LONELINESS - The silent killer

Overview;-

Learning objectives- After reading this article readers are going to be able to;

1. Identify being lonely and being alone.
2. Explore the consequences of social isolation.
3. How to combat the loneliness.

'Pic credit- Sanskriti( rsansk05@gmail.com)'

INTRODUCTION;-

 Everybody feels lonely from time to time. once we haven't anyone to speak even having a bunch of friends when nobody is there from whom we can share our stuffs or when nobody has time for us at the weekend. In the UK, 60% of 18 to 34-year-old say they often feel lonely. In the US, 46% of the complete population feels lonely regularly. 

We are living in the most connected time in human history. And yet, an unprecedented number of people feel isolated. People are perplexed about the term being alone and being lonely. 

WHAT IS LONELINESS?

Loneliness may be a purely subjective, individual experience. If you are feeling lonely, you are lonely. A common stereotype is that loneliness only happens to those who don't know the way to talk with people, or the way to behave around others. But population-based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections. Loneliness can affect rich, poor, popular, introverted, extroverted, beautiful, skilled, or an excellent personality.

 Loneliness is a bodily function, like hunger. Hunger causes you to listen to your physical needs. Loneliness causes you to concentrate on your social needs. Your body cares about your social needs because a lot of years ago it absolutely was a great indicator of how likely you were to survive. 

WHY BEING SOCIAL IS NECESSARY?

Survival of the fittest rewarded our ancestors for collaboration and forming connections with one another. Our brains evolve and make us understand other's feelings and helps in building social bonds around us. Being social became a part of our biology. 

Being together meant survival. Being alone meant death. So it had been crucial that you simply got bonded with others. For your ancestors, the most foremost threat to survival was not being eaten by a lion, but not getting the social vibe of your group and being excluded. so to induce elimination, our body came up with 'Social pain'. Pain of this type is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection: a kind of early warning system to create sure you stop behavior that will isolate you. Your ancestors who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to vary their behavior once they got rejected and thus stayed within the tribe, while people who didn't get kicked out and presumably died. That's why rejections hurt. And even more that's, why loneliness is so painful. These mechanisms of keeping us in social bonds or being attached helps us a lot in our history, until humans will evolve more and build a brand new World for themselves.

 

LONELINESS AS A EPIDEMIC;-

The loneliness epidemic we see today really only started within the late Renaissance. Civilization began to specialize in the individual. Intellectuals moved aloof from the collectivism of the Middle Ages, while the young Protestant theology stressed individual responsibility. This trend accelerated during the commercial Revolution. People left their villages and fields to enter factories. Communities that had existed for many years began to dissolve, while cities grew. As within the contemporary world, this process sped up. We meet fewer people head to head and that we meet them less often than within the past. The majority stumble into chronic loneliness unintentionally. As adulthood we become busy with work, university, romance, kids, and Netflix. There's just not enough time. The foremost convenient and simple thing to sacrifice is time with friends. 

Until you realize that you feel isolated; that you yearn for close relationships. But it's hard to search out close connections as adults then, loneliness can become chronic. While humans feel pretty great about things like iPhone and spaceships, our bodies and minds are fundamentally the identical they were 50,000 years ago. We are still biologically fine-tuned to being with one another. 

CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL ISOLATION;-

Large scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the foremost unhealthy things we will experience as humans.

• It causes you to age quicker.
• It makes cancer deadlier.
• Alzheimer's advances faster.
• Your immune systems weaker. 
• Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. 

The most dangerous thing about it is that when it becomes chronic, it can become self-sustaining. Our brain uses both physical and social pain as a threat. When loneliness becomes chronic, your brain goes into self-preservation mode. It starts to determine danger and hostility everywhere. 

But that's not all. Some studies found that when you're lonely, your brain is way more receptive and alert to social signals, while at the same time, it gets worse at interpreting them correctly. You pay more attention to others but you understand them less. The part of your brain that recognizes faces gets out of tune and becomes more likely to categorize neutral faces as hostile, which makes it distrustful of others.

