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Spirituality & Health
The Soul/Body Connection
Issue: Winter 2003
Risks from Loneliness May Have Nothing to Do with Other People
There is plenty of evidence that feeling lonely is hard on your health. For example, how a person rates the statement "I feel lonely" has been shown to predict survival of heart bypass patients at 30 days and after five years. So you might expect that the lives of the lonely and the socially connected are quite different. But apparently not.
In a major survey of 2,362 college students that was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, two University of Chicago psychologists, Louise C. Hawkley, Ph.D., and John T. Cacioppo, found no real difference between the health behaviors of lonely and socially connected individuals - except that lonely undergraduates were slightly less likely to consume alcohol. The researchers also found "no differences in the number of major life events, traumas, or intrusive events reported by lonely and nonlonely individuals."
Even more fascinating, lonely and socially connected students engage in the same activities with the same frequency. The two groups even spend the same amount of time alone.
Of course, the inside story is different. According to Cacioppo, "Lonely individuals reported higher levels of perceived stress, more frequent and more severe hassles, and less intense 'uplifts' than nonlonely individuals." They were significantly less likely to use active coping techniques or to seek help and emotional support from others.
In stress tests, blood flow in the hearts of lonely college students was chronically worse than that of the socially connected, to an extent that could over the years impair cardiovascular functioning; in fact, lonely elderly people are more likely to have high blood pressure than their socially connected peers. The research also suggests that loneliness impairs the body's natural methods of restoring itself, such as sleeping well and healing wounds. In other words, a lonely heart is a real phenomenon, and is not healed merely by the presence of other people.
The Soul/Body Connection
Issue: Winter 2003
Risks from Loneliness May Have Nothing to Do with Other People
There is plenty of evidence that feeling lonely is hard on your health. For example, how a person rates the statement "I feel lonely" has been shown to predict survival of heart bypass patients at 30 days and after five years. So you might expect that the lives of the lonely and the socially connected are quite different. But apparently not.
In a major survey of 2,362 college students that was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, two University of Chicago psychologists, Louise C. Hawkley, Ph.D., and John T. Cacioppo, found no real difference between the health behaviors of lonely and socially connected individuals - except that lonely undergraduates were slightly less likely to consume alcohol. The researchers also found "no differences in the number of major life events, traumas, or intrusive events reported by lonely and nonlonely individuals."
Even more fascinating, lonely and socially connected students engage in the same activities with the same frequency. The two groups even spend the same amount of time alone.
Of course, the inside story is different. According to Cacioppo, "Lonely individuals reported higher levels of perceived stress, more frequent and more severe hassles, and less intense 'uplifts' than nonlonely individuals." They were significantly less likely to use active coping techniques or to seek help and emotional support from others.
In stress tests, blood flow in the hearts of lonely college students was chronically worse than that of the socially connected, to an extent that could over the years impair cardiovascular functioning; in fact, lonely elderly people are more likely to have high blood pressure than their socially connected peers. The research also suggests that loneliness impairs the body's natural methods of restoring itself, such as sleeping well and healing wounds. In other words, a lonely heart is a real phenomenon, and is not healed merely by the presence of other people.