Tag: Loneliness

An article on loneliness

A surprising find!

I shall be 80 in November and I find myself thinking about death more often than I did a few years ago. As an example of how my mind has changed, yesterday I was contemplating renewing my subscription to the Free Inquiry magazine and wondering if I should renew it for two or three years? In other words will I still be alive in three years time? Silly but it is the truth. And that is not taking into account that I go to the Club Northwest two days a week and try and bike ride another two or three times a week.

Then let us not get into the topic of whether I will die before Jean or the reverse. That is an enormous subject and, thank goodness, where we live in Oregon one has the choice to die: “Two states, Oregon and Washington, currently have statutes providing a procedure for a terminally ill patient to request medication to end his or her life. These laws are sometimes referred to as “death with dignity” or “physician-assisted suicide” laws.“

All of which is an introduction to a recent article published in The Conversation that I republish below:

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Loneliness can kill, and new research shows middle-aged Americans are particularly vulnerable

The desire to belong is a fundamental human need. Oliver Rossi/Stone via Getty Images

Frank J. Infurna, Arizona State University

Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist.

Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. In contrast, middle-aged adults in continental and Nordic Europe reported the lowest levels of loneliness and stability over time.

We used survey data drawn from over 53,000 middle-aged adults from the U.S. and 13 European nations from 2002 to 2020. We tracked their reported changes in loneliness every two years across the midlife years of 45 to 65. This span provided us data from the so-called silent generation of people born between 1937 and 1945; baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; and members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1974.

Our study makes clear that middle-aged Americans today are experiencing more loneliness than their peers in European nations. This coincides with existing evidence that mortality rates are rising for working-age adults in the U.S.

We focused on middle-aged adults for several reasons. Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society by constituting a majority of the workforce. But they also face increasing challenges today, notably greater demands for support from both their aging parents and their children.

Following the Great Recession from late 2007 to 2009, middle-aged adults in the U.S. reported poorer mental and physical health compared to same-aged peers in the 1990s. Compared to several European nations, U.S. middle-aged adults currently report more depressive symptoms and higher rates of chronic illness, pain and disability.

Why it matters

The desire to belong is an innate and fundamental need. When this is lacking, it can have downstream consequences.

Loneliness is bad for your health. Researchers have found that loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. Loneliness increases one’s vulnerability to sickness, depression, chronic illness and premature death.

Loneliness is considered a global public health issue. The U.S. surgeon general released an advisory report in 2023 documenting an epidemic of loneliness and a pressing need to increase social connection. Other nations, such as the U.K. and Japan, have appointed ministers of loneliness to ensure relationships and loneliness are considered in policymaking.

You can be lonely even when surrounded by people.

What still isn’t known

Why are middle-aged Americans exceptional when it comes to loneliness and poorer overall mental and physical health?

We did not directly test this in our study, but in the future we hope to zero in on the factors driving these trends. We think that the loneliness Americans are reporting compared to peer nations comes down to limited social safety nets and to cultural norms that prioritize individualism over community.

Individualization carries psychological costs, such as reductions in social connections and support structures, which are correlates of loneliness. Relative to the other nations in our study, Americans have a higher tendency to relocate, which is associated with weak social and community ties.

One of the reasons why we chose countries from across Europe is that they differ dramatically from the U.S. when it comes to social and economic opportunities and social safety nets. Social and economic inequalities likely increase one’s loneliness through undermining one’s ability to meet basic needs. Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work-family conflict, as well as addressing health and gender inequities.

Our findings on loneliness in conjunction with previous studies on life expectancy, health, well-being and cognition suggest that being middle-aged in America is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health outcomes.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Frank J. Infurna, Associate Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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And on yesterday afternoon, the Sunday, I went for a bike ride of 22 miles. I loved the ride especially as I listened to music all the way; I have a portable speaker that clips near the front handlebars and plays tracks from my iPhone.

Then there was an article in March from the University of Bristol: “Happiness can be learnt, but we have to work at it – study finds.“

It reads:

Press release issued: 11 March 2024

We can learn to be happy, but only get lasting benefits if we keep practising, a first-of-its-kind study has revealed.

