Research has linked social isolation and loneliness to higher risks for a variety of physical and mental conditions: high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease, and even death.
If you've experienced ongoing feelings of loneliness, it can have negative effects on your physical health. 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.
Loneliness unleashes excess stress hormones, causing an elevated heart rate, and increased blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Loneliness also reduces the number of antibodies we produce to fight infection and may make us more susceptible to cancer.
Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests that loneliness can negatively affect hormonal, immunological, cardiovascular, and inflammatory responses. Loneliness has been implicated in everything from increased risk of hypertension and heart disease to a reduced antibody response to the flu vaccine.
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.
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.
In 1962, Richard Yates wrote a book entitled “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness”. But it was fiction. More recently, Sarah Biddlecombe, an award-winning journalist at 'Stylist', explained that there are four distinct types of loneliness identified by psychologists: emotional, social, situational, and chronic.
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.
The more lonely you've been over your life, the more likely you are to have conditions that affect your heart health: obesity, high blood pressure, and bad cholesterol levels, for example. And women who are lonely may be more likely to get coronary heart disease. Why?
Social isolation causes decreased white matter in brain regions critical for thinking and emotional control. Changes in connectivity between the amygdala and frontal lobes is associated with increased behavioral problems.
Defining Chronic Loneliness
You don't have any close friends. The people you see are casual acquaintances you can spend time with, but you don't have a deep connection with them. You experience feelings of isolation even when you're surrounded by other people or in large groups.
And so, we pepper the lonely with advice: you should go for a walk, go to the library, join an adult education class, go to a meetup group, do volunteer work. And it's true, the 'cure' for loneliness is not dependent on other people springing into action. No, it requires you, the lonely person, to spring into action.
Loneliness can lead to various psychiatric disorders like depression, alcohol abuse, child abuse, sleep problems, personality disorders and Alzheimer's disease.
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.
Some of the most common causes of loneliness include: Social Anxiety, Isolation, Difficulty with Assertiveness, and Poor Self-awareness. Common types or forms of loneliness include: Lack of Physical Connection, Lack of Common Interests, Lack of Shared Values, Lack of Emotional Intimacy, and Lack of Self-Intimacy.
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.
Published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a study found that people's expectations from interpersonal relationships undergo considerable changes as they age — resulting in them often feeling lonelier as they grow older, even if they're not alone.
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.
People who are socially isolated or lonely may be less likely to eat a healthy diet and get regular exercise and more likely to smoke and consume alcohol. In addition, social isolation is linked to inflammation and weakened immune systems.
The more alone we feel, the more we start to have thoughts of not belonging or of feeling rejected by others. Left alone with our thoughts, we become our own worst enemy. An isolated space is the perfect breeding ground for negative, self-critical thoughts.
You're always busy. Rushing around all day every day to get through your to-do list is one of the signs of lonely people. Filling your day with activities that prevent you from connecting with others is a way lonely people fill the void they feel inside.
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.