Mia Kohn

Almost everyone feels lonely at some point in their lives. It is a part of life that’s almost inescapable. However, there comes a point where loneliness becomes abnormal with dangerous effects on the mind, body, and relationships.

America is going through a loneliness epidemic as we are becoming more disconnected and isolated than ever before, according to the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy MED ’03 SOM ’03. And on college campuses like Yale, it not only can be easy to miss due to its lack of physical symptoms but it can be misconstrued as a regular occurrence when it can and does become extreme. 

“Loneliness is a fairly common human emotion and serves to tell us to engage in social behavior,” Dr. Paul Hoffman, the chief of Mental Health Counseling at Yale Health, wrote to the News. “I think what is worrying is the increase in how many people are reporting loneliness, which points to an idea that many people are feeling like there are fewer avenues to connect to others and feel a greater sense of helplessness when experiencing loneliness.” 

What causes chronic loneliness?

Loneliness is not the same as being alone, according to Hoffman. Loneliness is the mental and emotional discomfort that someone experiences when they desire some form of social interaction but aren’t able to access it. People can be alone yet not feel lonely and a person can be surrounded by people yet still feel lonely.

Loneliness is reaching levels that are unprecedented in modern times. One in three American adults report feeling lonely every week, particularly high among the geriatric population. However, young people like college students have also been hit hard by the epidemic. 40 percent of college students said that they experienced loneliness the previous day. That’s higher than feelings of sadness and anger, and it was only a second to the feeling of stress.

“It’s about the threshold. As a condition, compared to other mental health issues, loneliness arises when we don’t have good communication, or we don’t feel that social connection,” Andy Merolla, professor of communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the News. “And we’re seeing a lot more individuals crossing a threshold where loneliness is extreme.”

Loneliness can be caused by a myriad of individual scenarios and experiences from moving to a new place for the first time to not being accepted by a group of people. However, according to Klemanski, what seems to have contributed to the current societal rise in chronic loneliness is two-fold.

One is technology. It seems contradictory that in a world that allows us to be connected by technology, loneliness is actually increasing. However, technology fuels superficial connections as it doesn’t usually provide a platform for deeper connections. Texting, for example, is used for quick communication that doesn’t involve features of rich, in-person communication. And social media can suggest that what matters more is how many friends people have instead of the quality of the friendships.

Second is the societal shift to hustle culture, where society has become more interested in jobs, money, and career progression than actual deep relationships. On college campuses like Yale, the grind for some students is getting into a particular grad school or attaining a great job after graduation. This can easily lead to the deprioritization of deep friendships and interactions with the community.

“In America, especially in the last decade, we have this hustle culture where you have people who are looking for side hustles to augment their jobs to make even more money,” Klemanski told the News. “At a place like Yale, where I think it’s sort of just ingrained in the culture to sort of get these great jobs after graduation, we at times, don’t prioritize friendships and social connections.”

And, according to Merolla, college campuses prove to be a hotspot of loneliness because of the life transition of moving from one’s home to a different, unfamiliar place. Especially at a school like Yale where students come from all over the world, it can be difficult to transition seamlessly to college life. 

The dangers of chronic loneliness

The effects of such extreme loneliness can be destructive in various ways, according to Klemanski. Mentally, it can lead to depressive symptoms, heighten anxiety, and increase feelings of stress and despair. Physically, it can contribute to an increased risk of heart disease, a weakened immune system and chronic conditions like obesity. Socially, it can lead to difficulty forming even more connections. 

In a press conference this past May, Murthy said that loneliness can be as dangerous as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day as it significantly affects mortality.

“Loneliness is associated with cortisol, a hormone that’s sensitive to stress,” Klemanski said. “So loneliness can cause people to feel stressed for a long time, leading to elevated cortisol. And the elevated cortisol can make you weaker, vulnerable to infections, and dampen your cognition. It can do a lot of stuff at the individual level that we don’t usually correlate with loneliness.”

Now, it may seem that loneliness can be treated pretty easily. After all, all people have to do is go to a function to find new friends. However, chronic loneliness changes how we approach people as we become less confident in interacting with other people. Loneliness makes us judge ourselves all the more harshly as we think about every “wrong” thing that we say. And there’s a lot of shame in feeling lonely, for lonely people believe it shouldn’t be this hard to connect. 

And this then perpetuates a dangerous loop. People become chronically lonely, they become less confident to socially interact and think it’s their fault they can’t connect with others, which leads to shame, which leads to more loneliness. It becomes a spiral. 

Treatment and prevention

According to Klemanski, loneliness at times does require individualized treatment. Some people may be experiencing loneliness in addition to other mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Other people need more professional, therapeutic support to create a mindset shift and develop healthier thinking patterns. This can be done through techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness.

“Mindfulness is great because we encourage people to focus on the present moment and really accept their feelings and loneliness without judging themselves, without any shame,” Klemanski said. “We reduce the emotional impact of loneliness, because if people get more self-compassion, it puts them in a better headspace to find those connections.”

Experts like Hoffman and Klemanski don’t believe that the growing use of artificial intelligence as a treatment for loneliness is a long-term cure. AI might be good to provide social skill training and to help one learn how to keep conversations going. But it isn’t the best tool to actually find deep connections in real-life relationships, which would be the ultimate treatment of loneliness.

One of the simpler ways to become less lonely and prevent chronic loneliness is to make social interactions more purposeful. Scheduling times to interact with friends or acquaintances in the calendar, going to third-party spaces where people have shared characteristics like the cultural centers, or getting involved in extracurricular activities where people have similar interests and passions. 

“There are so many extracurricular opportunities here at Yale, and we sometimes see students feel decision fatigue so they don’t join anything or join too many things that they don’t feel connected to any one thing in particular,” Corrine Coia, director of student well-being, wrote to the News. “We work with students to think about what spaces on campus they would feel most comfortable in. We also work with students to think about other opportunities, like community engagement to give back to others.”

Yale provides various opportunities for students to interact, from the butteries to the cultural centers to religious spaces to forums of debate and discussion. Additionally, YC3 offers speed friending events for students to meet each other in a stress-free environment, Wellness Wednesdays and Take it Easy Tuesdays, and workshops on long-distance friendships and relationships. 

It is important to consider what happens after college as well. When we break out of the shell of college communities, it can be difficult to find new social connections and form deep relationships. That’s where finding community groups with initiatives that one cares about can become a good preventative measure to loneliness. 

“If you’re a family with kids in school, you’ve got your school community. If you’re in college, you’ve got your college community. Sometimes you have your work community,” Klemanski said. “But when people might not fit into those traditional molds, which many people don’t, it can be hard.  Groups like the community service groups can be a great way to find connections and prevent chronic loneliness.”

According to Merolla, students also have to look out for one another. Some people consistently eat by themselves in dining halls; some suitemates seem to be in the suite all the time and never go out to socially interact; a classmate in a seminar doesn’t seem to interact with anyone else in the class. These could be opportunities for students to introduce themselves, interact with the person and maybe even invite the person to sit with your friends. 

“We have to feel like we are in a community that supports us,” Merolla said.“And a large part of how we do that are the small moments of interaction we share with one another each day. And I think for a lot of us, we don’t have enough of those opportunities. So when we get them, we have to take advantage of them, but we also have to realize that we have a responsibility to other people to try to facilitate those moments for others, especially people who don’t have enough.”

According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Healthy Minds Poll, 30 percent of respondents ages 18 to 34 said they feel lonely several times a week.