3 experts explain everything you need to know about loneliness

From a very young age, there's this stigma that we learn where if you're alone, something's wrong with you

Our perceptions and the stories that we tell ourselves about feeling lonely, in turn, change the behaviors that we go out and do in the world

When we feel lonely, we're more likely to start to ruminate, to catastrophize in social situations

and to get caught up in these sort of negative thought patterns and beliefs that then influence

our behaviors. But they also influence our brains and our bodies. There are some studies

that suggest, for example, that being without a close friend, being lonely

is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day

We often hear that being alone is bad for us. This messaging is getting us to believe that being alone is bad for us

But there are many situations in which being alone can actually be good for us

Our social lives are rewiring our brains and in turn changing the experience that we have inside of our bodies

Loneliness is not a reflection on who we are. It's a reflection of what we need

It's information. It's data. Loneliness starts out as a thought pattern or an emotion This actually triggers a stress response in our body that is associated with heightened levels of cortisol

that's associated with more inflammation, which weakens our immune systems and actually makes us more susceptible to disease

We can see this in the neuroscience research. In one study, people went through mild electric shocks

while looking at photos of either their romantic partner or a complete stranger. What researchers found was that people who were looking at a photo of

their romantic partners reported feeling less fearful and the brain activity in the regions

associated with pain was lower. People's perception differs according to whether or not they feel

connected to another person. If we start to understand that health is not only physical

and mental, it's also social. That's going to change our behaviors. If you think about having

rich friendships and being embedded in your community and having a really strong sense of

support, that's going to completely transform the way that you experience the world

I think a big question now is whether we're facing a friendship recession

That's a term that Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has used to describe this rise in the number of people who lack a certain number of close friends, who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis

Today 15 of young men say that they don have a close friend That was just 3 back in the 1990s The pandemic interestingly there we see that it women who been most affected With more than 50 of young men say that they don have a close friend That was just 3 back in the 1990s The pandemic interestingly there we see that it women who been most affected with more than half of women saying they lost touch with at

least some of their friends. We've seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions, including

the family, people marrying later if they do marry, obviously in areas like religion, in some cases

the labor market. And so what that means is there's more of a need for people to have social

relationships, connections outside of those institutions. That's where friends are hugely important. And so it's not just that being without friends can make you isolated in a sort of economic

or a social sense, but it can also make you sad. And being sad, it turns out, is also bad in terms

of your physical as well as emotional health. There's obviously a dystopian version of how

these trends could continue, which is a world of essentially atomized individuals without friends

isolated, perhaps in ill health. I think that's why we have to recognize that friendship is

incredibly important to human flourishing. One of the necessary steps to making a friend

is to admitting that you want to make a friend, to being open to that. That requires a certain

vulnerability. And I think as we get older, there's sometimes a sense of shame that comes

along with not having enough friends. And actually saying, I need a friend, is maybe one of the

hardest sentences any human being can utter. There's been an increasing amount of attention over the past several years

about the negative consequences of loneliness We done research on this and found that the media is approximately 10 times more likely to describe experiences of being alone as negative as compared to positive

When we do research where we track people over time, what we see is that if you're the kind of person who thinks being alone is good for you, you actually feel good when you spend time alone

What I love about that finding is it gives us the opportunity to potentially intervene because we can shift people's beliefs about being alone

Rather than thinking about that experience as reflecting something wrong about me or the circumstances, we can reframe that situation as an opportunity to be creative, to be alone with our thoughts in a pleasant way

The more we talk about these things, the more it gets on our minds and the more it penetrates into the culture more broadly

Connection with yourself is as important as connection with other people. Being optimally socially healthy for you might be different than someone else based on how much socializing you enjoy and what kinds of connection feel fulfilling to you

Loneliness is just an opportunity to go further, to explore your social health, to be a scientist in the laboratory that is your social life

We can broaden the perception box that you're living in and help you to feel more connected and overcome that isolated experience of loneliness