One of my favorite films to rewatch in moments when I need some comfort is Up. Pixar’s tale of grief, aging, connection, and adventure brings tears to my eyes every single time. Loss can bring a sense of discombobulation that can challenge who we are and how we see ourselves. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows this. But it doesn’t have to be the loss of a person that brings us to feel alone. Retirement, becoming empty nesters, or even just a changing sense of self can alter how connected we feel with the world around us. How do these changes impact our physical and mental health?
“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” ― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
A study published in Nature Communications by researchers at Tulane University decided to look at exactly this. Looking at 277,489 adults aged 40 to 69 from the UK Biobank, all of whom started out free of seven major chronic conditions, they wanted to try to ascertain how feeling alone vs. social contact impacted both physical and mental health.
For the purposes of their research, the authors defined ‘Social isolation as an objective measure of the amount of social connection a person has, while loneliness is a subjective measure of a person’s dissatisfaction with the quality of their relationships—regardless of how social the person actually is.’ Is having a diary full of activities and meetings the same as feeling connected to others? It’s an important question to ask as the culture of busyness and hustle thrives in our social media-driven worlds. Using an observational design, the researchers decided to measure outcomes by looking at how many years people aged 50 and up could expect to live free of disease.
The researchers compared people who were both lonely and isolated with those who were neither. Considering physical conditions first, the researchers found that women who were both lonely and isolated lost 2.4 years free of physical disease vs. men losing 1.7 years. When it came to mental health, things looked slightly different. Women lost around 3.7 years free of mental disorders, and men nearly six.
When it comes to lifestyle interventions, it can be really hard to differentiate the impacts of individual lifestyle factors. In reality, many people take on changes in lifestyle habits in multiples. Exercising more, going to bed early, and cutting back on alcohol often form a triad of both advice offered and habits adopted. Here, the team found that having a healthy lifestyle (good diet, exercise, decent sleep, not smoking) helped buffer the effects of isolation, but made no meaningful difference to loneliness.
My understanding of this research mirrors what I’ve seen play out in practice. You can do everything right on paper but still feel lonely. This feeling of disconnection is often reported in younger people and adults who may have a very active online presence. The Biobank study is an observational study, so it can’t prove loneliness causes illness, but it does suggest that how connected we feel needs to be taken as seriously as our step count.
Back in the early 2000s, I remember chatting with a friend who was stuck in one of those dramatic relationships that you can only have in your 20s. You know the ones; when it’s clearly going nowhere, one day it’s on, the next it’s off, but yet the elastic band that is holding you together still can’t be snapped. “I hate the thought of being on my own,” she told me tearfully, over our chardonnay, “but my mother keeps telling me that there is nothing lonelier than being with the wrong person.”
Their relationship finally ended, but those words have stuck with me ever since. Being alone and feeling lonely are not the same thing. We’ve seen in our favorite characters—Fleabag, Bridget Jones, and Ted Lasso—that you can be surrounded by people at work, socially, even at home and still feel desperately alone.
Living with a chronic illness, I’m aware my life has become smaller. An introvert at heart, when I read these findings, it made me pause and think about how connected I really feel. And I believe taking an inventory of this is a really important place to start.
Here are the questions I asked myself:
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In the workplace, how connected do I feel, both within my professional role and to my colleagues?
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In friendships and casual coffees, who am I spending my time with, and how connected to both them and myself do I feel before, during, and after?
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How frequently am I meeting people outside of my immediate circle? How do I feel about that?
Loneliness Essential Reads
I found it really illuminating, and I’ve made some changes to my personal and professional life as a result. Moving through life stages brings both challenges and opportunities in both the frequency of social contacts and how connected we feel, and it’s important we consider our own relationship with these.
How to improve
Identifying where your weaker spots are is important. Getting out and meeting people can feel intimidating for different reasons at different stages of life, but treating it as an important lifestyle factor, like sleep, nutrition, and diet, can help.
As the study suggests, having a healthier lifestyle overall can help mitigate the effects of isolation. Feeling lonely can be harder to deal with. If it’s something that is swamping your life or having a serious impact on your ability to function, it’s important to discuss it with your doctor.
But otherwise it might be more of a tweak in how you spend your time. Less may be more. Instead of seeing friends who leave you feeling uplifted and heard just once a year, it might be worth finding a way to add a second meet-up. Similarly, the weekly coffee with a nearby friend that leaves you feeling stressed or frustrated might be worth swapping for a trip to the gym, or something else that gives you more back.
And if you need a quick reminder of how connections can be found in the most unexpected places, there is always Up.
