Feb. 13, 2025 — My 13-year-old son has taken to accusing me of “gaslighting” him.
That’s a term I never used (or even knew) in my teenage years. But these are the times we live in. Merriam-Webster picked “gaslighting” as the Word of the Year in 2022. In 2024, the Word of the Year was “polarization.”
If there’s one thing that most Americans today have in common, it’s a lack of trust in just about everything.
In Gallup’s annual poll of national confidence, Americans in 2024 had an average of just 28% trust in our institutions, the third consecutive year that it’s been below 30%. Here’s the not-so-funny part: The poll began in 1993 and in nearly 30 years had never previously fallen below 30%. Today, just 18% have a “great deal” of faith in higher education, 17% in organized religion, 13% in the presidency, and 7% in newspapers.
You won’t find much better news in other polls. A Pew national survey on trust last fall found pretty similar results. And the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that Americans in general don’t trust government leaders and journalists. One in three think they can do their own research and know as much as a doctor.
You’ve probably experienced some of this firsthand, especially if you spend your holidays with family. Last Christmas, aside from my gaslit son, my break was filled with relatives eager to tell me how much they don’t trust the media, politicians on either side of the aisle, celebrities, everyone on the internet, and in some cases, their own neighbors.
But let’s pause for a second. If you relate to this widespread lack of trust, ask yourself the following question, and answer honestly:
How do I feel?
Your answer is probably not surprising. This ongoing erosion of trust takes a toll on mental health. And degrading mental health takes a toll on physical health.
Let’s take a look at the function of trust in our lives — and how we can get back to a happier, healthier place where it starts to feel positive again.
The Source of Our Collective Bad Mood
What’s causing this great national collapse of trust depends on who you ask.
Jeffrey Jones, PhD, a senior editor of the Gallup poll, believes there are several explanations. “One is economic anxiety among Americans,” he says. “Another is disillusionment with the government in terms of its inability to address major problems facing the country, perhaps because of partisan gridlock. Another is that certain institutions are increasingly becoming aligned with one or the other party, like public schools, higher education, police, and organized religion.”
Lynn Bufka, PhD, deputy chief of professional practice at the American Psychological Association, says she thinks it has more to do with our collective perception of whether institutions — as well as the people closest to us — are conforming to our shared expectations.
“Trust is necessary for societies to function,” she says. “We all agree on the same driving rules or expectations about cleaning up after ourselves at picnic sites or not cutting in lines at the grocery store. This is a foundation for cooperation. It also makes it a bit easier as one doesn’t have to put mental energy into figuring out whether the other person will do X or Y but can ‘trust’ that person to follow the understood expectations. We trust each other on a broad level out of shared agreement on norms and expectations, and trust grows in individual relationships as people are more willing to be vulnerable and rely on others, and that gets positively reciprocated.”
A bigger issue, and one that rarely gets addressed, is what the erosion of trust is doing to our mental health. There’s been some recent research on this thorny issue, including a 2022 study from Japan exploring how the neuroanatomy of trust is linked with depression vulnerability. And a 2021 German study looked at how loneliness is associated with reduced trust. But there’s been no in-depth research into what our cultural and social mistrust is doing to our national psyche.
Losing faith in our government and media and churches and education system isn’t a natural evolution. “At their best, institutions provide a sense of stability in people's lives,” says Jacob Harold, a nonresident fellow in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and the author of The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact. “They offer a kind of foundation to daily life that creates space for life at its best. When that is absent, it makes it harder to move through life with a sense of confidence.”
Fun fact: Your family is an institution, too. Sometimes trust can be destroyed there and it has nothing to do with political leanings, but marital, financial, and familial bonds that for any number of reasons suffer damage. When you lose trust in someone and must still spend time close to them (literally and figuratively), that hurts.
“Trust makes it easier for us to go about our days,” says Bufka. “If we trust, we don’t expend as much mental energy trying to gauge whether something is in our best interest or even trying to figure out what the other entity might do or not do. We trust that the other person or institution, whatever, can be relied on to do what is expected. If we don’t trust, that leads to increased uncertainty, and that is stressful.”
Researchers from Cornell discovered as much in 2023 when surveying 168 teenagers from both the U.S. and U.K. Those who didn’t trust the COVID-19 health information they read on social media platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok were more likely to “experience significant stress,” the authors wrote.
The Chemical Reaction Behind Trust
Not only can a lack of trust lead to stress, but stress can also be a conduit for losing trust. Paul J. Zak, PhD, professor of economics, psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate University, has studied the connection between the neurochemical oxytocin and positive social behaviors like generosity and compassion. “Oxytocin is made in the brain and it’s not very stable,” he says. “One of the key inhibitors for oxytocin release is high levels of stress.”
What Zak discovered, after measuring oxytocin release in over 5,000 people around the world, from Papua New Guinea to Europe to Asia, is that oxytocin-killing stress can be reduced — “in about 95% of people,” he says — by interacting with others in positive ways.
In their experiments, participants made decisions about whether to share money with a stranger. The money would triple in value if they shared, but they had no way of knowing if the stranger would share his or her profits. Zak and his fellow researchers discovered that the more people trusted strangers enough to share their money with them, the more oxytocin they released. “If someone voluntarily trusts you, then your brain releases oxytocin in proportion to that degree of trust,” Zak explains.
