12 ms·

The brains of lonely people respond more negatively to social stimuli

140 points by acsillag 11y ago

Kenji 11y ago
>Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out. >It isn’t enough to rely on random invites. Get your calendar out and map out your social life. Make sure your week is scattered with social activities. This is the worst advice possible. I did this when I was a freshman at uni. Just saying yes to every invitation. Disco, birthday party, cinema, whatever. I thought it'd reduce the loneliness. But I never ever enjoyed it, and I felt lonelier than ever before. Then, at some point, I got a tinnitus from a disco visit. It's not loud, luckily, and I can barely make it out throughout the day, but it's there. But that was when everything changed. I started saying no to everything. Now, I maintain very few relationships but they're much deeper. And I'm happier like that. Don't ever say yes to things that don't feel right.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  Not to mention that people who scatter their calendar with social activities, in my experience, often get stressed and have an actual more stressed weekend/vacation than the stress at work (if any).
- netcan 11y ago
  College may be a bad example, social interactions are pretty available generally speaking. I think this advice is more targeted at people who are going long stretches with big, psychologically dangerous holes in their social "nutritional diet." This can happen much more easily later on. That doesn't mean go to night clubs when you hate them, but it does mean that if you rely on chance, you could go without for a long time. You could join a book club, a political party, volunteer in a kennel, do street art, join a architectural restoration organization, boxing club, sex club or anything that you do like. The thing is that you need to plan something that will include the types of social interactions that you need for psychological health, if they are not serendipitously available in your lifestyle at a point in time.
- danparsonson 11y ago
  As a counterpoint to your experiences, accepting invitations despite not feeling like going out works very well for me - at times when I'm feeling loneliness (or its onset) I almost always find that forcing myself to accept an invitation gives positive results. Perhaps as suggested by another commentator here, the concept of loneliness is nuanced - e.g. you were looking for deep connections whereas usually I just want some fun companionship, or something like that.
- vermooten 11y ago
  +1 This kind of advice seems to miss the point of what it is to be lonely.
- Mahn 11y ago
  Tangential comment, but regarding your tinnitus, there was this on reddit the other day that reportedly helped some people, you may want to take a look: https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_lighting_a_mortar_shell_in_their_garage/cv3474n https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...
- ionised 11y ago
  Agreed. I've got friends that I like spending time with but for the most part I like being alone. Sometimes (a lot of the time actually) I just don't feel like going out or socialising in any way.. There is some solitary activity I am looking forward to, like coding or learning some new programming skill (I'm learning Rust at the moment), learning guitar, reading a book I've just bought etc. Hell, maybe I just want to relax and play a game like Cities: Skylines. At those times I'll just tell people straight. I won't be out tonight, I've got stuff to do/I don't feel like it. It doesn't need to be treated with any more significance than that.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  The message, at least, is sound. You need to be proactive about making friends and being social, not just sit around and wait for life to happen to you.
waterhouse 11y ago
A proposition I have come up with: Loneliness is wanting or needing some particular kind of interaction with other people, and not getting it. (Consequently there are different kinds of loneliness for each different desired interaction.) ... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies: "respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to [all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown negative social cues", rather different from all. Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely => negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much to go on. (Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)
- louithethrid 11y ago
  What are you pritching here? Cinder for Communication? Desperatly searching for somebody else in a existenzialistic mood - feeling very depressed?
acqq 11y ago
The original research article is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315 "Loneliness and implicit attention to social threat: A high-performance electrical neuroimaging study; Cacioppo S, Bangee M, Balogh S, Cardenas-Iniguez C, Qualter P, Cacioppo JT." Note that the researches explicitly don't evaluate the reactions as being "more negative." They measured the speed of the threat detection in ms: 100 ms vs 250 ms. "Abstract: Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats-an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known, however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat) in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs. nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely) individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and self-representation."
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  From the article, not the paper: >"seven were nonsocial and positive (pleasant scenery) and seven were nonsocial and negative (snakes)" This seems kinda flawed as far as designing the experiment to present threat and non-threat stimulii. If you're an agoraphobic serpentophile then you're not seeing things the same, surely. People are going to be on a spectrum of finding scenery panoramas to be hugely positive to finding them hugely negative?? What strikes me is that "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is) doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends. All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out." seems quite clueless, are their people who're lonely but are getting social invitations and have friends they can call and make plans with? The abstract suggests a moderately interesting preliminary finding, assuming the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other stimulii. A wider study to confirm the result and then a new experiment to establish causation seem like the next moves (if they can be funded). You'd probably need a longitudinal study to see if speed of response to "social threats" changes as people become, or perceive themselves to be, more/less lonely.
