Feeling Lonely Is More Serious Than You Thought
What Loneliness Is And Why You Should Care

You’re scrolling through social media. Photo after photo, story after story, you watch as pictures of friends smiling, laughing, celebrating, even traveling together pass by. Without even realizing it, a feeling starts welling up in the pit of your stomach. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but it grows with every image that passes. It’s a combination of emptiness and yearning. It’s loneliness.
With the exponential increase in social media over the past decade, it seems as though this feeling is becoming normalized. What many people don’t realize, however, is how destructive the perceived feeling of loneliness can be. It’s like the drug commercials that list “heart attack” as a side effect. Everyone just accepts it, when really people should be alarmed.
Your initial reaction might be that loneliness and heart attacks are nowhere near on the same level of danger. What many individuals fail to realize, however, is that, like a heart attack, loneliness has potential to actually kill. Now I know what you’re thinking:
But studies show that individuals who feel lonely are more susceptible to getting sick and even to chronic disease, doubling their chances of dying from heart disease and increasing a person’s overall mortality risk by approximately 30%, specifically because of how feeling lonely affects our immune system. So while the effects loneliness are more long-term than a sudden heart attack, it is important to recognize that they exist, and may even be related.
Loneliness And The Body’s Physiological Response
But why? Why does something as arbitrary as a feeling have the power to affect something as steady as the human immune system? The answer to this question has to do with a human response pattern you may have learned about in your seventh grade health class.
Now before you get carried away, we’re not talking birds and the bees or how to put a condom on a banana. We’re talking fight or flight mode. Social isolation — even if just a perception — puts our bodies into this state.
The sympathetic nervous system responds by signaling our adrenal glands to release the stress hormone norepinephrine into our bloodstreams. Norepinephrine is known to initiate and alter the production of white blood cells, but not the good guys that fight infections. This type of white blood cells produced from the stresses of loneliness, called immature monocytes, weakens our anti-viral response and increases inflammation.
Now, if you are anything like me and science is not your forte, this is probably you right now:
But do not fear. All you need to take away from this is that the body actually has negative physiological responses to perceived feelings of loneliness.
Likewise, the body has positive physiological responses to positive social interactions, such as the release of dopamine, the “pleasure chemical,” from our brain’s reward headquarters.
Loneliness As An Evolutionary Response
The reason for these bodily responses — both negative and positive — is tied to evolution. Being close to our tribe helped us to conserve energy when hunting and gathering, to fight against predators, and to have children with greater chances of surviving. Today, while we no longer hunt, gather, or fight off predators, we still are left with these biological impulses that come with feeling socially connected or a lack thereof, motivating us to make our way into a tribe.
Distinguishing Loneliness From Social Isolation
If I asked you what a good synonym for loneliness is, your response would likely be someone who is “socially isolated.” Ironically, though, this is incorrect, and it’s important to note how these terms differ.
Social isolation is an objective state. Loneliness is a feeling. And, paradoxically, the two are not necessarily related.
Stay with me. I will illustrate:
Socially Isolated ≠ Lonely
A child who, after school, chooses to stay home and read rather than play with his or her neighbors, for example, may technically be “socially isolated.” But that does not mean that the child feels lonely. Rather, he or she may prefer to be alone, taking time to learn from and engage in stories of far-away places and times. In fact, many introverts are this way, gaining energy from being by themselves rather than from time spent with other people.
Lonely ≠ Socially Isolated
Someone who has thousands of Facebook friends or someone considered “popular” in school might actually, deep down, feel lonely.
Why This Matters
So, when our body is responding physiologically, it is crucial to recognize that it is not necessarily responding to what is happening externally, but rather to our own subjective internal experience of it.
Are Certain People More Prone To Subjective Internal Experiences of Loneliness?
Has a gene been found in humans indicating a higher likelihood of feeling lonely? No.
However, MIT neuroscientists recently conducted a study using mice and found that mice have a part of the brain consisting of neurons that respond to feelings of loneliness as well as social interaction. When the mice were isolated and not socializing, this part of the brain called the Dorsal Raphe Nucleus (DRN) craved social stimuli. And when the mice were once again allowed to interact, the DRN’s activity would spike, leading researchers to hypothesize that DRN neurons are likely to be what motivates us to socialize.
The Downward Spiral Of Loneliness
The tricky part about loneliness is that we can easily get stuck in a cycle, one that by no means is easy to get out of.
For one reason or another, we start to feel lonely.
Because we feel lonely, our desire to have good interactions with people deepens so that we can stop feeling lonely.
However, evolutionary-determined response patterns, as discussed above, are what cause us to switch into this self-preservation mode and to be on high alert for possible threats, even if there are none. This is why you friend’s innocent joke about your outfit can ruminate in your mind longer than the two hours of friendly conversation you just had. In this state of fear and protection, you are more likely to interpret something innocent as a sign of negativity or as an attack toward you. Additionally, this state diminishes our ability to pick up on positive social stimuli, completely distorting our outlook on our interactions.
This makes us act less trusting, more hostile, and more defensive in our social interactions, which not only pushes people away, but also sabotages our chances of developing relationships, only creating more space between us and other people.
After this period of being socially and emotionally isolated, our social skills tend to weaken, so when we do finally have a social interaction, we are more likely to be labeled as boring, shy, or just not the best overall social prospect by others.
We then use this social encounter to validate our feelings of loneliness, and the cycle starts over again. Somehow every interaction that we have fits perfectly into our own personal story about how lonely we are, and every piece of evidence proving the opposite is dismissed. As we keep searching for evidence that we are not lonely, our focus causes us to go deeper into this seemingly never ending hole.
The Solution
These days, with what seems like a never-ending wave of information available on the Internet, people often expect extensive, step-by-step answers; however, the solution to loneliness is, actually, suspiciously straightforward.
Just like the first step to overcoming addiction is acceptance, the first step to overcoming the cycle of loneliness is awareness. In particular, it requires awareness of this self-fulfilling prophecy and the biological as well as evolutionary processes associated with it.
Are you underwhelmed?
I know, it seems like an oversimplified answer to a complex problem; however, catching ourselves in the first place through awareness is the key to stopping ourselves from becoming victim to our own subconscious minds.
So, next time you start to feel lonely, take a second to step back. Recognize that much of what you are feeling is a result of physiological processes occurring in the body that have developed over time to increase our genetic fitness.
Additionally, note that much of what you are experiencing is less likely to be tied to your external surroundings and more like a result of your own internal subjective experience of it. This is not to undermine your experience, but rather to draw your attention to your mind or, more specifically, to your thoughts.
What does your internal dialogue look like? Is there a possibility that, feeling lonely, you are on high alert and, as a result, are interpreting what could be innocent comments as hostile? Or, is there any potential that you are jumping to conclusions that people are purposefully not reaching out to you when, in actuality, it is less of a slight and more of an oversight?
As best explained by Wayne Dyer, “You create your thoughts, your thoughts create your intentions, and your intentions create your reality.” It is through this level of awareness that individuals separate themselves from the downward spiral associated with loneliness and, ultimately, regain control of their own narrative.