the meaning of loneliness essay

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The Loneliness Pandemic

The psychology and social costs of isolation in everyday life.

January-February 2021

Illustration by Francescoch/iStock

Bradley Riew ’18 had a calendar reliably packed from 9 a.m. to midnight. To him, that didn’t seem so bad. “You know,” he says, “you have nine hours to sleep.”

On top of his schoolwork and various extracurriculars, he spent about 20 hours a week volunteering at local homeless shelters. He acknowledges now how well he fit the “overworked Harvard student” stereotype, but during sophomore year the commitments didn’t strike him as unusual. “I was just doing what everyone else was doing,” he says. “I was just absorbed in that culture of go, go, go, go, go.”

But the packed days strung together, the work piled on, and Riew felt more and more drained. Classwork encroached later into the night, and he went to bed with a level of exhaustion that rest couldn’t fix. “I didn’t really have time to do my schoolwork,” he recalls, “and I didn’t have time to just relax or spend time talking to somebody.”

Riew had no problem connecting with others, but keeping in touch and forming strong friendships was harder. He’d think about reaching out to someone, only to realize that they hadn’t spoken for months and decide the effort wasn’t worth it. Potential friends were now just friendly acquaintances. “And all my relationships were like that,” he says.

His productivity outpaced his social life, until it didn’t. His grades began to slip, and he started feeling depressed. “I got to the point where I didn’t care about anything I was doing,” he admits. “I was doing it because I had been doing it before.” He decided to take a leave of absence after that year, staying home in St. Louis. Only when the noise of undergraduate life began to fade did he finally begin to see the root of his problems: though he was far from alone, he was lonely.

Loneliness is a subjective experience—part of what makes it so hard to identify. “If you’re on Mars and you have the most powerful telescope, that can look through walls, you can find all the isolated people on planet Earth,” says Jeremy Nobel, a lecturer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) who teaches a course on loneliness. “But you couldn’t find the lonely people.”

The opposite is true as well, says Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry and a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). “You’ve probably known people who seem to have a lot of friends, but when they talk about it, they’ll say, ‘I don’t really feel like anybody knows me,’ or ‘I don’t really feel close to many people.’”

Social psychologists define loneliness as the gap between the social connections you would like to have and those you feel you experience. According to a 2018 report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 22 percent of adults in the United States say they often or always feel lonely or socially isolated. A national 2019 survey led by health insurer Cigna found that 61 percent of Americans report feeling lonely. Books like Bowling Alone (2000) , by Malkin professor of public policy emeritus Robert D. Putnam, have highlighted the decline of social capital in the United States, but more recently, loneliness has become a serious issue of public health. In 2017, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy ’97 called loneliness a public-health “epidemic.” The United Kingdom appointed a “minister for loneliness” a year later.

The health implications of loneliness have become clearer over time. According to the research of Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, and colleagues, the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness equals that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, and exceeds the health risks associated with obesity. Researchers are now actively studying the mechanisms by which loneliness affects health, including its relationship with inflammation and harmful changes in DNA expression. “If you’re stressed chronically, your body may be in a low-level fight-or-flight response all the time,” Waldinger explains. “So what we are looking at is whether some people are in a chronic state of mild inflammation.”

COVID-19 has pushed loneliness further into the public conversation as people across the country have stayed home, fearful of contracting a deadly virus and aiding its spread. Terms like “social distancing,” “self-isolation,” and “shelter in place” accentuate the idea that COVID-19 could have profound social implications. “A major adverse consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be increased social isolation and loneliness,” argued several professors in The Lancet Psychiatry in April. “Tracking loneliness and intervening early are important priorities.” “We’re all lonely now,” novelist Olivia Laing wrote in a New York Times column days after lockdowns began. “Social distancing is vital, but that doesn’t make it easy.”

Karestan Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at HSPH, always keeps an eye out for disasters. It’s part of her job; much of her work deals with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. But Koenen started thinking much more about COVID-19 when she began to see the virus’s potential implications for public health.

It began when one of her master’s students returned to the United States from Shanghai before the 2020 spring semester. As he quarantined—the first person she knew who had to do so—he described the situation he’d observed back in China. When they finally met in person, he began to sob uncontrollably.

“He just started crying and saying how awful he felt being in the U.S. when everyone was suffering in China,” Koenen recalls. “His colleagues were having PTSD, having dealt with SARS.” In Wuhan, he’d heard, doctors saw entire families dying, without full knowledge of what was going on. He’d also witnessed discrimination against people from Hubei province. He and Koenen started thinking through potential Chinese government public-health responses to the pandemic—and it struck her that the United States might have to prepare for similar trauma soon.

In March, a week before Harvard began sending students home, Koenen and some of her students and colleagues decided to meet to discuss various mental-health threats involving COVID-19. She added that everyone was free to invite those who might be interested. The group’s meetings usually drew only a handful of people, but when the Zoom call began—during the same afternoon when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic—more than 100 people were there. Instead of a group discussion, she and her colleagues presented what they knew about the mental-health repercussions of past pandemics. “A lot of people were thinking about this, and no one had any place to go,” Koenen says. “Clearly there was this huge need.”

Soon their group was hosting weekly forums, discussing the mental-health issue they felt most relevant. At first, the topics reflected the general concerns of past disasters: explaining the pandemic’s impacts on children, handling death and bereavement, and offering guidance on remaining resilient when the future is opaque. “We don’t know how long this thing will last,” she said in the first meeting. “This is a marathon, not a sprint….Really taking care of yourself and keeping routines is really important for kids, and adults too.”

Still Koenen remembers a frantic energy of connectedness. People were putting up signs for essential workers, organizing nightly Zoom dinners, spearheading Zoom book clubs. But as it became clear the pandemic wasn’t going away soon, people had to adjust and move forward in a far different way than they’d imagined. “I don’t think the immediate impact of COVID was people being lonely,” Jeremy Nobel says. “I think what it did do is raise the consciousness of people around isolation…. So I think as people started anticipating future reductions in social contact, it increased anxiety and also, as people started removing themselves from others, it increased the risk for loneliness.”

Loneliness is not monolithic. When most people think of the feeling, they think of what Nobel calls psychological or interpersonal loneliness. “Like, ‘Do I have a friend? Do I have someone I can tell my troubles to?’” he says. But there’s also existential loneliness: “Do I fit into the universe? Does my life have any meaning, purpose, weight, valence, mission?” He finds such questions particularly troublesome for 18- to 24-year-olds, who are, studies have shown, the loneliest group in the country. The third type of loneliness is societal: “If I enter a room, is my arrival both anticipated and welcomed?” Prejudice can augment this type of loneliness, Nobel says, most notably through racism. “But it goes beyond race, class, and gender preference,” he adds. “It affects anyone subject to exclusion, including people who don’t meet our beauty standards, people with disabilities, even many older adults….Society systematically excludes people, often.”

As president of the Foundation for Art & Healing, Jeremy Nobel launched “The UnLonely Project” to increase public awareness of loneliness and lessen its burden. Photograph by Brian Smith

Loneliness was rising even before the pandemic. “Modern progress has brought unprecedented advances that make it easier for us technically to connect,” writes Vivek Murthy in Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World , “but often these advances create unforeseen challenges that make us feel more alone and disconnected.” Social media, for instance, can bring people together with mutual interests or make it easier for friends to make plans, but it also amplifies disagreement and siphons people into increasingly divisive echo chambers . “Because of these divisions, many people are just hunkering down, I think,” Robert Waldinger says. And, he adds, they’re not necessarily happy, huddling in their tribes. “Many people are disturbed by all this, so you see levels of depression and anxiety going up in the population.”

“If you’re lonely, almost the last thing you want to do is reach out,” Karestan Koenen says. “But you have to make yourself.”

And loneliness begets loneliness. “If you’re lonely, almost the last thing you want to do is reach out,” Koenen says. “But you have to make yourself.” She saw the risks for her mother, who has a history of depression and lives alone in Atlanta. Koenen wanted to visit, but it never seemed wise as the pandemic raged in Massachusetts and then took hold in Georgia. To keep her mother engaged socially and focusing on topics other than politics, Koenen and her brother decided to call her each day and have her tell them what she was doing to get out of her apartment or connect with someone else online or by phone. “We’re often better when we’re accountable to other people,” she says. “That’s why you do it in therapy. If you can have someone call you and ask, ‘What did you do today?’ it might be a little motivating.” Her mother might go out just to have something to tell the kids, but that could make her feel better nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Koenen felt her own communication with others had become strained. “We’re in this together, but feeling so alone,” she says. “Although we have these shared experiences, because we’re deprived of so many [other] ways we would connect with people around us, it feels isolating.” She woke up one Saturday to a text from her sister saying that her father-in-law had passed away. A few days later, his wife did, too. “In life pre-COVID, I would be in Saratoga, helping with and taking comfort in the logistics and rituals of death,” she wrote in May. “As an older sister, professor…and clinical psychologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I am usually the person in the family everyone relies on to know what to do in a crisis. But instead, I remain in Boston, physically distant and emotionally helpless.”

The gradual reopening of society didn’t always make social connection easier. At times, new decisions about how to interact with others created tension among friends and family. “The people who are alone alone are really lonely,” Koenen says, “but people are feeling isolated even with the people they live with, because there’s a lot of stress and conflict.” Some couples have struggled over how strictly they should avoid other people and families—arguing about whether it’s appropriate to go to an outdoor restaurant or invite friends onto a front patio. Such discrepancies in comfort level have also occurred among families in the same neighborhood. While some children bike outside in groups or play soccer wearing masks, others aren’t allowed to get within 20 feet of their friends, even outdoors.

“What the pandemic did was it froze our lives, right?” Waldinger says. “It froze us in these weird positions where we’re closer than we want to be to some people, and we’re too distanced from others.” He mentions the evaporation of “weak ties” as another possible contributor to feelings of loneliness: “your relationship with the guy you always get your coffee from at Starbucks, or the mail carrier, or the person who checks you out at the grocery store, who you chat with”—or relationships with co-workers or acquaintances. A body of research suggests that these ties are meaningful and predominantly positive. Waldinger himself normally went to MGH every day for work, but by fall, he hadn’t been there in months. Seeing colleagues via Zoom is not the same, he says—and there are people he frequently interacted with in the coffee room whom he would never see in a Zoom call.

To improve mental health in times of stress, Karestan Koenen recommends “the boring stuff”: going to bed and waking up at consistent times, exercising, and scheduling enjoyable activities. Photograph by Brian Smith

And when people feel bad themselves, building relationships with others becomes more difficult. Although Koenen noticed people being quite proactive in connecting or reconnecting with friends when lockdowns began, she thinks some have increasingly decided to deal with their own issues privately. She sees friends on Zoom and says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” and they say, “Well, I know things suck for you, so why would I?”

When the pandemic took hold in the United States, Jeremy Nobel and his staff began to act. He had established The Foundation for Art & Healing in 2004, an independent nonprofit to help people heal emotionally through art-focused activities. Faced with this new threat, the organization launched the “Stuck at Home Together Initiative.” On their website, they encouraged anyone interested to participate in a variety of creative activities—and share the results with others in the group. The idea was spurred by Nobel’s research into how creative processes can enhance well-being and help alleviate loneliness. “It was just a way to bridge the gap,” he says, “offering a chance to be socially connected authentically, even at a time of distancing.” Some people joined virtual creative social circles; others “attended” the UnLonely Film Festival, an online screening of short films about loneliness and isolation, and discussed each film in groups.

Those reactions helped Nobel notice something. “People are typically embarrassed or ashamed about loneliness because they think it ties to some kind of inadequacy or deficiency on their part,” he says. But COVID-19 presents obvious reasons for people to feel lonely—involuntary isolation, quarantining—“So what’s different about this loneliness is it actually has the potential to be unifying.”

This potential for increased connection was observed in research, too. In June, Tyler Vanderweele, professor of epidemiology and director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, found some information that surprised him. An unrelated collaboration with the American Bible Society had caused his group to collect well-being data from thousands of participants in January and then in June. The results offered some unexpected COVID-19 insight, he says: he’d expected participants to experience major declines in their “close social relationships,” but in fact, those statistics declined only modestly.The research had evaluated well-being across six domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. Vanderweele observed that well-being overall was down, notably, with the largest decline in “financial and material stability.” But scores for “meaning and purpose,” “character and virtue,” and “close social relationships” declined much less significantly—each about a tenth of a standard deviation ( Correction 12/23:  "a tenth" originally written as "a third.") “I think people are reevaluating their lives,” he says, “and trying to find meaning in the midst of what is a very difficult set of circumstances.”

Though opportunities to meet new people and attend events have diminished, Vanderweele suspects that many people—especially those who report their close social relationships improving during this time—have put extra energy into connections they had pre-pandemic. “I tend to think what this time has required for either successful social engagement or successful community engagement is really drawing upon the resources of the past,” he explains. “What relationships do you already have in place? And can you make use of them and invest in them?” In addition to strengthening relationships with family members and close friends, he believes some people are taking the opportunity to revisit past friendships that were lost over an argument or a dispute: salvaging past connections even when forming new ones is difficult.

Tyler Vanderweele hopes the pandemic may spark “renewed interest not just in reestablishing social relationships, but also in participating in deeper, richer forms of community life.” Photograph by Brian Smith

Vanderweele sees some of these trends in his own life. Though he feels the loss of interactions with work colleagues and members of his church community acutely, he has gone from seeing his extended family every couple of months to chatting with them every week on Zoom. “That really has enriched those relationships,” he says.

But while overall declines in social relationships are modest, variance among these self-reports has increased. Some saw their relationships improve, but others saw a sharp decline. Vanderweele thinks that those living alone or lacking much community support fared especially poorly during widespread societal restrictions.

When people ask Robert Waldinger how to improve social relationships, he emphasizes the need to be active. “It’s being the one to reach out,” he says, even when that’s hard to do. “If you’re feeling worse about yourself or about your life, it can be hard to say, ‘I’m going to call up that friend I haven’t seen in a while.’”

“The virus doesn’t know tribes, it doesn’t know boundaries, it just doesn’t know,” says Robert Waldinger. “And that, in some ways, is a dramatic reminder of how connected we are.”

“Mostly, we think our relationships just are what they are, and they take care of themselves,” he adds. The pandemic has played a part in disabusing people of that notion, forcing people to think harder about the social interactions they are and aren’t having, and how they can maintain them. “The one thing that the pandemic does is it really emphasizes our interconnectedness, right?” he says. “The virus doesn’t know tribes, it doesn’t know boundaries, it just doesn’t know….And that, in some ways, is a dramatic reminder of how connected we are.”

“I think the stigma of loneliness can change radically right now,” Nobel says. “We’re lonely now not because someone might not like us, or we might get rejected….We’re lonely because we’re forced to take very specific actions in response to a common enemy.” And when the reasons for loneliness are clear, the answers may come more easily, too.

It took some time for Bradley Riew to realize that his problem, above all else, had been loneliness. But that awareness, and knowing that it wasn’t his fault, enabled him to do something about it.

When he returned for his junior year in 2016, he reduced his volunteering from 20 hours to four hours a week. He hung out with his roommates a lot and sought out students who valued “being there for friends” as much as he did—something that wasn’t always easy in the fast-paced Harvard environment. Slowly, he felt his network growing; he felt less alone and saw there were people around whom he trusted and who trusted him. “I realized that it doesn’t really matter how much work I do and how much stuff I put out,” he says. “What really matters is who do I hang out with on Friday? And do I show up for them when they need me to be there?”

Seeing how investing in connections improved his life, he began working with Jeremy Nobel at the Foundation for Art & Healing. He focused much of his work on the organization’s “UnLonely Project,” where he helped spread awareness about loneliness and how to cope. When lockdowns began, he helped transition the “Aging UnLonely” support group, for adults over 65, to a Zoom environment.

The social implications of COVID-19 might have thrown Riew for a loop years ago, but now they strike him more as a personal challenge—“Like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to level up and throw you something harder.’”

It’s still tough. He lives in New York City, now working at the mental-health nonprofit BrainFutures, but his friends are all across the country. His co-workers are friendly, but not really his friends, and he no longer sees them in person. But he doesn’t feel any reason to suffer quietly with loneliness. He might not always have the energy to reach out, but he knows doing so will keep him grounded and sane, even if it means going for long walks in Central Park with friends while keeping six feet apart and wearing masks.

“I think there’s a lot of people out there who are suffering quietly and don’t really know why. For a subset of those people—the reason why is loneliness. That’s the thing,” he says. “It’s like turning the light on. Once you see it, then you know, and then you can act.” 

Associate editor Jacob Sweet most recently covered student and faculty experiences with distanced learning in “School Goes Remote” (November-December 2020).

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Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. can philosophy explain why.

by Kaitlyn Creasy   + BIO

Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere, and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul …’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

This experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience ‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘ in-between ’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. There, he argues for the importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what ‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to be filled and now is not’. This is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to be met.

These accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. (The recognition given by the loving friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above: the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot , because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends .

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met, leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.

Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet, we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes, failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that produce loneliness will vary. Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly – ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. Through seeking relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often – perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those needs and desires begin to be met by another.

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Loneliness: Causes and Health Consequences

Loneliness vs. solitude.

• Health Risks

While common definitions of loneliness describe it as a state of solitude or being alone, loneliness is actually a state of mind. Loneliness causes people to feel empty, alone, and unwanted. People who are lonely often crave human contact, but their state of mind makes it more difficult to form connections with others.

Growing concerns around the dangers of loneliness have prompted a call to action by US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who recently issued an 82-page advisory on the issue. The advisory cites data from several studies, including research that found that nearly half of adults in the US experience feelings of loneliness daily.

Murthy's report also cites a meta-analysis that found that the risk of premature death due to loneliness increased by 26% and 29% due to social isolation. Furthermore, the lack of social connection can increase the risk of anxiety, depression, stroke, heart disease, and dementia.

Johner Images / Getty Images

Defining Loneliness

Loneliness is a universal human emotion that is both complex and unique to each individual. Because it has no single common cause, preventing and treating this potentially damaging state of mind can vary dramatically.

For example, a lonely child who struggles to make friends at school has different needs than a lonely older adult whose spouse has recently died.

Researchers suggest that loneliness is associated with social isolation, poor social skills, introversion, and depression.

Loneliness, according to many experts, is not necessarily about being alone. Instead, if you feel alone and isolated, then that is how loneliness plays into your state of mind.

For example, a college freshman might feel lonely despite being surrounded by roommates and other peers. A soldier beginning their military career might feel lonely after being deployed to a foreign country, despite being constantly surrounded by other troop members.

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While research clearly shows that loneliness and isolation are bad for both mental and physical health, being alone is not the same as being lonely. In fact, solitude actually has a number of important mental health benefits, including allowing people to better focus and recharge.

• Loneliness is marked by feelings of isolation despite wanting social connections. It is often perceived as an involuntary separation, rejection, or abandonment by other people.
• Solitude , on the other hand, is voluntary. People who enjoy spending time by themselves continue to maintain positive social relationships that they can return to when they crave connection. They still spend time with others, but these interactions are balanced with periods of time alone.

Loneliness is a state of mind linked to wanting human contact but feeling alone. People can be alone and not feel lonely, or they can have contact with people and still experience feelings of isolation.

