Coping with Loneliness
Luckily for me, the loneliest moment of my life was so absurd I ended up chuckling about it later.
It happened on November 1, 2020. I remember the date because I was relocating to Massachusetts after living in Texas for 30 years.
It was a cold evening. I had pulled my car into a rest stop off I-78, somewhere in Pennsylvania, and I was standing now inside a tiny, one-person bathroom, trying carefully not to touch anything.
What I feared wasn't the usual grime, but rather COVID-19. At the time, many experts still believed that contaminated surfaces could transmit the disease.
What made this such a lonely moment? Traveling alone at night? Leaving my home behind? Sure, but something else too. After nine months of pandemically-imposed isolation, I was now standing in this tiny room, not just avoiding people, but even shrinking from contact with the invisible microbes they might've left behind. For some reason, being alone in the room but still trying to isolate felt incredibly lonely.
Fortunately, I had much to distract me, including the long drive ahead. We're not always so fortunate. As I discussed last week, loneliness is a widespread problem in the U.S., viewed by many experts as an epidemic – a growing public health crisis that can undermine peoples' mental and physical health.
As for how to cope with the problem, there's plentiful advice and a ton of data, including some studies published in recent weeks. In this newsletter I'll be focusing on simple strategies that individuals can use to help others as well as themselves.
There's evidence that building parks and regulating social media platforms and integrating social skill instruction into the K-12 curriculum can all help increase social connectedness, but my focus here is on what any one of us can do, at any moment, without those big infrastructural changes.
A statistical note
This topic is important for individual well-being, but loneliness research also illustrates two of the most profound ways our society has been transformed by statistics.
First, as I mentioned last week, statistics provide insights about large masses of people. Census tools have been used for thousands of years, but they're slow and yield simple numerical data. (I'm guessing you don't care how many cows existed in England around 1086, but if you're eager to know, the Domesday Book has the answer.)
Beginning in the 20th century, developments in technology as well as statistics allowed us to probe more deeply into the lives of everyone (or at least everyone willing to be studied). The loneliness survey I described last week barely made the news, though more than 100,000 people from 142 countries were sampled. The mere fact that we can gather so much data, so quickly, on such a personal issue is pretty ho-hum nowadays, but it would astound our pre-20th century ancestors, who had no way of knowing about the well-being of so many people, much less connecting with them.
Statistics also help us develop solutions for the challenges that other statistics have identified. Evidence-based practices in medicine, education, and other fields are mostly 20th century phenomena, driven in part by studies in which the findings don't make sense until they're statistically analyzed. Just as we wouldn't know there was a loneliness epidemic without such analyses, so we wouldn't know much about the effectiveness of various solutions without them.
Helping others
Most of this newsletter focuses on what people can do to assuage their own loneliness, but I want to take a moment to discuss a simple strategy that helps others, according to substantial evidence.
Listening
People want to be heard. It doesn't matter whether we're talking to a spouse, a friend, a colleague, an elected representative, or a stranger at the bus stop. We want to feel that the other person gets who we are and how we feel. It's lonely talking to people who aren't really listening.
It follows that we can reduce loneliness by being good listeners, whether the other person is a lifelong partner or a stranger waiting for the bus.
Particularly strong evidence for this notion comes from a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Dr. Guy Itzchakov at Haifa University and colleagues showed that high-quality listening makes people feel more connected to the listener, as well as less lonely, even if the interactions only last a few minutes. (The listeners in this case were research assistants who'd been trained in listening behaviors that varied in quality from high to low. Loneliness was measured with a 10-point scale as well as other tools.)
What does it mean to be a good listener? Here's how the researchers described it:
"Constant eye contact, nonverbal responses, head-nodding, leaning toward the speaker, and facial expressions that conveyed interest. The listener asked open questions, such as “How did it make you feel?"... The listener further conveyed a nonjudgmental approach through nonverbal behavior and phrases such as…“Thank you for sharing this with me.”"
This passage captures most of what psychologists call active listening. (A key element that's missing is the use of paraphrasing and other ways of verbally demonstrating that you've understood the speaker.)
