TALKING to someone on the phone for 10 minutes multiple times a week — if you’re in control of the conversation — can decrease loneliness, a new study revealed.

Half of the 240 study participants were selected to receive brief phone calls from volunteers over the course of a month, and they reported feeling 20 percent less lonely on average, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Volunteers briefly trained in empathetic communication skills, which involved active listening and asking questions about what their subject was talking about, said lead study author Maninder “Mini” Kahlon, associate professor of population health and executive director of Factor Health at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, the United States.

The study participants, all clients of Meals on Wheels Central Texas, led the conversations, which allowed them to define the agenda of the calls.

The first week, volunteers called participants five days during the week at times the participants said were best for them. In the subsequent weeks, participants chose whether to receive as few as two calls per week or as many as five.

Conversations were a little over 10 minutes the first week, Kahlon said, but they evened out to 10 minutes during the rest of the month-long study. Participants talked about a variety of subjects including their own daily lives and asked about their volunteers’ lives.

Both the participants who received phone calls and the control group who did not had loneliness, anxiety and depression were measured on scientific scales at the start and end of the month.

Researchers also measured the study subjects’ anxiety and depression because those disorders could also be affected by the calls, Kahlon said.

On the three-question UCLA Loneliness Scale, which ranges from three to nine, phone call participants averaged 6.5 at the beginning and ended with 5.2.

There is no standardized way to interpret how much of a shift is clinically meaningful, Kahlon said, but the participants’ numbers dropped a significant amount “so that means we really made a meaningful impact on them,” she said.

If you’re feeling lonely, Kahlon recommended reaching out to someone in your family and friend networks whom you trust to talk to.

(SD-Agencies)