Causes of Loneliness

Contributing factors to loneliness include situational variables, such as physical isolation, moving to a new location, and divorce. The death of someone significant in a person's life can also lead to feelings of loneliness.

Additionally, it can be a symptom of a psychological disorder such as depression. Depression often causes people to withdrawal socially, which can lead to isolation. Research also suggests that loneliness can be a factor that contributes to symptoms of depression.

Loneliness can also be attributed to internal factors such as low self-esteem . People who lack confidence in themselves often believe that they are unworthy of the attention or regard of other people, which can lead to isolation and chronic loneliness .

Personality factors may also play a role. Introverts , for example, might be less likely to cultivate and seek social connections, which can contribute to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Health Risks Associated With Loneliness

Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health , including:

• Alcohol and drug misuse
• Altered brain function
• Alzheimer's disease progression
• Antisocial behavior
• Cardiovascular disease and stroke
• Decreased memory and learning
• Depression and suicide
• Increased stress levels
• Poor decision-making

If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911. 

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

These are not the only areas in which loneliness takes its toll. For example, lonely adults get less exercise than those who are not lonely. Their diet is higher in fat, their sleep is less efficient, and they report more daytime fatigue. Loneliness also disrupts the regulation of cellular processes deep within the body, predisposing lonely people to premature aging.

What Research Suggests About Loneliness

People who feel less lonely are more likely to be married, have higher incomes, and have higher educational status. High levels of loneliness are associated with physical health symptoms, living alone, small social networks, and low-quality social relationships.

Close Friends Help Combat Loneliness

Statistics suggest that loneliness is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly in younger generations. According to one 2019 survey, 25% of adults between the ages of 18 and 27 reported having no close friends, while 22% reported having no friends at all.

The rise of the internet and ironically, social media, are partially to blame.

Experts believe that it is not the quantity of social interaction that combats loneliness, but the quality .

Having a few close friends is enough to ward off loneliness and reduce the negative health consequences associated with this state of mind. Research suggests that the experience of actual face-to-face contact with friends helps boost people's sense of well-being.

Loneliness Can Be Contagious

One study suggests that loneliness may actually be contagious. Research has found that non-lonely people who spend time with lonely people are more likely to develop feelings of loneliness.

Tips to Prevent and Overcome Loneliness

Loneliness can be overcome. It does require a conscious effort to make a change. In the long run, making a change can make you happier, healthier, and enable you to impact others around you in a positive way.

Here are some ways to prevent loneliness:

• Consider community service or another activity that you enjoy . These situations present great opportunities to meet people and cultivate new friendships and social interactions.
• Expect the best . Lonely people often expect rejection, so instead, try focusing on positive thoughts and attitudes in your social relationships.
• Focus on developing quality relationships . Seek people who share similar attitudes, interests, and values with you.
• Recognize that loneliness is a sign that something needs to change. Don't expect things to change overnight, but you can start taking steps that will help relieve your feelings of loneliness and build connections that support your well-being.
• Understand the effects of loneliness on your life . There are physical and mental repercussions to loneliness. If you recognize some of these symptoms affecting how you feel, make a conscious effort to combat them.
• Join a group or start your own . For example, you might try creating a Meetup group where people from your area with similar interests can get together. You might also consider taking a class at a community college, joining a book club, or taking an exercise class.
• Strengthen a current relationship . Building new connections is important, but improving your existing relationships can also be a great way to combat loneliness. Try calling a friend or family member you have spoken to in a while.
• Talk to someone you can trust . Reaching out to someone in your life to talk about what you are feeling is important. This can be someone you know such as a family member, but you might also consider talking to your doctor or a therapist. Online therapy can be a great option because it allows you to contact a therapist whenever it is convenient for you.

Loneliness can leave people feeling isolated and disconnected from others. It is a complex state of mind that can be caused by life changes, mental health conditions, poor self-esteem, and personality traits. Loneliness can also have serious health consequences including decreased mental wellness and physical problems.

Loneliness can have a serious effect on your health, so it is important to be able to recognize signs that you are feeling lonely. It is also important to remember that being alone isn't the same as being lonely. 

If loneliness is affecting your well-being, there are things that you can do that can help you form new connections and find the social support that you need. Work on forming new connections and spend some time talking to people in your life. If you're still struggling, consider therapy. Whatever you choose to do, just remember that there are people who can help.

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Cigna Corporation. The Loneliness Epidemic Persists: A PostPandemic Look at the State of Loneliness among U.S. Adults. 2021

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review.  Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science , 2015 10 (2), 227–237.

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Hämmig O. Health risks associated with social isolation in general and in young, middle and old age [published correction appears in PLoS One. 2019 Aug 29;14(8):e0222124].  PLoS One . 2019;14(7):e0219663. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219663

Xia N, Li H. Loneliness, social isolation, and cardiovascular health . Antioxid Redox Signal . 2018 Mar 20;28(9):837-851. doi:10.1089/ars.2017.7312

Schrempft S, Jackowska M, Hamer M, Steptoe A. Associations between social isolation, loneliness, and objective physical activity in older men and women .  BMC Public Health . 2019;19(1):74. doi:10.1186/s12889-019-6424-y

Shovestul B, Han J, Germine L, Dodell-Feder D. Risk factors for loneliness: The high relative importance of age versus other factors .  PLoS One . 2020;15(2):e0229087. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0229087

Ballard J. Millennials are the loneliest generation . YouGov.

van der Horst M, Coffé H. How friendship network characteristics influence subjective well-being .  Soc Indic Res . 2012;107(3):509-529. doi:10.1007/s11205-011-9861-2

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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An Existential View Of Loneliness

By Tim Ruggiero

From an essay by Michele Carter, "Abiding Loneliness: An Existential Perspective," published by the Park Ridge Center for Health, Faith, and Ethics in Illinois.

"Many writers in the Western tradition portray...[the] existential form of loneliness as an unavoidable condition of our humanity. It resides in the innermost being of the self, expanding as each individual becomes aware of and confronts the ultimate experiences of life: change, upheaval, tragedy, joy, the passage of time, and death. Loneliness in this sense is not the same as suffering the loss of a loved one, or a perceived lack of a sense of wholeness or integrity. Further, it is not the unhealthy psychological defense against the threat of being alone, especially if being alone means we must confront the critical questions of life and death. Rather, existential loneliness is a way of being in the world, a way of grasping for and confronting one's own subjective truth. It is the experience of discovering one's own questions regarding human existence, and of confronting the sheer contingencies of the human condition. From an existential perspective, the lonely individual seeks to grasp some meaning in the face of life's impermanence, the angoisse of human freedom, and the inevitability of death. In his beautiful and tragic essay 'God's Lonely Man,' novelist Thomas Wolfe connects the intense loneliness of his own life to this universal aspect of humanity. He writes:

"For Wolfe, the experience of loneliness is neither strange nor curious, but 'inevitable and right' because it is part of the human heart. Just as the experience of joy is heightened by sorrow, loneliness, 'haunted always with the certainty of death,' makes life precious. Loneliness and death are thus inescapable facets of human existence, each ontologically necessary for a coherent human life.

"Loneliness is not the experience of what one lacks, but rather the experience of what one is. In a culture deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy and rights, the song of God's lonely man so often goes unvoiced and unheeded. It is ironic how much of our freedom we expend on power -- on conquering death, disease, and decay, all the while concealing from each other our carefully buried loneliness, which if shared, would deepen our understanding of each other."

Paul Tillich, in The Courage To Be , devotes many chapters to the issue of aloneness and existential anxiety. He offers this passage from one of Nietzsche's works:

Tillich writes, "These words reveal the other side of Nietzsche, that in him which makes him an Existentialist, the courage to look into the abyss of nonbeing in the complete loneliness of him who accepts the message that 'God is dead.'"

Loneliness, on this view, is an experience to be welcomed rather than banished, for it brings us face to face with two of life's most important questions: What is life really all about, and how should I use my freedom to define myself? The line about God "being dead" is another way of saying that all the pressure and responsibility for leading a meaningful life lie squarely on our shoulders. We, not God, decide what we become. We and we alone are the authors and governors of our moral life. This is what the existentialists mean when they say that existence precedes essence; it is this realization, too, that is the most frightening of all.

Loneliness brings us to the abyss Nietzsche describes, and forces us to make a decision. The temptation to eradicate unpleasant subjectivity is irresistible for perhaps most people, and they seek out any experience that will enable them to forget about it. There is always the sense of belonging that membership in a group can provide. There is an existential safety in living a "relevant" life, being connected to the power center of one's society, having a respectable job, a family, a few material comforts. This path is not in and of itself false: that would depend on the person. Many find meaning and fulfillment in just such a life. But that path may also be chosen as a result of seeing one's own freedom and individuality as a threat: some would rather turn away from a life that holds out the hope of affirmation and creativity than endure the existential insecurity that it requires.

There are those individuals, however, who peer into the abyss and do not cower. We think of Gautama who gave up an opulent life and family in his late twenties to travel the world alone in search of meaning. Or Thoreau who retreated to the woods for a few years so that he might gain a decent perspective upon the world. Or to any number of fictional characters: for instance, Lester Burnham in the movie American Beauty, who comes to grips with the fact that he has spent his adult life in an emotional and moral coma, and who chases what bits of meaning and beauty are still available to him in acts of rebelliousness. Or, still yet, to Christopher Reeve, who knew that the odds of returning to a normal and happy life were slim to nil, but who resolved to turn an awful tragedy into a quest to ferret out scientific solutions to such debilitating diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So loneliness, on this reading, isn't something to be shunned or afraid of: it is, rather, a possible catalyst for a more purposeful and engaging life, and an avenue for heightened self-awareness.

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In early December, The Wall Street Journal published a feature titled “The Loneliest Generation.”

“Baby boomers,” the article notes , “are aging alone more than any generation in U.S. history, and the resulting loneliness is a looming public health threat.”

The irony is that – in the midst of this loneliness crisis – we’re closer and more connected than ever before. Americans are moving to cities in record numbers , while internet use and smartphone ownership continue to grow.

What’s going on? Shouldn’t trends that ostensibly connect people and bring them closer together mitigate, not exacerbate, loneliness?

The way the meaning of loneliness has shifted – from physical solitude, to psychological isolation – could offer some clues.

1. To stray ‘far from neighbours’

When researching the Romantic poets, Amherst College English professor Amelia Worsley discovered that the concept of loneliness didn’t emerge until the late-16th century . It was first used to describe the dangers of straying too far from society – to surrender the protections of town and city and enter the unknown.

To be lonely, according to one 17th-century glossary, was to be “far from neighbours.”

2. New World loneliness

As the first European explorers left their neighbors and ventured across the Atlantic, they didn’t know what they’d find. What awaited them in the New World, University of Southern California historian Peter Mancall writes, was left to the imagination : creatures with heads in their chests, brutes with a single, massive leg and cyclops.

The Pilgrims didn’t encounter any of these monsters. But according to William Bradford , the first governor of Plymouth Colony, they nonetheless needed to contend with “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”

While they had God and they had each other, there wasn’t much else. A Native American raid could wipe out the entire settlement; a single strain of disease could kill off the whole group.

They were – in the earliest sense of the word – unbearably lonely.

3. The wilderness of the web

The Pilgrims, due to a combination of luck and skill , survived. Others soon joined them. Land was cleared, streets were laid and a country was built.

Over the centuries, as people grew closer and more connected, the old definition of loneliness slipped away.

“Modern loneliness,” Worsley writes, “isn’t just about being physically removed from other people. Instead, it’s an emotional state of feeling apart from others – without necessarily being so.”

Much of this new form of loneliness seems connected to another world – cyberspace – that opened up at the end of the 20th century.

Like the vast, untouched forests of the New World, the wilderness of the web can be imposing, unsparing and lawless. While there might not be literal monsters, trolls pounce, hackers lurk, governments spy and corporations glean data from your messages, searches and purchases.

What – and who – can be trusted ?

4. A sea of information

Yes, all of human knowledge is at our fingertips. But this has created another problem unique to the internet age: information overload.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas sociologist Simon Gottschalk spent a decade studying the social and psychological effects of new information and communication technologies.

“Our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages,” he writes . The unending stream of alerts and pings “deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other.”

The overwhelming sea of information creates a sense of being unmoored – tugged in one direction by tweets and advertisements, spun in another by breaking news alerts and email notifications.

At the mercy of these forces, exposed to exploitation, unsure of whom to trust, it’s difficult not to feel small, to feel helpless – to feel alone.

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What Is Loneliness? Causes, Effects And Prevention

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Table of Contents

What is loneliness, what causes loneliness, the effects of loneliness, how to cope with and prevent loneliness.

Loneliness is a universal emotion that most of us experience at least once during our lifetime, although certain events, such as an illness or a pandemic, can make it feel more pervasive. If you’re currently experiencing feelings of loneliness, you aren’t alone. In fact, a 2020 study by Cigna found that 61% of Americans reported being lonely in 2019, up from 54% in 2018 [1] Loneliness and the Workplace . Cigna. Accessed 7/6/2022. .

No matter what events are occurring around you, understanding loneliness and its risks is important for recognizing when you may need support. Read on to learn what loneliness is, its causes, long-term risks and ways to cope with the emotions that may come up when you’re lonely.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) defines loneliness as the “affective and cognitive discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary.”

In other words, loneliness is the mental or emotional discomfort you may experience from either being alone or feeling as though you are alone. This feeling stems from your social needs not being met and/or an inability to get the social connection you desire.

Loneliness vs Being Alone

Although loneliness and being alone are commonly confused, being alone doesn’t necessarily mean someone is lonely. “Loneliness is a feeling, while being alone is a situation or state of being, which is not inherently negative,” says Nina Vasan, M.D., psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief medical officer at Real, an online mental wellness membership site.

“You can feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by other people—such as a partner, family, co-workers or friends,” continues Dr. Vasan.

It’s also possible to be alone, but not feel lonely, she adds. “For example, if you’re by yourself but connecting to others through good communication or activities like volunteering, you don’t feel lonely.”

There are various demographic factors that may contribute to loneliness. Although Dr. Vasan notes that anyone can feel lonely at any time in their life, a few groups that stand out as having an increased risk of loneliness include “young adults, mothers with young children and the elderly.” Immigrants and individuals in the LGBTQ+ community are also at higher risk for loneliness, continues Dr. Vasan.

You may experience loneliness for a variety of reasons, but it can often stem from a major life change. A 2020 study by the University of Edinburgh suggests that the causes of loneliness differ depending on the age of the individual [2] Altschul D, Iveson M, Deary IJ. Generational differences in loneliness and its psychological and sociodemographic predictors: an exploratory and confirmatory machine learning study . Psychological Medicine. 2021;51(6):991-1000. . For example, older adults experience loneliness more frequently as a result of living alone, while middle-aged individuals aren’t as likely to report living alone as a cause of their loneliness.

This discrepancy between what causes loneliness in older adults versus those who are middle-aged could be due to the fact that older adults have retired and no longer have the community and daily interactions of work life, explains Nikki Press, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist in New York City. Older individuals are more likely to have lost friends and family members, and they are more likely to experience medical or physical limitations that restrict their opportunities for activities and socializing, continues Dr. Press.

Other common causes of loneliness include:

• The death of a close friend or family member
• Physical isolation, such as living alone or moving away from family and friends
• Illness or disability
• Working alone

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Healthy social connections are important to one’s overall health. Prolonged loneliness can have serious health implications, including decreased mental and physical health and even premature death.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), other long-term risks of chronic loneliness can include:

• Cognitive decline
• Heart disease
• High blood pressure (hypertension)
• Weakened immune system
• Alzheimer’s disease

Chronic feelings of loneliness can interfere with your quality of life. If left untreated, these feelings can lead to more serious issues, including depression or other mental health conditions. If you’re struggling with loneliness, consider seeking help from a mental health professional. A therapist can help you understand your emotions and offer coping strategies to improve your overall well-being.

In general, if loneliness seems to be taking over your experience, the sooner you talk with a therapist, the better, explains Dr. Vasan. “There is no harm in seeking help. The resources your doctor can provide can help not only you, but also your family and loved ones.”

If you’re not sure where to start, consider talking to your primary care doctor. They may be able to provide referrals to mental health professionals in your area.

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Just as the cause of loneliness can vary from person to person, coping and prevention strategies can also differ. In general, the goal is to make strong, healthy connections that fulfill your need for social interaction.

While there is no substitute for help from a mental health professional, the following tips may help you build emotional connections.

• Find hobbies you enjoy: Taking part in activities you enjoy can be a great way to meet others with similar interests. Consider a book club, art class, fitness group or any other activity where you can interact with others who enjoy the same things.
• Volunteer for an organization you support: Volunteering will not only give you a sense of accomplishment and pride, but it’s an opportunity to meet others who support that same organization.
• Join support groups: Support groups are an excellent way to connect with others who you have something in common with, such as a mental or physical condition.
• Routinely contacting family and friends: Attempting to stay connected, even if only by phone or video chat, can help nurture your emotional health and help prevent loneliness.
• Maintain a healthy diet and regular exercise regime: Living a healthy lifestyle promotes overall wellness and reduces your risk of chronic medical conditions—which could interfere with your social life.

Regardless of your interests, it’s important to listen to and fulfill your desire for social connection. This can help diminish feelings of loneliness or isolation, and could help improve the overall quality of your life.

• Loneliness and the Workplace. Cigna. Accessed 7/6/2022.
• Altschul D, Iveson M, Deary IJ. Generational differences in loneliness and its psychological and sociodemographic predictors: an exploratory and confirmatory machine learning study. Psychological Medicine. 2021;51(6):991-1000.
• Loneliness. American Psychological Association. 7/6/2022.
• Feeling Lonely. NHS. 7/6/2022.
• Loneliness and Social Isolation Linked to Serious Health Conditions. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 7/6/2022.
• Loneliness and Social Isolation—Tips for Staying Connected. National Institute on Aging. 7/6/2022.
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Lindsay Modglin is a nurse and professional writer who regularly writes about complex medical topics, as well as travel and the great outdoors. She holds a professional certificate in scientific writing from Stanford University School of Medicine and has contributed to many major publications including Insider and Verywell. As a passionate advocate for science-based content, she loves writing captivating material that supports scientific research and education. In her spare time, you can often find her exploring nature with her husband and three children.

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• Int J Environ Res Public Health

A Conceptual Review of Loneliness in Adults: Qualitative Evidence Synthesis

Louise mansfield.

1 Centre for Health and Wellbeing across the Lifecourse, College of Health, Medicine & Life Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK; [email protected] (C.V.); moc.liamg@yargrck (K.G.); moc.liamg@37gnidlogxela (A.G.)

Christina Victor

Catherine meads.

2 Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK; [email protected]

Norma Daykin

3 New Social Research, Faculty of IT and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, 33100 Tampere, Finland; [email protected]

Alan Tomlinson

4 Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4AT, UK; [email protected] (A.T.); [email protected] (J.L.)

Alex Golding

Associated data.

All summaries of data are available in the Supplementary Material .

