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- Loneliness is the experience of wanting more social connection than you have.
- Loneliness VS Solitude: Our language has wisely sensed the 2 different aspects of being alone. Loneliness is the pain you feel when you are alone. Solitude is the pleasure that you feel when you are alone.
- Lonely people tend to experience the world in negative terms, and to both expect and remember negative encounters. This creates a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn. This causes lonely people to act in ways that reinforce their loneliness.
- Loneliness causes a stress hormone (cortisol) in the body that keeps us alert and anxious. This is why lonely people are restless sleepers. It’s also why loneliness accelerates ageing, and acts as a precursor to cognitive decline. Because of the stress damage that loneliness causes on the body, it can prove fatal.
- Loneliness is the toxic equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day!
- The way to treat loneliness is by having quality relationships… quantity is not important. So Being around people all day doesn’t mean you’re not lonely. Basically what matters is not whether you had a conversation with someone, but whether you felt the conversation was meaningful.
- 40% of people in North America are lonely at any given time. This number is up from 20% in the 1970’s.
- Nearly 70% of students at Canadian universities self describe as “very lonely”.
- Roughly 25% of people have no real friends or family that they can discuss important matters with.
- 45% of Vancouverites live alone.
- Most people in North America spend over 10 hours a day looking at a screen. This is vastly more time then we have available to spend hanging out with each other.
- Loneliness is so painful that, throughout history, solitary confinement has been used as a form of torture.
- Loneliness is major risk factor in suicide.
- There is less child abuse, lower teenage pregnancy rates and less substance abuse in close-knit communities.
- Loneliness is contagious. If you are lonely and misinterpret your friends as not wanting to hang out with you, you are less likely to hang out with them. This makes your friends more vulnerable to loneliness as they no longer have you to hang out with!
- Many pain killers successfully treat loneliness. Opiates are so successful in knocking out loneliness that heroine addicted mothers neglect their own children because they don’t feel lonely for them! Tylenol also works.
- Ironically, we should be grateful for loneliness; it’s what gives us our human desire to connect with each other. Without loneliness, we wouldn’t want to connect with people; we would neglect our lovers, our children and our friends. Loneliness is part of what makes us social animals!