All of these studies, as well as our own Harvard Study, bear witness to the importance of human connections. They show that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. Sadly, this sense of disconnection from others is growing across the world. About one in four Americans report feeling lonely—more than sixty million people. In China, loneliness among older adults has markedly increased in recent years, and Great Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness to address what has become a major public health challenge.

2: Why Relationships Matter

“These feelings, big and small, are connected to biological processes. Just as our brain responds to the presence of food in our bellies by rewarding us with pleasure sensations, so does it respond to positive contact with others. The brain effectively says to us: Yes, more of this, please. Positive interaction tells our bodies that we are safe, reducing our physical arousal and increasing our sense of well-being. By contrast, negative experiences and interactions create a sense that we are in danger and stimulate us to produce stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are part of a cascade of physical reactions that raise alertness and help us respond to situations of critical importance—the “fight or flight” response. They are a big part of what gives us that feeling of stress.

When you’re lonely, it hurts. And we don’t mean that metaphorically. It has a physical effect on the body. Loneliness is associated with being more sensitive to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function, and less effective sleep, making an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Recent research has shown that for older people loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent. A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and selfcare in young adults. This ongoing study includes more than 2,200 people born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995. When they were 18, the researchers asked them how lonely they were. Those who reported being lonelier were more likely to experience mental health problems, to engage in risky physical health behaviors, and to use more negative strategies to cope with stress. Add to this the fact that a tide of loneliness is flooding through modern societies, and we have a serious problem. Recent stats should make us take notice.

If we feel disconnected from others at work, that means we feel lonely for the majority of our waking hours. This is a health concern. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, loneliness increases our risk of death as much as smoking or obesity. If we find ourselves feeling lonely at work, it may be up to us to create opportunities for social connection to the extent that we can. For parents raising their kids at home, play dates or visits to a local park (which are often as much for the parents as for the kids) can be restorative. For warehouse workers, there may be opportunities to connect with people directly before a shift, or directly after.

Summarizing their own and other’s research, a distinguished group of Canadian psychologists led by Toni Schmader (Schmader, Micheal Johns, and Chad Forbes) points to three things that typically happen when people are under this threat. First, they’re stressed. Their heart rate, blood pressure, and sweating are elevated. Activity in their prefrontal cortex is often suppressed— which makes it more difficult to control attention, thinking, emotions, and behaviour. It’s harder to engage in the task at hand. Second, they’re self-conscious. The exhort themselves to double down, to disprove the stereotype. Then they monitor themselves to see if their efforts are working. Third, they try to suppress negative thoughts that, if allowed to surface, would deepen their sense of threat.