Loneliness Is Acidic For Your Your Health

Two University of Chicago psychologists, Louise
Hawkley and John Cacioppo, have been trying to
disentangle social isolation, loneliness, and
the physical deterioration and diseases of aging,
right down to the cellular level.

The researchers suspected that while the toll of
loneliness may be mild and unremarkable in early life,
it accumulates with time. To test this idea, the
scientists studied a group of college-age individuals
and continued an annual study of a group of people who
joined when they were between 50 and 68 years old.

Their findings, reported in the August issue of
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal
of the Association for Psychological Science, are
revealing. Consider stress, for example. The more years
you live, the more stressful experiences you are going
to have: new jobs, marriage and divorce, parenting,
financial worries, illness. It's inevitable.

However, when the psychologists looked at the lives
of the middle-aged and older people in their study,
they found that although the lonely ones reported the
same number of stressful life events, they identified
more sources of chronic stress and recalled more
childhood adversity.

Moreover, they differed in how they perceived their
life experiences. Even when faced with similar
challenges, the lonelier people appeared more helpless
and threatened. And ironically, they were less apt to
actively seek help when they are stressed out.

Hawkley and Cacioppo then took urine samples from both
the lonely and the more contented volunteers, and found
that the lonely ones had more of the acidic hormone
epinephrine flowing in their bodies. Epinephrine is one
of the body's acidic "fight or flight" chemicals, and
high levels indicate that lonely people go through life
in a heightened state of arousal.

As with blood pressure, this physiological toll likely
becomes more apparent with aging. Since the body's
acidic stress hormones are intricately involved in
fighting inflammation and infection, it appears that
loneliness contributes to the acidic wear and tear
of aging through this pathway as well.

There is more bad news. When we experience the
depletion caused by stress, our bodies normally
rely on restorative processes like sleep to shore
us up. But when the researchers monitored the younger
volunteers' sleep, they found that the lonely nights
were disturbed by many "micro awakenings."

That is, they appeared to sleep as much as the
normal volunteers, but their sleep was of poorer
quality.

Not surprisingly, the lonelier people reported more
daytime dysfunction. Since sleep tends to deteriorate
with age anyway, the added hit from loneliness is
probably compromising this natural restoration process
even more.

Loneliness is not the same as solitude. Some people are
just fine with being alone, and some even see solitude
as an important path to spiritual growth. But for many,
social isolation and physical aging make for a toxic
acidic cocktail.

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