Udo 11y ago
At this time, about 70% of people who answered the poll on that page said they're lonely. Of course there is an obvious selection bias, but even so I find that number troubling. Loneliness is different from being alone, or single, or being a loner - it's a painful feeling of social isolation. I wonder if those articles encouraging people to "just get over themselves" and be social are conveying the wrong message entirely. For some people that advice might be outright harmful. The more you're being told your salvation is other people, the more your pain and isolation grow. The media introduces yet another yardstick for you to fall short of. At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are socialite extroverts, and eremites with no social desires, respectively. But most people fall in between. Being in a group (or a relationship for that matter) is not the universal cure for Weltschmerz. For most people, there is a balance between being social and being a lone individual, meaning you need both in a ratio that is appropriate to you.
- mbrutsch 11y ago
  Some of us lack social skills. I've struggled my entire life with this problem, and have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie. Also, small towns in the South offer only one place for communal gatherings, church, and I don't do church.
  - A010 11y ago
    > have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie So do I. I don't mind to practice social skills but I can smell the b.s in many people and don't like the fake socialization, so I prefer to be alone (now with my dog) with a small number of real friends who have the similar concept.
    - mbrutsch 11y ago
      6 cats, 2 dogs, one wife, no friends, what more could any insane homeworker ask for?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
Kiro 11y ago
People would consider me lonely but I don't feel lonely, at all. I may be asocial but not lonely. Where does that put me?
- epidemian 11y ago
  > Where does that put me? Into the "content being alone" category the article mentions.
- neverknowsbest 11y ago
  There's definitely a personality aspect to how folks perceive lonely vs not lonely that's completely independent of how many people are actually around you. I'm the opposite of you- I can see good friends and go out every day of the week, but the moment I'm not currently engaged: lonely
strumplet 11y ago
Society assuredly isn't your friend. The assumption behind its behaviour seems to be: 'So-and-so is unsocial and therefore unfriendly, and so, in the name of friendliness, we must denigrate/exclude this person.'
- chucksmash 11y ago
  Society doesn't exist in this context and therefore it can have no assumptions. You are dealing with individuals. Individuals with limited time, energy and maybe even limited social abilities. If someone reads as aloof and disinterested, how are you as an individual going to disambiguate between them being scared of social situations vs them being truly disinterested? Always remember that the other side of the social interaction is another person with their own inner life - they aren't just the particular face of "society" that is presenting itself to you.
  - nickthemagicman 11y ago
    He's generalizing based on human nature.
  - strumplet 11y ago
    Of course society exists in the in the context of a discussion of loneliness and social life, why wouldn't it? Also, people's social behaviour is controlled by memes of which they are unaware, so their inner lives can be disregarded for social purposes. The one part of the article that makes sense is the definition of loneliness; that it happens where there's a gap between one's social relationships and one's desired social relationships. My point was to try and reduce that gap not by increasing social skill and exposure but by being honest about the value of social life. Actually I think highly social people and lonely people both share the somewhat conflicting assumptions that society is cruel and that social life is the be-all and end-all. In the former case the response is to 'get with the winners', in the latter to withdraw. Both will ultimately end up frustrated if they fail to develop the inner life you mention.
    - chucksmash 11y ago
bagelwhiteoff 11y ago
This is a biased modern American perspective: if you're lonely or have no friends, you're probably depressed because you 'failed' in life. For me, and many others, loneliness is a blessing that has helped me do things most ignore: exercising, reading about Philosophy, developing ventures,etc. Plus, I'm never 'bounded' to my social circle and have resided in 11 countries. By the way, I look like an innate salesman. Always smiling, making jokes, building a network, etc. Still, I'd rather be on my own.
- huck_cussler 11y ago
  I would argue that what you describe as loneliness is not loneliness, but being content to be alone.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Yeah, not all solitude is lonely.
  - bagelwhiteoff 11y ago
    I found out that my first language apparently doesn't make a distinction of it. I tried to find synonyms, but none was able to grasp such difference. That's fascinating.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      So your first language doesn't distinguish between "being alone" and "loneliness"? What is the word, if I may ask? Or at least, what is the emotional tone? Is it neutral, or negative?
      - bagelwhiteoff 11y ago
        The word is 'solitudine'. Wiki quote: 'In lingua inglese il concetto viene espresso con due differenti vocaboli, solitude e loneliness, che si riferiscono rispettivamente al piacere e al dolore provati in condizioni di esclusione' 'In English, the concept is expressed by two words, solitude and loneliness, which refer to pleasure and pain in the condition of exclusion.
cLeEOGPw 11y ago
The conclusion is entirely not based on results from this study, if it can be called a proper study. What can be told from the abstract, is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals), there don't seem to be any control parameters and the distinction of "lonely" and "not lonely" is made based on self reporting, which is yet another source of potential errors. Other than that, the subject studied was reaction speed, which can be interpreted as basic alertness, and even if we consider the results reliable, which we can't, the conclusion could be made almost entirely different - lonely people are more alert to their surroundings, while non-lonely are more calm and relaxed. I'm not sure who are reviewing these studies, but it would never pass as a conclusive study by any standards in non-social sciences.
- Osmium 11y ago
