In fact, evidence has been growing that when our need for social relationships is not met, we fall apart mentally and even physically. There are effects on the brain and on the body. Some effects work subtly, through the exposure of multiple body systems to excess amounts of stress hormones. Yet the effects are distinct enough to be measured over time, so that unmet social needs take a serious toll on health, eroding our arteries, creating high blood pressure, and even undermining learning and memory.
A lack of close friends and a dearth of broader social contact generally bring the emotional discomfort or distress known as loneliness. It begins with an awareness of a deficiency of relationships. This cognitive awareness plays through our brain with an emotional soundtrack. It makes us sad. We might feel an emptiness. We may be filled with a longing for contact. We feel isolated, distanced from others, deprived. These feelings tear away at our emotional well-being.
Despite the negative effects of loneliness, it can hardly be considered abnormal. It is a most normal feeling. Everyone feels lonely sometimes—after a break-up with a friend or lover, when we move to a new place, when we are excluded from some social gathering.
Chronic loneliness is something else entirely. It is one of the surest markers in existence for maladjustment.
In children, it leads to all kinds of problems. Failure to be socially connected to peers is the real reason behind most school dropouts. It sets in motion a course on which children spin their way to outcast status and develop delinquency and other forms of antisocial behavior.
In adults, loneliness is a major precipitant of depression and alcoholism. And it increasingly appears to be the cause of a range of medical problems, some of which take decades to show up.
We’ve all experienced loneliness from time to time. Indeed, even the most popular, social butterflies among us have likely felt the yearning for social connection, or the pang of sadness from being unable to talk to a close friend now and again. This is a completely natural feeling to have, as humans are an incredibly social species. In fact, it’s arguable that we survive best by being part of a large group (Rokach, 2018). As a result, being alone or left out of a group causes the inevitable feeling that we experience as loneliness.
But although feeling lonely is a normal part of being human, it doesn’t mean that loneliness—especially prolonged loneliness—is healthy. In fact, while we think of loneliness as a sad condition, it is also a potentially threatening one. Several studies have even shown that social isolation can literally kill you. In an analysis of 70 studies on over 3 million participants, researchers found that increased risk of premature death was between 26 and 32 percent higher in individuals who were lonely or socially isolated (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2015). The authors of this study point out that obesity and smoking, which get constant media attention, lead to the same risk for premature death as loneliness.
You might be asking, how on earth is that possible? Scientists believe that since humans evolved to live in groups, being alone would make you more vulnerable to threats. And indeed, research suggests that being lonely is associated with paying more attention to threatening social information. For example, when presented with photos of threatening and non-threatening faces, the brains of lonely adults process threatening information more quickly than do adults who aren’t lonely (Cacioppo et al., 2015). This suggests that feeling lonely puts our bodies on high alert, responding more quickly to threat than we typically would. While this hypervigilance can be adaptive when there really is imminent threat to worry about, it also takes a toll on the body: Making us more attentive to threat increases our stress hormones, which thereby increases our blood pressure and impacts the functioning of our immune systems (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2014).
There is also direct evidence that loneliness has an immediate impact on your brain. For example, one group of researchers showed that after periods of being socially isolated, adults show activation in similar brain regions that are active when we’re hungry (Tomova et al., 2020). Another study looked at adults’ brains during an activity after researchers convinced them that they were being excluded from a game with their peers. The parts of the brain that were most active when the adults thought they were being excluded are the same parts of the brain that are active when you feel physical pain (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). On top of that, when given acetaminophen, a common painkiller that’s in over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol, the brain’s response to being excluded is diminished (DeWall et al., 2010).
This all suggests that loneliness literally hurts. So, it’s time to start taking loneliness seriously, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic where people are being forced into social isolation.
Why Belonging Matters: A Biological Imperative
Belonging isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s wired into our very survival. As social creatures, our ancestors thrived in groups, relying on shared resources and mutual protection.
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/when-inclusion-costs-and-ostracism-pays-ostracism-still
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/choke/201203/dealing-the-pain-social-exclusion
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-time-cure/201303/shunning-the-ultimate-rejection-part-ii
"HUMANS ARE SOCIAL BY NATURE AND CRAVE BEING A PART OF A GROUP (ANY GROUP). WE'RE INHERENTLY DRIVEN TO BE INCLUDED AND IF WE'RE NOT, IF WE FIND OURSELVES EXCLUDED AND ISOLATED, WE EXPERIENCE ADVERSE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS." - Peter Dagampat Ph.D.