The paper reports an evidence synthesis of how loneliness is conceptualised in qualitative studies in adults. Using PRISMA guidelines, our review evaluated exposure to or experiences of loneliness by adults (aged 16+) in any setting as outcomes, processes, or both. Our initial review included any qualitative or mixed-methods study, published or unpublished, in English, from 1945 to 2018, if it employed an identified theory or concept for understanding loneliness. The review was updated to include publications up to November 2020. We used a PEEST (Participants, Exposure, Evaluation, Study Design, Theory) inclusion criteria. Data extraction and quality assessment (CASP) were completed and cross-checked by a second reviewer. The Evidence of Reviews of Qualitative Research (CERQual) was used to evaluate confidence in the findings. We undertook a thematic synthesis using inductive methods for peer-reviewed papers. The evidence identified three types of distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of loneliness: social, emotional, and existential. We have high confidence in the evidence conceptualising social loneliness and moderate confidence in the evidence on emotional and existential loneliness. Our findings provide a more nuanced understanding of these diverse conceptualisations to inform more effective decision-making and intervention development to address the negative wellbeing impacts of loneliness.

1. Introduction

Most of us will encounter loneliness at some point in our lives. Indeed, some philosophers argue that loneliness is a universal human experience [ 1 , 2 ]. This experience may be momentary or protracted, occur frequently or rarely, and vary in intensity. Loneliness is characterised as a homogeneous, static, and/or linear experience that is quantitatively accessible (i.e., we can measure it), and it is understood as a problem about which ‘something’ can and should be done to prevent or cure it [ 3 ]. In public health, for example, loneliness has been problematised and medicalised because of the associations with a range of negative mental and physical health outcomes [ 4 ], including increased mortality, morbidity, poorer health behaviours and excess service use [ 5 ], cardiovascular disease [ 6 , 7 ], reduced physical activity [ 8 , 9 ], poorer cognitive function [ 10 , 11 ] and depression [ 12 , 13 ]. Distinct but related concepts, most notably loneliness and social isolation, but also living alone, aloneness, and solitude are often conflated despite not being linguistically, empirically, or conceptually interchangeable. Despite the almost universality of the experience of loneliness, and an extensive research literature, it remains an enigmatic concept for individuals, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners since it is the outcome of an individual’s subjective experience.

Understanding loneliness is made more challenging because it is characterised by differing antecedents across varying populations and across individual life courses [ 14 ]. There is a lack of clarity about theories of loneliness and their application in empirical studies, and how they should be evaluated, measured, and applied in policy and practice [ 4 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. When interpreting and using evidence about loneliness, these conceptual challenges are important to identify and address because they will have a profound influence on the generation, interpretation, and potential impact of evidence on policy, practice, and research in the field. In addition, there is a growing body of qualitative research that has not been fully explored for its contribution to bringing conceptual clarity to loneliness research. We undertook a synthesis of qualitative studies to start to address this evidence gap in 2018 with the aim of identifying, synthesising, and reporting on how the included studies have conceptualised loneliness as a way of enriching thinking and informing decision-making and practice in the field. We were not developing a new concept of loneliness. Following guidelines that reviews should be updated two years after publication, we updated the previous review to include relevant papers published up to 2020. This paper combines both reviews and summarises all the relevant literature on conceptualisations of social, emotional, and existential loneliness in diverse populations, their positive and negative attributes, and the ways people have found to alleviate loneliness as reported in academic journal articles and grey literature.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. methods.

The protocol was registered with the PROSPERO database (registration number: CRD42019124565). We followed PRISMA guidelines for conducting and reporting in this updated evidence review [ 18 ]. We employed a two-stage method, based on that proposed by key authors in the field [ 19 ]. Stage 1 identified evidence on conceptualisations, models, frameworks, and theories of loneliness and related concepts or domains. We made provision for a Stage 2 process to include additional evidence reviews for specific concepts and theories identified in Stage 1. This was not deemed necessary given the extensive evidence found at Stage 1. Our review was produced with stakeholder engagement on a project advisory board constituting personnel from key UK government departments, colleagues at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, local and regional public health experts, and community groups. Stakeholder engagement consisted of an inception meeting to agree the protocol for the review and ongoing update meetings to discuss preliminary findings, implications of the evidence, and translation and dissemination activities.

2.2. Inclusion Criteria

We used a bespoke framework, PEEST (Participants, Exposure, Evaluation, Study Design, Theory), to identify relevant literature. The inclusion criteria were agreed through peer review with our stakeholder group to reflect the focus of their work on loneliness on adults aged 16 or over and from high- or middle-income countries, using the United Nations (UN) criteria, and including both clinical and community populations. The included studies evaluated participants’ exposure to or experiences of loneliness, however conceptualised, in any setting, reported as outcomes, processes, or both. Any qualitative or mixed-methods study with qualitative component in English, published between 1945 and November 2018 (for the previous review) and December 2018 and December 2020 (for the new review) was eligible if employing an identified theory, model, concept, or framework for understanding loneliness beyond a simple definition. Studies were considered off-PEEST if they included only a simple definition of loneliness with no conceptual analysis or were background literature reviews.

2.3. Data Sources and Search Strategy

The search strategy was informed by engaging in the peer review process with our stakeholder group, bringing expertise in policymaking, practice, and academic work on loneliness, the librarians at Brunel University London and the University of Brighton, and through advice from a systematic review expert, in accordance with PRISMA guidelines [ 18 ] for reviews in public health. Full details of our search strategy are in Supplementary S1 . Eight electronic databases (Scopus, Medline (via Ovid), Eric, PsycINFO (via EBSCO), CINAHL Plus, and the Science, Social Science, Arts, and Humanities Citation Indices (via Web of Science) were searched using a combination of MeSH terms and text words. All database searches were framed by this strategy, but individual searches were appropriately revised to suit the precise requirements for each database. We hand-searched reference lists of reviews and systematic reviews published between 1945 and 2020, following PRISMA guidelines [ 18 ]. Grey literature was sought via an online call for evidence, employment of expert input, review of key-sector websites, and a Google search (a keyword search and review of titles of the first 100 hits) for the previous and new reviews.

2.4. Study Selection

Search results (titles and abstracts) were independently checked by two review authors. Where eligibility was unclear, the full article was checked. Disagreements were resolved through consensus, or a third team member considered the citation and a majority decision was made.

2.5. Data Extraction

We extracted data as reported by authors on: (a) the conceptualisation(s) of loneliness, (b) population defined by age, identity, or context, (c) positive and negative attributes of loneliness identified, and (d) mechanisms for alleviating loneliness. Data were extracted onto standardised forms independently by one reviewer and cross-checked by a second. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus. Our protocol allowed us to contact authors if the required information could not be extracted and if this was essential for interpretation of their results, but we did not need to follow this procedure.

2.6. Quality Assessment

The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) quality checklist for qualitative studies was used for published studies [ 20 ]. Two authors independently applied the criteria to each included study, and disagreements were resolved through discussion. For grey literature, the Public Health England (PHE) Arts for Health and Wellbeing Evaluation Framework [ 21 ] was used to judge the quality in terms of the appropriateness of the evaluation design, the rigour of the data collection and analysis and the precision of the reporting. This checklist was employed by agreement with stakeholders in the project on account of the methods and context for collecting evidence in the grey literature being less well established than the published literature.

Confidence in the Evidence of Reviews of Qualitative Research (CERQual) was used to judge confidence in the review findings, specifically the methodological limitations, relevance, coherence, and adequacy of the data [ 22 ]. Confidence was decreased if there were serious or very serious limitations in the design or conduct of the study, the evidence was not relevant to the study objectives, the findings/conclusions were not supported by the evidence, or the data were of inferior quality and inadequate in supporting the findings. Confidence was increased if the study was well designed with few limitations, the evidence was applicable to the context specified in the objectives, the findings/conclusions were supported by evidence and provided convincing explanation for any patterns found, or the data supporting findings were rich and of high quality.

2.7. Data Synthesis

The synthesis was conducted thematically using the principles of inductive and reflexive methods (see for example [ 23 ]) through the development of a broadly inductive and iterative framework or typology that identified three types of loneliness: (i) social loneliness, (ii) emotional loneliness, and (iii) existential loneliness. This framework was drafted by L.M. and N.D. and refined by the research team. Each paper was categorised as representing one or more of the types of loneliness, bringing a more nuanced understanding to the analysis, anchored in a recognition of the complex social, emotional, and contextual factors which characterise loneliness.

3.1. Search Results

The previous review returned 5117 citations after the removal of duplicates and 15 records from additional searches (total 5192) of which 223 full texts were assessed for eligibility. From the previous review, 127 published studies and 16 grey literature reports (total 143) were included. The new review returned 3449 citations after the removal of duplicates, of which 25 full texts were assessed for eligibility. There were 10 published studies and 2 grey literature reports that were included from the new review (a total of 12). In total, 137 published studies and 18 grey literature reports are included in this systematic review, providing 155 sources of evidence conceptualising loneliness: 116 qualitative studies in journal articles and 7 book chapters (including interviews, observation, document analysis, diaries, and focus group methods); 14 mixed-methods studies (only the qualitative findings met inclusion criteria); and 18 grey literature reports. The search-screening process is illustrated in the PRISMA flowchart (see Figure 1 ). A table of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion can be found in Supplementary S2 .

PRISMA flowchart.

3.2. Study Characteristics

A summary of the characteristics of included studies can be found in a list in Supplementary S3 (with full details of study objectives, description, participants, design and analysis employed, how it conceptualises loneliness, the predominant themes, and study conclusions). In terms of populations, 68 studies reported that participants were solely aged 50+ years (43%). However, the included studies also demonstrated considerable heterogeneity including groups specified by youth and middle age, cultural, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation, people living with physical and mental illness, those living in care homes, people in clinical settings, homeless people, healthcare professionals, volunteers, parents, and prisoners. Studies were reported for 26 different countries with the largest representation from the UK ( n = 37) and the USA ( n = 33), and the earliest published study, by Jerrome, was dated 1983. Loneliness was conceptualised in the included studies principally by three types: social loneliness ( n = 108), emotional loneliness ( n = 27), and existential loneliness ( n = 20). Studies emphasised one of these three types of loneliness, and some considered the interconnections between two or more different types, which we discuss later in the section on multidimensional concepts of loneliness.

3.3. Study Quality

Following the CASP quality checklist, articles were scored out of 8, where 8 is the highest. In general, the quality was good for the published journal articles, with a relatively high number of studies (73/155) receiving scores of 7 and 8, but less so for the book chapters, most likely due to the different publishing requirements. Study quality varied across the types of loneliness studies with ratings of 7 or 8 for 48% of the social loneliness (52/108), 65% of existential loneliness (13/20), and 37% of emotional loneliness (10/27) studies. Methodological weaknesses included a lack of exact details of the researcher’s role, potential bias, and influence on the sample recruitment, setting, and responses of participants. Published studies identified ethical issues but did not always include an official record. The grey literature was of mixed quality with high-quality reports, including details of methods, theoretical analysis and recognition of limitations, and low-quality (credibility) reports providing little detail of the methods, commonly taking participant accounts at face value without theoretical analysis. A summary of quality checklist results and scores is presented in Supplementary S4 for published studies. Supplementary S5 presents quality ratings for the grey literature. The CERQual qualitative evidence profile is shown in Supplementary S6 (providing a succinct summary of the methodological limitations of all the included studies). This shows that there was much more evidence for social loneliness than emotional and existential loneliness, and we have high confidence in the social loneliness results and moderate confidence in the emotional and existential loneliness results.

3.4. Social Loneliness

Studies of social loneliness dominate the evidence accounting for 70% (108/155) of sources in the review and included populations of different ages, family carers, and a range of different employment groups [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 , 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ]. The typical conceptualisation of social loneliness was as an ‘objective’ condition framed by numbers of social connections and explained as a subjective evaluation of feeling isolated, deprived of companionship, lacking a sense of belonging, and lacking access to a satisfying social network; that is, it describes a sense of disconnection from others. How this concept was manifest and the underpinning contributary mechanisms varied across populations and contexts.

In studies focused on older 50+ years and younger populations, social loneliness was articulated as a feeling of disconnection across various domains of life including devaluation, helplessness, powerlessness, and feelings of stigma and shame. The vulnerability created by social loneliness was highlighted by accounts of financial fraud in elderly people [ 38 ]. For older adults, loss, detachment, and boredom were commonly identified as contributors to loneliness in both community and care home settings. Young people noted loneliness to be connected to the need to escape from someone or something and aligned loneliness with submission or resignation to negative feelings, often alongside feelings of shame and stigma [ 67 ]. The stigma of loneliness was reported by a wide range of groups, including people with HIV and with cancer [ 24 ], homeless people [ 25 , 32 , 74 , 111 ], female prisoners [ 43 ], men who have sex with other men [ 53 ], transgender people [ 108 ], and older people living in care settings [ 29 ]. To clarify, within the context of loneliness, stigma is understood to mean some kind of marginalisation, feelings of disgrace, or exclusion. If the papers did not directly use the term ‘stigma’ but used one of these concepts, we took it to mean stigmatisation.

There were groups or contexts where the feeling of disconnection associated with social loneliness took specific forms. Cultural difference was reported as a potential source of social loneliness in older population groups [ 69 , 82 ]. For international students, the absence of intimate personal connections combined with a lack of cultural fit created ‘cultural loneliness’, a version of social loneliness generated by the absence of their cultural and linguistic settings [ 112 ]. This notion of cultural loneliness could persist even when people had good access to social networks. Studies of social loneliness in the employment context identified a lack of support and employment-related ‘distancing’ or isolation from others from a diverse range of employees including long-haul truck drivers [ 26 ], homeworkers [ 46 ], school principals [ 57 , 60 , 113 ], medical educators [ 96 ], professional golfers [ 40 ], and senior corporate managers [ 104 ], as well as family caregivers [ 45 , 98 ]. Homeworkers and family caregivers seem to be especially vulnerable. Both groups experienced a sense of being cut off from their networks, professional and personal, because of the restrictions their respective roles had on their personal life [ 46 , 98 ]. For family caregivers, not feeling understood and being denied recognition for their role was experienced alongside more generic feelings of powerlessness and helplessness to take control of live events.

Experiences of illness and healthcare led to or compounded social loneliness in ways not reported for other population groups. In care homes, feeling lonely was exacerbated by issues preventing carers from providing adequate care (e.g., limited resources, time pressures, and professional rules) [ 83 ]. For stroke patients, a lack of support and contact, a sense of being unable to contribute, and not having an intimate relationship contributed to loneliness [ 109 ]. The design of healthcare environments can generate social loneliness as illustrated by a stroke ward, which while allowing privacy and supporting efficient clinical care, increased loneliness and created barriers to social connection [ 25 ]. This example provides one of the few explanations of loneliness not simply attributable to individual characteristics. In mental health contexts, social loneliness was affected by external environments, activities, and therapies/treatment, as well as people [ 121 ]. Social loneliness arose as a result of physical, cognitive, behavioural, and emotional responses following traumatic brain injury since these changes could affect existing relationships, leading to the loss of old friends and creating difficulties in making new ones [ 85 ].

Solutions to social loneliness were numerous and diverse in this evidence base. For older adults, services to alleviate social loneliness were largely focussed on increasing social contacts. These included friendship clubs [ 44 ], music provision [ 127 ], museum-based social prescribing [ 129 , 131 ], local history cafes [ 119 ], broadly defined community-based approaches [ 30 , 58 , 89 , 100 , 125 ], and health-messaging services [ 49 , 124 ]. Community-based approaches to alleviating social loneliness were explored where community leaders worked with older women [ 100 ]. These suggested that increasing independence, improving communication and developing mentoring, buddying, and intergenerational befriending programmes could provide relevant support to women of older age [ 100 ]. Intergenerational approaches using reverse mentoring in which younger adults trained older people in the use of information technology (IT) were reported as successful in alleviating self-reported social loneliness in older people in one study [ 33 ]. Provision of social activities to alleviate social loneliness in nursing homes could include a range of activities (e.g., self-awareness programmes, humour sessions, social engagements, and faith-based activities), but these were only associated with self-reported reductions in social loneliness if the activities were relevant to older people [ 72 , 80 ].

Young people used a variety of coping strategies for managing social loneliness and preserving and extending social connections. These included distraction, seeking help from professionals and institutions, support seeking, self-reliance, and problem-solving behaviours [ 67 , 112 , 118 ]. Although social loneliness in young people was difficult to identify, youth workers could help to prevent a downward spiral by addressing loneliness risk at key moments, which would differ amongst individuals, but may be related to relationship concerns, mental health issues, and a range of perceived stressors in life [ 128 ].

Studies reported a range of strategies for addressing workplace social loneliness in different contexts, including provision of opportunities to socialise and maintaining connections with people who provide social support [ 26 ]. The use of mobile technologies, such as smartphones, widened possibilities for homeworkers to socialise while retaining access to emails and remaining contactable by clients, although the use of technological devices did not necessarily address professional isolation in homeworkers [ 46 ]. Strategic responses to alleviating social loneliness at the organisational level were noted in the context of academic institutions as part of a wider examination of the role of social support in improving mental wellbeing [ 6 ]. In wider work contexts, the extent to which senior managers felt lonely was also dependent on coping strategies they used, including mental and physical disconnection, adopting a healthy lifestyle, gaining support from one’s network, and affecting and influencing others.

3.5. Emotional Loneliness

A total of 27 of the 155 included studies conceptualised emotional loneliness with a ‘loss model’ or ‘primary relationship deficit’ approach, which was used in all but two of the studies as the explanatory framework [ 132 , 133 , 134 , 135 , 136 , 137 , 138 , 139 , 140 , 141 , 142 , 143 , 144 , 145 , 146 , 147 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 , 152 , 153 , 154 , 155 , 156 , 157 , 158 ]. A common theme in conceptualisations of emotional loneliness was the connection with social isolation and a loss or lack of good quality social relationships in all the included studies in this theme. However, in contrast to social loneliness, the sense of loss, disconnection, withdrawal, detachment, or alienation from people and places and feelings of abandonment and exclusion was resultant from a lack of a sense of belonging or recognition and, for older adults, perceptions of agism and stereotyping. Negative emotions identified in conceptualisations of emotional loneliness included sadness, fear, anxiety, and worry. Although it overlaps with social loneliness, the emotional aspect within this conceptualisation of loneliness requires addressing in a distinct way because these negative feelings occur even when one is in close contact with people. Positive emotions connected to emotional loneliness were also conceptualised in terms of optimistic perceptions of aloneness and solitude associated with learning to cope with loneliness and adjusting to imposed loneliness. Emotional loneliness was reported as both acute, temporary, and subject to negotiation and change, but also permanent, long-lasting, and associated with detrimental mental and physical health.

