Many of us don’t identify as lonely nor do we look around our world and see loneliness as an issue. That makes sense. Loneliness often masquerades as depression, anxiety, irritability, distrust, isolation, shyness, fear of evaluation, and trouble seeing another’s point of view. At work, it makes team-building harder, co-workers more annoying, and meetings less productive. In your nervous system it activates stress hormones and ages you faster, shortening your precious time on this planet. 

When you hear the word “loneliness” what does it conjure up for you? A temporary state of missing close friends and family because you moved across the country? A feeling of isolation and not knowing how to reach out to connect? A sad person sitting home alone? Does loneliness have a face for you? Does it look like someone you know, perhaps even someone you see in the mirror? 

Loneliness is an epidemic. Up to a fifth of all UK adults and one in 4 adults in the United States feel lonely most or all of the time. Britain even has a Minister of Loneliness because loneliness is so common and such a health hazard. As damaging as obesity and alcohol abuse, loneliness is correlated with early death and suffering.

If you think loneliness is all in the head of the person experiencing it, you’re almost right. In their book loneliness John Cacioppo and William Patrick write, “It was the subjective sense of loneliness – not a lack of objective social support – that uniquely predicted depressive symptoms, chronic health conditions, and elevated blood pressure.”

Cacioppo and Patrick go on to tell us that loneliness has a tendency to last and it’s the elderly that suffer the most. Once it becomes more than a short-term situational experience, loneliness is hard to shake. Lonely people behave in ways that are less socially engaging and more likely to alienate people, even people who would be neutral or friendly. 

When we are lonely, we don’t make eye contact as much and may glare when we do. We become hyper-aware of social cues — body language, tone of voice, hesitation, inflection — but we develop a negative bias. Put simply, we get very wary of others as we expect them to hurt us and let us down.  Loneliness feels like a threat and we behave as though we are being threatened.

The human nervous system evolved with an amazing ability to adapt to changing circumstances including the ability to go into hyper-drive when there is a threat. Pupils dilate, digestion slows down or stops, making love or being friendly take a back seat to fighting or escaping, the heart beats faster and the extra blood goes to the muscles. “Get ready for action,” the whole body says. But what do we do when the threat is loneliness rather than a saber tooth tiger? What enemy do we strike out against or run from? How do we make it stop?

Unless something interrupts the perception of threat, it doesn’t stop. Constant hyper-arousal puts the body into a state of overdrive, into a state we are not meant to exist in. We don’t get the deep sleep, digestion, and quiet connection we need to recover.  Instead, we live in a state of alert, warines, and vigilance that wears us out. This is not just a metaphorical ‘wearing out’. Loneliness is like driving with the gas and brake on at the same time and not stopping for oil changes. It’s not comfortable in the moment and it’s going to cause trouble unless we interrupt it. 

I work directly with people to give them an experience of connection and belonging, a safe place to be themselves and learn skills that translate immediately into relaxing their vigilance and a state of nervous system recovery. They get to take the foot off the gas and recover from the stress. In the short-term this translates to more effectiveness, good-will, and patience with co-workers and family members, alike. In the long-term reducing this kind of stress adds years to your life.

Loneliness is a signal. Like hunger is a signal to eat, loneliness is a signal to connect. 

Humans are wired for connection. We need it. We aren’t meant to live in isolation from each other. We evolved in tribes, depending on one another for physical safety as well as comfort. We are creatures shaped by evolution to feel safe in company and scared when we are alone.  

Unfortunately, just being near other people doesn’t automatically make us feel safer. Have you ever been at a party and pretended to have fun while really feeling left out, lonely, and awkward? In our modern world, we are far more likely to be hurt by other humans than by wild animals or starvation. Even as we need other people, we often feel wary and guarded around them. 

Cacioppo and Patrick found that what predicted loneliness was a person’s experience of the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of their social encounters. They found that “lack of meaning in one’s social encounters could become as injurious as obesity, lack of exercise, or the inhalation of carcinogenic smoke” via “a grinding process of wear and tear that proceeds along five intersecting pathways.” 

Interestingly, most of the following Causal Pathways were about the same for lonely vs non-lonely college students. But as they aged, these factors became more and more evident in the lonely. They had more social stress, less ease recovering, and higher blood pressure. Again, the idea that loneliness wears us down faster than life itself normally would shines through. 

Loneliness and Health: Five Causal Pathways from loneliness

1. Health Behaviors — It might feel good to eat a salad or go for a run but the immediate enjoyment of eating ice cream and sitting on the couch requires less effort. The executive functioning required to get out the door is impaired by loneliness. Loneliness also tends to lower self-esteem making it harder to treat yourself well. 
2. Exposure to Stressors and Life Events — Life is hard for everyone, but as they aged, the lonely folks experienced significantly more life stress. They experienced a disconnect between effort and reward and felt trapped by their circumstances reporting more marital stress, run-ins with neighbors, and less agency at work.
3. Perceived Stress and Coping — While the aging lonely actually had more life stress, they also had an increased perception of how bad the stress was and a decreased ability to feel calmed, soothed, and supported even when a caring someone reached out. 
4. Physiological Response to Stress — Loneliness revs up the sympathetic nervous system and is shown to increase chronic inflammation, blood pressure, and even change DNA. At the same time, it reduces the benefits of the human contact that could be comforting by increasing our wariness and distrust of other people.
5. Rest and Recuperation – The ability to rest and recover is one significant reason we live longer now than our forefathers did. After conducting sleep studies Cacioppo and Patrick state, “even though the lonely got the same quantity of sleep as the nonlonely, their quality of sleep was greatly diminished.”  It took the lonely longer to fall asleep and they experienced more afternoon fatigue further reducing their total time to be productive.

I agree with Cacioppo and Patrick when they say, “Once we see loneliness on the list of serious risk factors for illness and early death, right alongside smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, that context should heighten our motivation to improve our level of social satisfaction both as individuals and as a society.”

The Indian Journal of Psychiatry states “(Loneliness) has been described as the major problem associated with old age; and therefore, has been identified as an appropriate condition for therapeutic intervention.” 

While the impacts of loneliness might be harder to see for people in their 20’s through 50’s, it’s easier to change the experience of social connectedness in younger and middle-aged adults than in the elderly. Intervention is important and the workplace can be one effective place for that intervention.