Loneliness is a vicious cycle. The more isolated we are, the more threatened we feel. The more threatened we feel, the more we seek isolation.
"Humans are social animals" is a phrase often repeated by psychologists to sum up why we've been such a successful species. Our ability to live, work, and cooperate in groups is
the key to our survival.
But it comes with a tradeoff. Companionship is an asset for human survival, but its mirror twin, isolation, can be toxic.
Loneliness is associated with higher blood pressure and heart disease โ it literally breaks our hearts. A 2015 meta-review
of 70 studies showed that loneliness increases the risk of your chance of dying by 26 percent. (Compare that to depression and anxiety, which is associated with a
comparable 21 percent increase in mortality.)
Now researchers are trying to understand exactly how loneliness causes disease at the cellular level. And they're finding that loneliness
is far more than a psychological pain โ it's a biological wound that wreaks havoc on our cells."Social isolation is far and away the strongest social risk factor out there," Steve Cole, a genetics researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, tells me. Or, as John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who frequently collaborates with Cole on loneliness studies, has
said, "The level of toxicity from loneliness is stunning."
I called Cole to learn how loneliness can make us sick โ and what that means for the 40 percent of people age 65 and older who
report being lonely at times. I was also thinking about this GIF of how America will age until 2050. It's a wave of increasing old age, but it may also represent
a soul-crushing wave of loneliness as baby boomers age into their 70s.How does a feeling like loneliness influence our biology?In 2007, Cole and a team of researchers at UCLA make a breakthrough in a small 14-participant study. The very cells of people who lived through periods of chronic loneliness looked different.
More specifically, the white blood cells of people who suffered through chronic loneliness appeared to be stuck in a state of fear. Cole and his colleagues observed two main genetic differences between lonely and non-lonely people.
1) Genes that code for the body's inflammation response are turned on to a degree not seen in non-lonely participants.Which isn't good. "Inflammation is great at responding to acute injury, but if you have inflammation going chronically, it serves as
a fertilizer for chronic diseases like atherosclerosis and cardio vascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and metastatic cancer," he says. "That provides one reasonable biological explanation for why they might be at an increased risk for these diseases."
2) "At the same time, in almost like a teeter-totter regulatory dynamic, we see
down-regulated, or suppressed activity, in a block of genes involved in fending off against viral infections." Those genes code for proteins known as type-1 interferons, which direct the immune system to kill viruses.
This is a bit of a head-scratcher. Increasing the body's inflammation response in the face of stress makes sense. It's protective in the short term. But why would our bodies become less willing to attack viruses?
Cole says it's essentially a biological tradeoff. The inflammation response is how the body attacks bacteria. And it so happens that the body's response to viruses can actually make bacteria thrive. So the body makes a choice โ and it's all in the name of protecting against bacteria. (Cole says there's more nuance to it, but this is the basic concept.)
Overall, Cole finds, the response to chronic loneliness isn't different than the response to other sources of chronic stress โ like low socioeconomic status or living with post-traumatic stress. "You see the same general molecular pattern across a diverse range of bad human life circumstances," he says. Loneliness activates the body's generic stress response.
When we're stressed, our bodies release the hormones epinephrine and cortisol, and when those are in the blood, they activate the genetic changes mentioned above (through a long chain of action,
read more on that here). And, in the long term, that response harms us.
In all, the results โ which have been
replicated in
larger and more longitudinal studies โ suggest people who are lonely are more susceptible to chronic diseases, and less able to fight off immediate threats. And that may explain the decrease in mortality among lonely people. (It's not the sole reason, however. Having friends around makes life easier. They drive you to doctors' appointments. They help you through tough times.)
We still don't have great ways to avert lonelinessIn longitudinal studies that track people over a period of time, Cole and his colleagues find that when feelings of loneliness wane, so do the cellular symptoms. And there are
small preliminary studies that offer some hope that reducing loneliness also reduces the impact of these cellular changes.
Cole says the evidence that interventions can help people become less lonely is currently only "modest. ... I'm not impressed with the magnitude of the effects." Interventions that work tend to not target decreasing loneliness, he says, but instead try to give people a sense of purpose. One
pilot program pairs lonely older Americans with elementary school children. The older participants are told to tutor and look out for the kids. "Secretly, this is an intervention for the older people," he says.
Make no mistake: We need stress. We need loneliness. The pain of loneliness is a reminder that we need to be around other people. And there's evidence that
suggests loneliness naturally rises and falls throughout our lifetimes.
Cole says when he first started to study loneliness, he discounted its destructive power. But he is now convinced it's a silent epidemic.
It's a larger risk factor for disease than "other things we spend more time worrying about;" things like anxiety and depression, he says.
Loneliness increases with age. And an aging wave of baby boomers means a wave of loneliness is coming for America.
After he published that first 2007 study, he started to get notes from "lonely people being devoured by disease and suffering, both personal and somatic," he says.