Emotional loneliness was described by older people as a type of inner pain or suffering, a feeling to be kept hidden and silent because of fears of being stigmatised as lonely and old, becoming a burden on family and friends, and feeling responsible for controlling emotional aspects of loneliness [ 140 , 141 , 150 , 151 ]. Negative feelings associated with loss [ 133 , 134 , 135 , 137 , 140 , 141 , 150 , 154 , 156 ], disconnection, withdrawal, detachment, or alienation from people and places [ 135 , 150 , 152 , 156 ], a feeling of abandonment [ 137 , 143 ], exclusion [ 141 ], and a sense of losing or being in conflict with ones’ established identity [ 135 , 140 , 144 , 145 ] were descriptions of emotional loneliness in old age. Two studies focussed on young people, highlighting a dearth of studies in this area [ 139 , 149 ]. Both studies related to young people growing up in particular family contexts: living with a parent diagnosed with cancer and having parents who were Holocaust survivors, highlighting specific exclusionary contexts. For the parental cancer patient context, key exclusionary processes included failure of professionals to explain the situation to them, being left out of decisions and conversations connected to diagnoses, and treatment of their parents. Alongside this, feelings of uncertainty about the future, fear of losing a parent, and a sense that they were not equipped to cope generated a sense of distance or disconnection from others. For children of parents who were Holocaust survivors, emotional loneliness was a cognitive reaction to parental trauma [ 149 ] and a consequence of negative self-comparison to families without such trauma. Alleviating this kind of emotional loneliness was associated with support and comfort offered by family members and being given accurate information by healthcare professionals, which combined to provide a sense of relief from emotional loneliness for the young people.

Positive feelings associated with emotional loneliness were observed only for older adults and were associated with the perceived benefits of solitude or aloneness [ 137 , 143 , 147 ]. Solitude was connected to feelings of freedom and a sense of comfort in old age in one study and defined as an ‘at homeness’. Being able to cope with emotional loneliness in old age was associated with a sense of joy and pride in oneself [ 147 ] and emotional self-management [ 143 ]. The included studies examined processes of negotiating and adapting to loneliness in old age. Alleviating emotional loneliness was connected to establishing new routines to account for the loss of loved ones or social networks [ 135 , 152 ], including developing opportunities for meaningful social contact [ 156 ], engaging in therapy for those living with long-term mental health conditions [ 141 ], and taking part in meaningful activities, such as reading, gardening, and social meals [ 143 , 151 ].

Of the 27 studies on emotional loneliness, seven studies explored emotional loneliness as a consequence of relational issues [ 132 , 136 , 138 , 142 , 148 , 153 , 155 , 157 ], further supporting the idea that social and emotional loneliness are interconnected. Four of these identified that complex family dynamics including responsibility for childcare, older children leaving home, and bereavement (for mothers) [ 132 ]; poor childhood attachment (to fathers), and weak sibling relationships [ 153 ]; being placed in a care home [ 148 ]; and loss of intimate partner relationships [ 136 , 155 ]. These all resulted in the deeply emotional character of loneliness connected to low mood, a lack of sense of purpose and feelings of suffering, family abandonment, and pervasive worry. Such negative consequences of emotional loneliness could be further entrenched by disadvantaged living conditions, such as low income and limited access to spaces/places with good amenities [ 132 ]. This evidence points to the significance of high quality and meaningful relationships and an understanding of the role of place/space in countering social and emotional loneliness. When relationships (particularly intimate ones) are not high quality, there is a negative impact on emotional loneliness, shaped through feelings of disappointment, abandonment, and feeling devalued or powerless [ 157 ]. In studies of people living with learning disabilities or mental health conditions [ 142 , 146 ], the structuring of exclusion was identified as a contributory factor to emotional loneliness, characterised by a sense of exclusion and lack of acceptance even in the presence of people. In one of these studies, the potential of reframing loneliness in terms of the benefits of solitude was considered possible [ 142 ].

Approaches to alleviating emotional loneliness for those living with physical and mental health conditions included nostalgic activities, allowing remembering and reminiscing about happy times, keeping busy, and engaging in activities involving meeting people, which could lead to feelings of pride in self-management [ 141 , 147 , 151 , 152 ]. Participating in therapy was also considered to help strengthen a sense of connection to the world and alleviate emotional loneliness for those living with mental health conditions [ 141 ]. Alleviating emotional loneliness associated with insecurity or a lack of attachment to place, either rural or urban, through place-based strategies was reported in one study [ 154 ]. Creating place-based opportunities for the development of a sense of neighbourhood was similarly suggested in one study as a potential solution to emotional loneliness [ 156 ].

3.6. Existential Loneliness

A total of 20 the 155 included studies conceptualised existential loneliness [ 159 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 165 , 166 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 175 , 176 , 177 , 178 ]. In contrast to emotional or social loneliness, existential loneliness was defined as a feeling of fundamental separateness from others and the wider world, not simply as the absence of meaningful relationships and negative emotional experience. Participants described it as a feeling that occurred when important others were absent through some form of psychological rejection or absence [ 159 , 161 , 162 ], or when people felt left behind by life events, such as death or divorce, and/or experiences of physical or mental decline or limitation through illness, traumatic experience, aging, and a sense of one’s mortality [ 160 , 163 , 164 , 165 , 166 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 176 , 177 , 178 ]. Similar explanations of existential loneliness were reported by healthcare professionals supporting older people experiencing this type of loneliness [ 175 ]. This conceptualisation of existential loneliness was connected, in all studies examining the concept, to feelings of separateness from other human beings, feelings of loss and longing, and/or a sense of being an outsider against a need for connectedness, belonging, and companionship. Studies indicated that existential loneliness may also be felt while with others, as a sense of disconnection from a group [ 159 , 161 , 163 , 167 , 168 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 174 ]. In such situations, participants reported that existential loneliness was experienced through being misunderstood, psychologically and emotionally detached, and more deeply as a perception of being without others. For AIDS patients in one study, this was shown to lead to stigma for this population group [ 159 ]. Negative feelings of existential loneliness were connected to healthcare contexts via the concept of the ‘lonely patient’ who, while in close proximity to other patients or healthcare professionals, may feel disconnected because of a sense of vulnerability, lack of care [ 161 , 163 ], or issues with communication [ 169 ].

Existential loneliness was not always conceived of as a negative experience. Evidence in one study suggested that existential loneliness could be meaningful if developed as part of a voluntary transcendental experience [ 161 ]. Such self-directed and potentially positive experiences of existential loneliness were conceptualised as a powerful force for calm and peace, a type of temporary recharging experience adopted when people felt a need to break from human connection for a while. While old age, frailty, and impending death were most often considered in the context of negative feelings of existential loneliness, there was evidence in two studies that such life experiences contributed to an understanding of loneliness as a balance between solitude and meaningful human connections that involved both social and emotional experiences, and the building of new and trusting relationships [ 173 , 177 ].

3.7. Multidimensional Models of Loneliness

Perhaps representing an advance in understandings of loneliness, six studies in this review proposed what we would refer to as multidimensional models of loneliness [ 29 , 37 , 63 , 69 , 82 , 94 ]. Multidimensional models of loneliness in studies of older people reflected the influence of interactions between relationship quality, becoming and being old, personal troubles/personality traits, and sickness on feelings of loneliness [ 29 , 37 , 94 ]. In these models, social loneliness intertwines with emotional loneliness in complex ways revealing loneliness to be deeply or intensely felt, potentially hidden or masked, and diverse in experience. In two studies, the complexity of social loneliness was explored in terms of cultural difference and diversity [ 69 , 82 ]. Social loneliness was conceptualised as embodied and culturally nuanced in terms of physical, emotional, and spiritual expression [ 69 ]. Disrupted cultures and communities were linked with diverse cultural experience of loneliness [ 82 ]. Severe mental illness (SMI) had the effect of reducing or changing social networks even though many people with SMI desired to have greater social networks [ 93 ]. Social loneliness was also characterised as emotionally as well as socially excluding and reported as the feeling of being somehow removed from life [ 63 ]. Such findings demonstrate some overlap with existential types of loneliness for those living with mental health conditions [ 63 ].

4. Discussion

Principal findings and contribution to knowledge.

The findings in this review support calls for better understandings of the complexity of loneliness in different population groups and social contexts [ 179 , 180 ] to inform policymakers and practitioners in the field. We have thematically synthesised the evidence for three types of loneliness: social, emotional, and existential. This supports but significantly develops a preliminary typology of loneliness, focused only on loneliness in healthcare research [ 181 ].

In summary of our findings, social loneliness describes the perception of dissatisfaction with the quality of relationships [ 182 ] and as a discrepancy between the actual and desired quantity and quality of social interactions [ 28 , 133 , 183 ]. This type of loneliness most closely reflects established ways in which loneliness is defined and measured in the current literature, where it is understood as a negative experience in which our social relations are deficient in some way, quantitively or qualitatively [ 184 ]. It also reflects the evidence showing correlations between loneliness and poor physical and mental health [ 5 , 14 ].

Emotional loneliness arises from the absence or loss of meaningful relationships, possibly of a primary attachment figure, such as a spouse. Emotional loneliness is also a consequence of a loss of health and social opportunities that are not easily replaceable. It is also interconnected with not meeting the need to be recognised and to belong. This type of loneliness reflects the extant literature, which identifies the connection between feeling lonely and distressed, emptiness, and loss [ 135 ]. Moreover, existential loneliness describes an expression of separateness from others that can occur at any time, but particularly so when facing life threatening illnesses, trauma, and one’s mortality [ 159 , 185 ].

Central to our findings is the implication that unlike social loneliness, emotional and existential loneliness may not be relieved by interventions focused on social connectedness and integration into a social community. Hence, a key finding from this review is that it provides a more nuanced understanding of loneliness, which can inform a targeted approach to alleviating loneliness, particularly in policy and intervention work.

Our review identifies some key gaps in the literature on loneliness. We found only two published studies focussed on the link between emotional loneliness in young people living with a parent with cancer [ 139 ]; children of Holocaust survivor parents, [ 149 ]). Innovative work reported in the grey literature shows that emotional loneliness in youth is complex and associated with a variety of life experiences [ 118 , 186 ]. Indeed, feelings of loneliness arise during key moments of transition in life, and they are unlikely to be fully captured by the current static and unidimensional definitions that solely focus on the quality and quantity of social relationships. This links to another key gap we found in that there is a dearth of studies on loneliness across the life course since this could show how loneliness is experienced distinctly at different points in time and through different life events [ 187 , 188 , 189 ] The review also identified a lack of studies on loneliness and inequalities, such as socio-economic status and disability, since the included studies present thin demographic data. This, therefore, provides a direction for future research in this area.

More specifically, our review also highlights the importance of conceptualising existential loneliness in order to design effective interventions in circumstances and contexts in which people feel hopelessly detached from social life or misunderstood [ 190 ]. The extant literature on existential loneliness has predominantly focussed on chronic illness [ 172 ] and end-of-life care [ 181 ]. However, our review reveals other contexts in which existential loneliness requires attention. In studies of mental health, existential loneliness appears to be conceived as the sense of physical separation from others, sometimes as a development from having a disturbed self-image or as a consequence of being unable to form social connections, resulting in feelings of exclusion from normal life, stigma, emptiness, and being an outsider.

Each type of loneliness and the potential overlaps between them illustrates the diverse and complex interplay between social, psychological, and contextual factors which contribute to loneliness and potentially its alleviation in people’s lives. Understanding these conceptual differences demonstrates the need for theoretical development in multidimensional studies of loneliness, critical reviews of and methodological developments in both how loneliness is measured, and the interventions that need to be designed and implemented. At present, the current definition of loneliness is not sufficiently broad in its scope or sophisticated in its conceptualisation to capture the range, diversity, and depth of experiences that people define as lonely [ 17 , 191 ]. It also often confuses loneliness, a subjective phenomenon, with social isolation, an objective condition arising from quantitatively diminished social networks [ 28 , 44 ]. Imprecise definitions and, indeed, generalised and broad measures will limit understanding of the impact of loneliness on health.

Most studies in our review focused on social loneliness ( n = 108), reflecting the current academic focus. Using the CERQual rating, we have high confidence in this evidence. However, there was a dearth of studies examining emotional loneliness ( n = 27) and existential loneliness ( n = 20), and both these types of loneliness have been found to be associated with negative health outcomes. This reflects both the more recent emergence of these two types of loneliness as distinct conceptual and empirical entities. The most established measures of loneliness implicitly or explicitly focus on social loneliness. These findings suggest a need for detailed studies of these different types of loneliness and points to the scope for public health policy and practice developments rooted in an understanding of loneliness types, interactions, and settings. We need to comprehend more clearly who feels lonely, when, where, and in what context.

5. Conclusions

5.1. strengths and limitations.

The rigorous and systematic search strategy and comprehensive nature of this review is a strength. We focused on loneliness only and did not include social isolation and other similar concepts. The pre-publication of our protocol on PROSPERO ensured methodological transparency and mitigated any potential post-hoc decision-making, which may have introduced bias. Dual screening of the searches and data extraction and independent quality assessment of the included reviews ensured a rigorous process.

Systematic reviews and evidence syntheses of conceptual frameworks and models are unusual, and methods for such reviews are not yet well-developed. Our use of a PEEST inclusion criteria meant that the types of studies we were interested in were clear to all team members. The focus on concepts, models, theories, and frameworks of loneliness means that it is possible that some relevant evidence was not included. Seventeen potentially includable studies were unavailable, and they may have influenced findings had they been available. There is also a potential risk of publication lag where possible important new evidence has not yet been included in published articles and reports, and thus not identified and included. The grey literature search was used to mitigate that risk in part. The use of the CERQual criteria also acts as a checklist as much as an evaluative tool or measure of quality. A consistent approach to judgements across the different interventions has been applied, but it should be recognised that these judgements are open to interpretation.

5.2. Implications for Policymakers and Future Research

Our review identified an extensive qualitative literature conceptualising social, emotional, and existential loneliness, providing theoretical frameworks for understanding loneliness that are adaptable for decision-making in policy and practice. The literature is dominated by research conceptualising social loneliness, which understates the potential significance of emotional and existential loneliness. We suggest that a parallel review evaluating how loneliness is conceptualised in our commonly used measurement tools would be valuable.

Improved measures and high-quality mixed-methods studies would help to address this. We would recommend rigorous and systematic quantitative methods, longitudinal process evaluations, and cost effectiveness evaluations alongside appropriate qualitative methodologies and analytical techniques. Research, policy, and practice approaches to loneliness can be enhanced through co-production methods involving mutually beneficial working practices in service design, implementation, and evaluation.

5.3. Concluding Remarks

This systematic review summarises all the available qualitative literature on conceptualising social, emotional, and existential loneliness in diverse adult populations. Our evidence base would benefit from an improved understanding of these different types of loneliness, their inter-relationships, and how these may vary across the life course. Such evidence would underpin more effective decision-making and intervention development and influence developments in measuring loneliness. This would enable policymakers and practitioners to determine what intervention would work, for whom, and in what context.

Our findings showed that there is a lack of detail in the literature on loneliness and inequalities (gender, ethnicity, disability, and socio-economic status) because of limited reporting of demographic data in the included studies. There remains, therefore, a need for future rigorous research on loneliness and inequality to understand how loneliness may be experienced differently and thus how to address the detrimental health effects of the interaction of these issues. The findings will be useful for decision-making in public policy and practice that seeks to identify who is lonely, why loneliness occurs, how it is experienced, and the most effective ways to alleviate loneliness or optimise the positive aspects of solitude for enhanced health and wellbeing outcomes. If public health interventions and policy decisions for alleviating loneliness are not based on accurate definitions and understandings, it is unlikely that they will be effective.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the expert support for the searches provided by library-based information scientists at Brunel University London and the University of Brighton. We also acknowledge the support of doctoral researchers at Brunel University London in completing the updated review (Helen Pickford, Amelia Beddoe, and Jake Gifford).

Supplementary Materials

The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph182111522/s1 , Supplementary S1: Search strategy; Supplementary S2: Table of excluded studies; Supplementary S3: Characteristics of included studies conceptualising loneliness (published and unpublished literature); Supplementary S4: Quality checklist scores for qualitative studies (published); Supplementary S5: Quality ratings for grey (unpublished) studies; Supplementary S6: CERQual qualitative evidence profile.

Author Contributions

The review was conceived and designed and the protocol developed by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T. and C.V.; article screening was carried out by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G. and C.V.; data extraction, quality checks of data and interpretation were completed by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G. and C.V.; and the was manuscript drafted by C.M. and L.M. and critically reviewed, updated, and edited by N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G., A.G. and C.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/NOO3721/1).

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The risks of social isolation

Psychologists are studying how to combat loneliness in those most at risk, such as older adults

By Amy Novotney

May 2019, Vol 50, No. 5

Print version: page 32

12 min read

• Parenting, Families, Relationships

CE credits: 1

Learning objectives:  After reading this article, CE candidates will be able to: 

• Identify the effects of social isolation and loneliness on physical, mental and cognitive health.
• Explore how loneliness differs from social isolation.
• Discuss evidence-based interventions for combating loneliness.

For more information on earning CE credit for this article, go to www.apa.org/ed/ce/resources/ce-corner .

According to a 2018 national survey by Cigna , loneliness levels have reached an all-time high, with nearly half of 20,000 U.S. adults reporting they sometimes or always feel alone. Forty percent of survey participants also reported they sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful and that they feel isolated.

Such numbers are alarming because of the health and mental health risks associated with loneliness. According to a meta-analysis co-authored by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or having alcohol use disorder. She’s also found that loneliness and social isolation are twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity ( Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 10, No. 2, 2015 ).

"There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators," Holt-­Lunstad says.

In an effort to stem such health risks, campaigns and coalitions to reduce social isolation and loneliness—an individual’s perceived level of social isolation—have been launched in Australia, ­Denmark and the United Kingdom. These national programs bring together research experts, nonprofit and government agencies, community groups and skilled volunteers to raise awareness of loneliness and address social isolation through evidence-based interventions and advocacy.

But is loneliness really increasing, or is it a condition that humans have always experienced at various times of life? In other words, are we becoming lonelier or just more inclined to recognize and talk about the problem?

These are tough questions to answer because historical data about loneliness are scant. Still, some research suggests that social isolation is increasing, so loneliness may be, too, says Holt-Lunstad. The most recent U.S. census data, for example, show that more than a quarter of the population lives alone—the highest rate ever recorded. In addition, more than half of the population is unmarried, and marriage rates and the number of children per household have declined since the previous census. Rates of volunteerism have also decreased, according to research by the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, and an increasing percentage of Americans report no religious affiliation —suggesting declines in the kinds of religious and other institutional connections that can provide community.

"Regardless of whether loneliness is increasing or remaining stable, we have lots of evidence that a significant portion of the population is affected by it," says Holt-­Lunstad. "Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need—crucial to both well-being and survival."

As experts in behavior change, psychologists are well-positioned to help the nation combat loneliness. Through their research and public policy work, many psychologists have been providing data and detailed recommendations for advancing social connection as a U.S. public health priority on both the societal and individual levels.

"With an increasing aging population, the effects of loneliness on public health are only anticipated to increase," Holt-Lunstad says. "The challenge we face now is figuring out what can be done about it."

Who is most likely?

Loneliness is an experience that has been around since the beginning of time—and we all deal with it, according to Ami Rokach, PhD, an instructor at York University in Canada and a clinical psychologist. "It’s something every single one of us deals with from time to time," he explains, and can occur during life transitions such as the death of a loved one, a divorce or a move to a new place. This kind of loneliness is referred to by researchers as reactive loneliness.

