When loneliness won’t leave us alone
WHAT TO DO WITH THE INCREASING NUMBER WHO FEEL ALONE IN A CONNECTED AGE?
The volunteers at the University of Chicago’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory, all otherwise young and healthy, were tied together by really only one thing: nearly off-the-chart scores on the most widely used scale measuring loneliness.
Asked how often they felt they had no one they could turn to, how often they felt their relationships seemed superficial and forced, how often they felt alone, left out, isolated or no longer closer to anyone, the answer, almost always, was “always.”
The volunteers agreed to be randomly dosed over eight weeks with either pregnenolone, a hormone naturally produced
by the body’s adrenal gland, or a placebo. Two hours after swallowing the assigned tablet, the university’s researchers captured and recorded their brain activity while the participants looked at pictures of emotional faces or neutral scenes.
Studies in animals suggest that a single injection of pregnenolone can reduce or “normalize” an exaggerated threat response in socially isolated lab mice, similar to the kind of hyper vigilance lonely people feel that makes them poor at reading other people’s intentions and feelings.
The researchers have every hope the drug will work in lonely human brains, too, although they insist the goal is not an attempt to cure loneliness with a pill.
Lead researcher and neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo has likened using a drug to rubbing frost from a windshield. Loneliness increases both a desire to connect with others, and a gut instinct for self-preservation (“if I let you get close to me, you’ll only hurt me, too”).
People become more wary, cautious and self-centred. The idea is to help people see things as they are, “rather than being afraid of everyone,” Cacioppo said in an interview with Smithsonian. com.
For some, the idea of a pharmacological buffer against loneliness is just another sign of the creeping medicalization of everyday human woes: Wouldn’t a pill for loneliness only make us more indifferent, more disconnected? Is it really the best we can do to fix the modern world’s so-called epidemic of loneliness?
Headlines suggest we’ve become consumed by loneliness, a new generation of Eleanor Rigbys half a century after the Beatles lament for the lonely: Why are 30somethings lonely? What You Need to Know about the Loneliness Epidemic. Loneliness is a human catastrophe.
A recent Angus Reid Institute survey found that nearly half of Canadians sometimes or often feel alone. In the U.S., the number of Americans who feel they have no one with whom they can speak to has tripled since 1985.
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of ‘parties’ with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear,” Sylvia Plath wrote in journals published nearly four decades ago. Today, people across the West are reporting higher levels of persistent loneliness than ever before.
But is the epidemic real? Are we truly more lonesome than generations past, or have we simply lost the capacity, the tolerance, to be alone? Are the digital technologies that enable us to have instant contact and faux friendships distancing us from meaningful ones? Is it fair to pin the blame on our digital culture, or is the course of western politics, the rise of populism and individualism really the cause?
To those testing the loneliness pill, a “therapeutic” little helper, the epidemic is certainly real.
“Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed and self-centred, and is associated with a 26 per cent increase in the risk of premature mortality,” Cacioppo and her late husband, John Cacioppo, wrote in The Lancet last year. Around a third of people in industrialized countries report feeling lonely, one in 12 severely so, and the proportions are increasing, they warned.
The Angus Reid study, conducted in partnership with the faith-based think tank Cardus, found that four in 10 Canadians surveyed said they often or sometimes wished they had someone to talk to, but don’t. One quarter said they would rather have less time alone, led by 18- to 34-year-olds. Women under 35 expressed more feelings of loneliness than any other age group.
In a poll of 20,000 Americans last year, nearly half said they lack companionship or meaningful relationships. One in four Americans rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them. Six in 10 Britons recently told pollsters their pet is their closest companion.
“Nearly 300 million Americans live alone, many not out of preference,” said Christophe Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. In Canada, the percentage