Neuroscience Explains Why The Lonelier You Feel, The More You Want To Be By Yourself
Prostock-studio / Shutterstock When you're truly lonely, you'll likely experience a wide range of emotions. You might feel disconnected, sad, and like you're constantly being left out, yet it can seem impossible to escape from.
Being lonely is a key factor in all kinds of mental and emotional distress. Unfortunately, it can lead to a downward spiral where people feel so alone, they start to dread being social and believe it's impossible to enjoy being with others, even though that's exactly what they need.
People who feel increasingly lonely often end up wanting to spend more time alone.
In a 2015 study published in the journal Cortex, researchers found that lonely people's brains are actually different than those of people who aren't lonely. According to Psychology Today, when we feel socially isolated, our brains automatically change into self-preservation mode, making us more defensive and abrasive in the face of supposed social danger.
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Guy Winch, a New York psychologist and the author of "Emotional First Aid," says, "Lonely people can become overly defensive and come across to others as detached, aloof, or even hostile — which only pushes them further away." Loneliness can create its own self-perpetuating negative behavior.
The brains of people who are lonely tend to perceive social threats differently.
Another study, conducted by a University of Chicago research team, sought to explore this phenomenon further. They wanted to provide the first evidence that lonely people's brains are finely tuned to pick up on the difference between social and non-social threats, and that loneliness triggers a cascade of brain-related changes that puts them into a socially nervous, vigilant mode.
A questionnaire was given out to 38 extremely lonely people and 32 not-so-lonely people. For the study, loneliness was defined as the feeling of isolation as opposed to not having a lot of friends or close relatives. An electrode array of 128 sensors was put on each of the participants' heads to record their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that measures brain activity changes over short time periods.
The researchers also conducted a Stroop Test, in which subjects were asked to focus on the color of a word on a computer screen rather than its name. Participants were asked to quickly type the color of the word. The test was meant to figure out how the participants' brains worked when it came to automatic and subconscious influences.
On the questionnaire, the researchers used an array of different words that were positive and negative, social and non-social. This helped them determine how the subject's brains reacted to the sight of negative words that were social in nature when compared to those that were non-social.
The results showed that people focus more on negativity when they feel lonely.
From the reactions of the lonely people's brains compared to the non-lonely person's brains, the researchers concluded that lonely people's vigilance to social threat is an implicit, non-conscious bias — something they're not even aware of.
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This is disturbing because these results suggest that when people are feeling loneliest, their brains aren't tuned in to smiles and laughter; they're focused on negativity. In today's world, that's a stressful and unhelpful state to be in.
Even if your brain is making you want to stay isolated, it's important to keep yourself connected to others. Engage in meaningful, enjoyable activities and take the time to reach out to your friends and loved ones. You never know if they might be feeling lonely as well.
As Guy Winch said in his TED talk, "By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds — you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive."
Christine Schoenwald is a writer, performer, and frequent contributor to YourTango. She's had articles featured in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Bustle, Medium, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Woman's Day, among many others.