More recently, researchers have been turning their focus to the related—yet less well studied—phenomenon of "social isolation," a common correlate of loneliness that is nevertheless a separate and distinct state. Loneliness is generally defined as ”the discrepancy between a person's preferred and actual level of social contact.” It is a subjective, qualitative self-perception.
Social isolation, on the other hand, has been defined as “an objective state of having minimal social contact with other individuals.” Social isolation is often assessed using quantitative measures such as marital status, living alone, religious attendance, group memberships, and frequency of contact with children, family, and friends.
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The results with regard to loneliness and social isolation, however, have been trending in the opposite direction. For example, Andrew Steptoe and colleagues (2013) assessed both social isolation (in terms of contact with family and friends and participation in civic organizations) and loneliness (via a standard questionnaire measure) in 6,500 men and women aged 52 and older from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, while monitoring all-cause mortality for several years.
They found that mortality was higher both among more isolated and more lonely participants. However, “after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality… but loneliness did not.” They conclude: “Both social isolation and loneliness were associated with increased mortality. However, the effect of loneliness was not independent of demographic characteristics or health problems and did not contribute to the risk associated with social isolation. Although both isolation and loneliness impair quality of life and well-being, efforts to reduce isolation are likely to be more relevant to mortality.”
Berkeley researcher Bin Yu and colleagues (2020) followed 1267 Taiwanese patients 65 years or older with confirmed CVD for up to 10 years. Analyzing the association between social isolation and loneliness at baseline and mortality at follow-up while adjusting for demographic variables, health-related behaviors, and health status. “Social isolation was associated with increased risk of mortality after accounting for established risk factors… whereas loneliness was not associated with increased risk of mortality.”
A recent (2022) study by researcher Chun Shen and colleagues used neuroimaging data from over 400,000 participants in the UK Biobank large longitudinal data set to explore whether social isolation and loneliness predicted dementia. Socially isolated individuals were shown to have a 26% increased likelihood of developing dementia, after adjusting for various risk factors including socio-economic factors, chronic illness, lifestyle, depression, APOE genotype (a genetic risk factor for dementia), Alzheimer's disease, and cardiovascular disease.
Socially isolated individuals were found to have lower gray matter volumes in brain regions involved in memory and learning. Interestingly, while loneliness was also initially associated with subsequent dementia, the association disappeared after adjusting for depression. In other words, the effects of loneliness may be attributed mostly to depression. The authors note: “Relative to the subjective feeling of loneliness, objective social isolation is an independent risk factor for later dementia.”
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Humans are social animals. We need to be connected to other humans through friendships, companionships, and romantic relationships. A series of reviews have examined the relationship between loneliness and physical and mental health (Christiansen, et al., 2021; Hodgson, et al., 2020). Here’s what they’ve found:
There is little doubt that loneliness and lack of social connections can lead to depression and anxiety, but there is also good evidence that lonely people have poorer physical health. For example, people who have no friendships or poor-quality support relationships are more prone to premature death. Some of this may be due to stress, as those without social connections lack the support from friends and loved ones that help them to cope with stress-related illnesses. There is also some evidence that people who lack these supportive relationships are more prone to life-threatening heart attack and stroke – one reason why the American Heart Association has warned the public against the dangers of social isolation.
In fact, studies (e.g., Algoe, 2019) have found that when it comes to strategies that increase human lifespan, good interpersonal relationships are important, along with well-known healthful practices such as regular exercise, a healthy diet, avoidance of addictive substances, and good sleep patterns.
At a more “informal” level, our own research showed that first-year college students who established good social relationships with peers were less likely to drop out of college, and reported higher levels of satisfaction and engagement. In fact, it wasn’t enough for students to just focus on academic pursuits; they also needed to feel social connections to do well (Riggio et al., 1993).
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/biohack-your-brain/202102/how-social-isolation-and-loneliness-impact-brain-function
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fifth-vital-sign/202005/the-impact-social-isolation-and-loneliness
https://www.psypost.org/social-isolation-leads-to-reductions-in-brain-cells-and-mild-cognitive-impairment/
https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1084904395211386880In the early weeks and months of solitary confinement you're reduced to an animal-like state. I mean, you are an animal in a cage, and the majority of your hours are spent pacing. And the animal-like state eventually transforms into a more plant-like state: your mind starts to slow down and your thoughts become repetitive. Your brain turns on itself and becomes the source of your worst pain and your worst torture. I'd relive every moment of my life, and eventually you run out of memories. You've told them all to yourself so many times. And it doesn't take that long.
