Loneliness is damaging to our health
Back to work, in bars, bistros, folks still feel isolated
For two years you didn’t see friends like you used to. You missed your colleagues from work, even the barista on the way there.
You were lonely. We all were.
Here’s what neuroscientists think was happening in your brain.
The human brain, having evolved to seek safety in numbers, registers loneliness as a threat. The centers that monitor for danger, including the amygdala, go into overdrive, triggering a release of “fight or flight” stress hormones. Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure and blood sugar level increase to provide energy in case you need it. Your body produces extra inflammatory cells to repair tissue damage and prevent infection, and fewer antibodies to fight viruses. Subconsciously, you start to view other people more as potential threats — sources of rejection or apathy — and less as friends, remedies for your loneliness.
And in a cruel twist, your protective measures to isolate you from the coronavirus may actually make you less resistant to it, or less responsive to the vaccine, because you have fewer antibodies to fight it.
New York City, where 1 million people live alone, was for two years an experiment in loneliness: 9 million people siloed with smartphones and 24/7 home delivery, cut off from the places where they used to gather. Therapists were booked up, even as tens of thousands of New Yorkers were grieving for a best friend, a spouse, a partner, a parent.
For Julie Anderson, a documentary filmmaker, it sets in every day at 5 p.m. — the hour when she would be thinking of dinner with friends, evening plans, now shrunk to watching television alone. Stephen Lipman, a fine artist in the Bronx, feels it in the idle hours — once a cherished time to work on his art, now drained of ideas or motivation. Eduardo Lazo, whose wife died of pancreatic cancer early in the pandemic, feels it every minute, as the end of the world they made together.
“Who doesn’t see suicide as an option at that juncture of life?” he said. “But I’m religious, and that would terminate any chance I have of being with my wife or my loved ones when I’m dead. I can’t jeopardize that possibility.”
Robin Solod, who lives alone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, thought she was an unlikely candidate for loneliness.
“I was too busy schmoozing,” she said of her life before the pandemic. “Chicken soup at the Mansion Diner. We would go to Zabar’s on the West Side every week, get a bagel, sit, schmooze. Who was home? I never was home. Then all of a sudden, everything comes to a halt.”
As some pandemic restrictions now finally lift, and New York returns to some semblance of normal, one unknown is the lasting effects of two years of prolonged isolation and the loneliness that came with it. Some people cut off nearly all physical interaction, others were more social, but few got through the various lockdowns and spikes without some sense of loss for the human connections they were missing.
For Solod, who believed “people are my air,” one of the hardest blows came just before the pandemic, when she had to part with her loyal companion, a rescue Shih Tzu named Annie. Solod, 67, has health problems that keep her in a wheelchair, and eventually she felt she could no longer care for the dog.
“Now Annie lives out in Long Island, and it’s so lonely without her,” she said.
Biology of an epidemic
Loneliness, as defined by mental health professionals, is a gap between the level of connectedness that you want and what you have. It is not the same as social isolation, which is codified in the social sciences as a measure of a person’s contacts. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. People can have a lot of contact and still be lonely, or be perfectly content by themselves.
For many New Yorkers, the pandemic brought too much contact with others — in crowded apartments, workplaces or subways. But the contacts were not necessarily fulfilling or desired and maybe seemed dangerous. This, too, is a condition for loneliness.
In small doses, loneliness is like hunger or thirst, a healthy signal that you are missing something and to seek out what you need. But prolonged over time, loneliness can be damaging not just to mental health, but also to physical health.
Even before the pandemic, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said the country was experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness,” driven by the accelerated pace of life and the spread of technology into all of our social interactions. With this acceleration, he said, efficiency and convenience have “edged out” the time-consuming messiness of real relationships.
The result is a public health crisis on the scale of the opioid epidemic or obesity, Murthy said. In a 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 1 in 5 Americans said they always or often felt lonely or socially isolated.
The pandemic only exacerbated these feelings. In a recent citywide survey by New York’s health department, 57 percent of people said they felt lonely some or most of the time, and two-thirds said they felt socially isolated in the prior month.
“Loneliness,” Murthy said, “has real consequences to our health and wellbeing.”
Being lonely, like other forms of stress, increases the risk of emotional disorders like depression, anxiety and substance abuse.
Less obviously, it also puts people at greater risk of physical ailments that seem unrelated, like heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, dementia and premature death.
In lab experiments, lonely people who were exposed to a cold virus were more likely to develop symptoms than people who were not lonely.
New normal?
Even as case numbers in New York have remained well below their peak, Solod’s loneliness has not eased. If anything, she said, seeing people about their business, without masks, has made her feel even more isolated.
Even if life returns to the way it was before the pandemic, it is unclear how far the loneliness of the last two years will lift, or what scars it might leave behind.
According to Stephanie Cacioppo, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, loneliness, like other forms of stress, may leave lasting damage.
One early indicator is life on the college campus, Cacioppo said. “Now that students are back, we are hearing so much loneliness and isolation tied to disappointment. College is not what kids expected it to be.” So social isolation was reduced, but a form of loneliness has lingered.