Loneliness can increase the risk of death

Being alone and isolated has negative consequences for your health.

We often associate loneliness loneliness to the negative feelings caused by isolation.

However, today we know that it can also have very negative material repercussions. In fact, the feeling of prolonged loneliness can increase the risk of death by 26%. can increase the risk of death by 26%, a percentage that increases to 32% in cases of loneliness.This percentage increases to 32% in cases where social isolation is real. These are the data published by psychologists from Brigham Young University in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Loneliness can increase the risk of death, according to a study.

The study carried out by these researchers is a meta-analysis of different researches in the field of social psychology which aims to find relationships between loneliness (real and perceived) and mortality patterns. What they found is what appears to be a correlation between social isolation and risk of death so marked that it may have large-scale repercussions.

Moreover, the results of the meta-analysis not only speak of an increased risk of death in those people who, because of their habits, come into little contact with other people (i.e., show cases of real social isolation) but the same thing happens in people who, regardless of the number of real interactions with others and the time devoted to these, feel lonely. Chronic loneliness, whether real or subjective, carries certain dangers.

That is why addressing this problem is more complicated than one might expect, since it is not only the quantity of actual interactions with others that needs to be addressed, but also the quality of these relationships. quality of these relationships.

Both the subjective and objective factors associated with loneliness may be affecting our health in various ways: producing episodes of stress, negatively affecting the functioning of the immune system, producing states of Blood Pressure that favor the appearance of inflammations, leading to negative social dynamics, etc. All these factors interact and feed back on each other, and that is why, although they do not necessarily result in the occurrence of fatal accidents, they wear down the health of the individual, they wear down the health of the organismThis is why, although they may not lead to fatal accidents, they do wear down the body's health, causing it to age earlier and complications of all kinds to appear.

Practically all the benefits associated with a life full of satisfying relationships can serve to get an idea of the negative aspects of the lack of physical and affective contact with others.

Loneliness: a spreading problem in the Western world

These findings are particularly worrisome in view of the fact that in Western countries, more and more people are living alone or without strong ties to any community. more and more people are living alone or without strong ties to any community.. Moreover, new forms of communication through digital media are not conducive to the emergence of sustained face-to-face relationships, and there are even new forms of work that require no more company than a laptop and a drink.

Moreover, a large part of the population at risk of social isolation is precisely those in the most delicate state of health: older people. These people may find themselves at a point where family lives far away, contact with co-workers has been lost, and there are hardly any social activities that are geared towards them.

Providing these older people (and ourselves) with contexts in which to develop diverse social ties may be one of the fundamental keys to improving people's health on a large scale and preventing certain fatal accidents from occurring. The result, moreover, would be the construction of a well-cohesive society, with all the advantages that entails.

Bibliographical references:

• Holdt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T. and Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), accessed at http://pps.sagepub.com/content/10/2/227.full.pdf