something people can feel.

Find their strengths and amplify them. In the sea of mergers and AI and constant change, we’ve lost the habit of catching what people do well. Cher said it plainly about herself: when someone tells her, I saw what you did there, it makes her want to do more. And when someone’s falling down, be clear and be kind about it — in a safe way, not out of left field. If an employee trusts that their manager will be real with them, humanely, they’ll take more creative risks. People do more with a little runway.

And the third: emotional intelligence — which she refuses to call a soft skill, and as a therapist, I thanked her for that. It’s not just reading other people’s feelings. It’s knowing your own. Being able to be angry and pause and regulate before you speak, so you can say, I was really disappointed by that, instead of attacking. Because the moment you scream at someone or demean them, they stop hearing you and start thinking about their grocery list. Same as a parent with a child. Approach it with emotional intelligence — yours and theirs — and you get so much further.

This is exactly what I saw working with the Navy, evaluating work culture from the sailors’ surveys. The two issues that came up over and over were lack of communication and lack of connection. But here’s the fascinating part. Some commands were badly shorthanded — positions unfilled, people carrying extra load. And in the commands with strong connection and communication, the sailors said: it’s tough, it’s a lot of work and pressure, but leadership gets it and finds ways to make us feel supported, so we’re good. Same workload, in the commands without that connection, and it was: we’re overworked, exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed. Same conditions. Completely different experience. The difference was connection.

The one thing to carry out

I asked Cher for one message for leaders and employees to take with them. Hers was this: don’t let AI, or the mergers, or all the challenges you’re facing, keep you from seeing your employees as human beings — individual people who want to do good.

And she pushed back on the easy dismissal of the younger generation. These young people want to work hard, she said. They just don’t want to be slaves to their careers the way a lot of us were. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go home and have quality time with your kids. When you treat people well, you build a loyalty that money at another company can’t outbid — I’ve watched people turn down more money because they’d rather stay where they’re treated like a person.

Because no employer is going to call you Friday night and say, I hope you have plans with your friends and family this weekend. They’re not. So you make that commitment yourself. Back to the micro habits. Back to the small things that don’t feel like they matter, until you look up and realize they were everything.

Cher Knebel is a connection researcher and speaker, and the author of Withering to Flourishing and Your Social Connection Guidebook.

— Roselyn Pérez Casiano