Loneliness can harm your health

We are social creatures. Social relationships and cooperation have fuelled the rapid ascent of human culture and civilization. However, we struggle when we are forced to live in isolation. The amount of loneliness has sped up in the past decade.

As one consequence, the UK has launched the ‘Campaign to End Loneliness’ – a network of over 600 national, regional, and local organizations that aim to create the right conditions for reducing loneliness in later life. Such efforts speak to the growing public recognition and political will to confront this evolving societal challenge.

These concerns are intensified if there are protracted cycles of social isolation enforced by national policy responses to extraordinary crises such as COVID-19. Social isolation in childhood and in late adulthood both impact on neurobiological architecture and functional organization. The ensuing loss of social and cognitive capacity has sizable public health outcomes. On the individual scale, this can result in people becoming less socially engaged. If social isolation during development or in older adults happens on a sufficiently large scale, it is likely to have significant consequences for community stability and social cohesion.

Social isolation at a massive scale risks creating many individuals who are less socially functional. It may be important to identify ways of mitigating the worst of the effects of social isolation to alleviate the consequences. One promising intervention would involve creating opportunities where mutual social support relationships (friendships) can develop naturally. By providing more opportunities for people to meet in friendly settings, new friendships may blossom.

Social neuroscientists undertook a longitudinal study of 332 matched adults who underwent regular training sessions. Several months of cognitive training improved empathy for others, which resulted in structural remodelling in brain regions belonging to the social brain network, including the frontoinsular network and the default mode network. There is an urgent need for further research to explore therapeutic interventions using the training of social capacities in socially deprived humans.

One important lesson is that joining clubs can have important benefits in reducing both a sense of loneliness and psychological or psychiatric conditions. One obvious solution is to encourage vulnerable individuals to join social groups and communities that suit their interests and abilities. Establishing a wide range of such clubs is likely to be much cheaper than paying for care homes.

Singing is known to have a dramatic, immediate effect on creating a sense of social engagement and elevating psychological well-being (the 'ice-breaker effect'). Vulnerable individuals could be encouraged to join choirs and community singing groups. Encouragement and funding may need to be invested in establishing a network of choirs. The use of video-embedded digital communication is likely to gain in importance. This is especially true where family and friendship groups cannot meet in the same space. The visual component of the interpersonal encounter appears to play a key role in creating a more satisfying experience of digital social media.