Loneliness
I wrote this essay on loneliness for a science and writing class.
- All the lonely people
- Where do they all come from?
- All the lonely people
- Where do they all belong?
- –Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles
Three weeks before Christmas, Doris Rafferty, an elderly woman of 82, admits herself to the hospital with complaints of a flutter in her chest. The doctors proceed to examine her but find nothing. No signs of pain, no physical symptoms, no problem to diagnose. By all medical measures, Doris is healthy. Three weeks later, she is still in the hospital, diagnosis free.
“Doctor, can you give me a cure for loneliness?” Doris asks of her attending physician days before Christmas and her third expected discharge from the hospital.
Despite his well wishes, despite how badly he wants to cure her pain, he cannot. Her husband is dead. Her sense of home is gone. He cannot even prescribe her antidepressants because she fails to meet clinical criteria. The only solace he can offer her is temporary relief: he retracts his impending diagnosis and insists she spend her Christmas in the hospital ward, where company and gifts are abundant. Immediately her mood lifts. Her discharge date is buffered. No longer does Doris have to fib physical symptoms for emotional comfort, at least for the moment.
I know how Doris feels; we all do. Loneliness: it is a condition that afflicts us all. Under its dark veil, life is drained of all color. It lingers and permeates, haunts and terrifies. At times it even moves, inspires, and magnifies the soul.
What is loneliness? What are its causes and how does it affect our health and wellbeing? And why do poets and songwriters seem to have a better understanding of it than scientists do? The poet David Whyte writes of the condition as “the doorway as to yet unspecified desire”; the writer Olivia Laing states it is “an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired”; the sociologist Robert Weiss defines it as “a chronic disease without redeeming features.”
These definitions, while satisfactory in the poetic sense, fall short in capturing loneliness in its entirety. The first person to systematically explore it was German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Published in the late 1950s, Reichmann set the foundation for what may now be considered ‘loneliness studies’ in her trailblazing essay “Loneliness.” She begins the discussion by outlining the inherent difficulty in writing about such a topic: “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it.” Anyone who has ever felt lonely will understand that it is not an experience one wishes to relive.
Yet this explanation doesn’t seem to capture why, upon self-reflection or inquiry, one is unable to recall their episodic loneliness, whether consciously or subconsciously. In consequence, loneliness has been neglected as a topic of scientific scrutiny, in part because everyone who has experienced it seeks to avoid its pangs, including psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: “This avoidance seems to include a strange reluctance on the part of psychiatrists to seek scientific clarification of the subject,” Fromm-Reichmann muses. Perhaps we reject these memories because they threaten our current state of wellbeing. This seems paradoxical though because we remember physically painful events in order to avoid them in the future. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case for loneliness despite the sensations of physical suffering often experienced by those in its grasp.
She proceeds to define different kinds of loneliness, with “real loneliness”, in contrast to “creative loneliness” or “temporary loneliness”, being “the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with an inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy, for interpersonal intimacy.” Loneliness of the problematic variety, then, is linked to a lack of human intimacy, love, tenderness, and connection, the very things Doris Rafferty lacked outside the hospital.
Fromm-Reichmann adds that it is a universal human need: “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy throughout life; and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.” This idea is supported by psychologist John Bowlby’s theory of attachment. He postulated that every child is born with the biological need to form an emotional bond with a primary caregiver, typically the mother. This bond is crucial for the proper development and long-term wellbeing of the child, and when left unmet, problems arise: toxic relationships, delinquency, compulsive and addictive behaviors, impaired mental functioning. Loneliness often results from these problems, and the desire to escape it.
“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast,” writes Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City. This hunger is a desire to fill the lack of attachment, that pervasive emotional void that distorts our social perceptions which further prevent us further from engaging in the very behaviors that would otherwise satisfy our need for intimacy. “It feels shameful and alarming,” Laing writes, “and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.”
