Is It Ok to Be a Lonely Person?
Feeling lonely sometimes is a normal part of the human condition, but being in a perpetual state of loneliness can negatively affect your overall health.
If you often find yourself in a perpetual state of loneliness, I know it can feel like you were destined for lonesomeness, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to overcome it, but take it from the singer Bill Withers and a seasoned loner like myself: “… it won't be long / Till [you’re] gonna need somebody to lean on.”
Since I grew up with a shy, introverted personality, I know a thing or two about being lonely, including the occasional pros and breadth of cons. So in this blog post, I want to provide fellow loners with some information about loneliness, and some practical advice for overcoming it.
The Science Behind the Social Brain of Humans
Human connections are crucial to human survival, as most of us know from our personal lives, but what does science have to say to back up this claim? University of Penn Arts and Sciences hosted a panel on February 1, 2023, called The Science of Being Social to discuss the topic of the human social brain in the aftermath of COVID-19 quarantine rules.
One of the panelists Michael Platt, a professor of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing at multiple colleges and universities, researches topics ranging from how we make decisions, learn, explore, and make social connections to how we apply newfound knowledge about the brain to improve overall health and well-being. Platt explains how the human brain structure aims to manage our interactions with other people, and individuals with more friendships and relationships have a larger “social brain network” than those with fewer relationships.
As Platt put it,
“People who have more friends or deeper friendships live longer, healthier, happier lives, and they make more money. And the flip side is true: Chronic loneliness is more devastating to your health and well-being than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”
We know from additional research including the other researchers and professors in the aforementioned panel that humans thrive on making meaningful social connections.
How Loneliness Can Negatively Impact Your Health
It’s normal to feel lonely every now and again. Sometimes it’s a reasonable response to both external and internal factors: maybe someone important in your life has died, or you’ve just moved to a new city. However, staying in that state of loneliness for an extended period of time can contribute to serious negative effects on your mental and physical health from as early as infancy.
Mental Health
A growing body of research shows that loneliness is a risk factor for depression in adolescence and adulthood.
Loneliness has been shown to play a part in cognitive decline and dementia in later adulthood.
Feeling lonely, which is in part an indication of inadequate or maladaptive social cognitive skills, is associated with impaired prefrontal cortical function, a region heavily implicated in executive control.
Physical Health
Loneliness impairs the ability to recover from daily stress and may make adolescents more susceptible to stress-related mental, somatic, and health complaints.
Lonely young adults exhibited more restless and lower quality sleep as evidenced by the amount of wake time during sleep.
Those with both high levels of loneliness and a small social network had the lowest antibody response to influenza immunization.
Threatened social exclusion led to decrements in the ability to regulate eating behavior.
When considering these statistics, it’s important to note that correlation does not always equal causation, i.e. just because something negative is correlated with loneliness, does not mean loneliness is the sole cause of it; it could just be a contributing factor in addition to other external or internal factors. Even still, the data doesn’t lie about the potential negative consequences of being lonely.
If you’ve been feeling lonely lately, maybe you’d benefit from some curated journal prompts that were meant to help lonely people cope with feelings of loneliness:
Can Loneliness Be a Good Thing?
There is little evidence to suggest that being lonely for extended periods of time is positive for humans; however, there can certainly be some benefits to solitude, which is more temporary than loneliness, and feelings of loneliness can also act as an aversive state, which promotes behavior to change our state of loneliness.
We are social beings by nature, and in fact we thrive on being in fellowship with like-minded people for survival and reproduction, whether that be a spouse, friends, or family, but everyone needs some alone time every now and then; no matter how extroverted you may be.
Benefits of Feeling Lonely:
While being lonely is not a positive thing, the negative feelings loneliness causes can encourage us to change those feelings. Research that sought to review evidence on the heritability of loneliness and to outline an evolutionary theory of loneliness suggests that loneliness may have evolved to mimic aversive states like hunger, thirst and pain in that it promotes a change in our behavior so that we can change the behavior that’s making us feel lonely and therefore have a higher likelihood of our genes surviving. [8]
Benefits of Aloneness (Not Loneliness):
If you’re an introvert like I am, you might actually enjoy being alone most of the time, especially after you’ve just had a heavy period of being social.
Introverted or not, here are some of the many benefits of being alone but not lonely:
Clear your head when you feel overwhelmed
Gain clarity about something that’s been weighing on your brain
Meditate on important things, like a new idea you might have
Remove yourself from unhealthy social environments
Relieve yourself of sensory overload
Protect your peace of mind
Protect others from an overwhelmed version of yourself, which can sometimes cause you to be snappy or mean
How to Overcome Loneliness
Seeking professional help from a therapist is a great way to overcome feeling lonely, especially if your feelings of loneliness are accompanied with other, more serious feelings; however, not everyone is in the position to get professional help in the near future, so it’s nice to have some practical, applicable ways to overcome feeling perpetually lonely and make friends. Read over my article How to Cope With Being a Social Outcast/Misfit where I outline specific ways you can overcome feelings of loneliness, or if you happen to be an introverted person struggling with loneliness, my article How to Overcome Feeling Lonely as an Introvert provides more specific tips you might find useful.
What are your thoughts on loneliness? Let me know; I love hearing stories from my readers!
