Rethinking Loneliness
Does How We Think About Being Alone Make Us Lonely?
I frequently come across the claim that America is experiencing a loneliness epidemic. When the evidence is presented, it usually focuses on how much time people are spending alone, treated as inherently bad for them. But encouraging people to believe time alone is harmful may actually be contributing to rising rates of loneliness.
To be clear, loneliness is a real problem. It is a major risk factor for depression, anxiety, self harm and suicide, and it also raises the risk of heart disease, dementia, and other illness. Humans are a social species. From infancy we depend on parents, caregivers, and later mentors and peers, to survive and grow into capable adults. As adults, we partner up, cooperate, and collaborate to build and sustain families, businesses, institutions, and communities. And we just like being together. For instance, research finds that most everyday activities are more enjoyable when we do them with other people than when we do them alone.
However, being alone and feeling lonely are not the same thing. Loneliness is the psychological distress that comes from feeling a lack of meaningful connection or belonging. That is different from simply being by yourself. We do not always feel lonely just because we are not interacting with or in the presence of others. And we often choose to spend time alone doing things we find restful or absorbing, or working on personal projects and goals. Even when we would rather be with others, spending time by ourselves does not automatically make us feel lonely. In addition, people can be surrounded by others and still feel lonely if they do not feel like they truly belong or matter to the people around them. All of this helps explain why the correlation between being alone and loneliness is fairly weak.
So spending time alone does not automatically make us lonely, but it turns out how we think about that time can. Across a series of studies, researchers examined how our beliefs about the time we spend by ourselves influence loneliness. First, they examined coverage in the most widely read newspapers in the country and found that stories about being alone were ten times more likely to frame it as bad for us than good for us, despite the fact that time alone is not inherently harmful and can be beneficial.
The researchers then tested whether that kind of negative framing actually changes attitudes about alone time. In an experiment, people who read a short article about the risks of being alone came away believing time alone was more harmful than people who read about its benefits.
They then conducted a study in which they recruited young adults, measured their existing beliefs about being alone, and subsequently tracked them over two weeks, checking in several times a day to ask how much time they had spent alone and how lonely they felt. Individuals who held negative beliefs about being alone felt considerably lonelier after time by themselves. Those who held more positive beliefs felt less lonely after the same stretches of time by themselves. In further studies, the researchers found that this pattern held up across many different countries and cultures.
I think this points to something bigger than just loneliness. As a culture, we have become increasingly fixated on and worried about psychological suffering. In some ways this is a good thing. It has reduced stigma around mental illness and made more people willing to seek help when they need it. But the more preoccupied we become with our psychological states, constantly monitoring our stress, our sadness, our sense of connection, the more we appear to be making ourselves worse off.
Our team created a project called Head Out to make the case for a different approach, one built on outward-directed action rather than inward-directed fixation. Loneliness was not part of the original thinking behind Head Out, but I think it fits. Our mental and social health does not improve by turning inward and constantly monitoring how we feel. It improves when we turn outward and engage in activities that better our own lives and the lives of others.
This is where meaning comes in. True loneliness is, I believe, ultimately an existential issue. It is about a lack of meaning-providing social engagement. Meaning is tied to social connection, but not simply to being around other people. It comes from playing a significant role in their lives. This further highlights how fixating on how much time we spend alone or in the presence of others is not especially useful for addressing the problem of loneliness.
There is real value in paying attention to loneliness as a society. But treating being alone as inherently harmful, and acting like every trend toward more solitary living is evidence of a loneliness crisis, might be making the problem worse. Instead of worrying so much about how much time people spend alone, maybe we should spend more time promoting the aspirations and activities that give our lives meaning, which will inevitably increase the amount of time we spend with others and make that time more fulfilling.
Have a great weekend!
Clay