“Loneliness Is a Warning Sign to Be Social”
““Loneliness is a warning system,” says Louise Hawkley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. It is our body telling us we’re breaking from the social bonds that nourished us as a species. “We’re failing to satisfy our fundamental drive to connect with other humans,” Hawkley says. Feeling isolated switches our bodies into self-preservation mode. “What happens with people who are lonely for a long time is their threat-defense programs get activated,” says Steve Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The body interprets loneliness as threatening.”…
They found that lonely brains respond less positively to pleasant images than non-lonely brains, and more strongly to images of violence and unpleasant social situations. Loneliness spurs the brain into a hyper-vigilant state, unable to relax. The lonely brain doesn’t passively take the world in, but actively interprets it as an unfriendly place.
Hawkley found that lonely individuals take longer to fall asleep, wake up more during the night, and sleep less deeply. “The lonely person’s feeling of not being safe, socially safe, could contribute to disrupted sleep,” she says…
At any given moment, 20 to 40 percent of adults in Western countries feel lonely, and experience these physical changes in their bodies whether they are aware of it or not. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing unless it occurs chronically,” says Leah Doane, a psychologist at Arizona State University. But up to 30 percent of lonely sufferers can’t seem to kick it, and it’s the chronic loneliness that harms us. In a meta-analysis from 2010, researchers found that lonely individuals are 26 percent more likely to have an early death, twice the rate of obese individuals.”
