In small doses, loneliness is like hunger or thirst, a healthy signal that something is missing and you should seek what you need. But if it goes on longer, loneliness can be detrimental not only to mental health, but also to physical health.
Even before the pandemic, the top US health official, Vivek Murthy, said the country was experiencing a “loneliness epidemic”, driven by the fast pace of life and the spread of technology to all our social interactions. With this acceleration, she claimed, efficiency and convenience have “displaced” the time-consuming clutter of actual relationships.
The result is a public health crisis on the level of the obesity or opioid crisis, Murthy said. In a 2018 study Surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said they always or often felt lonely or socially isolated.
The pandemic exacerbated those emotions. In a recent citywide survey According to the New York Department of Health, 57 percent of people said they felt lonely some or most of the time, and two-thirds said they felt socially isolated in the past month.
“Loneliness has real consequences for our health and well-being,” Murthy said.
Being alone, like other forms of stress, increases the risk of emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Less obviously, it also puts people at higher risk for seemingly unrelated physical ailments, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, high blood pressure, dementia, and premature death. In laboratory experimentsLonely people who were exposed to a cold virus were more likely to develop symptoms than people who were not alone.
And meta analysisThe oft-cited study by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University compared the risk effects of loneliness, isolation, and having weak social networks with smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“The general public recognizes how loneliness can influence our levels of distress, our emotional or mental health,” Holt-Lunstad said. “But we probably don’t recognize the strong evidence of effects on our physical health.”
