This guy has so many friends. He is so popular. I bet he is doing fun stuff all day long, even all night long. I’m so jealous. Does it sound familiar? Well, despite what the old saying says, the grass is not always greener in the neighbors’ loan. As a matter of fact, the appearance rarely reflects reality. This guy is not alone per se, but odds are he might feel alone. He is a lonely boy.

Alone vs. lonely

There is a crucial difference between being alone and being lonely. One can be alone without feeling lonely or one can be feeling lonely even if physically surrounded by friends or family.
It is a question of perception. Loneliness refers to the feeling of being alone against your will. There is a gap between the desires of social interactions and the actual experience of it. It triggers a pervasive discomfort caused by existential angst.

“the feeling of being alone against your will.”

What loneliness feels like

Many symptoms are associated with loneliness. Amongst them, feeling empty, feeling unwanted, or not likable but also, the craving for human contact. All of those symptoms participate as well to the pervasive aspect of loneliness with a state of mind that prevents connections with other people. Lonely individuals tend to focus on reasons of rejection from others and do a good job to protect themselves.

Am I silently suffering?

Loneliness has been so far mainly diagnosed using the UCLA Loneliness Scale [1]. It’s a questionnaire of 20 items with 4 response categories. Russell and colleagues came up with this survey in 1980 — It doesn’t make me any younger since I was born around that time…, loneliness has been an ongoing problem for decades. But it seemed to have exacerbated in this past decade. You would think that the wide accessibility of communication devices, connected to the internet, would push people to communicate to a higher degree and thus help to deal with their loneliness, but interestingly, individuals with social anxiety or loneliness receive less incoming calls and SMS [2]. Could it be because of an increase of self-centrism of the general population? or is it due to the rejection issue mentioned above, which in return makes the rejected relegating the rejectee to a deeper rank of priority? No clear answer to these questions — opened to debate.

“We have no control over other people’s actions.”

We have no control over other people’s actions. Trying to act on it is a never-ending task that always leads to disappointment. It generates unnecessary stress which in fine interferes with your mental health.

How loneliness affects mental health

“We’re social beings and our bodies respond when we lack the proximity to others,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad in an interview for the New York Times. And unfortunately, those responses are not really healthy. A continuous release of stress hormones causes physical health issues in the longterm.

For instance, lacking any social connection is

• comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day as a risk factor for mortality [3].

• associated with depression and other mental illnesses.

• a risk factor for heart diseases, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease.

And not to mention that lonely individuals have an increased by 26% risk of premature death [4].

Will loneliness kill you?

The answer is no, or at least not directly. But it contributes to deteriorating your general health slowly but surely. The good news is, it gives you time to consult a doctor to define a strategy to heal this invisible illness of the century.

References

[1] Hughes, M. E., Waite, L. J., Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004). A Short Scale for Measuring Loneliness in Large Surveys: Results From Two Population-Based Studies. Research on Aging, 26(6), 655–672.
[2] Gao, Y., Li, A., Zhu, T., Liu, X., & Liu, X. (2016). How smartphone usage correlates with social anxiety and loneliness. PeerJ, 4, e2197.
[3]Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
[4] Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on psychological science: a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.