The Cure

This will probably sound familiar. It’s the same conclusion I reported two days ago. It’s about how the mind heals, how people achieve long life and happiness. The solution does not involve therapy. It involves social connection.

This time, the study was conducted by Harvard, over a period of decades:

Once we had followed the people in the Harvard Study all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them in midlife to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn’t. So we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50 and found that it wasn’t their middle-aged cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old; it was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest, mentally and physically, at age 80.

A study tracking 3,720 adults in Baltimore since 2004 found that participants who reported receiving more social support also reported less depression. A study following a representative sample of 229 older adults in Chicago since 2002 found that people in satisfying relationships reported higher levels of happiness. And a study based in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that social connections in adolescence were better than academic achievement at predicting well-being in adulthood.

And:

The simple measure of time spent with others proved quite important, because on a day-to-day basis this measurement was clearly linked with happiness. On days when these men and women spent more time in the company of others, they were happier. In particular, the more time they spent with their partners, the more happiness they reported. This was true across all couples but especially true for those in satisfying relationships.

Social connection is the antidote to loneliness. And, loneliness is the problem. And, to be clear, being aware of the problem does not count as much as does doing something about the problem:

This finding makes sense in light of the growing evidence that loneliness is associated with greater sensitivity to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function and less effective sleep. Recent research has shown that for older people, loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26%.

How can loneliness be so physically harmful when it’s a subjective experience? Answering that question is easier if we understand the biological roots of the problem. Human beings have evolved to be social, and the biological processes that encourage social behavior are there to protect us. When we feel isolated, our bodies and brains react in ways that are designed to help us survive that isolation.

Fifty thousand years ago, being alone was dangerous, and an isolated person’s body and brain would have gone into temporary survival mode. The need to recognize threats would have fallen on her alone, so her stress hormones would have increased and made her more alert. If her family or tribe were away overnight and she had to sleep by herself, her sleep would be shallower. If a predator was approaching, she would want to know, so she would be more easily aroused and experience more awakenings during the night.

When we feel isolated, our bodies and brains react in ways that are designed to help us survive that isolation.

If for some reason she found herself alone for say, a month, rather than a night, these physical processes would continue, morphing into a droning, constant sense of unease, and they would begin to take a toll on her mental and physical health. She would be, as we say today, stressed out. She would be lonely.

The same effects of loneliness continue today. The feeling of loneliness is a kind of alarm ringing inside the body. At first, its signals may help us; we need them to alert us to a problem. But imagine living in your house with a fire alarm going off all day, every day, and you start to get a sense of what chronic loneliness is doing behind the scenes to our minds and bodies.

With apologies if this seems repetitious.