Welcome to the latest essay in our “On Healing” series, where Dr. Wayne Jonas explores whole person care and the deeper dimensions of healing.
We walk through life thinking we are individuals. But what if our minds are actually exquisite detectors of deeper connections with one another? Beyond the obvious ways we connect—through memories, words, and actions—emerging science suggests we are wired to perceive, act, and react collectively and instantly and in ways that serve healing. What if caregiving is not simply something we do for others but a fundamental expression of our interconnected nature?
After more than 40 years as a medical doctor, I thought I understood the dynamics of care. I provided care to sick patients, maintaining empathy without burnout and providing compassionate support to help people heal. But when my wife died, suddenly everything shifted. I found myself desperately in need of care.
Family, friends, and community members emerged from what seemed like everywhere to surround me with support. In that vulnerable space, I discovered something profound: There is no such thing as a pure caregiver or care receiver. Caregiving is always a two-way street, a sacred reciprocity that reveals profound human connections.
The Student Chaplain’s First Lesson
I learned about the sacred reciprocity of care decades ago, before I became a physician. My father was a hospital chaplain, and watching him leave each morning to help the sick sparked my curiosity about spiritual care. At age 23, before entering medical school, I spent several months training as a student hospital chaplain through Union Theological Seminary.
My first assignment was an older man with metastatic lung cancer. He was hospitalized for intractable pain and receiving IV narcotics. When I entered his room, my patient appeared to be sleeping. I pulled up a chair and sat quietly beside him, saying softly, “I’m a student chaplain. You requested spiritual care and I’m here. If you’d like me to pray, let me know, but if you’d like to rest, I’ll just sit here for a while.”
After several minutes, he opened his eyes and said simply, “Son, you’re going to be OK.”
Despite his own pain, he reached out to comfort my obvious nervousness and uncertainty. In that moment, I understood that caregiving flows both ways. We talked about his love of music and his life as a professional musician. When I arranged for him to have a cassette player and earphones, his pain medication needs decreased markedly. And that helped make me “OK,” as he had promised.
The healing that emerged from our connection—where we both gave and received care—created space for practical improvements in his medical treatment. This experience taught me that at a fundamental level, we are all connected, and healing emerges from recognizing that and honoring our interconnectedness.
The Power of Community Care
Recently, I witnessed this principle again with Debbie, a patient who consulted me about her advanced metastatic breast cancer. She needed specialized CyberKnife radiation for brain metastases, but the most critical barrier wasn’t medical—it was social. Debbie had limited social support, and her brain metastases left her confused and struggling to understand her situation.
What she needed most was something the medical team never discussed: a community care network. Working with her sister and a few friends, we created a schedule for meals, transportation to treatments, and daily check-ins. Her cancer was incurable, but her social support structure provided a good death, free of pain and confusion, which helped her feel great love at the end of her life.
The data powerfully support this intervention. Studies show that high social support compared to low social support creates a 50% increased likelihood of survival, with specific aspects of social support showing mortality risk reductions of approximately 19-25%—effects comparable to quitting smoking and exceeding the influence of obesity and physical inactivity.1 Yet this crucial component of healing rarely appears in medical treatment plans, and insurance does not pay for setting up networks like the one Debbie needed.
The Deeper Science of Connection
Recent neuroscience research illuminates the mechanisms behind these healing connections. Dr. Daniel Siegel at UCLA describes the brain as a “mind connection machine” that goes beyond our five senses, connecting and interacting with others through known and unknown pathways.2
Dr. Tanya Singer’s pioneering work in neurosociology shows distinct brain patterns for empathy versus compassion, with compassion—the emotional outreach part of caring—creating beneficial changes for both giver and receiver, while empathy alone can lead to caregiver burnout. Her research demonstrates that training in compassion activates networks associated with positive affect and affiliation, while empathy training alone can lead to negative emotional states.3
Even more remarkable are studies by researchers like Guillaume Dumas in Montreal, who has documented instantaneous, dynamic changes in brain activity when people touch each other with compassion. Using simultaneous EEG monitoring, he shows real-time correspondence between the brain patterns of the person touching and the person being touched, revealing what researchers call “the healing presence.” His research found that hand-holding between partners during pain increases brain-to-brain coupling, with greater coupling correlating with both pain reduction and empathic accuracy.4
Perhaps most intriguing is emerging research on hyperscanning—simultaneous EEG monitoring of deeply bonded individuals like parents and children, twins, or siblings. Studies have documented that brain wave coherence can be measured between connected individuals, suggesting our brains detect fields of social connectivity that transcend physical proximity.5 Remarkably, this brain wave coherence can even occur at a distance, showing that connections can operate beyond the brain and the usual mechanisms of social communication.6
Beyond Individual Care: The Uber of Healing
These insights point toward a fundamental shift needed in how we understand and organize health care. Just as Uber recognized that unused cars were sitting idle and created a system to mobilize them for those who needed to go places, we need to recognize the vast social capital of caring that is sitting untapped in our communities and create systems to mobilize it for healing.
