Loneliness is associated with poor physical health, including higher rates of cardiovascular disease and dementia, faster cognitive decline, and increased risk of mortality, as well as disruptions in mental health, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and negative affect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Loneliness was found to be significantly associated with lifetime and childhood physical abuse as well as emotional abuse/neglect. A positive correlation between cumulative trauma and loneliness also exists, with increasing numbers of traumatic events associated with greater loneliness scores.
There are different types of loneliness: emotional, and social and existential loneliness.
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.
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.
Cole found that social isolation sets off antiviral responses in the body linked to survival tactics from thousands of years ago, proving that our bodies perceive loneliness as a life or death situation. However, rather than being a positive, this defensive response drives inflammation in the body that can be toxic.
Neither loneliness nor chronic loneliness is a classified mental health condition, but chronic loneliness can lead to mental health problems, such as depression, or other effects, such as alcohol use disorder.
—Elevated cortisol: Loneliness can cause stress, which your body interprets as danger. In response, it releases the hormone cortisol, explains Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.
It is clear that the chronic experience of social isolation escalates the risk of depression and dementias, as well as cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer6,7,8.
Can someone survive with no human interaction? Depends on how long the lack of human interaction is going for. At about six to nine months, you're looking at the sort of psych profile that can cope with being the only person in an outpost in Alaska during the winter.
Other studies have linked loneliness to cardiovascular disease, inflammation and depression. We've known since the 1980s that people who are more socially isolated tend to have worse health, but we still don't know why loneliness is so closely linked to our health.
One neuroscientist found significant inflammatory responses in human white blood cells in lonely people. Long-term inflammation can lead to tissue breakdown, decreased immunity, increased heart disease and hypertension, and diabetes and cognitive problems. So yes, loneliness is a physical problem.
Poor social skills often lead to stress and loneliness, which can negatively affect physical as well as mental health.
When a feeling of being alone and disconnected persists for extended periods of time (often despite actually surrounding yourself with other humans), quality, rejuvenating alone time transitions into crippling loneliness.
It was suggested in the present series of survey studies that childhood abuse, which compromises a child's sense of safety in relationships, may affect social processes that contribute to loneliness in young adulthood.
To be happy alone, experts say that it can help to try exercising, spending time in nature, or volunteering. Taking a break from social media or adopting a pet can also help you feel less lonely. However, if you are struggling to feel happy alone, it may be worth seeking medical help.