Problems can arise, however, when an experience of loneliness becomes chronic, Rokach notes. "If reactive loneliness is painful, chronic loneliness is torturous," he says. Chronic loneliness is most likely to set in when individuals either don’t have the emotional, mental or financial resources to get out and satisfy their social needs or they lack a social circle that can provide these benefits, says psychologist Louise Hawkley, PhD, a senior research scientist at the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

"That’s when things can become very problematic, and when many of the major negative health consequences of loneliness can set in," she says.

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey of more than 6,000 U.S. adults linked frequent loneliness to dissatisfaction with one’s family, social and community life. About 28 percent of those dissatisfied with their family life feel lonely all or most of the time, compared with just 7 percent of those satisfied with their family life. Satisfaction with one’s social life follows a similar pattern: 26 percent of those dissatisfied with their social lives are frequently lonely, compared with just 5 percent of those who are satisfied with their social lives. One in five Americans who say they are not satisfied with the quality of life in their local communities feel frequent loneliness, roughly triple the 7 percent of Americans who are satisfied with the quality of life in their communities.

And, of course, loneliness can occur when people are surrounded by others—on the subway, in a classroom, or even with their spouses and children, according to Rokach, who adds that loneliness is not synonymous with chosen isolation or solitude. Rather, loneliness is defined by people’s levels of satisfaction with their connectedness, or their perceived social isolation.

Effects of loneliness and isolation

As demonstrated by a review of the effects of perceived social isolation across the life span, co-authored by Hawkley, loneliness can wreak havoc on an individual’s physical, mental and cognitive health ( Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B , Vol. 370, No. 1669, 2015 ). Hawkley points to evidence linking perceived social isolation with adverse health consequences including depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, poor cardiovascular function and impaired immunity at every stage of life. In addition, a 2019 study led by Kassandra Alcaraz, PhD, MPH, a public health researcher with the American Cancer Society, analyzed data from more than 580,000 adults and found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death from every cause for every race ( American Journal of Epidemiology , Vol. 188, No. 1, 2019 ). According to Alcaraz, among black participants, social isolation doubled the risk of early death, while it increased the risk among white participants by 60 to 84 percent.

"Our research really shows that the magnitude of risk presented by social isolation is very similar in magnitude to that of obesity, smoking, lack of access to care and physical inactivity," she says. In the study, investigators weighted several standard measures of social isolation, including marital status, frequency of religious service attendance, club meetings/group activities and number of close friends or relatives. They found that overall, race seemed to be a stronger predictor of social isolation than sex; white men and women were more likely to be in the least isolated category than were black men and women.

The American Cancer Society study is the largest to date on all races and genders, but previous research has provided glimpses into the harmful effects of social isolation and loneliness. A 2016 study led by Newcastle University epidemiologist Nicole Valtorta, PhD, for example, linked loneliness to a 30 percent increase in risk of stroke or the development of coronary heart disease ( Heart , Vol. 102, No. 13 ). Valtorta notes that a lonely individual’s higher risk of ill health likely stems from several combined factors: behavioral, biological and psychological.

"Lacking encouragement from family or friends, those who are lonely may slide into unhealthy habits," Valtorta says. "In addition, loneliness has been found to raise levels of stress, impede sleep and, in turn, harm the body. Loneliness can also augment depression or anxiety."

Last year, researchers at the Florida State University College of Medicine also found that loneliness is associated with a 40 percent increase in a person’s risk of dementia ( The Journals of Gerontology: Series B , online 2018). Led by Angelina Sutin, PhD, the study examined data on more than 12,000 U.S. adults ages 50 years and older. Participants rated their levels of loneliness and social isolation and completed a cognitive battery every two years for up to 10 years.

Among older adults in particular, loneliness is more likely to set in when an individual is dealing with functional limitations and has low family support, Hawkley says. Better self-rated health, more social interaction and less family strain reduce older adults’ feelings of loneliness, according to a study, led by Hawkley, examining data from more than 2,200 older adults ( Research on Aging , Vol. 40, No. 4, 2018 ). "Even among those who started out lonely, those who were in better health and socialized with others more often had much better odds of subsequently recovering from their loneliness," she says.

A 2015 study led by Steven Cole, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides additional clues as to why loneliness can harm overall health ( PNAS , Vol. 112, No. 49, 2015). He and his colleagues examined gene expressions in leukocytes, white blood cells that play key roles in the immune system’s response to infection. They found that the leukocytes of lonely participants—both humans and rhesus macaques—showed an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased expression of genes involved in antiviral responses.

Loneliness, it seems, can lead to long-term "fight-or-flight" stress signaling, which negatively affects immune system functioning. Simply put, people who feel lonely have less immunity and more inflammation than people who don’t.

Combating loneliness

While the harmful effects of loneliness are well established in the research literature, finding solutions to curb chronic loneliness has proven more challenging, says Holt-Lunstad.

Developing effective interventions is not a simple task because there’s no single underlying cause of loneliness, she says. "Different people may be lonely for different reasons, and so a one-size-fits-all kind of intervention is not likely to work because you need something that is going to address the underlying cause." Rokach notes that efforts to minimize loneliness can start at home, with teaching children that aloneness does not mean loneliness. Also, he says, schools can help foster environments in which children look for, identify and intervene when a peer seems lonely or disconnected from others.

In terms of additional ways to address social isolation and feelings of loneliness, research led by Christopher Masi, MD, and a team of researchers at the University of Chicago suggests that interventions that focus inward and address the negative thoughts underlying loneliness in the first place seem to help combat loneliness more than those designed to improve social skills, enhance social support or increase opportunities for social interaction ( Personality and Social Psychology Review , Vol. 15, No. 3, 2011). The meta-analysis reviewed 20 randomized trials of interventions to decrease loneliness in children, adolescents and adults and showed that addressing what the researchers termed maladaptive social cognition through cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) worked best because it empowered patients to recognize and deal with their negative thoughts about self-worth and how others perceive them, says Hawkley, one of the study’s co-authors.

Still, some research has found that engaging older adults in community and social groups can lead to positive mental health effects and reduce feelings of loneliness. Last year, Julene Johnson, PhD, a University of California, San Francisco researcher on aging, examined how joining a choir might combat feelings of loneliness among older adults ( The Journals of Gerontology: Series B , online 2018 ). Half of the study’s 12 senior centers were randomly selected for the choir program, which involved weekly 90-minute choir sessions, including informal public performances. The other half of the centers did not participate in choir sessions. After six months, the researchers found no significant differences between the two groups on tests of cognitive function, lower body strength and overall psychosocial health. But they did find significant improvements in two components of the psychosocial evaluation among choir participants: This group reported feeling less lonely and indicated they had more interest in life. Seniors in the non-choir group saw no change in their loneliness, and their interest in life declined slightly.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have also found that older adults who take part in social groups such as book clubs or church groups have a lower risk of death ( BMJ Open , Vol. 6, No. 2, 2016 ). Led by psychologist Niklas Steffens, PhD, the team tracked the health of 424 people for six years after they had retired and found that social group membership had a compounding effect on quality of life and risk of death. Compared with those still working, every group membership lost after retirement was associated with around a 10 percent drop in quality of life six years later. In addition, if participants belonged to two groups before retirement and kept these up over the following six years, their risk of death was 2 percent, rising to 5 percent if they gave up membership in one group and to 12 percent if they gave up membership in both.

"In this regard, practical interventions need to focus on helping retirees to maintain their sense of purpose and belonging by assisting them to connect to groups and communities that are meaningful to them," the authors say.

To that end, cohousing appears to be growing in popularity among young and old around the world as a way to improve social connections and decrease loneliness, among other benefits. Cohousing communities and mixed-age residences are intentionally built to bring older and younger generations together, either in whole neighborhoods within single-family homes or in larger apartment buildings, where they share dining, laundry and recreational spaces. Neighbors gather for parties, games, movies or other events, and the co­housing piece makes it easy to form clubs, organize child and elder care, and carpool. Hawkley and other psychologists argue that these living situations may also provide an antidote to loneliness, particularly among older adults. Although formal evaluations of their effectiveness in reducing loneliness remain scarce, cohousing communities in the United States now number 165 nationwide, according to the Cohousing Association , with another 140 in the planning stages.

"Older adults have become so marginalized and made to feel as though they are no longer productive members of society, which is lonely-making in and of itself," Hawkley says. "For society to be healthy, we have to find ways to include all segments of the population, and many of these intergenerational housing programs seem to be doing a lot in terms of dispelling myths about old age and helping older individuals feel like they are important and valued members of society again." 

Additional reading

Life-saving Relationships Weir, K. Monitor , 2018

Advancing Social Connection as a Public Health Priority in the United States Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. American Psychologist, 2017

The Potential Public Health Relevance of Social Isolation and Loneliness: Prevalence, Epidemiology, and Risk Factors Holt-Lunstad, J. Public Policy & Aging Report , 2017

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• Social isolation and chronic loneliness place individuals at much greater risk for a variety of diseases, as well as for premature mortality.
• Loneliness is defined by a person’s perceived level of social isolation and is not synonymous with chosen solitude.
• CBT therapy focused on addressing negative self-worth and interventions that bring people together through community groups appear to be effective at combating loneliness among older adults.

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Science News

Why scientists are expanding the definition of loneliness.

A more holistic view could offer new ways to manage the feeling

Social isolation can result in loneliness. Other types of separation can too.

undrey/iStock/Getty Images Plus

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By Sujata Gupta

November 7, 2023 at 9:00 am

For centuries, the Turkana pastoralists of northern Kenya have followed the water. Families once moved about 15 times a year in search of watering holes for their cows, donkeys, camels, goats and sheep.

But the Turkana people’s seasonal way of life has become precarious in recent decades. With drought and ongoing fighting across the region, many women and children stay put while men roam the landscape — often at their own peril. Violence has forced many families to flee for their lives at a moment’s notice. Separated from their livestock, these families eke out a living along the edges of cities or bide their time in displacement camps ringed by tightly woven fencing.

Friendships built on the exchange of livestock also disintegrate. “When no one has any animals, how can we help one another?” a Turkana woman asked anthropologist Ivy Pike, who has worked in the region for 25 years, during an interview.

The suffering within these communities is profound, says Pike, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Unable to safely comb the landscape for medicinal plants, such as herbs to stem postpartum bleeding or curb fevers in children, women find it hard to fulfill their role as nurturers. Men’s identities, meanwhile, are often so bound up in owning livestock that the Turkana language has a word to describe a man without animals — ekebotonit .

“The loneliness of having no animals holds a particular place of distress that transcends the food and livelihood that livestock offer,” Pike and a colleague wrote in 2020 in Transcultural Psychiatry . “An ekebotonit … not only loses his sense of purpose and the companionship herds offer, but according to the Turkana, becomes erased — a man with no say in society.”

These experiences of loneliness among many Turkana people demonstrate how the feeling defies simple characterization — it’s more than social disconnection. That complexity is seen in cultures worldwide. In a study done in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, for instance, many respondents attributed their loneliness to several factors that left them feeling disconnected. One woman missed going to the grocery store, anthropologist Michelle Parsons of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff reported in 2022 in SSM-Mental Health . Another woman longed to browse the stacks at the library, a typically solitary activity.

Efforts to broaden the definition of loneliness to include a feeling of disconnect from animals, places, habits, rituals and even the weather have been gaining momentum across the social sciences. In October 2020, for instance, Parsons coauthored the introduction to a special issue on the anthropology of loneliness in Transcultural Psychiatry .

Getting a handle on the constituents of loneliness — and its flip side, belonging — is not just an academic pursuit; it’s a matter of public health, research suggests. In a May advisory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic , citing findings from numerous studies: Loneliness appears to increase a person’s risk of heart disease by 29 percent and risk of stroke by 32 percent. In older adults, chronic loneliness is associated with a 50 percent increase in the risk of developing dementia. Social isolation can increase the risk for premature death by 29 percent.

Broadening concepts of loneliness can help expand the toolkit of possible interventions, Parsons says.

Tethering people to the wider world could even help people recognize and address climate change, suggests geographer Sarah Wright of the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. This process begins, she says, by “building intentional relationships with more than human beings.”

Ancient forms of belonging

To understand belonging and by extension loneliness, Wright has looked to Indigenous communities. Though these communities span the globe and are comprised of myriad practices and languages, broadly speaking, they share a belief that well-being stems from harmony between people and the planet ( SN: 9/23/23, p. 14 ).

Wright and colleagues recently studied the stories the Aboriginal Yolŋu people tell through ritualized songs known as songspirals . This ancient practice explores the connections among place, culture, people and the stories they tell. Wright’s team, including members of the Yolŋu community and drawing on the work of the Gay’wu Group of Women, published an analysis of one matriarch’s songspiral in 2022 in Qualitative Inquiry . In keeping with the Yolŋu world view, Bawaka Country, the tribe’s homeland in northern Australia, is listed as the lead author.

While lying on her deathbed, the matriarch began singing about her place, her sense of belonging, within a wide web of human and nonhuman relationships. In accordance with her people’s tradition, the matriarch saw this last journey as taking her to the sea; she envisioned herself as a whale. “I can see the saltwater carrying me, moving together with the current; carrying me further into the depths of the ocean, where the foundation of my bloodline lies.”

The matriarch built from an ancient script, one that spirals outward from a voiceless land, explain the authors. That song always starts something like: “At the beginning of time someone had to talk for the land, it was quiet, nothingness. And then it began with the sound from deep within the water, ‘Hmmm hmmm.’ That was the starting point.…”

From there, the matriarch’s song moves forward and backward across generations to anchor people in the broader arc of time, Wright says. The matriarch sings of swimming alongside her deceased grandmother; she sings of her daughters, her granddaughters and her great-granddaughters.

The song also anchors the Yolŋu people to their homeland by giving voice to whale migratory patterns, key fishing grounds and physical connections across the land and sea. The songspiral “maps the land from the sea point of view,” Wright says.

The matriarch’s songspiral shows how for the Yolŋu people, nonhuman relationships are as real as relationships with humans, Wright says. With such relationships, people feel a sense of belonging in the world. Without them, people feel lost.

As the matriarch’s daughter Merrkiyawuy explains in the paper, if the laws of balance between people and land, or country, are broken, “the spiral can come tumbling down and burst. That’s what we say, it will burst open and just float and you will be like a leaf floating in the air, nothing controlling you … if that spiral is burst open, then the songs disappear.”

Losing place — through migration, development, climate change or some other cause — can manifest as loneliness in Indigenous communities, other research suggests. For instance, in 1987, anthropologist Theresa O’Nell of the University of Oregon in Eugene began an 18-month study of depression among the Salish and Pend d’Oreille peoples living on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. But whenever O’Nell asked people if they had ever been depressed, they would invariably talk about loneliness.

“Time after time, I asked about ‘depression,’ and time after time, I was told about ‘loneliness,’ ” O’Nell recounted in the 2004 issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry . As an example, O’Nell cited “the loneliness of an elder lamenting the loss of a song that is no longer sung.”

O’Nell attributed this loneliness to several causes, including a feeling of exclusion from society, an existential feeling of separation between the self and a higher power, and bereavement over losing rituals and language. The Salish and Pend d’Oreille peoples, she observed, did not see their loneliness as pathological, but instead saw it as a natural response to the erosion of their way of life.

“Traditionally oriented Indian people are less susceptible to sadness and more susceptible to loneliness,” says Joseph P. Gone, a psychologist at Harvard University and a member of the Aaniiih -Gros Ventre tribal nation located in Montana.

If land loss is connected to loneliness, especially in Indigenous communities, then the feeling would be expected to grow as climate change wreaks havoc on people’s ancestral lands. ( SN: 3/28/20, p. 6 ). For instance, the 2019–20 bushfires that scorched millions of hectares in Australia caused tremendous suffering for Aboriginal communities , researchers in Australia who worked with these communities wrote in 2020 for the Conversation, a nonprofit news organization: “For Aboriginal people … who live with the trauma of dispossession and neglect and now, the trauma of catastrophic fire, our grief is immeasurably different to that of non-Indigenous people.”

Longing for daily rituals

An emphasis on harmony between people and the planet appears less frequently in industrialized cultures, Wright says. “The fact that you can have a nourishing relationship with place has been invalidated.”

But as the pandemic illuminated, even in industrialized cultures, many people’s sense of belonging still hinges on connections to the more-than-human world. Rather than a connection between person and the landscape, though, these relationships frequently show up between people and aspects of the built environment.

This need for relationships with the built environment comes through in journal entries submitted to the Pandemic Journaling Project , Parsons says. This global initiative to gather people’s experiences of the historic health crisis amassed some 22,000 entries from 1,750 people from May 2020 to January 2022.

“The loneliness creeps up on me. It appears out of left field. The desire to just go and hang out with friends, go out to eat, even browse stacks at the library,” wrote Denise, described as a divorced Midwestern Black woman in her 60s.

The typical tools psychologists use to measure loneliness probably miss these feelings, Parsons reported in her 2022 article in SSM-Mental Health . She reached that conclusion after homing in on 35 U.S. journal writers, many with multiple entries, who used words containing the fragments “lone” or “isolat” in at least one entry. The journal writers also filled out a five-statement loneliness survey alongside their first entry and then every six weeks thereafter. Journal writers responded “yes,” “more or less” or “no” to statements such as: “I miss having people around me.” “There are plenty of people I can rely on when I have problems.” “There are enough people I feel close to.”

Even though many respondents reported feeling lonely in their entries, they still scored low on the loneliness survey , Parsons found. For instance, on the same date that Taylor, described as twenty­something, nonbinary single white person, wrote that they had “never been more lonely,” they scored a 0 on the loneliness survey.

Parsons attributes the discordance to limitations in the survey. The psychological survey used in the journaling project, called the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, and another widely used survey, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, both define loneliness as a form of social pain brought on by the felt absence of a social network or meaningful relationships.

By design, then, most loneliness surveys miss people’s connections to places, activities or even casual acquaintances. In the journaling project, people wrote about missing rituals and other practices, such as birthday celebrations, holidays, religious services and funerals, or missing places, such as the gym, grocery store, library and friends’ houses, Parsons notes. People also wrote about missing everyday encounters with others, the seemingly mundane interactions that can arise when people wander their communities.

Those feelings of loneliness show up in one of Taylor’s entries. They write: “Not only do I miss my friends, but I also miss strangers. I miss the random encounters I used to have with people on the street, in stores, at bars. I miss making a connection with someone and then going our own ways.”

The De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale is great at capturing a longing for the sort of deep, meaningful relationships that people typically associate with loneliness, but it misses other sorts of loneliness, Parsons says. “It’s not picking up place at all. It’s not picking up practices.”

Expanding the loneliness toolkit

Including the built environment in assessments of loneliness is not yet common. But architects, whose trade rests on understanding how people move about their communities, often intuitively think about how the design of the physical environment can worsen feelings of isolation or foster belonging.

“We usually think of loneliness as a singular situational, social or mental experience of being detached from place, domicile, or other human beings,” reads the opening line of the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s chapter in the 2021 book of essays and lectures Loneliness and the Built Environment .

Many architects, including Pallasmaa, have found inspiration in the writings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who believed that dwellings provide a means of both shelter and self-expression. Architects thus design environments that imbue life with meaning, he argued.

Social scientists are starting to join architects in thinking about how the built environment can affect loneliness. In his recent public health advisory, Surgeon General Murthy outlined six pillars to advance social connection. In the first pillar, he recommended facilitating connection among people through better urban planning, such as providing people with easy access to green spaces and bolstering the reach of public transit.