Current projections show health care costs rising to over 20% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2033—with national health expenditures projected to grow at 5.8% annually compared to 4.3% GDP growth, reaching $8.5 trillion annually, or $24,200 per person.7 Meanwhile, enormous healing capacity remains unused in our communities.
We need payment systems that compensate for the time needed for deep connections to develop, support for informal caregivers who provide essential care, and research to better understand the underlying mechanisms of healing presence.
Successful examples exist of relationship-centered health care systems. The NUKA system of care in Alaska, operated by the South Central Foundation, transformed health care delivery for Alaska Native people by emphasizing ownership and relationships. This customer-driven model has achieved remarkable outcomes, including a 36% reduction in hospital days, 42% reduction in emergency visits, and 58% reduction in specialty clinic visits.8 They use the traditional “talking circle” approach to facilitate deep connections at all levels of the system. Evidence from health services research demonstrates that compassion reduces costs and has large measurable benefits across quality of care and patient self-care.9
The Transformation of Suffering
Sometimes life brings deep and difficult suffering. But caregiving becomes the medium through which suffering can transform us, returning us not just to health but to a deeper experience of love, connection, and simple joys. When my wife died, the community of care that surrounded me didn’t just help me survive—it helped me grow in ways that increased my gratitude for others and my understanding of life’s sacredness.
This transformation through caring connections points to something fundamental about human nature: We are not separate individuals struggling alone. We are part of a web of relationships that can help us heal when we learn to recognize and nurture these connections.
A Call to Connection
In our technology-driven health care system, we often lose sight of the most powerful healing force available to us: our capacity for deep, caring connection with one another. The evidence is clear that relationships don’t just support healing—they create it. They reduce mortality, improve treatment adherence, decrease health care costs, and can transform suffering into growth.
But realizing this potential requires investment in the relational infrastructure of healing. We need health care policies that pay for time and connection, training programs that teach the skills of compassionate presence, and community systems that mobilize our collective capacity for care and communication.
The brain may not be the generator of our minds but rather its detector—an antenna for the social and spiritual connections that constantly surround us. When we learn to tune in to these deeper connections and create space for them to flourish, we access a healing presence that can transform the giver and the receiver.
This understanding aligns with findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of human happiness and health. Following participants for more than 85 years, the research consistently shows that good relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term happiness and health—relationship satisfaction at age 50 was a better predictor of future physical health than cholesterol levels.10
In the end, caregiving reveals a profound truth: We are never truly alone. In the sacred reciprocity of care, we discover that healing emerges not from what we do to or for one another, but from the recognition that we are fundamentally connected, and in that connection lies our greatest source of healing and hope.
References
- Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine. 2010;7(7). doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
- Siegel, DJ. Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence. TarcherPerigee; 2018.
- Klimecki OM, Leiberg S, Lamm C, Singer T. (2013). Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect after compassion training. Cerebral Cortex. 2013;23(7), 1552-1561. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhs142
- Goldstein P, Weissman-Fogel I, Dumas G, Shamay-Tsoory SG. Brain-to-brain coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2018;115(11), E2528-E2537. doi:10.1073/pnas.1703643115
- Bullock TH, McClune MC, Achimowicz JZ, Iragui-Madoz VJ, Duckrow RB, Spencer SS. Temporal fluctuations in coherence of brain waves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 1995;92(25), 11568-11572. doi:10.1073/pnas.92.25.11568
- Wackermann J, Seiter C, Keibel H, Walach H. Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects. Neuroscience Letters. 2003;336(1): 60-64. doi:10.1016/S0304-3940(02)01248-x
- Keehan SP, Madison AJ, Poisal JA, et al. National Health Expenditure Projections, 2024–33: Despite insurance coverage declines, health to grow as share of GDP. Health Affairs. 2025;44(7):776-787. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2025.00545
- Gottlieb K. The Nuka System of Care: Improving health through ownership and relationships. International Journal of Circumpolar Health. 2013;72(1), 21118. doi:10.3402/ijch.v72i0.21118
- Trzeciak S, Mazzarelli A. Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Studer Group; 2019.
- Waldinger RJ, Schulz MS. The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster; 2023.
Touching You
In the morning
The terrors of the night retreat.
My care flows toward you.
In the morning
I pause from fear,
Resting in your presence.
For a moment, I am touching you,
Touching everything.
From “Pause: Poems Written in the Space Between.”© Wayne B. Jonas
Image by: Getty for Unsplash+