  > is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals) This is not meaningful. I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated, but it's entirely possible to get significant results from small sample sizes. No comment on the rest of the study, but I just don't think sample sizes are worth mentioning, and I wouldn't even call that "extremely small". This is what significance testing is for, after all. With regards to self-reporting, I read a very nice defence on this in a book on the scientific study of consciousness [1], which basically says that we need to let go of this idea that self-reporting is somehow "unscientific", because some phenomena only exist as experiences (and I'd think loneliness is one of them), and therefore the scientific study of these experiences has to incorporate self-reporting on some level. You can't get a blood test for loneliness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain
  - wpietri 11y ago
    I don't think self-reporting is unscientific, but I do think it's not particularly reliable. Reported loneliness may correlate with actual loneliness, but they're different phenomena. This was really driven home to me in doing product development and user testing. I've worked with some great user researchers, and they were extremely skeptical about self-reported characteristics. The classic example is, "Would you buy X?" People are terrible at answering that correctly and honestly. But there were a bunch more where we carefully rigged situations so we could measure behavior rather than self-reported internal state, because behavior ended up being a better measure of internal state for us. I could well believe the same is true for loneliness. I'd also disagree that some phenomena only exist as experiences. As far as we know, all experiences are also physical states in the brain. We currently may not have the tools to usefully read that physical state. We may not have a blood test for loneliness, but we may one day have a brain scan for it. Or, perhaps sooner, a pattern in the sort of data that will be gathered by the iPhone 15m (the "m" being for medical, of course).
Xcelerate 11y ago
> "It is important to be self-aware about what loneliness does to your brain — that it primes it to be hypervigilant to threats and go into self-preservation mode. Feeling lonely might mean you need to reinterpret your view of your social interactions, says Dr. Cacioppo. For example, if you feel a friend has slighted you, ask yourself if you were actually hostile and in an isolation mode first and your friend is reacting to your behavior. “You need to understand that you may be responsible,” says Dr. Cacioppo." Interesting. This suggestion sounds very similar to advice given to those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (a condition that's thus far resisted all attempts at being renamed "emotional dysregulation disorder"). Recent research seems to indicate that the defining features of BPD are: 1) the presence of emotions that are disproportionately negative and intense for the situations that caused them and 2) an inability to subdue those negative emotions and alleviate anxiety. In other words, if a family member routinely says "I love you" at the end of every phone call but forgets to say it one time, then there's a decent chance that someone with BPD would start wondering if their relative hates them for some reason.
yason 11y ago
My new anti-loneliness antidote? I adopted a puppy. Scout demands that we get out of the house—multiple times a day. She happily makes friends with everyone she meets. And if the people we meet like Scout, it is a pretty good bet I will like them. I don't know the author's background but this surely is no way to reduce loneliness in itself. Loneliness is, as I see it, about not having a good friend or partner with whom build a meaningful friendship or relationship. Loneliness is about quality and no amount of quantity doesn't make it go away. Of course, you can't find quality unless you wade through enough quantity but meeting new people is consuming in itself. Thus, a natural balance will establish itself. You will spend some time finding friends, and probably a lot more time to just go by life yourself. Also, unless you become your own best friend first it's really hard to build a friendship where you see each other not because you need each other but because you enjoy each others' company so as to choose spend time together. This is where I might suggest that you can't fix loneliness by finding friends per se.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  I'm a deeply unsocial person who's often lonely, and unexpectedly got a dog a few years back. My 2c on this: a. the physical exercise that a dog needs is also good for you and can help stave off the depression that can easily accompany loneliness. b. social interaction is tiring for some people. How you got your dog, what your dog is like and so on is an easy, low-effort conversation to have, and it's also one that can be managed without causing offense - if you're tired or having a bad day, you can always cite a need to walk the dog home. This allows you to enjoy some friendly conversation without needing to locate it in any kind of semantic framework (eg 'is this person being friendly or just networking with me'). c. dogs are very generous emotionally and also very reliable. They will try to trick you into playing ball or possibly destroy on of your shoes and try to hide it, but basically you don't need to second-guess them the way you do people (including yourself). Your dog doesn't care what anyone else thinks of you and likes seeing you happy. It may be a simple friendship but it's a very sincere one. d. over time, your dog is in many ways a reflection of you, a four-legged psychological mirror, if you like. If you choose, you can learn and adjust things about yourself through observing how your dog responds to you. If you need to make life changes, your dog doesn't need you to explain them. So while a dog won't cure loneliness, they're excellent at helping you deal with it.
naiyt 11y ago
> You cannot connect if you isolate yourself—or if you only connect online where many people present a non-authentic self. I agree that you shouldn't only connect with people online, but people can be just as non-authentic in real life as they are online...
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  If anything I find people putting on a face more offline. Online, you can be yourself with far less consequences thanks to anonymity. Yes, this leads to some showing they are horrible people, but it lets others show vulnerable sides they are too scared to show face to face.
jokoon 11y ago
A guy once yelled "wooo" at me while he in his car because I was crossing the road. I just flipped him off the finger because I just felt insulted. Looking back he seemed he was just joking.

