The Health Consequences of Loneliness (2023)

FAQs

What are the three major health consequences of loneliness? ›

Loneliness was associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.

It could lead to weight gain, sleep deprivation, poor heart health, and a weakened immune system. Loneliness can also put your body under more stress than normal. An increased amount of stress can increase blood pressure and affect your memory and problem-solving skills.

What happens to your body when you're lonely? “When you're experiencing loneliness, your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, go up,” she says. “Cortisol can impair cognitive performance, compromise the immune system, and increase your risk for vascular problems, inflammation and heart disease.”

"Loneliness can change the neurochemistry of the brain, turning off the dopamine neurons, which trigger the reward response, and causing some degeneration in the brain when the reward response is not activated," says Katherine Peters, MD, PhD, FAAN, associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Duke University.

Long term feelings of loneliness and social isolation can also reduce cognitive skills, such as the ability to concentrate, make decisions, problem-solve, and even change negative self-beliefs. And it can ultimately lead to depression.

Feeling lonely can also have a negative impact on your mental health, especially if these feelings have lasted a long time. Some research suggests that loneliness is associated with an increased risk of certain mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, sleep problems and increased stress.

The Physiological Effects of Loneliness

Loneliness is also associated with problematic changes in the cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems. The result is a chronic counterproductive inflammatory state which damages the heart, reduces one's capacity to resist infection and promotes loss of bone and muscle.

Hawkley points to evidence linking perceived social isolation with adverse health consequences including depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, poor cardiovascular function and impaired immunity at every stage of life.

Your nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode, making it harder to sleep. When you're lonely, research shows that your brain can produce an excess of norepinephrine, a hormone that's a crucial “signal during the fight or flight response.” Loneliness can feel, to our social selves, like dire straits.

How does loneliness shorten life? ›

Biologists have shown that feelings of loneliness trigger the release of stress hormones that in turn are associated with higher blood pressure, decreased resistance to infection and increased risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer.

PREFRONTAL CORTEX: In some studies, people who are lonely have been found to have reduced brain volumes in the prefrontal cortex, a region important in decision making and social behavior, although other research suggests this relationship might be mediated by personality factors.

When you feel lonely, you get more defensive. You focus more on self-preservation even though this is not done intentionally. Completely unbeknownst to you, your brain is focusing more on self-preservation than the preservation of those around you. This, in turn, can make you less pleasant to be around.

Can someone survive with no human interaction? Yes once you can feed yourself and clean yourself you could Infact live completely alone though loneliness could drive you insane but you can't miss what you didn't have to begin with.

These feelings of loneliness may ultimately lead to posttraumatic stress symptoms via a number of pathways. For example, loneliness may lead to the development of negative cognitions (Cacioppo and Hawkley, 2009), which can predict future PTSD symptoms and impact PTSD treatment (Brown et al., 2019).

If feelings of loneliness linger, it may be a good idea to reach out to your healthcare provider or a mental health professional. Also consider getting help if: feelings of loneliness negatively affect your daily life or make it hard to do the things you want to do. you have a low mood or feelings of depression.

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.

Contributing factors to loneliness include situational variables, such as physical isolation, moving to a new location, and divorce. 2 The death of someone significant in a person's life can also lead to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also be attributed to internal factors such as low self-esteem.

The most prevalent cause for loneliness was feeling disconnected. Many young adults spoke about being lonely because they felt unable to express themselves, their feelings or talk about their issues. They also talked about being lonely due to feeling they did not matter to others and were not understood.

40% of respondents aged 16-24 reported feeling lonely often or very often, while only 29% of people aged 65-74 and 27% of people aged over 75 said the same⁶.

What age group is the most lonely? ›

Young people feel loneliness the most

However, in contrast, the young report feeling lonely much more – with 40% saying they have felt this way at least some of the time. The BBC Loneliness Experiment surveyed 55,000 people and showed that 16–24-year-olds feel loneliness the most.

It is not surprising that loneliness hurts. A brain imaging study showed that feeling ostracized actually activates our neural pain matrix. In fact, several studies show that ostracizing others hurts us as much as being ostracized ourselves.

People describe thoughts and feelings of loneliness with words like anxiety, fear, shame and helplessness. These powerful emotions can influence how we act. They can create a downward spiral where loneliness causes someone to withdraw further from family and friends and so become lonelier.

Examples might be: Play or listen to music, write, work or study, exercise, walk, work on a hobby and/or read. Being comfortable when you are alone takes time, but it will come. Think of it as being with yourself instead of being without someone.

Research suggests that several risk factors may increase a person's risk of becoming isolated or lonely. These include mental or physical health conditions, low education or income, and social factors (eg, unmarried, living alone).

289). Three dimensions of loneliness were identified, namely intensity (i.e. nature and magnitude of social isolation), time perspective (i.e. changeability of loneliness) and emotional characteristics (i.e. absence of positive feelings).

What causes loneliness? There is not one single cause of loneliness. Loneliness can often be a result of life changes or circumstances that include living alone, changing your living arrangements, having financial problems, or death of a loved one.

What is toxic loneliness? ›

Loneliness is toxic

Loneliness has clear consequences for mental health, aggravating anxiety, depression, and stress-related symptoms. Additionally, it sabotages our physical health. According to two leading researchers, loneliness triggers an inflammatory response and threatens our immune system.

Stage 4: Depression. The despair of loneliness is an all-encompassing emotion.

Some studies show a linear decline, some an inverted U-pattern (peaking in middle age), and others a U-pattern (peaking in early and late adulthood). Our previous study found that loneliness was highest in the late 20s, mid-50s, and late 80s.

When someone feels lonely they are more likely to try to distract themselves with the other things in their lives. So if your colleague is always talking about their stamp collection, or always flying away on exotic solo city breaks rather than spending weekends at home, they might be feeling alone.

Childhood trauma can lead to loneliness in adulthood because of the way it impacts your social interactions and ability to form meaningful connections. According to a 2018 study, people who had experienced childhood or adulthood trauma reported higher loneliness-related distress than those without a trauma history.

Loneliness affects people in different ways, and for this reason there are four distinct types of loneliness identified by psychologists: emotional, social, situational and chronic.