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF LONELINESS;-

• Loneliness causes you to assume the worst about others' intentions towards you. 
• Due to this, you become self-centered, isolated, and awkward than before you were. 
• If loneliness has become a robust presence in your life, the primary thing you can do is to try to recognize the vicious cycle you may be trapped in. 
• It always goes something like this: An initial feeling of isolation ends up in feelings of tension and sadness, which causes you to focus your attention selectively on negative interactions with others. 
• This makes your thoughts about yourself and others more negative, which then changes your behavior. 
• You start to avoid social interaction, which ends up in more feelings of isolation. This cycle becomes more severe and harder to flee anytime. 
• Loneliness makes you sit far-flung from others within the class, not answer the phone when friends call, decline invitations until the invitations stop. 

Each and each one among us contains a story about ourselves, and if your story becomes that individual exclude you, others acquire thereon, and so the outside world can become the way you are feeling about it. This is often a creeping process that takes years, and might end in depression and a mental state that prevents connections, even if you yearn for them. The primary thing you can do to flee it is to accept that loneliness could be a totally normal feeling and zilch to be ashamed of. 

IDENTIFYING AND FIGHTING LONELINESS;-

Literally, everybody feels lonely at some point in their life, it's a universal human experience. You can't eliminate or ignore a feeling until it goes away magically, but you will accept that you feel it and get rid of its cause. You can self-examine what you focus your attention on, and check if you are selectively concentrating on negative things. 

• Was this interaction with a colleague really negative, or was it really neutral or maybe positive? 
• What was the particular content of an interaction? 
• What did another person say? 
• And did they assert something bad, or did you add extra intending to their words? 
• Maybe another person was not really reacting negatively, but just short on time. Then, there are your thoughts about the globe. 
• Are you assuming the worst about others' intentions? Does one enter a social situation and have already decided how it will go? 
• Do you assume others don't want you around? 
• Are you trying to avoid being hurt and not risking opening up? 
• And, if so, are you able to try to give others the good thing of the doubt? 
• Are you able to assume that they're not against you? 
• Can you risk being open and vulnerable again? 
• And lastly, your behavior. Are you avoiding opportunities to be around others? 
• Are you trying to find excuses to say NO to invitations? 
• Or are you pushing others away preemptively to shield yourself? 
• Are you acting as if you're getting attacked? 
• Are you actually trying to seek out new connections, or have you ever become complacent along together with your situation? 

COMBATTING LONELINESS;-
Of course, every person and situation is unique and different, and just introspection alone may not be enough. If you are feeling unable to unravel your situation by yourself, please try and reach out and get professional help. 

It's not an indication of weakness, but of courage. However I look at loneliness, as a purely individual problem that needs solving to make more personal happiness, or as a public health crisis, it is something that deserves more attention. Humans have built a world that's nothing wanting amazing, and yet, none of the shiny things we've made is in a position to satisfy or substitute our fundamental biological need for connection. Most animals get what they have from their physical surroundings. We get what we need from each other, and we need to build our artificial human world that supported that.

•  Let's try something together
•  let's reach resolute someone today, regardless if you are feeling a little bit lonely, or if you wish to make someone else's day better. 
• Maybe write a friend you haven't spoken to in a while. 
• Call a loved one who's become estranged. Invite a work buddy for a coffee
• Or simply head to something you're usually too afraid to travel to or too lazy to go to, like an event or a sports club. 
• Everybody's different, so you recognize what's a decent fit for you. 

Maybe nothing will come of it, and that is okay. Don't try this with any expectations. The goal is solely to open up a bit; to exercise your connection muscles, so they can grow stronger over time, or to help others.

SOURCES;-

I want to recommend two of the books I read while researching about this topic;-

• 'Emotional First Aid' by Guy Winch, a book that addresses, among other topics, A way to deal with loneliness in a very way that I found helpful and actionable 
• 'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' by John Cacioppo and William Patrick. 

It's an entertaining and scientific exploration as to why we experience loneliness on a biological level, how it spread in society and what science has to say about how to escape it.

If you want the pdf or link of the mentioned book then please comment below. 

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SANSKRITI