Similarly, in January, a cross-disciplinary team of researchers in Australia and England, whose areas of expertise include urban planning, public health and sociology, identified several urban design features that have the potential to reduce loneliness . Those features include common spaces, walkability, public transit, housing design, sense of safety and access to natural spaces.

While the focus of such urban design projects often aim to get people together, there is growing awareness that connecting people with the natural world may also alleviate loneliness. “People can be socially isolated but still not feel lonely,” says Emily Rugel, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Sydney. “They may find that ability to tap a biophilic connection and go out and view wildlife and walk among the trees. [That may be] enough to make them feel connected to the broader world. They don’t necessarily need interaction with friends or family members to do that.”

Consider, for instance, a small project in New Zealand that aims to alleviate loneliness, in part, by helping people reconnect to their extended families and ancestral lands. Members of one Māori subtribe, the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, developed a 30-home papakāinga , a type of communal Māori cohousing setup, on ancestral land. Completed in 2016, that project brought people together by connecting homes via shared lanes, community gardens and play spaces for children.

Developers wanted people to feel as if they were walking the same paths as their ancestors , researchers wrote in the 2022 issue of Wellbeing, Space and Society . They hoped that feeling would help residents feel rooted in their culture and the long arc of time. Even when building on ancestral lands is not possible, bringing often far-flung community members back together has the potential to revive languages and cultural practices, the authors note. But more research is needed to know if a return to the papakāinga reduces loneliness.

The bottom line is that expanding how we think about loneliness has the potential to expand the toolkit of possible interventions, Parsons says. “We can regulate our loneliness by not necessarily calling up a friend but by going out, going for a walk, or going to the library, or going and sitting in a coffee shop.”

Loneliness and climate change

Many years ago, I moved to a small city in New England while several months pregnant. I knew no one except my husband and spent my lonely days wandering the woods behind my house. Once, after my baby was born, I strapped him into a carrier and scrambled down a steep embankment. There, at the edge of a lake, a log had lodged into the rocky shore. We would spend hours watching waves pummel the log’s rough bark. As I observed loons dive for fish in summer and heard waves shatter ice like glass in winter, my loneliness would briefly ebb.

I was reminded of this log after speaking with Sarah Wright about songspirals and why we should all cultivate intentional relationships with the natural world. I had never considered my relationship with the log particularly important, or even as a relationship at all. But Wright made me realize that in this new and unfamiliar place, the log had provided a haven. Her words also explained the sadness I felt over the years as the waves chipped away the log’s bark — a process accelerated no doubt by a lake that froze over less and less come winter.

There’s a word to describe what I was feeling. In the early 2000s, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht of the University of Sydney coined the term “ solastalgia ” to describe the pain or sickness a person experiences when natural or human-made disasters destroy their home. Etymologically, the word originates from both solace and desolation. Desolation, Albrecht wrote in 2007, has “meanings connected to abandonment and loneliness.” Solastalgia is also a play on nostalgia.

Albrecht felt compelled to create such a term after observing and interviewing over 50 people living in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, where there has been intensive mining. Residents expressed concerns over how mining was affecting their health and well-being. “The fact that you can see those huge mine heaps et cetera makes you think that sometime in the future there may be dreadful consequences for the water table movement in the valley,” a man named Leo said. A woman named Eve said, “When the coal is gone, the people of Singleton will be left with nothing but ‘the final void.’ ”

The residents’ experience is ironic, Albrecht noted. These people are descended from the colonizers who dispossessed Indigenous communities of their land. Now, this “second wave of colonization,” Albrecht wrote, “is leading to complete dispossession for some and solastalgia for those left behind.” In other words: desolation, abandonment and loneliness.

In recent years, related terms have emerged: ecoanxiety and climate grief ( SN: 2/29/20, p. 22 ). Unlike solastalgia, though, researchers rarely connect these ideas to loneliness. That’s changing. In 2022, an online survey of over 3,000 German adults, for instance, showed that those who scored high in loneliness on the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale also tended to score high in climate anxiety on a different scale.

These terms make clear that building a relationship with the nonhuman elements of our world is bittersweet in this time of rapid climate change. We come to love what we may well lose. Yet, absent these deep relationships, how can we care for the world we live in?

Last winter in my New England town, it didn’t snow until mid-February and the water around the log never froze. Those months of battering waves were hard on the log. When I trekked down to that rocky shore one muddy spring day, my two school-aged children in tow, the log was smooth to the touch and white as bone.

On a solo walk a few weeks later, I discovered that the log was gone. It had, after so many years of holding on, floated away.

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The History of Loneliness

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April, together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches, out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia, in the monkey house, where it was just the two of them, they had become “accustomed to sleep at night in each other’s arms on a blanket on the floor,” clutching each other, desperately, achingly, through the long, cold night.

The Philadelphia Zoological Garden was the first zoo in the United States. It opened in 1874, two years after Charles Darwin published “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in which he related what he had learned about the social attachments of primates from Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Society of London:

Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behavior of two chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much protruded lips; and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. They then mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths, and yelled with delight.

Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four chimpanzees in America, and when she died human observers mourned her loss, but, above all, they remarked on the behavior of her companion. For a long time, they reported, he tried in vain to rouse her. Then he “went into a frenzy of grief.” This paroxysm accorded entirely with what Darwin had described in humans: “Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements.” The bereaved chimpanzee began to pull out the hair from his head. He wailed, making a sound the zookeeper had never heard before: Hah-ah-ah-ah-ah . “His cries were heard over the entire garden. He dashed himself against the bars of the cage and butted his head upon the hard-wood bottom, and when this burst of grief was ended he poked his head under the straw in one corner and moaned as if his heart would break.”

Nothing quite like this had ever been recorded. Superintendent Brown prepared a scholarly article, “Grief in the Chimpanzee.” Even long after the death of the female, Brown reported, the male “invariably slept on a cross-beam at the top of the cage, returning to inherited habit, and showing, probably, that the apprehension of unseen dangers has been heightened by his sense of loneliness.”

Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it. And yet, long before the present pandemic, with its forced isolation and social distancing, humans had begun building their own monkey houses. Before modern times, very few human beings lived alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for your health. In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K. appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition, doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?

I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I cannot tolerate being so alone. I feel as if nobody really understands me. I am no longer close to anyone. There is no one I can turn to. I feel isolated from others.

In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?

“Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state of profound distress. Neuroscientists identify loneliness as a state of hypervigilance whose origins lie among our primate ancestors and in our own hunter-gatherer past. Much of the research in this field was led by John Cacioppo, at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago. Cacioppo, who died in 2018, was known as Dr. Loneliness. In the new book “ Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World ” (Harper Wave), Murthy explains how Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory of loneliness has been tested by anthropologists at the University of Oxford, who have traced its origins back fifty-two million years, to the very first primates. Primates need to belong to an intimate social group, a family or a band, in order to survive; this is especially true for humans (humans you don’t know might very well kill you, which is a problem not shared by most other primates). Separated from the group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness,” Murthy writes. We breathe fast, our heart races, our blood pressure rises, we don’t sleep. We act fearful, defensive, and self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually want to help, and tend to stop lonely people from doing what would benefit them most: reaching out to others.

The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little. These drives backfire.

Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and even political polarization. Murthy writes with compassion, but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow, not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties, when “homelessness” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say than “poverty”—and saying it didn’t help. (Since then, the number of homeless Americans has increased.) Curiously, Murthy often conflates the two, explaining loneliness as feeling homeless. To belong is to feel at home. “To be at home is to be known,” he writes. Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar. Loneliness is the feeling that no place is home. “In community after community,” Murthy writes, “I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.” Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.

In “ A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion ” (Oxford), the British historian Fay Bound Alberti defines loneliness as “a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others,” and she objects to the idea that it’s universal, transhistorical, and the source of all that ails us. She argues that the condition really didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, at least not in a chronic form. It’s not that people—widows and widowers, in particular, and the very poor, the sick, and the outcast—weren’t lonely; it’s that, since it wasn’t possible to survive without living among other people, and without being bonded to other people, by ties of affection and loyalty and obligation, loneliness was a passing experience. Monarchs probably were lonely, chronically. (Hey, it’s lonely at the top!) But, for most ordinary people, daily living involved such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying. The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely. One exception is “Hamlet”: Ophelia suffers from “loneliness”; then she drowns herself.

Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for.

Alberti’s book is a cultural history (she offers an anodyne reading of “Wuthering Heights,” for instance, and another of the letters of Sylvia Plath ). But the social history is more interesting, and there the scholarship demonstrates that whatever epidemic of loneliness can be said to exist is very closely associated with living alone. Whether living alone makes people lonely or whether people live alone because they’re lonely might seem to be harder to say, but the preponderance of the evidence supports the former: it is the force of history, not the exertion of choice, that leads people to live alone. This is a problem for people trying to fight an epidemic of loneliness, because the force of history is relentless.

Before the twentieth century, according to the best longitudinal demographic studies, about five per cent of all households (or about one per cent of the world population) consisted of just one person. That figure began rising around 1910, driven by urbanization, the decline of live-in servants, a declining birth rate, and the replacement of the traditional, multigenerational family with the nuclear family. By the time David Riesman published “ The Lonely Crowd ,” in 1950, nine per cent of all households consisted of a single person. In 1959, psychiatry discovered loneliness, in a subtle essay by the German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it,” she wrote. She, too, shrank in horror from its contemplation. “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life,” she wrote, “and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.” People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely, afraid that the condition might be contagious. And people who are lonely are themselves so horrified by what they are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed—“it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.

“During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment,” the sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote in “ Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ,” from 2012. “For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.” Klinenberg considers this to be, in large part, a triumph; more plausibly, it is a disaster. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, the percentage of single-person households grew at a much steeper rate, driven by a high divorce rate, a still-falling birth rate, and longer lifespans over all. (After the rise of the nuclear family, the old began to reside alone, with women typically outliving their husbands.) A medical literature on loneliness began to emerge in the nineteen-eighties, at the same time that policymakers became concerned with, and named, “homelessness,” which is a far more dire condition than being a single-person household: to be homeless is to be a household that does not hold a house. Cacioppo began his research in the nineteen-nineties, even as humans were building a network of computers, to connect us all. Klinenberg, who graduated from college in 1993, is particularly interested in people who chose to live alone right about then.

I suppose I was one of them. I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.

This experience might not fit so well into the story Klinenberg tells; he argues that networked technologies of communication, beginning with the telephone’s widespread adoption, in the nineteen-fifties, helped make living alone possible. Radio, television, Internet, social media: we can feel at home online. Or not. Robert Putnam’s influential book about the decline of American community ties, “Bowling Alone,” came out in 2000, four years before the launch of Facebook, which monetized loneliness. Some people say that the success of social media was a product of an epidemic of loneliness; some people say it was a contributor to it; some people say it’s the only remedy for it. Connect! Disconnect! The Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.” The epidemic only grew.

This is not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Living alone, while common in the United States, is more common in many other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Australia, and Canada, and it’s on the rise in China, India, and Brazil. Living alone works best in nations with strong social supports. It works worst in places like the United States. It is best to have not only an Internet but a social safety net.

Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday? ♦

A Guide to the Coronavirus

• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
• How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
• How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
• Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
• We are all irrational panic shoppers .
• The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .
• How pandemics change history .

Theme of Loneliness, Isolation, & Alienation in Literature with Examples

Humans are social creatures. Most of us enjoy communication and try to build relationships with others. It’s no wonder that the inability to be a part of society often leads to emotional turmoil.

World literature has numerous examples of characters who are disconnected from their loved ones or don’t fit into the social norms. Stories featuring themes of isolation and loneliness often describe a quest for happiness or explore the reasons behind these feelings.

In this article by Custom-Writing.org , we will:

• discuss isolation and loneliness in literary works;
• cite many excellent examples;
• provide relevant quotations.

🏝️ Isolation Theme in Literature

• 🏠 Theme of Loneliness
• 👽 Theme of Alienation
• Frankenstein
• The Metamorphosis
• Of Mice and Men
• ✍️ Essay Topics

🔍 References

Isolation is a state of being detached from other people, either physically or emotionally. It may have positive and negative connotations:

• In a positive sense, isolation can be a powerful source of creativity and independence.
• In negative terms , it can cause mental suffering and difficulties with interpersonal relationships.

Theme of Isolation and Loneliness: Difference

As you can see, isolation can be enjoyable in certain situations. That’s how it differs from loneliness : a negative state in which a person feels uncomfortable and emotionally down because of a lack of social interactions . In other words, isolated people are not necessarily lonely.

Isolation Theme Characteristics with Examples

Now, let’s examine isolation as a literary theme. It often appears in stories of different genres and has various shades of meaning. We’ll explain the different uses of this theme and provide examples from literature.

Forced vs. Voluntary Isolation in Literature

Isolation can be voluntary or happen for external reasons beyond the person’s control. The main difference lies in the agent who imposes isolation on the person:

• If someone decides to be alone and enjoys this state of solitude, it’s voluntary isolation . The poetry of Emily Dickinson is a prominent example.
• Forced isolation often acts as punishment and leads to detrimental emotional consequences. This form of isolation doesn’t depend on the character’s will, such as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter .

Physical vs. Emotional Isolation in Literature

Aside from forced and voluntary, isolation can be physical or emotional:

• Isolation at the physical level makes the character unable to reach out to other people, such as Robinson Crusoe being stranded on an island.
• Emotional isolation is an inner state of separation from other people. It also involves unwillingness or inability to build quality relationships. A great example is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye .

These two forms are often interlinked, like in A Rose for Emily . The story’s titular character is isolated from the others both physically and emotionally .

Symbols of Isolation in Literature

In literary works dedicated to emotional isolation, authors often use physical artifacts as symbols. For example, the moors in Wuthering Heights or the room in The Yellow Wallpaper are means of the characters’ physical isolation. They also symbolize a much deeper divide between the protagonists and the people around them.

🏠 Theme of Loneliness in Literature

Loneliness is often used as a theme in stories of people unable to build relationships with others. Their state of mind always comes with sadness and a low self-esteem. Naturally, it causes profound emotional suffering.

We will examine how the theme of loneliness functions in literature. But first, let’s see how it differs from its positive counterpart: solitude.

Solitude vs. Loneliness: The Difference

Loneliness Theme: History & Examples

The modern concept of loneliness is relatively new. It first emerged in the 16 th century and has undergone many transformations since then.

• The first formal mention of loneliness appeared in George Milton’s Paradise Lost in the 17 th century. There are also many references to loneliness in Shakespeare’s works.
• Later on, after the Industrial Revolution , the theme got more popular. During that time, people started moving to large cities. As a result, they were losing bonds with their families and hometowns. Illustrative examples of that period are Gothic novels and the works of Charles Dickens .
• According to The New Yorker , the 20 th century witnessed a broad spread of loneliness due to the rise of Capitalism. Philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus explored existential loneliness, influencing numerous authors. The absurdist writings of Kafka and Beckett also played an essential role in reflecting the isolation felt by people in Capitalist societies. Sylvia Plath has masterfully explored mental health struggles related to this condition in The Bell Jar (you can learn more about it in our The Bell Jar analysis .)

👽 Theme of Alienation in Literature

Another facet of being alone that is often explored in literature is alienation . Let’s see how this concept differs from those we discussed previously.

Alienation vs. Loneliness: Difference

While loneliness is more about being on your own and lacking connection, alienation means involuntary estrangement and a lack of sympathy from society. In other words, alienated people don’t fit their community, thus lacking a sense of belonging.

Isolation vs. Alienation: The Difference

Theme of Alienation vs. Identity in Literature

There is a prominent connection between alienation and a loss of identity. It often results from a character’s self-search in a hostile society with alien ideas and values. These characters often differ from the dominant majority, so the community treats them negatively. Such is the case with Mrs. Dalloway from Woolf’s eponymous novel.

Writers with unique, non-conforming identity are often alienated during their lifetime. Their distinct mindset sets them apart from their social circle. Naturally, it creates discomfort and relationship problems. These experiences are often reflected in their works, such as in James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Alienation in Modernism

Alienation as a theme is mainly associated with Modernism . It’s not surprising, considering that the 20 th century witnessed fundamental changes in people’s lifestyle. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution couldn’t help eroding the quality of human bonding and the depth of relationships.

It’s also vital to mention that the two World Wars introduced even greater changes in human relationships. People got more locked up emotionally in order to withstand the war trauma and avoid further turmoil. Consequently, the theme of alienation and comradeship found reflection in the works of Ernest Hemingway , Erich Maria Remarque , Norman Mailer, and Rebecca West, among others.

📚 Books about Loneliness and Isolation: Quotes & Examples

Loneliness and isolation themes are featured prominently in many of the world’s greatest literary works. Here we’ll analyze several well-known examples: Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, and The Metamorphosis.

Theme of Isolation & Alienation in Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is among the earliest depictions of loneliness in modern literature. It shows the depth of emotional suffering that alienation can impose.

Victor Frankenstein , a talented scientist, creates a monster from the human body parts. The monster becomes the loneliest creature in the world. Seeing that his master hates him and wouldn’t become his friend, he ruined everything Victor held dear. He was driven by revenge, trying to drive him into the same despair.

The novel contains many references to emotional and physical alienation. It also explores the distinction between voluntary and involuntary isolation:

• The monster is involuntarily driven into an emotionally devastating state of alienation.
• Victor imposes voluntary isolation on himself after witnessing the crimes of his creature.

To learn more about the representation of loneliness and isolation in the novel, check out our article on themes in Frankenstein .

Frankenstein Quotes about Isolation

Here are a couple of quotes from Frankenstein directly related to the theme of isolation and loneliness:

How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow…I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend. Frankenstein , Letter 2

In this quote, Walton expresses his loneliness and desire for company. He uses frost and snow as symbols to refer to his isolation. Perhaps a heart-warming relationship could melt the ice surrounding him.

I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

This quote is related to Victor’s inability to make friends and function as a regular member of society. He also misses his friends and relatives in Ingolstadt, which causes him further discomfort.

I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was now alone. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

In this quote, Victor shares his fear of loneliness. As a person who used to spend most of his time in social activity among people, Victor feared the solitude that awaited him in Ingolstadt.

Isolation & Alienation in The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is an enigmatic masterpiece by Franz Kafka, telling a story of a young man Gregor. He is alienated at work and home by his demanding, disrespectful family. He lacks deep, rewarding relationships in his life. As a result, he feels profound loneliness.

Gregor’s family isolates him both as a human and an insect, refusing to recognize his personhood. Gregor’s stay in confinement is also a reflection of his broader alienation from society, resulting from his self-perception as a parasite.  To learn more about it, feel free to read our article on themes in The Metamorphosis .

The Metamorphosis: Isolation Quotes

Let’s analyze several quotes from The Metamorphosis to see how Kafka approached the theme of isolation.

The upset of doing business is much worse than the actual business in the home office, and, besides, I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

In this fragment, Gregor’s lifestyle is described with a couple of strokes. It shows that he lived an empty, superficial life without meaningful relationships.

