Our perceptions create our reality. And, because we use them to make sense of and interact with what we perceive, language and verbal reasoning also play a constitutive role in our world.
Patterns in our perceptions create expectations for future experiences. Often, these expectations narrow our sense of what is possible and leave us with an assumption of inevitability.
For example, an expectation of old age is that it will eventually bring loneliness. And, as shown in a study reviewed by the UK’s Campaign to End Loneliness, people who expected old age to be a “time of loneliness” were 2.8 times more likely to actually feel lonely when they reached that period of their lives.
Founded in 2011, the campaign seeks to subvert such expectations and to legitimize loneliness, particularly among the elderly, as a public health concern deserving of both investigative research and transformative social policy.
We experience loneliness if we sense separation from the people we care about or feel isolated from our community.
While confronting such situations at some point in time is perhaps nearly inevitable, enduring loneliness that defines an entire period of our lives is not.
Despite the efforts of the Campaign to End Loneliness and other similar organizations, loneliness as an issue of mental health still lacks a lot of public recognition and social credibility.
There is, however, a lot of evidence as to why this should not be the case.
Last year, researchers at Brigham Young University conducted a meta-analytic study of existing research that measures the connection between loneliness and premature death. After reviewing all research of appropriate relevance and quality from 1980 to 2014, the study found that loneliness increases a person’s likelihood of early death by 26 percent.
This is not to say that any passing sensation of unpleasant solitude poses a significant threat to our health. Specifically, chronic loneliness is what concerns researchers and activist organizations.
Professor John Cacioppo, the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, has studied loneliness since 1992. Some of his more recent research illuminates the physiological consequences of chronic loneliness.
Prolonged emotional pain due to social isolation is a stressful experience that the body attempts to counter by releasing the stress hormone cortisol, which regulates immune system and central nervous system activity as well as blood pressure and blood sugar.
All of these are adversely affected by overexposure to cortisol. When combined with detriments in independent and cognitive function, these symptoms place chronically lonely people at a higher risk for early death than people who struggle with obesity.
So, how do we save ourselves? A good place to start might be in our own minds, which, after all, we use to construct our reality.
It can be hard to admit personal connections to universal experiences, particularly if doing so risks exposing vulnerability.
But if we decide to destigmatize the language we use to describe our desire for human connection and to stop perceiving that desire as a weakness, it would be much easier to build relationships and avoid the potentially lethal pain of loneliness.
mareklei@indiana.edu
@foreverfloral97
