essay on adverse effects of loneliness
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Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health, including: Depression and suicide. Cardiovascular disease and stroke. Increased stress levels.
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Loneliness is a common emotion when someone feels alone, separated from others or unsupported and distressed. It’s often transient. But loneliness that becomes persistent causes accelerated aging with multiple health consequences, including conditions that lead to death. Studies, including one published in March by Brigham Young University researchers, suggest that loneliness, isolation and living alone can be as threatening to health as cigarettes, excess alcohol and obesity.
Elderly senior man resting his head on his handsThe danger of loneliness is especially acute in later life when social resources decline and illness accumulates, which can have an impact on independence. The simple reality from birth to old age is that we need one another to regulate not only our emotions but our bodies as well. Not all people who live alone will describe themselves as lonely. But when living alone leads to social isolation there are health consequences.
The Emotional Impact of Loneliness
On the emotional side the perception that social support is inadequate is associated with depression, which, if severe and untreated, is associated with increasing disability, loss of weight, disturbed sleep and thoughts of suicide or actual suicide. Loneliness can also lead to a self-defeating sense of hopelessness and helplessness that can perpetuate isolation. It can become a vicious, unrelenting cycle.
The Physiological Effects of Loneliness
Loneliness is also associated with problematic changes in the cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems. The result is a chronic counterproductive inflammatory state which damages the heart, reduces one’s capacity to resist infection and promotes loss of bone and muscle. Loneliness is also associated with frailty, a condition of old age when independence is minimized and vulnerability approaches its maximum.
Social isolation results in a lack of opportunities for social engagement and mental stimulation, activities that are thought to keep the brain in good condition and reduce the risk of dementia. Obviously, declining health and loss of independence can be the cause rather than the effect of loneliness and isolation. But for decades the health status of older adults has improved just as the number of seniors living alone has increased fivefold. The scientific term for this phenomenon in which an increasing percentage of older adults have experienced an increase in the active life span is “compression of morbidity”. This means that the period of disability in old age is being compressed to the end of the life span. And the majority of those living alone have learned to optimize the social resources they have left. Nonetheless the absolute number of persons living alone means an increase in the number of those vulnerable to loneliness, social isolation and their undesired effect on health. As a result, loneliness, social isolation and living alone are a greater threat to health and well-being than the other way around.