Loneliness

I read the “The Lethality of loneliness” by Judith Shulevitz. I thought it was a really interesting article because I know that loneliness is really bad for you. However, it was interesting to see how loneliness could cause not only mental problems but also physical problems. This is due to humans being pack animals, as the article mentioned. Caciappo a scientist tested this by sorting 3 groups of college freshman based on loneliness he found that:

              As expected, he found the students with bodily symptoms of distress (poor sleep, high cortisol) were not the ones with too few acquaintances, but the ones who were unhappy about not having made close friends. These students also had higher than normal vascular resistance, which is caused by the arteries narrowing as their tissue becomes inflamed. High vascular resistance contributes to high blood pressure; it makes the heart work harder to pump blood and wears out the blood vessels. If it goes on for a long time, it can morph into heart disease. (Shulevitz)

It’s just really cool to see something that has been suspected for a long time, that loneliness is detrimental to health, and to see through science how deadly it can prove for a person to feel lonely.

            I also found it interesting that rejection lights up the same receptors that physical pain does. So emotional pain can be just as bad as physical pain. It’s just really interesting how much, it turns out that humans crave to be close to other humans and crave acceptance. It was really interesting to learn about the effect of loneliness, because it seems that it would be so unlikely that something like loneliness can have such a big effect on the human body.  It was even more intriguing to find out that loneliness can have a genetic factor. I had always assumed that it was just a social factor, like your home life that effected how lonely a person felt.

Citation

Shulevitz, Judith. "The Lethality of Loneliness." New Republic. New Republic, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.