This may seem obvious, but I find it striking that one could influence the extent of loneliness in the world, even during a bus stop conversation, simply by listening well.
Of course, we don't always like what strangers say, much less what we hear from family and friends, so being a good listener may turn out to be, in effect, a charitable act that costs us a few moments of annoyance but makes the other person feel better. I'm all for it.
Helping oneself
A lot of the evidence-based advice on dealing with loneliness covers the same ground: When you're feeling lonely, reach out to a friend. Make small talk with a stranger. Join a group. Volunteer in your community.
At first glance, advice like this doesn't seem helpful. Being told to reach out to friends when you're lonely is like going to the doctor for a sore leg and being told to stop feeling pain. If I could do that, I wouldn't go to the doctor. Likewise, if I could reach out to friends when I'm lonely, I wouldn't need loneliness advice. The problem is that I don't have enough friends, or they're busy, or they're not supportive enough, or it's the middle of the night, etc.
Certainly for people who struggle with social anxiety, or people who have extremely poor social skills, encouraging them to reach out to friends or make new connections isn't likely to help.
I do think this kind of advice is useful, but only for certain kinds of people, such as children, or adults who just need a reminder, or elderly people who may not be aware of, say, online groups that share their interests.
Here's another evidence-based suggestion:
Change your thinking
Easier said than done, but changing how you think about social interactions can reduce loneliness. In fact, recent meta-analyses suggest that this is one of the most effective strategies.
For instance, studies have linked loneliness to a kind of oversensitivity to personal rejection and other social threats. When you're talking to a someone and they say, "Well, gotta run", it's possible that they've grown tired of the conversation, but they may just have work to do, an important errand to finish, or an urgent but unstated need to use the bathroom. "Gotta run" is one of those conventional phrases we use for just about anything. Studies show, however, that lonely people are more likely to interpret phrases like this as a sign of rejection.
The takeaway from this research is that if you're often lonely, you might try to be more flexible about how you interpret social interactions. (I say "might" because the studies rely on aggregate data, and it seems clear that some lonely people have little or no oversensitivity to social rejection. As with other advice gleaned from social science research, this particular suggestion may or may not apply to individual cases.)
Also, it's worth keeping in mind "the liking gap", a phrase created by Dr. Erica Boothby to describe the tendency to underestimate how much our conversational partners enjoy our company.
In one 2018 experiment, for instance, Boothby and colleagues asked pairs of college students who didn't know each other to interact for 5 minutes, then surveyed them separately as to how much they liked the other person, and how much they thought the other person liked them.
On average, people underestimated how much their conversational partner liked them. Although the effects tended to be small (e.g., less than one point on a 7-point scale) and relied on mean comparisons, Boothby and colleagues replicated the liking gap across a variety of samples and settings.
In short, people may appreciate you more than you realize – an encouraging message for those who want to reach out to others but feel apprehensive about being disliked.
Don't blame yourself
Studies show that although lonely people tend to blame their loneliness on undesirable personal characteristics, they often underestimate themselves. That's one good reason not to blame yourself for feeling lonely.
Another reason is that loneliness has a genetic basis. That is, some people are more genetically predisposed than others to feel this. (The data show that this is somewhat independent of genetic predispositions toward shyness and other relevant personality variables.)
The key word here is "predisposed". People who are genetically predisposed don't necessarily end up lonely. Some people without the predisposition do experience loneliness.
In the Appendix I describe the specific heritability estimates for loneliness and what those statistics mean. Here I just want to emphasize two points:
(a) One of many reasons people shouldn't be blamed for their loneliness, or feel embarrassed or ashamed about it, is that their genes may be partly responsible.
(b) Loneliness is not pre-determined. It's not like the color of your eyes. Saying that people can be genetically "predisposed" to loneliness means, by definition, that they won't necessarily end up lonely. I would view this as a source of hope.
(There's also some evidence, including a study published this April, that loneliness is associated with distinctive neural processing. There might be less stigma around loneliness if we knew that it reflects a difference in the way peoples' brains work, though it's not clear in this case what causes what. Researchers acknowledge that we don't know yet whether neural differences cause loneliness, or whether loneliness changes the brain.)
