From that craving for a reassuring hug, a helping hand when you need it most, or someone to talk to after a long day — we all likely know how painful pangs of loneliness can feel.
“Throughout human history, we’ve had to rely on others for our survival, whether that’s protection from physical threats or our need for a sense of community,” explains Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “From a neuroscience perspective, our brains have adapted to social proximity.”
In other words: We’ve adapted to feel safer and more secure when we feel like we’re not alone.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA)’s definition, loneliness is the discomfort or uneasiness of being or perceiving oneself to be alone — the emotional distress we feel when our innate need for intimacy and companionship goes unmet.
And while passing, transient loneliness is a feeling we’ll all likely encounter at some point or another, when loneliness is chronic or severe, the long-term effects can be very detrimental to health.
“When we’re lonely, our brains are in constant alert. We’re in a state of feeling physically threatened, and that interferes with our thinking and perception,” Dr. Holt-Lunstad says.
Here are four big ways loneliness can lead to changes in the brain that affect our thinking, perception, and well-being.
1. Loneliness Can Cause ‘Cravings’ for Companionship as Strong as Hunger or Thirst
Research suggests that loneliness triggers neural responses in the brain similar to the activity they see when people are hungry and want food.
In a study published in Nature Neuroscience in January 2021, neuroscientists had 40 healthy participants stay isolated for 10 hours, followed by 10 hours of fasting. After each 10-hour block, the neuroscientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity, and compared it with the participants’ baseline fMRI scans.
“A hungry person looking at food and an isolated person feeling loneliness cues — they shared the same neural signature between those two states,” says the lead author, Livia Tomova, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge in England, where she specializes in studying how stress, loneliness, and social isolation affect the brain and mind.
Other studies have suggested that when we feel lonely and rejected, brain regions tied to feelings of uncertainty, ruminating, and stress light up. The researchers behind one review on the topic hypothesized that these cues alert us to return to social connection.
“Loneliness is not just an adverse state, it’s a signal that something is lacking, and that we need to take action,” Dr. Tomova says.
2. Loneliness May Make Us More Hostile and Pessimistic
Feeling lonely may make us more likely to focus on the negative in a situation. Researchers have found this to be true in experiments that used fMRI scans to show that the brain indeed activates more in response to negative stimuli than positive triggers, according to previous review on the topic.
It’s a “self-preservation” response, wrote two coauthors of that study, Stephanie Cacioppo, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience and the director of the Brain Dynamics Laboratory at University of Chicago, and her late husband, John Cacioppo, PhD, who studied social neuroscience for decades.
Because lonely people often don’t have anyone looking out for them, they end up being hypervigilant to potential threats. This kind of thinking turns into a vicious cycle, according to a study published in the journal Psychology and Aging in March 2020.
In the sample of 7,500 older adults who answered survey questions, that data revealed that lonelier people tended to be more likely to feel hurt or hard done by loved ones, withdraw from their relationships, and even act with “cynical hostility.” While the researchers suggest that hostility is a defense mechanism lonely people employ because they fear further rejection, it still results in pushing people (and the companionship they crave) further away.
In a study published in the journal Psychiatry in 2017, researchers called this a “self-reinforcing loop” of participants feeling lonely, criticizing their friendships, and isolating themselves from others.
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