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Loneliness is bad for your health.
Two
University of Chicago psychologists, Louise
Hawkley and John Cacioppo,
have been trying to disentangle social isolation,
loneliness, and the
physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the
cellular level.
The
researchers suspected that while the toll of loneliness may be mild and
unremarkable in early life, it accumulates with time. To test this
idea, the scientists studied a group of college-age individuals and
continued an annual study of a group of people who joined when they
were between 50 and 68 years old.
Their
findings, reported in the August issue of Current Directions in
Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
Science, are revealing. Consider stress, for example. The more years
you live, the more stressful experiences you are going to have: new
jobs, marriage and divorce, parenting, financial worries, illness. It’s
inevitable.
However,
when the psychologists looked at the lives of the middle-aged and old
people in their study, they found that although the lonely ones
reported the same number of stressful life events, they identified more
sources of chronic stress and recalled more childhood adversity.
Moreover, they differed in how they perceived their life experiences.
Even when faced with similar challenges, the lonelier people appeared
more helpless and threatened. And ironically, they were less apt to
actively seek help when they are stressed out.
Hawkley
and Cacioppo then took urine samples from both the lonely and the more
contented
volunteers, and found that the lonely ones had more of the
hormone epinephrine flowing in their bodies. Epinephrine is one of the
body’s “fight or flight” chemicals, and high levels indicate that
lonely people go through life in a heightened state of arousal. As with
blood pressure, this physiological toll likely becomes more apparent
with aging. Since the body’s stress hormones are intricately involved
in fighting inflammation and infection, it appears that loneliness
contributes to the wear and tear of aging through this pathway as well.
There
is more bad news. When we experience the depletion caused by stress,
our bodies normally rely on restorative processes like sleep to shore
us up. But when the researchers monitored the younger volunteers’
sleep, they found that the lonely nights were disturbed by many “micro
awakenings.” That is, they appeared to sleep as much as the normal
volunteers, but their sleep was of poorer quality. Not surprisingly,
the lonelier people reported more daytime dysfunction. Since sleep
tends to deteriorate with age anyway, the added hit from loneliness is
probably compromising this natural restoration process even more.
Loneliness
is not the same as solitude. Some people are just fine with being
alone, and some even see solitude as an important path to spiritual
growth. But for many, social isolation and physical aging make for a
toxic cocktail.
Source: Association for Psychological Science