The sun would come in at a certain time of day at an angle through my window. And all of the little dust particles in my cell were illuminated by the sun. I saw all those particles of dust as other human beings occupying the planet. And they were in the stream of life, they were interacting, they were bouncing off one another. They were doing something collective. I saw myself as off in a corner, walled up. Out of the stream of life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/sunday/popular-people-live-longer.html
The results revealed that being unpopular — feeling isolated, disconnected, lonely — predicts our life span. More surprising is just how powerful this effect can be. Dr. Holt-Lunstad found that people who had larger networks of friends had a 50 percent increased chance of survival by the end of the study they were in. And those who had good-quality relationships had a 91 percent higher survival rate. This suggests that being unpopular increases our chance of death more strongly than obesity, physical inactivity or binge drinking. In fact, the only comparable health hazard is smoking.
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This may be why we remain so attuned to popularity today, even when we’re not consciously thinking of it. Research in psychology and neuroscience has begun to reveal a number of automatic physiological responses to unpopularity. For instance, our popularity may have an effect on our DNA.
| https://x.com/robsica/status/1909653676571926913 "we need to understand social isolation not as some endogenous risk factor, but as itself socially, economically and politically determined, and thus a contributor to social inequalities in health" |
George Slavich and Steve Cole, experts in the field of human social genomics at the University of California, Los Angeles, have described our genomic material as being exquisitely “sensitive to social rejection.” They study what happens immediately after we’ve been left by a romantic partner, excluded from a social event, rejected by a stranger or even simply told that we may be judged by others we care about. Within 40 minutes, they and other researchers have found, these experiences affect the expression of individual genes, determining which parts of our DNA are turned on or off (called epigenetics). Even imagining that we might lose our connection to the herd, they have found, can change how DNA behaves.
How Loneliness Undermines Health
The structure of modern societies exposes large numbers of people to circumstances where it is difficult to fulfill social needs and avoid loneliness. With increased loneliness comes vulnerability to anxiety and depression that are associated with leading killers such as heart disease, drug addiction, and suicide.
While the psychological effects of social isolation are fairly obvious, health researchers have labored to establish the mechanisms through which loneliness increases the risk of early mortality. Loneliness increases stress hormones. This is partly because close social interaction releases oxytocin, an anti-stress hormone. Loneliness also increases inflammation that features in diverse serious illnesses, including heart disease and cancers.
Lonely people often suffer from a lack of meaning that derives from social integration and community involvement. They are prone to hopelessness and are not good at recovering from setbacks.
Loneliness is associated with poor nutrition, bad sleep habits, smoking, and failure to get adequate exercise or medical attention. It is alarming that around half of Americans report feeling lonely. This is a grim statistic, considering that loneliness increases the risk of premature mortality by 65 percent.
In fact, the researchers found that “those with close social ties and unhealthful lifestyles (such as smoking, obesity and lack of exercise) actually lived longer than those with poor social ties but more healthful living habits,” Mr. Robbins wrote. However, he quickly added, “Needless to say, people with both healthful lifestyles and close social ties lived the longest of all.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqrcanPgGyI
Going Ape Social Climbers S01E03 Full Episode Tune
I Have No Friends!
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1305871956751929344
Foe Realz!
https://x.com/robkhenderson/status/1725927751096430688
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202001/who-experiences-more-loneliness-men-or-women
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/202406/will-you-become-lonely-as-you-age
You Can't Hold The Beliefs I Hold Concerning Race And Religion (That There Are Racial Differences Resulting In Different Behavior And Different Life Outcomes And That God Has No Part To Play In Any Of This Because God Doesn't Exist), Announce Them To The World, And Expect To Be Liked And Accepted By People. Why? because These
Beliefs Are Anathema To Most People (Unacceptable) Since They're Contrary To The Myths, Legends, And Folklore (i.e.Wive's Tales, Common Sense, And Intuition) That They've Been Inculcated By Our Culture To Believe And Are Ultimately Unpleasing To The Mind (i.e. These Beliefs Don't Provide The Upbeat, Positive, Optimistic, Encouraging Thoughts That We've Evolved To Seek In Beliefs And Ideologies).
http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-the-blues-visits-must-be-real-not-virtual-1464899707
https://x.com/datepsych/status/1914761170478829992