140 points by acsillag 11y ago

Kenji 11y ago

>Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out. >It isn’t enough to rely on random invites. Get your calendar out and map out your social life. Make sure your week is scattered with social activities. This is the worst advice possible. I did this when I was a freshman at uni. Just saying yes to every invitation. Disco, birthday party, cinema, whatever. I thought it'd reduce the loneliness. But I never ever enjoyed it, and I felt lonelier than ever before. Then, at some point, I got a tinnitus from a disco visit. It's not loud, luckily, and I can barely make it out throughout the day, but it's there. But that was when everything changed. I started saying no to everything. Now, I maintain very few relationships but they're much deeper. And I'm happier like that. Don't ever say yes to things that don't feel right.

tluyben2 11y ago
Not to mention that people who scatter their calendar with social activities, in my experience, often get stressed and have an actual more stressed weekend/vacation than the stress at work (if any).
netcan 11y ago
College may be a bad example, social interactions are pretty available generally speaking. I think this advice is more targeted at people who are going long stretches with big, psychologically dangerous holes in their social "nutritional diet." This can happen much more easily later on. That doesn't mean go to night clubs when you hate them, but it does mean that if you rely on chance, you could go without for a long time. You could join a book club, a political party, volunteer in a kennel, do street art, join a architectural restoration organization, boxing club, sex club or anything that you do like. The thing is that you need to plan something that will include the types of social interactions that you need for psychological health, if they are not serendipitously available in your lifestyle at a point in time.
danparsonson 11y ago
As a counterpoint to your experiences, accepting invitations despite not feeling like going out works very well for me - at times when I'm feeling loneliness (or its onset) I almost always find that forcing myself to accept an invitation gives positive results. Perhaps as suggested by another commentator here, the concept of loneliness is nuanced - e.g. you were looking for deep connections whereas usually I just want some fun companionship, or something like that.
vermooten 11y ago
+1 This kind of advice seems to miss the point of what it is to be lonely.
Mahn 11y ago
Tangential comment, but regarding your tinnitus, there was this on reddit the other day that reportedly helped some people, you may want to take a look: https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_lighting_a_mortar_shell_in_their_garage/cv3474n https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...
ionised 11y ago
Agreed. I've got friends that I like spending time with but for the most part I like being alone. Sometimes (a lot of the time actually) I just don't feel like going out or socialising in any way.. There is some solitary activity I am looking forward to, like coding or learning some new programming skill (I'm learning Rust at the moment), learning guitar, reading a book I've just bought etc. Hell, maybe I just want to relax and play a game like Cities: Skylines. At those times I'll just tell people straight. I won't be out tonight, I've got stuff to do/I don't feel like it. It doesn't need to be treated with any more significance than that.
sliverstorm 11y ago
The message, at least, is sound. You need to be proactive about making friends and being social, not just sit around and wait for life to happen to you.

