Loneliness

Everyone feels lonely from time to time. When we have no one to sit with at lunch, when we move to a new city, or when no one has time for us on the weekend. But over the past few decades, this occasional feeling has become chronic for millions of people. In the United Kingdom, 60% of people aged 18 to 34 say they often feel lonely. In the US, 46% of the entire population feels lonely regularly. We live in the most connected time in human history. And yet, a vast number of us feel isolated. Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. You can be filled with happiness by yourself and hate every second of being surrounded by friends. Loneliness is an entirely subjective, individual experience. If you feel lonely, you are lonely. A common stereotype is that loneliness only happens to people who don't know how to converse with people, or how to behave around others. But population-based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections. Loneliness can affect anyone: money, fame, power, beauty, social skills, a great personality; nothing can protect us from loneliness because it is part of our biology. Loneliness is a bodily function, like hunger. Hunger makes you pay attention to your physical needs. Loneliness makes you care for your social needs. Your body cares for your social needs because millions of years ago it was a good indicator of your chances of survival. Natural selection rewarded our ancestors for cooperation, and for forming bonds with each other. Our brains grew and became increasingly well-adapted to recognizing what others thought and felt, and to forming and maintaining social bonds. Being social became part of our biology. Born in groups of 50 to 150 people, with whom you usually stayed until the end of your life. Getting enough calories, being safe and warm, or caring for offspring was practically impossible alone. Being together meant survival. Being alone meant death. So, it was important that you got along with others. For your ancestors, the most dangerous threat to survival was not being eaten by a lion, but rather not being accepted into social circles and being excluded. To avoid this, your body invented "social pain." Pain of this kind is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection: a kind of early warning system to ensure you stop behavior that would isolate you. Your ancestors who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behavior when rejected and thus stayed in the tribe, while those who did not behave this way were excluded and most likely died. This is why rejections hurt us. And even more so, why loneliness is so painful. These mechanisms for keeping us connected worked very well for most of our history, until humans began to build a new world for themselves. The epidemic of loneliness we see today really only began at the end of the Renaissance. Western culture began to focus on the individual. Intellectuals moved away from the collectivism of the Middle Ages, while new Protestant theology emphasized individual responsibility. This trend accelerated during the Industrial Revolution. People abandoned their villages and fields to enter factories. Communities that had existed for hundreds of years began to break apart, while cities grew larger. As our world rapidly became modern, this trend grew more and more. Today we move great distances for new jobs, love, and education, and leave our social network behind. We meet fewer people in person, and meet them less often than in the past. In the US, the average number of close friends dropped from 3 in 1985 to 2 in 2011. Most people fall into chronic loneliness accidentally. You reach adulthood and become busy with work, university, romance, children, and Netflix. There isn't enough time. The most convenient and easiest thing to sacrifice is time with friends. Until you wake up one day and realize you feel isolated; that you long for close relationships. But it is difficult to find close connections as an adult and so, loneliness can become chronic. While people feel very good about things like iPhones and spaceships, our bodies and minds are essentially the same as they were 50,000 years ago. We are still biologically wired to be with each other. Large-scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the unhealthiest things we can experience as humans. It accelerates aging, makes cancer more deadly, Alzheimer's advance faster, immune systems weaker. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The most dangerous thing about it is that once it becomes chronic, it can become self-perpetuating. Physical and social pain use common mechanisms in your brain. Both feel like a threat, and so, social pain leads to immediate self-protective behavior when it is inflicted upon you. When loneliness becomes chronic, your brain goes into self-protective mode. It begins to see danger and hostility everywhere. But that's not all. Some studies found that when you are lonely, your brain is much more open and attentive to social cues, while at the same time, it becomes worse at interpreting them correctly. You pay more attention to others but understand them less. The part of your brain that recognizes faces becomes miscalibrated and is more likely to categorize neutral faces as hostile, which makes you distrustful of others. Loneliness makes you assume the worst about others' intentions towards you. Because of this perceived hostile world, you may become more self-centered to protect yourself, which can make you appear colder, less friendly, and stranger in society than you actually are. If loneliness has become a strong presence in your life, the first thing you can do is try to recognize the vicious cycle you may be falling into. It's usually something like this: An initial feeling of isolation leads to feelings of tension and sadness, which makes you selectively focus your attention on negative interactions with others. This makes your thoughts about yourself and others more negative, which then changes your behavior. You start to avoid social interaction, which leads to more feelings of isolation. This cycle becomes more severe and harder to escape each time. Loneliness makes you sit away from others in class, not answer the phone when friends call, not accept invitations until the invitations stop. Each of us has a story about ourselves, and if your story becomes that people exclude you, others pick up on this, and so the outside world can become the way you feel about it. This is often a slow process that takes years, and can end in depression and a state of mind that hinders connection, even if you desire it. The first thing you can do to escape is to accept that loneliness is a perfectly normal feeling and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, everyone feels lonely at some point in their lives, it is a universal human experience. You cannot eliminate or ignore a feeling until it magically goes away, but you can accept that you feel it and get rid of its cause. You can self-examine the things you focus your attention on, and check if you are selectively focusing on negative things. Was this interaction with a colleague really negative, or was it really neutral or even positive? What was the actual content of an interaction? What did the other person say? And did they say something bad, or did you add extra meaning to their words? Perhaps another person wasn't really reacting negatively, but just didn't have much time. Then, we have your thoughts about the world. Are you assuming the worst about others' intentions? Do you enter a social situation having already decided how it will go? Do you assume that others don't want you around? Are you trying to avoid getting hurt by not risking opening up to others? And, if so, can you try to think positively about others' behavior towards you? Can you assume they are not against you? Can you risk opening up again and being more vulnerable? And finally, your behavior. Are you avoiding opportunities to be around others? Are you looking for excuses to decline invitations? Or are you pushing others away to protect yourself? Are you acting as if you are under attack? Are you really looking for new connections, or are you content with your situation? Of course, every person and situation is unique and different, and self-analysis alone may not be enough. If you feel unable to resolve your situation yourself, try to reach out and get professional help. This is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of courage. However we look at loneliness, whether as an entirely individual problem that needs to be solved to create more personal happiness, or as a public health crisis, it is something that deserves more attention. Humans have built a world that is amazing, and yet, none of the shiny things we have made are able to satisfy or replace our fundamental biological need for connection. Most animals get what they need from their surroundings. We get what we need from each other, and we must build our artificial human world based on this.