Well, leaving out the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? In spite of all his miseries, he could not repress a smile at this thought. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

This quote shows how Gregor feels isolated even before anyone else can see him as an insect. He knows that being different will inevitably affect his life and his relationships with his family. So, he prefers to confine himself to voluntary isolation instead of seeking help.

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. The Metamorphosis , Part 3

This final paragraph of Kafka’s story reveals the human nature of Gregor. It also shows the depth of his suffering in isolation after turning into a vermin. He reconciles with his metamorphosis and agrees to disappear from this world. Eventually, he vanishes from his family’s troubled memories.

Theme of Loneliness in Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a touching novella by John Steinbeck examining the intricacies of laborers’ relationships on a ranch. It’s a snapshot of class and race relations that delves into the depths of human loneliness. Steinbeck shows how this feeling makes people mean, reckless, and cold.

Many characters in this story suffer from being alienated from the community:

• Crooks is ostracized because of his race, living in a separate shabby house as a misfit.
• George also suffers from forced alienation because he takes care of the mentally disabled Lennie.
• Curley’s wife is another character suffering from loneliness. This feeling drives her to despair. She seeks the warmth of human relationships in the hands of Lennie, which causes her accidental death.

Isolation Quotes: Of Mice and Men

Now, let’s analyze a couple of quotes from Of Mice and Men to see how the author approached the theme of loneliness.

Guys like us who work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world, they ain’t got no family, they don’t belong no place. Of Mice and Men , Section 1

In this quote, Steinbeck describes several dimensions of isolation suffered by his characters:

• They are physically isolated , working on large farms where they may not meet a single person for weeks.
• They have no chances for social communication and relationship building, thus remaining emotionally isolated without a life partner.
• They can’t develop a sense of belonging to the place where they work; it’s another person’s property.

Candy looked for help from face to face. Of Mice and Men , Section 3

Candy’s loneliness on the ranch becomes highly pronounced during his conflict with Carlson. The reason is that he is an old man afraid of being “disposed of.” The episode is an in-depth look into a society that doesn’t cherish human relationships, focusing only on a person’s practical utility. 

I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely. Of Mice and Men , Chapter 5

This quote expresses the depth of Curley’s wife’s loneliness. She doesn’t have anyone with whom she would be able to talk, aside from her husband. Curley is also not an appropriate companion, as he treats his wife rudely and carelessly. As a result of her loneliness, she falls into deeper frustration.

✍️ Essay on Loneliness and Isolation: Topics & Ideas

If you’ve got a task to write an essay about loneliness and isolation, it’s vital to pick the right topic. You can explore how these feelings are covered in literature or focus on their real-life manifestations. Here are some excellent topic suggestions for your inspiration:

• Cross-national comparisons of people’s experience of loneliness and isolation.
• Social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality among the elderly.
• Public health consequences of extended social isolation .
• Impact of social isolation on young people’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Connections between social isolation and depression.
• Interventions for reducing social isolation and loneliness among older people.
• Loneliness and social isolation among rural area residents.
• The effect of social distancing rules on perceived loneliness.
• How does social isolation affect older people’s functional status?
• Video calls as a measure for reducing social isolation.
• Isolation, loneliness, and otherness in Frankenstein .
• The unique combination of addiction and isolation in Frankenstein .
• Exploration of solitude in Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance .
•  Artificial isolation and voluntary seclusion in Against Nature .
• Different layers of isolation in George Eliot’s Silas Marner .
• Celebration of self-imposed solitude in Emily Dickinson’s works.
• Buddhist aesthetics of solitude in Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude .
• Loneliness of childhood in Charles Dickens’s works.
• Moby-Dick : Loneliness in the struggle.
• Medieval literature about loneliness and social isolation.

Now you know everything about the themes of isolation, loneliness, and alienation in fiction and can correctly identify and interpret them. What is your favorite literary work focusing on any of these themes? Tell us in the comments!

❓ Themes of Loneliness and Isolation FAQs

Isolation is a popular theme in poetry. The speakers in such poems often reflect on their separation from others or being away from their loved ones. Metaphorically, isolation may mean hiding unshared emotions. The magnitude of the feeling can vary from light blues to depression.

In his masterpiece Of Mice and Men , John Steinbeck presents loneliness in many tragic ways. The most alienated characters in the book are Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. Most of them were eventually destroyed by the negative consequences of their loneliness.

The Catcher in the Rye uses many symbols as manifestations of Holden’s loneliness. One prominent example is an image of his dead brother Allie. He’s the person Holden wants to bond with but can’t because he is gone. Holden also perceives other people as phony or corny, thus separating himself from his peers.

Beloved is a work about the deeply entrenched trauma of slavery that finds its manifestation in later generations. Characters of Beloved prefer self-isolation and alienation from others to avoid emotional pain.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , all people must conform to society’s rules to be accepted. Those who don’t fit in that established order and feel their individuality are erased from society.

• What Is Solitude?: Psychology Today
• Loneliness in Literature: Springer Link
• What Literature and Language Tell Us about the History of Loneliness: Scroll.in
• On Isolation and Literature: The Millions
• 10 Books About Loneliness: Publishers Weekly
• Alienation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Isolation and Revenge: Where Victor Frankenstein Went Wrong: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• On Isolation: Gale
• Top 10 Books About Loneliness: The Guardian
• Emily Dickinson and the Creative “Solitude of Space:” Psyche
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Loneliness Essay Example

Loneliness is a feeling that many people experience at one point or another. The impact of it on your life can vary greatly depending on the situation. This sample will explore the different types of loneliness, how to deal with them, and some tips for overcoming loneliness in general.

Essay Example On Loneliness

• Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay
• Introduction – Loneliness Essay
• Main Body – Loneliness Essay
• Conclusion – Loneliness Essay

Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. It can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against. Introduction – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a social phenomenon that has been the subject of much research since time immemorial. Yet there still does not exist any solid explanation as to why some people are more prone to loneliness than others. This paper will seek to analyze this potentially debilitating condition from different perspectives. It will cover the relationship between loneliness and incarceration or loss of liberty; then it will proceed into discussing how emotions play a role in making us feel lonely; finally, it will look at how these feelings can affect our mental stability and overall well-being. Get Non-Plagiarized Custom Essay on Loneliness in USA Order Now Main Body – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a universal feeling which has the ability to create its own culture within different societies. In detention facilities, there is a unique kind of loneliness that prevails between prisoners who are often divided into various categories and population groups. This has been described by Mandela as a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. The fact that it can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against makes it even clearer why this isolation from other people occurs so frequently among detainees. In addition, when one spends time incarcerated in solitary confinement, they may become more experienced at coping with feelings of loneliness and despondency; however, these feelings do not tend to dissipate completely because living in an artificial environment cannot be compared with living out in the open. There is also a difference between feeling lonely and actually being alone; many individuals who do not feel social pressure, meaning that they are more than happy spending time on their own without any external stimulation, may still find themselves surrounded by people every day. Yet even this does not guarantee that one will escape feelings of isolation or rejection. Loneliness becomes an issue when it is chronic and experienced frequently, if only fleetingly. It can affect our psychological balance as well as our physical health because it usually initiates stress responses within the body which cause high blood pressure and prompt addiction to drugs or alcohol consumption. All these reasons may lead to decreased productivity and ultimately affect one’s ability to develop or maintain social connections. Buy Customized Essay on Loneliness At Cheapest Price Order Now Conclusion – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a condition that we can’t always avoid, but it is something we should be aware of and try to limit. Thus, while the effects of loneliness on the individual may not be able to stimulate any significant changes in society, at least there will always remain one person more who understands what you are going through. Ultimately, it all comes down to empathy and sharing our own stories so that more people learn how to cope with this potentially dangerous emotional response. Hire USA Experts for Loneliness Essay Order Now

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This essay sample has given you some insights into the psychology of loneliness as well as suggestions for how to combat it in your own life.

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Loneliness and Social Isolation

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Are you feeling lonely?

How to stop feeling lonely tip 1: find creative ways to keep in touch, tip 2: engage with communities—online and in-person, tip 3: help others, tip 4: get outside, tip 5: travel virtually, tip 6: talk to yourself like a caring friend, tip 7: distract yourself, tip 8: take care of your overall mental health, i feel lonely 8 simple ways to deal with loneliness.

Feeling isolated and alone? This toolkit offers simple ways to cope with loneliness and strengthen your connections—and most of them you can do right now.

Human beings are social creatures. While it’s normal to feel lonely sometimes, we thrive within relationships and communities of people. When you feel isolated and cut off from others, it can take a toll on both your mental and physical health, sending your stress levels soaring, triggering anxiety and depression, and increasing your risk for heart disease and stroke.    

Of course, loneliness is something most of us have to deal with at certain times. You may have to quarantine away from loved ones for health reasons, for example, as was so common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving to a new city for work, attending college far from home, grieving the loss of someone close, or breaking up with a romantic partner can also leave you feeling socially disconnected and alone.

In other circumstances, you may find that you have a number of casual acquaintances but no friends close enough to make you feel understood or cared for. Whatever the reasons for you feeling lonely, know that it is a normal human experience and there are steps you can take right now to help alleviate loneliness, protect your health, and strengthen your connections with others

It’s true that during in-person interactions, your body releases hormones that reduce stress and stimulate positive emotional responses. That’s why face-to-face contact with friends and family is so integral to maintaining your mental health .

However, it’s not always possible to connect in-person with loved ones whenever feelings of loneliness strike. Whether you’re traveling with work, live far away, or kept apart for another reason, there are other ways of staying connected and avoiding isolation.

Use video chat.  Videoconferencing services such as Zoom became popular during the pandemic, but there’s no reason not to employ them now when you feel lonely. Video chatting can help you to:

• Keep up with friends and family no matter how far away they live.
• Arrange group hangouts with friends to play party games, watch sports events together, or enjoy happy hour drinks without anyone having to worry about finding a designated driver or baby sitter.
• Schedule meetings or lunch breaks with your co-workers if you’re working remotely.
• Join in with webcasts or online tutorials.  

Call on the phone.  If you feel uncomfortable about calling people out of the blue—even on days when you feel especially lonely—text to set up a good time to call. Or better still, schedule regular times each week to talk on the phone with a friend or loved one. It will give you something to look forward to whenever you’re feeling lonely.

Write a letter. Handwriting a letter or postcard to a loved one may not be the fastest way to send a message. However, the time and effort required to write and mail a letter or card makes it so much more significant to the reader than a text, email, or Facebook post.

• Writing a heartfelt letter can help relieve some of the stress of loneliness.
• Writing your thoughts down on paper can be a great way to come to terms with what you’re going through at the moment.
• It can also help you to find things you can feel grateful or positive about.
• Receiving a letter or postcard in return can brighten your day and make you feel more connected.

Speak to a Licensed Therapist

BetterHelp is an online therapy service that matches you to licensed, accredited therapists who can help with depression, anxiety, relationships, and more. Take the assessment and get matched with a therapist in as little as 48 hours.

Connecting with others doesn’t have to be limited to close friends, family, or work colleagues. Even communicating with strangers can help to combat loneliness and the negative effects of social isolation. You might even develop lifelong friendships as you begin to branch out and talk to people in online or offline spaces.

• Find people with similar hobbies and interests through online platforms like meetup.com.
• Attend peer support meetings to improve your health—such as AA or Weight Watchers .
• Stop by local events where you might run into like-minded people, such as concerts, sports events, or open-mic nights.
• Join a book club—online or in-person.
• Use social media to reconnect with old contacts and expand your social network.
• Participate in social media groups and online forums for topics that interest you.
• Play multiplayer games online or join a fantasy sports league.
• Try a dating app if you’re single or meet new people using a live video chat app.

As well as expanding your social network, helping others can add meaning and purpose to life. In fact,  volunteering to help others  can be just as beneficial for you as it is for those you help.

Volunteer for a cause that’s important to you , whether it’s campaigning for a political cause, walking shelter animals, or feeding the homeless, for example. As well as serving the community, it can help foster a sense of connection with other volunteers. However, if you have limited mobility or are unable to leave home for whatever reason, you can often still volunteer for tasks such as making or answering calls or sending emails.

Run errands for a neighbor in need , such as fetching medications or groceries for a senior, new parent, or someone who’s ill. You can build social connections while making life easier for people with physical or mental disabilities or people who simply feel overwhelmed by their daily errands. Become a mentor. Look for ways to pass down valuable skills or knowledge you possess. You can take a younger person under your wing, for example, and teach them something you specialize in, such as a trade, sport, or musical instrument. Not only will you help the other person grow, you’ll also have a chance to bond with them. Search for local and national organizations that can help match you with kids in need.

If you work from home, it’s easy to feel confined within the same four walls every day. Even if you commute, it’s easy to fall into a routine that’s limited to traveling to and from work. Try to set aside some time to actually enjoy being outdoors. Not only will spending time in fresh air and open spaces improve how you feel, it can open you up to meeting new people.

Walk around your neighborhood.  Taking a different route each day and discovering new places can be a stimulating experience and give you the opportunity to cross paths with new people. Be a tourist in your own neighborhood and explore places you’ve never been to before or familiar places as if seeing them for the first time. Try snapping photos of interesting sights—there’s beauty in even the mundane and familiar.

Spend time in public places. Rather than eating lunch at your desk or alone in your home, head out to a restaurant, coffee shop, or shopping mall food court. To save money, pack your own lunch and enjoy it at in a park or other public space. Simply being within eyeshot of others can help you feel less alone and increase the chances of meeting new people. If you happen to make extra food, consider inviting a neighbor, colleague, or casual acquaintance to join you for lunch.

[Read: Making Good Friends]

Adopt outdoor hobbies. Try cycling, hiking, playing in the park with your dog or kids, or simply walking around outdoor spaces. If the weather is bad, switch to walking inside a shopping mall—it’s a popular fitness routine, especially for older people.

Traveling can of course be an excellent way to cope with loneliness and isolation, but it’s not always a feasible solution, especially in these financially uncertain times. But even if you’re stuck at home, don’t have the means to get away at the moment, or prefer not to travel alone, there are ways to still experience a small taste of adventure.

Recreate a trip you’ve always wanted to take.  Read guide books for the location you want to visit, view online video tours of museums, zoos, and other tourist attractions, or even shop your local grocery store and create meals from that region.

Take a virtual vacation . Visit  different places around the world , touring by foot or by car. Or for a fun twist play the  virtual vacation guessing game  where you try to work out your location from your surroundings.

Find online concerts, theater performances, or other events.  There are plenty of live and recorded shows you can enjoy at home when you’re feeling isolated. Try searching YouTube, streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, or theater company websites. Hearing performers interact with a live audience can help ease the sense of isolation better than simply watching a movie or TV show.

Relive a favorite trip from your past.  Turn old travel photos and other mementos into a scrapbook of your adventures. Post them on social media or edit and share old vacation videos.

Plan for future escapes.  Even if you’re unable to travel right now, you can still start to plan your next getaway. Whether you’re hoping to meet friends locally, take a road trip, or fly overseas, making plans can give you something to look forward to. Research your destination online and devise an itinerary

Many of us fill hours of solitude by focusing on the negative, rehashing past mistakes, or dwelling on worst-case scenarios. But that only makes the sense of loneliness and isolation worse. Instead, you can challenge negative thoughts and talk to yourself in a kinder, more realistic way—like a caring friend.

• Note any negative thought  that leaves you feeling upset or lonely, such as “I’ll never make new friends,” or “I can’t stand being this alone.”
• Challenge the thought  by asking yourself: “Do I know that for sure?” or “What would I say to a friend who thought the same?”
• Change the thought  to a more helpful way of thinking. “I feel lonely and miss my old friends, but I’ll make new friends soon,” or “I’ve made it through bad times before. I can do it again.”

Focusing on a hobby or interest can help you to feel less alone and strengthen your sense of purpose and meaning. If you’ve always wanted to learn a new language or a musical instrument, when you’re feeling lonely and isolated could be the perfect time.

• Do something creative, like writing your memoirs, painting, practicing a craft, or learning to cook.
• Improve your home—make repairs or decorate a room.
• Take a class, listen to a lecture or new album, or explore a museum.
• Create a family tree using a genealogy website.
• If you’re  out of work or dissatisfied with your job, update your resume and LinkedIn profile, and explore ways to network.
• Find comfort in animals. Adopting a pet is a big move, but caring for an animal provides excellent companionship . Even if you’re not ready to own a cat or a dog, offer to sit for a neighbor’s pet or take a shelter dog for a walk. Dog walkers often stop to chat while their animals play together.

Feeling lonely can activate your body’s fight-or-flight response and add to your stress levels. To compensate, take time to nurture your spirit, boost your mood and outlook, and protect your mental health.

Learn to relax.  Practicing a  relaxation technique  such as meditation is an excellent way to relieve stress, tension, and anxiety. If you’re feeling homesick, missing your loved ones, or separated from your happy place, guided imagery meditation can be particularly useful. Guided imagery uses the power of your imagination to visualize happier times and relax your body and mind. Try using HelpGuide’s  Guided Imagery Meditation .

Get active.  Regular exercise can help you better manage your body’s stress hormones. Taking your workouts to a public space, such as a gym or park, can also help you feel less alone. Consider joining a pickup basketball game, finding a running group, joining a golf club, or taking a yoga class.

Draw comfort from simple daily pleasures.  Take a relaxing bath, read a good book, or watch your favorite Netflix show.

Watch what you eat and drink.   Self-medicating  with alcohol, drugs, or food may offer short-term relief, but over time will only worsen your mood and make the loneliness even harder to bear.

Practice acceptance. Remember that loneliness is something that everyone deals with at some point. There’s no shame in feeling lonely. It’s also important to accept factors that are beyond your control. Maybe you can’t afford a plane ticket to go visit your loved ones right now—but that doesn’t mean you need to confine yourself to home.

Loneliness can also sometimes be hard to shake, even after you’ve taken steps to change the situation. For example, even when you make friends in a new town, you might still long for your old friends. It’s okay to miss them; just remember to do what you can to reach out.

Know when to get help

If loneliness becomes too much to bear and you feel overwhelmed or in despair, please reach out. Read  Are You Feeling Suicidal? , call the  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255, or find a helpline in your country at  Befrienders Worldwide .

Know that loneliness and isolation aren’t permanent. With the right strategies and support, you can develop or rebuild a healthy and satisfying social life.

More Information

• SAGEConnect - Phone-buddy program for LGBTQ+ elders.
• MeetUp.com - Tool for finding local groups and other social opportunities.
• AmeriCorps Seniors Program - Volunteer opportunities for older adults.
• Connect2Affect - Tool to assess risk of social isolation (AARP).
• The Jed Foundation - Resources for teens and young adults looking for social connectedness.
• Cole, S. W., Capitanio, J. P., Chun, K., Arevalo, J. M. G., Ma, J., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2015). Myeloid differentiation architecture of leukocyte transcriptome dynamics in perceived social isolation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 112(49), 15142–15147. Link
• Exercising to Relax—Harvard Health Publishing—Harvard Health . (n.d.). Retrieved November 7, 2022, from Link
• Pilcher, J. J., & Bryant, S. A. (2016). Implications of Social Support as a Self-Control Resource. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience , 10. Link
• Valtorta, N. K., Kanaan, M., Gilbody, S., Ronzi, S., & Hanratty, B. (2016). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for coronary heart disease and stroke: Systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal observational studies. Heart , 102(13), 1009–1016. Link
• Gillihan, Seth. The CBT Deck: 101 Practices to Improve Thoughts, Be in the Moment & Take Action in Your Life . PESI Publishing, 2019. Link

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U.S. Surgeon General Issues Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents

Washington, D.C. – Today, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents, highlighting the urgent need to better support parents, caregivers, and families to help our communities thrive.