waterhouse 11y ago

A proposition I have come up with: Loneliness is wanting or needing some particular kind of interaction with other people, and not getting it. (Consequently there are different kinds of loneliness for each different desired interaction.) ... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies: "respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to [all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown negative social cues", rather different from all. Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely => negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much to go on. (Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)

louithethrid 11y ago
What are you pritching here? Cinder for Communication? Desperatly searching for somebody else in a existenzialistic mood - feeling very depressed?

acqq 11y ago

The original research article is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315 "Loneliness and implicit attention to social threat: A high-performance electrical neuroimaging study; Cacioppo S, Bangee M, Balogh S, Cardenas-Iniguez C, Qualter P, Cacioppo JT." Note that the researches explicitly don't evaluate the reactions as being "more negative." They measured the speed of the threat detection in ms: 100 ms vs 250 ms. "Abstract: Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats-an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known, however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat) in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs. nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely) individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and self-representation."

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
From the article, not the paper: >"seven were nonsocial and positive (pleasant scenery) and seven were nonsocial and negative (snakes)" This seems kinda flawed as far as designing the experiment to present threat and non-threat stimulii. If you're an agoraphobic serpentophile then you're not seeing things the same, surely. People are going to be on a spectrum of finding scenery panoramas to be hugely positive to finding them hugely negative?? What strikes me is that "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is) doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends. All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out." seems quite clueless, are their people who're lonely but are getting social invitations and have friends they can call and make plans with? The abstract suggests a moderately interesting preliminary finding, assuming the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other stimulii. A wider study to confirm the result and then a new experiment to establish causation seem like the next moves (if they can be funded). You'd probably need a longitudinal study to see if speed of response to "social threats" changes as people become, or perceive themselves to be, more/less lonely.

Udo 11y ago

At this time, about 70% of people who answered the poll on that page said they're lonely. Of course there is an obvious selection bias, but even so I find that number troubling. Loneliness is different from being alone, or single, or being a loner - it's a painful feeling of social isolation. I wonder if those articles encouraging people to "just get over themselves" and be social are conveying the wrong message entirely. For some people that advice might be outright harmful. The more you're being told your salvation is other people, the more your pain and isolation grow. The media introduces yet another yardstick for you to fall short of. At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are socialite extroverts, and eremites with no social desires, respectively. But most people fall in between. Being in a group (or a relationship for that matter) is not the universal cure for Weltschmerz. For most people, there is a balance between being social and being a lone individual, meaning you need both in a ratio that is appropriate to you.

mbrutsch 11y ago
Some of us lack social skills. I've struggled my entire life with this problem, and have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie. Also, small towns in the South offer only one place for communal gatherings, church, and I don't do church.
- A010 11y ago
  > have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie So do I. I don't mind to practice social skills but I can smell the b.s in many people and don't like the fake socialization, so I prefer to be alone (now with my dog) with a small number of real friends who have the similar concept.
  - mbrutsch 11y ago
    6 cats, 2 dogs, one wife, no friends, what more could any insane homeworker ask for?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

Kiro 11y ago

People would consider me lonely but I don't feel lonely, at all. I may be asocial but not lonely. Where does that put me?

epidemian 11y ago
> Where does that put me? Into the "content being alone" category the article mentions.
neverknowsbest 11y ago
There's definitely a personality aspect to how folks perceive lonely vs not lonely that's completely independent of how many people are actually around you. I'm the opposite of you- I can see good friends and go out every day of the week, but the moment I'm not currently engaged: lonely

strumplet 11y ago

Society assuredly isn't your friend. The assumption behind its behaviour seems to be: 'So-and-so is unsocial and therefore unfriendly, and so, in the name of friendliness, we must denigrate/exclude this person.'

