In a couple days, it’ll be Thanksgiving. And in my house, that means we sit down for… a home screening of legendary director John Hughes‘ 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I love to keep track of the classic comedy tropes on offer, and ever since I heard that the original script was for a film twice as long as what’s on the DVD in my library, I’ve been pining to watch a director’s cut.
Over my many years of viewing this holiday classic, I’ve come to appreciate the character portraits it presents. I find myself agreeing with Roger Ebert that Neal Page and Del Griffith are both, in their own ways, lonely souls. And isn’t that ironic, given that Thanksgiving is a holiday that evokes such strong images of togetherness and connection, like the iconic 1943 Norman Rockwell painting from his “Four Freedoms” series.
But the reality is, you can still feel lonely while being with other people. That’s because loneliness, as social-science researchers define it, is “a perceived/subjective condition in which an individual is dissatisfied with the quality and/or quantity of their social relationships.”
So if loneliness is a “perceived/subjective condition,” how is it that the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory report earlier this year with the title Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation?
As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website points out, social isolation and loneliness have been linked to increased risk for
- Heart disease and stroke
- Type 2 diabetes
- Depression and anxiety
- Addiction
- Suicidality and self-harm
- Dementia
- Earlier death
An influential 2010 meta-analytic1 review concluded that “the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.” A key figure in that review made its way into another scholarly paper, from there into the 2023 Surgeon General’s advisory report, and ultimately into a host of click-baity headlines (just a sampling: Loneliness poses risks as deadly as smoking: surgeon general and ‘Angry, sick, and alone’: Social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day).
Brigham Young University Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the lead author of the “15 Cigarettes” study, provides some nuance and context around this research—but her bottom line is clear: social isolation and loneliness is indeed a major public health concern, just like smoking was sixty years ago.
And researchers are on their way to figuring out how being lonely can lead to poor health outcomes. There’s lots of evidence that loneliness can “provoke changes at the cellular and tissue level” and most interestingly that it can lead to “altered structure and function in specific brain regions and networks.”
Now I get why the Norwegian pop group 3-11 Porter can sing: “Hello I’m so lonely / And it feels like a disease.” And the title of that song gives us a clue as to how we go about dealing with this disease of disconnection. In her TEDx Talk (highly recommended viewing!), Julianne Holt-Lunstad says: “My research suggests that one of the single best things that you can do for your health is to nurture your relationships.”
How do you “nurture your relationships”?
For starters, you need to take inventory of where you stand in terms of those relationships. Professor Holt-Lunstad suggests asking yourself the following questions (this is drawn from her TEDx Talk, at around the 10-minute mark):
- How many friends do I have?
- How frequently do I interact socially with others?
- Do family/friends care about me? Do they understand the way I feel?
- Can I rely on them? Can I open up to them?
- Do family/friends make too many demands? Do they criticize me?
- Do they let me down? Do they get on my nerves?
These are a lot like the kinds of questions that get asked in the various survey instruments social science researchers use to measure loneliness. Yes, you too can be a researcher!
Next, when looking at building, growing, or repairing your relationships, keep the acronym GRACE top of mind. Social neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo (a/k/a “Doctor Love”) came up with it as a way of highlighting the key elements of strategies for successfully enhancing our connections. It stands for Gratitude, Reciprocity, Altruism, Choice, and Enjoyment.
In a future blog post, I’ll share with you my experiences putting GRACE into practice—and how volunteering has been an important factor in helping me achieve greater wellbeing.
To learn more about income protection, visit RealityCheckup.info, which is part of a CDA consumer outreach program to help working adults understand the importance of having alternate sources of income for times when they cannot work due to illness, injury, or pregnancy.
1“Meta-analysis is a quantitative, formal, epidemiological study design used to systematically assess previous research studies to derive conclusions about that body of research.” (source)