Over the last decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress compared to other adults. 33% of parents reporting high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults. When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a harmful effect on the mental health of parents and caregivers, which in turn also affects the well- being of the children they raise. Children of parents with mental health conditions may face heightened risks for symptoms of depression and anxiety and for earlier onset, recurrence, and prolonged functional impairment from mental health conditions.

“Parents have a profound impact on the health of our children and the health of society. Yet parents and caregivers today face tremendous pressures, from familiar stressors such as worrying about their kids’ health and safety and financial concerns, to new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest. As a father of two kids, I feel these pressures too,” said U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. “With this Advisory, I am calling for a fundamental shift in how we value and prioritize the mental health and well-being of parents. I am also outlining policies, programs, and individual actions we can all take to support parents and caregivers.”

There are approximately 63 million parents living with children under the age of 18 in the United States, and there are millions of additional caregivers who hold the primary responsibility for caring for children. This population experiences a range of unique stressors that come with raising children; including common demands of parenting, financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns about children’s health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures. In addition to the common stressors listed above, mental health conditions disproportionately affect some parents and caregivers, including those facing circumstances like family or community violence, poverty, and racism and discrimination, among others.

The work of parenting is essential not only for the health of children but also for the health and future of society. Better supporting parents will require policy changes and expanded community programs that will help ensure parents and caregivers can get paid time off to be with a sick child, secure affordable child care, access reliable mental health care, and benefit from places and initiatives that support social connection and community.

This Surgeon General’s Advisory calls for a shift in culture, policies, and programs to ensure all parents and caregivers can thrive. The American public can do more to support parents and caregivers by shifting norms to foster a culture that values, supports, and empowers parents/caregivers and addresses stressors that can impact their mental health and well-being. This Advisory builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s critical steps to ensure families have the support they need, pushing for increased access to paid family leave, improving early childhood education and childcare, and delivering historic investments in mental health care.

The Surgeon General’s Advisory also provides recommendations for several stakeholders that can help reduce stress for and better support the mental health and well-being of parents and caregivers through policy changes, community programs, and individual actions. These stakeholders include national, territorial, state, local and tribal governments; employers; communities, community organizations, and schools; health and social service systems and professionals; researchers; family and friends; and parents and caregivers.

Surgeon General’s Advisories are public statements that call the American people’s attention to a critical public health issue. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action. As the Nation’s Doctor, the 21 st Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Murthy, has issued Surgeon General’s Advisories on Firearm Violence , Loneliness and Isolation , Social Media and Youth Mental Health , Youth Mental Health , Health Worker Well-Being , and a Framework on Workplace Well-Being .

You can read the full Advisory here . For more information about the Office of the Surgeon General, please visit www.surgeongeneral.gov/priorities .

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ArtI.S8.C18.1 Overview of Necessary and Proper Clause

Article I, Section 8, Clause 18:

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

The Necessary and Proper Clause 1 Footnote Although Necessary and Proper Clause is the modern term for the constitutional provision, historically it was often called the Sweeping Clause. See, e.g. , The Federalist No. 33 (Alexander Hamilton) ( [T]he sweeping clause, as it has been affectedly called, authori[z]es the national legislature to pass all necessary and proper laws. ); see generally John Mikhail , The Necessary and Proper Clauses , 102 Geo. L.J. 1045 , 1059 & n.47 (2014) ( [The Framers] referred to the last clause of Article I, Section 8 as the ‘Sweeping Clause.’ ). The terms Elastic Clause, Basket Clause, and Coefficient Clause are also occasionally used to refer to this provision. See Devotion Garner & Cheryl Nyberg , Popular Names of Constitutional Provisions , Univ. of Wash. Sch. of Law , https://lib.law.uw.edu/ref/consticlauses.html#oth (listing these terms as popular name[s] for the provision). concludes Article I’s list of Congress’s enumerated powers with a general statement that Congress’s powers include not only those expressly listed, but also the authority to use all means necessary and proper for executing those express powers. Under the Necessary and Proper Clause, congressional power encompasses all implied and incidental powers that are conducive to the beneficial exercise of an enumerated power. 2 Footnote McCulloch v. Maryland , 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 418 (1819) . The Clause does not require that legislation be absolutely necessary to the exercise of federal power. 3 Footnote See id. ( [T]his limited construction of the word ' necessary ’ [as meaning indispensably necessary ] must be abandoned. ). Rather, so long as Congress’s end is within the scope of federal power under the Constitution, the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to employ any means that are appropriate and plainly adapted to the permitted end. 4 Footnote United States v. Darby , 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941) .

The Necessary and Proper Clause was included in the Constitution in response to the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, which had limited federal power to only those powers expressly delegated to the United States. 5 Footnote Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. II ( Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. ). While the Framers chose to follow the Articles in enumerating a list of specific federal powers—as opposed to some general statement of federal power 6 Footnote See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 2 – 8 and accompanying text (discussing alternative formulations of federal power considered at the Constitutional Convention). —they included the Necessary and Proper Clause to make clear that Congress’s power encompassed the implied power to use all appropriate means required to execute those express powers. 7 Footnote See The Federalist No. 44 (James Madison) . The Necessary and Proper Clause was not a primary focus of debate at the Constitutional Convention itself, but its meaning quickly became a major issue in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, 8 Footnote See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 17 – 24 and accompanying text (reviewing the role of the Clause in the ratification debates). and in the early Republic. 9 Footnote See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 25 – 28 and accompanying text (reviewing the debate over the constitutionality of the First Bank of the United States).

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Necessary and Proper Clause as an extension of the other powers vested in the Federal Government, most notably Congress’s enumerated Article I powers. 10 Footnote See generally United States v. Comstock , 560 U.S. 126, 133–34 (2010) . Thus, whenever the Supreme Court addresses the outer limits of Congress’s enumerated powers, it necessarily invokes the Necessary and Proper Clause as well, either explicitly or implicitly. 11 Footnote See, e.g. , Gonzales v. Raich , 545 U.S. 1, 5 (2005) (addressing whether the prohibition of intrastate use and cultivation of marijuana was necessary and proper to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce); United States v. Kahriger , 345 U.S. 22, 29–32 (1953) (addressing whether registration requirement for tax on illegal gambling activities was a necessary and proper exercise of Congress’s power to tax), overruled in part by Marchetti v. United States , 390 U.S. 39 (1968) ; United States v. Darby , 312 U.S. 100, 121–25 (1941) (addressing whether wage and hour regulations, as applied to intrastate activities, were necessary and proper to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce). However, the Necessary and Proper Clause is not, in itself, an independent grant of congressional power. 12 Footnote See Kinsella v. United States ex rel. Singleton , 361 U.S. 234, 247 (1960) ( The [ Necessary and Proper Clause] is not itself a grant of power, but a caveat that the Congress possesses all the means necessary to carry out the specifically granted ‘foregoing’ powers of [Article I, Section 8] ‘and all other Powers vested by this Constitution.’ ). Although the Necessary and Proper Clause is therefore implicated in many cases examining the extent of Congress’s power under, for example, the Commerce Clause, those decisions are primarily addressed elsewhere in the Constitution Annotated , under the particular enumerated federal power at issue. 13 Footnote See e.g. , ArtI.S8.C1.1.1 Overview of Taxing Clause ; ArtI.S8.C1.2.1 Overview of Spending Clause ; and ArtI.S8.C3.6.1 United States v. Lopez and Interstate Commerce Clause .

In a few cases, however, the Supreme Court has analyzed Congress’s power under the Necessary and Proper Clause separately from any specific enumerated power. Typically, these cases involve either multiple enumerated powers 14 Footnote See, e.g. , McCulloch v. Maryland , 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819) (considering whether Congress’s powers to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise and support armies and navies implied the power to establish a national bank under the Necessary and Proper Clause); Juilliard v. Greenman , 110 U.S. 421, 439–40 (1884) (considering whether Congress’s powers to borrow money, coin money, lay and collect taxes, and regulate interstate and foreign commerce implied the power to make paper notes legal tender for public and private debts under the Necessary and Proper Clause). or congressional actions that are many steps removed from the exercise of the underlying enumerated federal power. 15 Footnote See, e.g. , United States v. Comstock , 560 U.S. 126, 148 (2010) (considering whether the same enumerated power that justifies the creation of a federal criminal statute further justifies indefinite civil commitment of federal prisoners after the expiration of their criminal sentences). Because the extent of the Necessary and Proper Clause defines the outer reaches of Congress’s Article I legislative powers, these cases, in effect, delineate the boundary between the authority of the Federal Government and those areas reserved to the states. 16 Footnote See U.S. Const. amend. X ( The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution . . . are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. ).

This section first reviews the history of the Necessary and Proper Clause’s inclusion in the Constitution and its role in the ratification debates. Next, the section turns to the early judicial interpretation of the Clause, culminating in the Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark 1819 opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland . After briefly reviewing the major nineteenth century Supreme Court decisions on the Necessary and Proper Clause following McCulloch , the section concludes with a review of the modern Supreme Court cases on the scope of Congress’s power under the Clause.

•   Jump to essay-1 Although Necessary and Proper Clause is the modern term for the constitutional provision, historically it was often called the Sweeping Clause. See, e.g. , The Federalist No. 33 (Alexander Hamilton) ( [T]he sweeping clause, as it has been affectedly called, authori[z]es the national legislature to pass all necessary and proper laws. ); see generally John Mikhail , The Necessary and Proper Clauses , 102 Geo. L.J. 1045 , 1059 & n.47 (2014) ( [The Framers] referred to the last clause of Article I, Section 8 as the ‘Sweeping Clause.’ ). The terms Elastic Clause, Basket Clause, and Coefficient Clause are also occasionally used to refer to this provision. See Devotion Garner & Cheryl Nyberg , Popular Names of Constitutional Provisions , Univ. of Wash. Sch. of Law , https://lib.law.uw.edu/ref/consticlauses.html#oth (listing these terms as popular name[s] for the provision).
•   Jump to essay-2 McCulloch v. Maryland , 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 418 (1819) .
•   Jump to essay-3 See id. ( [T]his limited construction of the word ' necessary ’ [as meaning indispensably necessary ] must be abandoned. ).
•   Jump to essay-4 United States v. Darby , 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941) .
•   Jump to essay-5 Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. II ( Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. ).
•   Jump to essay-6 See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 2 – 8 and accompanying text (discussing alternative formulations of federal power considered at the Constitutional Convention).
•   Jump to essay-7 See The Federalist No. 44 (James Madison) .
•   Jump to essay-8 See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 17 – 24 and accompanying text (reviewing the role of the Clause in the ratification debates).
•   Jump to essay-9 See ArtI.S8.C18.2 Historical Background on Necessary and Proper Clause notes 25 – 28 and accompanying text (reviewing the debate over the constitutionality of the First Bank of the United States).
•   Jump to essay-10 See generally United States v. Comstock , 560 U.S. 126, 133–34 (2010) .
•   Jump to essay-11 See, e.g. , Gonzales v. Raich , 545 U.S. 1, 5 (2005) (addressing whether the prohibition of intrastate use and cultivation of marijuana was necessary and proper to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce); United States v. Kahriger , 345 U.S. 22, 29–32 (1953) (addressing whether registration requirement for tax on illegal gambling activities was a necessary and proper exercise of Congress’s power to tax), overruled in part by Marchetti v. United States , 390 U.S. 39 (1968) ; United States v. Darby , 312 U.S. 100, 121–25 (1941) (addressing whether wage and hour regulations, as applied to intrastate activities, were necessary and proper to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce).
•   Jump to essay-12 See Kinsella v. United States ex rel. Singleton , 361 U.S. 234, 247 (1960) ( The [ Necessary and Proper Clause] is not itself a grant of power, but a caveat that the Congress possesses all the means necessary to carry out the specifically granted ‘foregoing’ powers of [Article I, Section 8] ‘and all other Powers vested by this Constitution.’ ).
•   Jump to essay-13 See e.g. , ArtI.S8.C1.1.1 Overview of Taxing Clause ; ArtI.S8.C1.2.1 Overview of Spending Clause ; and ArtI.S8.C3.6.1 United States v. Lopez and Interstate Commerce Clause .
•   Jump to essay-14 See, e.g. , McCulloch v. Maryland , 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819) (considering whether Congress’s powers to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise and support armies and navies implied the power to establish a national bank under the Necessary and Proper Clause); Juilliard v. Greenman , 110 U.S. 421, 439–40 (1884) (considering whether Congress’s powers to borrow money, coin money, lay and collect taxes, and regulate interstate and foreign commerce implied the power to make paper notes legal tender for public and private debts under the Necessary and Proper Clause).
•   Jump to essay-15 See, e.g. , United States v. Comstock , 560 U.S. 126, 148 (2010) (considering whether the same enumerated power that justifies the creation of a federal criminal statute further justifies indefinite civil commitment of federal prisoners after the expiration of their criminal sentences).
•   Jump to essay-16 See U.S. Const. amend. X ( The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution . . . are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. ).

The Particular Loneliness of Losing a Spouse

Personal perspective: losing my husband has left me wondering who i am..

Posted September 1, 2024 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

• Understanding Loneliness
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• Losing a spouse is a kind of existential loneliness.
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• Losing the view of yourself in another's eyes can be disorienting.

A recent New York Times article about the epidemic of loneliness in America barely mentioned the loneliness that comes with grief . I get that—the article was looking at the broader problems of our disconnectedness, the decline of participation in communal activities, the post-pandemic decline of social skills, our reliance on online interaction, and that sort of thing. The loneliness of grief is something outside of that—although we musn’t forget that nearly two million Americans died during the pandemic; that’s a lot of grief adding to our nation’s loneliness statistics.

An existential loneliness

But the article got me thinking about my own loneliness—the very particular loneliness of losing a spouse. This is loneliness like no other. It is existential loneliness. And it has nothing to do with anyone but me and Tom.

While I have very little in the way of family, I do have friends. Lots of them, old and new, and I value them more than ever since losing Tom. So in one way, I am not lonely at all. Any time I need to be around people, people are available. I am extremely fortunate in that way.

But I’m lonely, nonetheless, in a way that all the friends in the world can’t help. Because nobody in this world ever has, or ever will, know me as well as Tom did.

The intimacy of a long-term relationship

Tom and I met in our 20s and were together for more than 30 years. We grew up together. He knew my parents, who are long gone. He knew my younger brother, who is even longer gone. (I moved in with Tom the day after Oliver died, and he was my rock through that grief.) Tom saw me happy, he saw me sad, he saw me ugly cry, and he made me laugh until I cried. He took care of me through my stem cell transplant but died before my hair had fully grown back. (He took to calling me “Sarge” when it reached crewcut length.) He knew what drove me crazy and what brought me joy and what kind of movies I like. (“Everybody talks a lot, and nothing happens.”) He knew that I have nightmares, how I like my morning coffee, and that I’m grumpy when I wake up. (He did request, quite reasonably, that I not scowl at him when he delivered that coffee to me in bed.)

Of course every relationship is unique, and I suppose I have discussed things with close girlfriends that I didn’t discuss with Tom, but there is nothing that compares to the intimacy of living with a person day in and day out for decades. This level of intimacy is achievable only through proximity and time. I envy no one more than I do my friends who are in long marriages. Nothing can replace that. Nothing. And it can’t be recreated.

The luxury of being known

Your spouse is privy to who you are behind closed doors and sees the face you don’t show to the public. (Without makeup, first thing in the morning.) Your spouse knows your history, your quirks, your phobias. This is the person who you can be with even when you don’t feel like being with people—value-added solitude, I call it.

Your spouse knows who you are and who you want to be. Nothing has ever made me prouder than when Tom would say he was proud of me—especially since he was not generally lavish with praise. He believed I could accomplish my goals even when I failed. He believed in me more than I believed in me. I always appreciated that support, but never as much as now that’s its gone.

Past wounds may reopen

Of course, we all live with old wounds that can be ripped open in grief. Having grown up in a family that provided no emotional nurturing—it just wasn’t in my parents’ skill set—the relationship with Tom, in which I felt seen and heard and loved like never before, was like a cold drink in the desert. Losing him churns up very old feelings of being alone in the world.

The loneliness of losing the person who knows you is different from just missing the person. It is among the many secondary losses we suffer, one of the least concrete, and one that’s taken me a long time to understand and articulate. Once I got past missing Tom’s hugs, his humor , his barbecue chicken wings, his guitar playing, our social life as a couple, and a million other things, I realized how disorienting it is to no longer see myself reflected in his eyes.

Who am I without Tom? I don’t know yet, which adds to my loneliness. In losing him I have, in some ways, lost myself as well. Yet another dimension to the complicated process of rebuilding my life.

Sophia Dembling is a Dallas-based writer and the author of Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After.

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Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?

Here’s what we can learn from the way faith communities stay rooted in the real world — and diminish the harms of the virtual one..

S eth Kaplan, an author and lecturer, spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids.

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”

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His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”

Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health

That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend?

At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction , and suicide (for both men and women ). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future , a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

In “ The Anxious Generation ” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms , from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls .

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?

What religious communities are getting right

The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure . Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person.

The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong real-world communities and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.

Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity . Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . . . unsettling change.’”

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.

What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?

One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.

Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.

This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? It’s a difficult question to answer, though many organizations , like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, and the Girl Scouts, are creatively trying to do just this . My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.

Zach Rausch is an associate research scientist at New York University, the lead researcher for the book “The Anxious Generation,” and managing editor of the Substack newsletter After Babel.

Critic’s Notebook

The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?

One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.

Credit... Photo illustration by Ben Denzer

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By Jennifer Szalai

• Aug. 31, 2024

The United States Constitution is in trouble. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he called for the “ termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Outraged critics denounced him for threatening a document that is supposed to be “sacrosanct.” By announcing his desire to throw off constitutional constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, Trump was making his authoritarian inclinations abundantly clear.

It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution . But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.

After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed . The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”

Back in 2018, Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, still seemed to place considerable faith in the Constitution, pleading with fellow progressives in his book “We the People” “not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.” By contrast, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” is markedly pessimistic. Asserting that the Constitution, which is famously difficult to amend , has put the country “in grave danger,” Chemerinsky lays out what would need to happen for a new constitutional convention — and, in the book’s more somber moments, he entertains the possibility of secession . West Coast states might form a nation called “Pacifica.” Red states might form their own country. He hopes that any divorce, if it comes, will be peaceful.

The prospect of secession sounds extreme, but in suggesting that the Constitution could hasten the end of American democracy, Chemerinsky is far from alone. The argument that what ails the country’s politics isn’t simply the president, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, but the founding document that presides over all three, has been gaining traction, especially among liberals. Books and op-eds critiquing the Constitution have proliferated. Scholars are arguing that the Constitution has incentivized what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call a “Tyranny of the Minority.”

The anguish is, in some sense, a flip side of veneration. Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.

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