chucksmash 11y ago
Society doesn't exist in this context and therefore it can have no assumptions. You are dealing with individuals. Individuals with limited time, energy and maybe even limited social abilities. If someone reads as aloof and disinterested, how are you as an individual going to disambiguate between them being scared of social situations vs them being truly disinterested? Always remember that the other side of the social interaction is another person with their own inner life - they aren't just the particular face of "society" that is presenting itself to you.
- nickthemagicman 11y ago
  He's generalizing based on human nature.
- strumplet 11y ago
  Of course society exists in the in the context of a discussion of loneliness and social life, why wouldn't it? Also, people's social behaviour is controlled by memes of which they are unaware, so their inner lives can be disregarded for social purposes. The one part of the article that makes sense is the definition of loneliness; that it happens where there's a gap between one's social relationships and one's desired social relationships. My point was to try and reduce that gap not by increasing social skill and exposure but by being honest about the value of social life. Actually I think highly social people and lonely people both share the somewhat conflicting assumptions that society is cruel and that social life is the be-all and end-all. In the former case the response is to 'get with the winners', in the latter to withdraw. Both will ultimately end up frustrated if they fail to develop the inner life you mention.
  - chucksmash 11y ago

bagelwhiteoff 11y ago

This is a biased modern American perspective: if you're lonely or have no friends, you're probably depressed because you 'failed' in life. For me, and many others, loneliness is a blessing that has helped me do things most ignore: exercising, reading about Philosophy, developing ventures,etc. Plus, I'm never 'bounded' to my social circle and have resided in 11 countries. By the way, I look like an innate salesman. Always smiling, making jokes, building a network, etc. Still, I'd rather be on my own.

huck_cussler 11y ago
I would argue that what you describe as loneliness is not loneliness, but being content to be alone.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Yeah, not all solitude is lonely.
- bagelwhiteoff 11y ago
  I found out that my first language apparently doesn't make a distinction of it. I tried to find synonyms, but none was able to grasp such difference. That's fascinating.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    So your first language doesn't distinguish between "being alone" and "loneliness"? What is the word, if I may ask? Or at least, what is the emotional tone? Is it neutral, or negative?
    - bagelwhiteoff 11y ago
      The word is 'solitudine'. Wiki quote: 'In lingua inglese il concetto viene espresso con due differenti vocaboli, solitude e loneliness, che si riferiscono rispettivamente al piacere e al dolore provati in condizioni di esclusione' 'In English, the concept is expressed by two words, solitude and loneliness, which refer to pleasure and pain in the condition of exclusion.

cLeEOGPw 11y ago

The conclusion is entirely not based on results from this study, if it can be called a proper study. What can be told from the abstract, is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals), there don't seem to be any control parameters and the distinction of "lonely" and "not lonely" is made based on self reporting, which is yet another source of potential errors. Other than that, the subject studied was reaction speed, which can be interpreted as basic alertness, and even if we consider the results reliable, which we can't, the conclusion could be made almost entirely different - lonely people are more alert to their surroundings, while non-lonely are more calm and relaxed. I'm not sure who are reviewing these studies, but it would never pass as a conclusive study by any standards in non-social sciences.

Osmium 11y ago
> is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals) This is not meaningful. I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated, but it's entirely possible to get significant results from small sample sizes. No comment on the rest of the study, but I just don't think sample sizes are worth mentioning, and I wouldn't even call that "extremely small". This is what significance testing is for, after all. With regards to self-reporting, I read a very nice defence on this in a book on the scientific study of consciousness [1], which basically says that we need to let go of this idea that self-reporting is somehow "unscientific", because some phenomena only exist as experiences (and I'd think loneliness is one of them), and therefore the scientific study of these experiences has to incorporate self-reporting on some level. You can't get a blood test for loneliness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain
- wpietri 11y ago
  I don't think self-reporting is unscientific, but I do think it's not particularly reliable. Reported loneliness may correlate with actual loneliness, but they're different phenomena. This was really driven home to me in doing product development and user testing. I've worked with some great user researchers, and they were extremely skeptical about self-reported characteristics. The classic example is, "Would you buy X?" People are terrible at answering that correctly and honestly. But there were a bunch more where we carefully rigged situations so we could measure behavior rather than self-reported internal state, because behavior ended up being a better measure of internal state for us. I could well believe the same is true for loneliness. I'd also disagree that some phenomena only exist as experiences. As far as we know, all experiences are also physical states in the brain. We currently may not have the tools to usefully read that physical state. We may not have a blood test for loneliness, but we may one day have a brain scan for it. Or, perhaps sooner, a pattern in the sort of data that will be gathered by the iPhone 15m (the "m" being for medical, of course).