Use more technology (?)
There's a product for every need, including needs we never knew we had until the product appeared.
Loneliness is no exception. For instance, you can buy a HugShirt. This is not one of those t-shirts that says "Hug Me" on it. It's a t-shirt wired so that by using a smartphone app, a friend can send you a hug anytime they want by simply pressing a button. If you prefer a more personal connection, you can rent a friend or even a person to cuddle with.
I assume these products and services help at least some people at least some of the time, though I'm not aware of any credible data yet. (You might even ask whether we need data. I suspect that if a person thinks that cuddling with a nurturing, gentle stranger will make them feel better, it probably will.)
One of the loneliness products that has received a lot attention is social robots, which make use of AI to converse with some degree of intelligence. Imagine a world filled with Sophias (shown below, next to her creator Robert Hanson. I'm not sure which one of them looks more creepy.)
The data on social robots illustrates a familiar theme: They may reduce loneliness among some people, and among some members of particular groups (e.g., individuals with autism spectrum disorder) but they don't help everyone. A recent umbrella review adds that, overall, robot pets aren't helpful either.
(By the way, what about real pets? The review I mentioned found no benefits overall, but "overall" is just a term for aggregate statistics such as mean differences. Pets – both real and robotic – make some people feel good. For instance, I've found that my rabbits cure pretty much any malady. They're great listeners!)
Try an AI chatbot (?)
There's apparently no data yet that focuses specifically on loneliness, but Dr. MacIntyre, Head of Evidence at the U.K.-based organization Campaign to End Loneliness, referred me to this discussion of the pros and cons of AI chatbots. On the pro side, chatbots could provide a bit of low-cost companionship and social skill instruction, even though people realize they're just interacting with a program. Cons include the well-known tendency for chatbots to occasionally utter senseless or harmful things, plus the concern that if an already isolated person comes to rely on a chatbot, their social skills may further atrophy, making it even harder to connect with people.
Use social media cautiously
"Some say we're more connnected now than ever, mostly due to the internet. And some say we're less connected, mostly due to the internet. Both views are correct." (Susan Pinker, The Village Effect, 2014.)
In other words, the internet has been a cause as well as a cure for loneliness.
With respect to social media, a small number studies have linked loneliness to excessive use. As Dr. MacIntyre noted in her email to me: "There is not a great deal of evidence on loneliness and social media use - but indications are that problematic use (too much of the time, encouraging rumination on problems and so on) can increase loneliness."
That's a useful warning, and indeed some studies find that teens and young adults report less loneliness after scaling back their social media use. However, (a) researchers don't agree on how much use constitutes a safe maximum, and (b) in any case, the direction of causality isn't altogether clear. Does overuse of social media create loneliness, or do lonely people rely more on social media. (Or, is there a vicious cycle whereby lonely people turn to social media for comfort when they feel lonely, and this exacerbates their loneliness, causing them to rely more heavily on their preferred platforms?)
Bottom line: If you persuade a person to spend less time on social media, it's not clear their loneliness would subside. Maybe, maybe not.
Seek a mix of face-to-face and online support
A lot of interventions for helping people cope with loneliness, whether they focus on how people think about the problem, or teach social skills, or provide other resources, could be delivered face-to-face or online. Does the format matter? More broadly, should lonely people pursue connections with others face-to-face or online?
Here's what Dr. McIntyre had to say:
"It depends who the intervention is for and what kind of intervention it is. For example, some of the zoom meetings, groups and activities that were set up during the Covid-19 pandemic were a great positive for people who already had mobility problems or were otherwise housebound and couldn't anyway attend face to face meetings…Online platforms can also act as a first step towards meeting face to face. For example see the Umi App for students. There are also online groups which are an entry point to peer support groups or social groups which can be a gentle way to find out about and get comfortable with the idea of attending a group before going to a face to face meeting."