"There is a huge hidden epidemic of loneliness and disenfranchisement from the human race."
#Loneliness actually hurts us on a cellular level:Loneliness is historical fact. It has accompanied humanity for eons. We are born alone and we die alone. Time to ACCEPT you are NEVER alone!
None of us can accept or live with loneliness - me especially - but I do and choose to now, Why?
My thoughts are that there are no mistakes in the universe and man is so perverse that he never sees what is just in front of him. All is for a reason - to wake us up from our eternal stupor! In the nicest - but forever harder, loving ways! Lessons!
Look, when the sun is shining we all love to play in the hay and fields. But when the going gets tough, only then, do we worry about our 'future' our destiny, our 'protection' our support system, our existentialist concerns - our death!
Whoah - and why would that be? Perhaps it is the barometer that was missing in our lives all along? Perhaps when the sun is shining and all is good with the world people are so happily ensconced in playing in the hay and sunning themselves in their hedonistic lifestyles, that they have no 'time' to even consider the idea of 'consciousness'
Then when winter sets in and they are trapped inside, they omit to consider the 'inside' that truly matters. However, unbeknownst to them, there is a means of trying to wake them up to their existential reality - called LONELINESS!
I can think of many reasons to feel 'lonely' but none of them truly fit the real meaning of 'loneliness' that we experience on this planet, All are deviations and false ideas of the true meaning. Yes, of course, it is not really the search for a 'soul mate', more likely the loss of our 'spiritual home' - the connection never dies. HOWEVER, higher than that even, IMO is that the real reason we have this 'loneliness' and perhaps intentionally so, is because we HAVE LOST OUR CONNECTION WITH THE DIVINE. To me the 'prompting' via loneliness is just a LOVING way of guiding us back to our CREATOR. We are soooooo lost, and so miss and need this connection at the basic of levels - ie even a rock or crystal level, as we are ALL unity - ALL CONNECTED - whether most of us are not aware of it or not, that this LONELINESS is purely LOVE and re-membering -WHAT/WHO we really ARE.
When all is just lessons in the Universe, then when the loneliness gets unbearable (suffering wise) perhaps we have more chance of being re-born, re-membering, when the pain is unbearable and nobody to call - Can we finally re-member THAT (DCM) that was always there in the first place, never faltering, never absent, always guiding us in our many faltering attempts at learning? Never allowed to intervene due to 'free-will' thus getting the 'blame' all the time we falter or we suffer - when ultimately - like a doting parent - the toddler has to fall again and again in order to learn to walk - and independently at that?
LONELINESS - Last Friday, when I was at the lowest ebb that I could have ever imagined - and yes the loneliness seeped away at my rationality - there was no darker night of the soul for me - and if you have ever lost a child you will know the real depth of a dark night! Well, dark overlords, a spiritual attachment, whatever the cause did not matter - the trauma and 'incentives' and ' infiltrated ideas' to end my life were so so inhumanly STRONG - and I was only drinking tea in a corner of my fave cafe in the sun doing a crossword, that the emanations were nigh on impossible to ignore - because I was already stupidly, mechanically, emotionally, transitionally, feeling 'lonely and unloved'!!
This turned out to be the deepest existential fight for my life I have EVER experienced - at a visceral lever and spiritual level combined. It truly overcame me totally unexpectedly like a black hole, like only a negative 'spiritual attachment' could render. I have no other explanation at present. So when I say all of the above - it was what I wrote AFTER THE EVENT. The realization, the total gratitude I felt as I prayed from every cell in my body for assistance and knowledge. And this was happening in a normal cafe in the middle of a sunny afternoon!
Yes I was sad, Yes, I was 'grieving' again - for a different reason - but nothing could attribute the darkness that suddenly came upon me. But within 5 minutes of 'asking/praying' I felt a huge relief and lifting of the immense pressure that was trying to take over me and trying utmost to give me no reason (temporarily in my 'mind') to continue living - and very convincing 'it' truly was! So much so that I immediately shared the experience - not like me to do so - with the open-minded owner of the cafe! Not because I then felt 'alone' but because I now needed to share what what like an 'epiphany' for me!
Had the help not 'arrived' to lift this awful dark suicidal-making energy from me, I would not be writing this now - so evil and all-pervading on someone normally so so aware and anti the selfishness of 'suicide'!!! But help DID arrive. Only a few days after I had asked the Universe to help me learn/become closer to the Divine. Boy what a lesson!! But a lesson I will NEVER forget and a lesson I asked for - though NOT expecting such frightening 'results' - but perhaps that was what I needed - because NEVER WILL I forget the gratitude and knowledge given when asked for - and the help that came accordingly. SOOOOOO what 'I' learned from that lesson too was - LONELINESS IS ONLY AN ILLUSION - AND A LOVING WAY TO GUIDE US BACK TO THE DIVINE THAT WE LOST ALONG THE WAY.