Xcelerate 11y ago

> "It is important to be self-aware about what loneliness does to your brain — that it primes it to be hypervigilant to threats and go into self-preservation mode. Feeling lonely might mean you need to reinterpret your view of your social interactions, says Dr. Cacioppo. For example, if you feel a friend has slighted you, ask yourself if you were actually hostile and in an isolation mode first and your friend is reacting to your behavior. “You need to understand that you may be responsible,” says Dr. Cacioppo." Interesting. This suggestion sounds very similar to advice given to those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (a condition that's thus far resisted all attempts at being renamed "emotional dysregulation disorder"). Recent research seems to indicate that the defining features of BPD are: 1) the presence of emotions that are disproportionately negative and intense for the situations that caused them and 2) an inability to subdue those negative emotions and alleviate anxiety. In other words, if a family member routinely says "I love you" at the end of every phone call but forgets to say it one time, then there's a decent chance that someone with BPD would start wondering if their relative hates them for some reason.

yason 11y ago

My new anti-loneliness antidote? I adopted a puppy. Scout demands that we get out of the house—multiple times a day. She happily makes friends with everyone she meets. And if the people we meet like Scout, it is a pretty good bet I will like them. I don't know the author's background but this surely is no way to reduce loneliness in itself. Loneliness is, as I see it, about not having a good friend or partner with whom build a meaningful friendship or relationship. Loneliness is about quality and no amount of quantity doesn't make it go away. Of course, you can't find quality unless you wade through enough quantity but meeting new people is consuming in itself. Thus, a natural balance will establish itself. You will spend some time finding friends, and probably a lot more time to just go by life yourself. Also, unless you become your own best friend first it's really hard to build a friendship where you see each other not because you need each other but because you enjoy each others' company so as to choose spend time together. This is where I might suggest that you can't fix loneliness by finding friends per se.

anigbrowl 11y ago
I'm a deeply unsocial person who's often lonely, and unexpectedly got a dog a few years back. My 2c on this: a. the physical exercise that a dog needs is also good for you and can help stave off the depression that can easily accompany loneliness. b. social interaction is tiring for some people. How you got your dog, what your dog is like and so on is an easy, low-effort conversation to have, and it's also one that can be managed without causing offense - if you're tired or having a bad day, you can always cite a need to walk the dog home. This allows you to enjoy some friendly conversation without needing to locate it in any kind of semantic framework (eg 'is this person being friendly or just networking with me'). c. dogs are very generous emotionally and also very reliable. They will try to trick you into playing ball or possibly destroy on of your shoes and try to hide it, but basically you don't need to second-guess them the way you do people (including yourself). Your dog doesn't care what anyone else thinks of you and likes seeing you happy. It may be a simple friendship but it's a very sincere one. d. over time, your dog is in many ways a reflection of you, a four-legged psychological mirror, if you like. If you choose, you can learn and adjust things about yourself through observing how your dog responds to you. If you need to make life changes, your dog doesn't need you to explain them. So while a dog won't cure loneliness, they're excellent at helping you deal with it.

naiyt 11y ago

> You cannot connect if you isolate yourself—or if you only connect online where many people present a non-authentic self. I agree that you shouldn't only connect with people online, but people can be just as non-authentic in real life as they are online...

Lawtonfogle 11y ago
If anything I find people putting on a face more offline. Online, you can be yourself with far less consequences thanks to anonymity. Yes, this leads to some showing they are horrible people, but it lets others show vulnerable sides they are too scared to show face to face.

jokoon 11y ago

A guy once yelled "wooo" at me while he in his car because I was crossing the road. I just flipped him off the finger because I just felt insulted. Looking back he seemed he was just joking.