To further test their theory, they also gave some participants a small dose of synthetic oxytocin. It more than doubled the amount of money they gave to strangers.
Reclaiming Healthy Trust
Being trusting is essentially the factory setting for psychologically healthy humans, Zak says. “It’s why so many people get taken advantage of by con men. Our default appears to be to trust strangers, at least until we acquire enough evidence that we shouldn’t trust them.”
But what’s interesting about that trust is that it isn’t rooted in, “Will this person do me harm?” It has more to do with empathy. We trust someone because we realize they’re not all that different from us.
“The release of oxytocin, and the increase of trust that comes with it, makes us better social creatures,” Zak says. “If I understand the emotions you're feeling, I'm a better partner. I'm a better parent. I'm a better team member at work.” It’s also something that makes us uniquely human, he says. No other animal has this driving need to interact with unfamiliar faces and is rewarded for that trust with a burst of feel-good chemicals.
“It’s kind of fascinating,” Zak says. “We have this underlying neurobiological mechanism that manifests as a psychological effect that improves the quality of our relationships and therefore helps sustain our emotional fitness.”
It also leads to all kinds of health benefits, both physical and mental, like improved immune system functioning and lower rates of anxiety.
“Oxytocin does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of improving your quality of life,” Zak says. “But it needs stimulus.” It depends on positive social interaction, someone proving that your trust is justified. “You can’t just flip a switch in your brain and suddenly feel overwhelmed with empathy and trust for other people,” he says.
In some ways, it explains why the internet has been so effective in chipping away at our trust. It isolates us while simultaneously keeping us engaged and scrolling and reacting negatively. It’s made us less inclined to seek out strangers in the real world, look them in the eyes, and find empathy.
“On a one-to-one basis, we're not seeing a decline in trust,” Zak says. “Which is why I’m very skeptical of the echo chamber media reports that we're the most divided we've ever been. It really depends on where you look.”
Your Prescription for “Emotional Fitness”
If mental health is improved by trust, and trust is promoted by the release of oxytocin, and you can’t get that oxytocin release without being around other human beings, that really leads to only one logical prescription: Leaving the house. Because that’s where the people are.
“Think of it like emotional fitness,” says Zak. “You can build up your emotional fitness in the same way that people build up their physical fitness, and that's by stretching that neurologic muscle, if you will.”
“Going local” seems to be the theme even when considering larger-scale trust issues. For example, Gallup’s 2024 poll showed low confidence in big-ticket institutions. But among the most trusted institutions? Small business. Those aren’t the faceless corporations where you’ll never get a human on the phone. Those are the local places where you interact one-on-one with people every day.
There’s more. A January 2025 KFF poll on Health Information and Trust found trust levels for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at 61%. However, trust in personal doctors was 85%. That’s the person you meet one-on-one and look in the eye.
That’s no coincidence.
Rebuilding trust comes down to intentionally building relationships, Zak says, and finding daily goals for practicing pro-sociality. “It’s no different than aiming for 10,000 steps in a day,” he says. “It’s taking steps to improve your mental health.” For those with underlying depression or anxiety, finding excuses to have positive social engagement “is a major way to reduce symptoms of anxiety without medication,” Zak says.
Zak has tried to incorporate emotional fitness into his own daily routine, and he does it in a way that tends to catch strangers by surprise. “I’ve decided to hug everybody instead of shaking hands,” he says. “I meet someone new and they put their hand out and I’m like, ‘Oh, I hug everybody.”
He points to a 2023 study from German researchers that found a connection between intimate touch and the release of oxytocin. “So what I’m basically doing is hacking their brains,” he says. “Who do you hug? You hug people you like, you hug people you trust. So I'm getting their brains to release oxytocin. And all of a sudden we’re having a better conversation.”
His other emotional fitness strategy is striking up conversations with complete strangers in elevators. “You're in a box with other people and we pretend like no one's there,” Zak says. “That's not normal. So I just start talking. I ask them questions, and I talk about my day.”
Of course, not everyone likes this. Roughly half of the elevator strangers he’s encountered have tried to ignore him, he says. But half of them engage. The emotional connection is brief, but he swears it feels meaningful.
Zak also recommends adopting a pet, especially a dog that forces you out of the house and into contact with other people. “I was walking my dog this morning and I ran into one of my neighbors, somebody I haven’t seen in months,” he says. “We had a 60-second conversation on the street, but that was enough for us both to have the oxytocin release.”
Walking his dog is part of his emotional fitness routine. “Random people will come over and talk to you if you have a dog,” Zak says. “It makes you seem trustworthy.” Several studies have shown that dogs can be social facilitators, whether it’s inspiring people to help a stranger or interact with someone with disabilities. And researchers at Kyoto University found that dogs are pretty good at identifying untrustworthy humans.
Now, what if you don’t want a dog?
What if you’re uncomfortable talking to random strangers?
What if you don’t want to hug people?
The point is we all have to consider our “emotional fitness” in the same terms we take our physical fitness. All fitness requires routine and repetition.
“Trust is like a muscle,” Zak says. “You can train yourself to be more emotionally open and emotionally available.”
It might not make you more inclined to trust politicians or the media, but at least you won’t be so quick to assume that the world is filled with people trying to gaslight you. And you may just make some new friends.