This state of self-perpetuating social isolation is what John Cacioppo, social neuroscience professor at the University of Chicago, calls hypervigilance. This state of abnormally heightened arousal is experienced by the chronically lonely, and in it, unknowingly, the individual begins to see the world in increasingly negative terms. “They expect and remember instances of rudeness, rejection and abrasion, giving them greater weight and prominence than other, more benign or friendly interactions,” writes Laing. Thus, the cycle begins. The lonely individual becomes more vigilant, isolated, and withdrawn, without being conscious of it. The lonely become lonelier.
At the same time, the body begins to undergo a cascade of physiological changes. Loneliness disrupts homeostasis, our baseline level of internal equilibrium. Adrenaline and cortisol levels rise, immune functioning weakens. This is a normal and necessary response to stress; the body is fighting to return to its natural baseline. However, simmering in a constant state of flight-or-fight, the effects are detrimental. Loneliness elevates blood pressure, impairs executive brain functioning, diminishes quality of sleep, and promotes cardiovascular disease. And when loneliness is chronic, “when it persists for years and is caused by something that cannot be outrun,” as Laing puts it, the consequences are fatal: “Living with loneliness increases your odds of an early death by 45%,” Cacioppo states in his 2013 Ted Talk.
This is staggering in comparison to the other statistics Cacioppo lists: a 20% increase by obesity and a 30% increase by excessive alcohol consumption. Perhaps these are reasons why the former Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has sounded the alarm on the growing number of lonely people in America, going so far as to call it a public health crisis, an epidemic. “It turns out that loneliness is associated with a reduction in your lifespan that is as severe as the lifespan you see with smoking 15 cigarettes a day,” the general states in a 2017 CBS interview.
His assertion is supported by a large study conducted in 2018 by the health insurer Cigna. About 20,000 U.S. adults were administered the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the bread-and-butter metric of loneliness which asks participants to rate on a Likert scale how much they agree with statements such as, “I feel left out” and “People are around me but not with me”. A sum score above 43 is classified as loneliness, and the average score combining all age groups in the study was a 44, suggesting the rise of a loneliness epidemic. However, perhaps most surprising was that Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) averaged a loneliness score of 48.3, whereas “The Greatest Generation” (adults ages 72+) averaged a loneliness score of 38.6. As a group, the young feel more lonely than the elderly.
Most people are quick to blame the differences on social media use for these disproportionate results, but it’s not quite so cut-and-dry. The study compared the loneliness scores of the digitally active Gen-Zers to their lesser active peers and found no differences, suggesting a more nuanced picture. Another contributing factor may be that the elderly tend to live in emotionally and mentally supportive communities while the young reside in a stage of life transitions and self-discovery.
It is important to emphasize that loneliness is different from being alone, as alluded to by Fromm-Reichmann. One can feel perfectly content in the midst of their solitude, while also feeling isolated in the throngs of a crowd. “[Loneliness] is not synonymous with being alone,” Cacioppo writes, “nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness.” It is the feeling itself that has the potential to destroy the body and mind, “the feeling that sets the whole grim cascade into motion,” Laing writes. The subjective experience matters.
What Doris feels is not so different from what we feel when confronting the fact that something feels missing from our lives. Whether an episodic bout or a lifelong vacancy, we all know how it feels to be lonely. So long as we continue to live, loneliness will accompany us. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Contrary to Weiss, perhaps there are redeeming features. “Loneliness is the substrate and foundation of belonging,” the poet David Whyte writes, “the gravitational field that draws us home.” Loneliness compels us to unite with one another, to seek belonging and acceptance among others amid the uncertainties of the world. It can give us the courage to beckon for that which we all need and desire to thrive: love. “I am alone,” Whyte concludes, “therefore I belong.”
“Loneliness is collective,” writes Laing. “It is a city,” one which we all inhabit. We are therefore obliged to take care of each other; to accept and be kind to one another. “We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell.” But it is a hell we do not have to endure alone.
Perhaps there is no singular cure for loneliness. But there is us.
- It’s hard to believe that there’s nobody out there
- it’s hard to believe that I’m all alone
- at least I have her love, the city she loves me
- lonely as I am, together we cry
- –Under the Bridge, The Red Hot Chili Peppers
