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Dr Vivek Murthy, US surgeon general, declared America’s brand new epidemic last month. And it’s loneliness. He released an 81-page report from his office that said conclusively that widespread loneliness in the US poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually. After the pandemic, this sounds like a crisis we already seemingly know how to brave. But this is not new. Loneliness is pain. It is lack of connection and intimacy. Since forever, loneliness which is not a choice, has been a trigger for mental ailments.
This is what neuroscientists believe happens in your brain when you are lonely: The human brain has evolved seeking safety in numbers and groups, and registering loneliness as a threat. Amygdala, the core of a neural system in our brains for detecting and processing threat, go into an overdrive, triggering a release of “fight or flight” stress hormones. Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure and blood sugar level increase to provide energy in case you need it. Your body produces extra inflammatory cells to repair tissue damage and prevent infection, and fewer antibodies to fight viruses. Subconsciously, as you start getting used to living that way, you view other people more as potential threats and less as friends or well-wishers who could be remedies for your loneliness.
So the theory that floated during the pandemic that social isolation was a double-edged sword — that while we could escape the virus, our immune system wasn’t the best it could be because of the isolation — is not entirely baseless.
Several new studies and several more in the last decade have pointed to this connection between loneliness and health. This year, a study by the journal Nature Human Behavior, which involved more than two million adults, a meta-analysis of 90 previously published studies, examined the links between social isolation and early death and found that participants who experienced loneliness had a 14 per cent higher risk of dying early compared to those who didn’t feel lonely. Participants who experienced social isolation, on the other hand, were 32 per cent more likely to die early compared to those who weren’t socially isolated. Participants were followed for anywhere from six months to 25 years. A 2023 paper published in Science Advances found that people who had stronger social bonds, whether with their friends and family or with an extended group like their government or country, were less likely to be anxious or depressed compared to those who didn’t. The study also found that people who had an easy time connecting with society reported higher levels of well-being. Blimey! Isn’t the desire or inability to connect with society more common than we think? Isn’t solitude and pursuing our own tribe no matter how long it takes also therapeutic when society around us is always expecting us to be a certain way?
In India, loneliness takes on a dimension that’s far removed from the individual-first culture of the West. Besides our immediate family, the people who are over-interested in our friends and connections and over-eager to help us find a soulmate who they think are right for us are our uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, besties from school, colleagues and bosses, neighbours and domestic helps — basically, everybody.
Our loneliness is much worse because those of us with minds and hearts that refuse to follow are lonely in crowds. And when we cut off from oppressive or limiting situations and settings, it can even be seen as taboo. If we haven’t found a life partner on our own, it is the responsibility of these aforementioned people to find one for us with dire urgency and purpose.
It is obvious by now that Indians in their 20s and 30s now are much bigger fans of structure, planning and balance than the generations before. Self-care is their religion — the idea of self-care being predicated on the fact that it is for us, our unique problems and issues and can heal us the persons. The hope, perhaps, is that all of us in our individual healing chambers will one day meet each other’s best selves and we can all go back to being connected.
The sustainable, healthy cure for loneliness, at least in India, is being part of communities that understand us, accept us and gain from us. No shrink can cure loneliness and amp up our immune cells if we hold on to the idea that finding a life-partner or spouse and having our own children are the only ways we can find connection and intimacy.
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