In other words, it may be worthwhile to consider both face-to-face and online support. But, as Dr. MacIntyre added, "It's probably not ideal if digital spaces take the place of too much face to face contact. It's likely to be a matter of balance.
Avoid the silver bullets
There's a lot of advice floating around that says, in effect, do this and you won't be lonely.
For instance, the New York Times ran an opinion piece this February asserting that "Americans, in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, are not having enough sex". The author argued that "the rise in loneliness closely parallels a decline in sex", and that having more sex would therefore help solve our loneliness problem.
No doubt this is good advice for some people, but as a general recommendation it's borderline ridiculous.
First, telling lonely people to have more sex will be unhelpful if (a) they're dissatisfied with their friendships rather than their sex lives, or (b) they're married to a selfish person who makes sex a lonely experience, or (c) they'd like to have more sex, but what hinders them from finding a sex partner is what also prevents them from developing friendships that would alleviate their loneliness. In other words, the core issue for them might be social anxiety, or awkwardness around people, or whatever.
A deeper issue is that you can't just look at matching historical trends and infer causality. The author frequently uses the 1990s as her starting point. Well, during the same time period, Republicans steadily gained more control over state legislatures. Are Republicans causing Americans to have less sex? Are they causing us to feel more lonely? Lots of things have happened since the 1990s, but that doesn't mean they're casually related.
To be clear, I'm not saying that lonely people shouldn't have more sex. My point is simply that they shouldn't be made to feel that there's one thing they should do, and that this one thing will help. This only creates pressure – and disappointment if that one thing doesn't help.
Conclusion
There are lots of strategies for coping with loneliness, whether your goal is to support someone else or to help yourself.
For me, what helps most is distraction (this got me through that long drive to Massachusetts) as well as meaningful conversations. Chit-chat, for me, is like eating salad: It's great for the moment, but it doesn't do much for the hunger. That's just me.
None of the strategies I've discussed help everyone, but most of them help at least some people. I find that encouraging. There are many strategies to choose from. The trick is to find the one(s) that work for you and the people you encounter.
For more information, check out the Campaign to End Loneliness website, run by experts who experts synthesize and disseminate data, support the loneliness community, and proactively influence policy.
Thanks for reading!
Appendix: The heritability of loneliness
Although a specific gene hasn't been identified yet, studies looking at individuals differing in biological relatedness estimate the heritability of loneliness at somewhere between 37% and 55%.
Heritability statistics are often misunderstood. A lot of nastiness arises from misapplying them to individuals and sub-groups.
Let's suppose, conservatively, that loneliness is 40% heritable.
This doesn't mean that 40% of the time a person will be as lonely as their parents.
Nor does it mean that 40% of the loneliness a person feels comes from their parents.
That 40% statistic isn't about any one person and their parents per se. Rather, it tells us something about the entire population.
We know already that people vary a lot in how much loneliness they experience. A 40% heritability estimate tells us that about 40% of that variation can be traced to genetic differences between people.
This seems to imply that 40% of how lonely you feel is determined by your specific genetic makeup (regardless of how genetically similar you are to your parents).
Alas, it's not quite so simple. For instance, genes often influence a specific phenotypic characteristic (e.g., loneliness) more strongly in some individuals than in others.
If we were sure that loneliness is 40% heritable, all we could conclude about any one individual is that the extent of loneliness they experience is probably due to a mix of genetic and environmental influences. We couldn't know whether the ratio is exactly 40-60. We also couldn't identify, based on heritability statistics, how genetic and environmental influences interacted during that person's development.
I realize that sounds a bit esoteric, but it's worth keeping in mind, because misunderstandings around heritability statistics have created a lot of trouble.
For example, we know that IQ is well over 50% heritable. This has led to the false assertion that racial group differences in IQ reflect genetic differences between groups. In fact, the claim that IQ is, say, 70% heritable only means that across the entire population of humans, 70% of the variation in IQ can be explained by genetic variation among individuals.
Here again, all you could conclude about any one group or individual is that their IQ reflects a mix of genetic and environmental influences. Heritability statistics like these can't by themselves tell us anything more specific about group or individual differences.