The team behind the University of Bristol’s ‘Science of Happiness’ course had already discovered that teaching students the latest scientific studies on happiness created a marked improvement in their wellbeing.

But their latest study found that these wellbeing boosts are short-lived unless the evidence-informed habits learnt on the course – such as gratitude, exercise, meditation or journaling – are kept up over the long-term.

Senior author Professor Bruce Hood said: “It’s like going to the gym – we can’t expect to do one class and be fit forever. Just as with physical health, we have to continuously work on our mental health, otherwise the improvements are temporary.”

Launched in 2018, the University of Bristol’s Science of Happiness course was the first of its kind in the UK. It involves no exams or coursework, and teaches students what the latest peer-reviewed studies in psychology and neuroscience say really makes us happy.

Students who took the course reported a 10 to 15% improvement in wellbeing. But only those who continued implementing the course learnings maintained that improved wellbeing when they were surveyed again two years on.

Published in the journal Higher Education, it is the first to track wellbeing of students on a happiness course long after they have left the course.

Professor Hood said: “This study shows that just doing a course – be that at the gym, a meditation retreat or on an evidence-based happiness course like ours – is just the start: you must commit to using what you learn on a regular basis.

“Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating.

“This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”

Professor Hood has distilled the Science of Happiness course into a new book, out on March 10. ‘The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well’ reveals an evidence-informed roadmap to better wellbeing.

The other paper authors are fellow University of Bristol academics Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Jelbert, and Laurie R Santos, a Yale academic whose course inspired Bristol’s Science of Happiness course.

Paper

‘Long‑term analysis of a psychoeducational course on university students’ mental well‑being‘ by Catherine Hobbs, Sarah Jelbert, Laurie R. Santos and Bruce Hood in Higher Education

Further information
  • Surprising take aways from the Science of Happiness course include:
    • Talking to strangers makes us happier, despite a majority of us shying away from such encounters.
    • Social media is not bad for everyone, but it can be bad for those who focus on their reputation.
    • Loneliness impacts on our health by impairing our immune systems.
    • Optimism increases life expectancy.
    • Giving gifts to others activates the reward centres in our brain – often providing more of a happiness boost than spending money on oneself.
    • Sleep deprivation impacts on how well we are liked by others.
    • Walking in nature deactivates part of the brain related to negative ruminations, which are associated with depression.
    • Kindness and happiness are correlated.

I sincerely hope you find today’s post, a long post, of interest.

One is never alone with a dog!

Breaking the spell of loneliness!

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Those words above are attributed to Mother Teresa and I have no reason to doubt that.

george_monbiot_cropped
George Monbiot

I selected them because they seemed to capture the mood that flowed out at me from a recent essay by George Monbiot.

Many will know George for he is a British writer very well-known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books.

Way back in the early days of this blog I was moved to republish some of GM’s essays and sought his permission to do just that. He responded promptly giving me blanket permission to republish any of his essays.

Now it’s a long time since I have availed myself of that permission for the simple reason that so very often George writes about matters that are tough to read and I choose not to share with you because there’s no shortage of tough commentaries about today’s world. That’s no criticism, actual or implied, into George Monbiot’s integrity as a reporter and writer.

But his essay that was published on the 4th October is one that does need to be shared with you.

Read it!

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Social Harmony

4th October 2016

Is music an answer to the epidemic of loneliness?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3rd October 2016

Two years ago, I wrote a column for the Guardian in which I argued that what distinguishes our age from those preceding it is an epidemic of loneliness. Throughout human history, we have been hyper-social animals, dependent on each other for both physical and psychic survival. Thomas Hobbes’s claim – that our natural state is a war of “every man against every man” – is a myth proposed by someone whose understanding of human evolution was confined to the book of Genesis. But the myth is now being realised through the religion of our time: a celebration of extreme individualism and universal competition. The resulting loneliness, I argued, is a deadly condition, which kills as many people as smoking or obesity.

To my astonishment, the article exploded, and the ripples can still be felt today. A documentary it inspired, called the Age of Loneliness, aired recently on BBC1. Several publishers asked me to write books on the topic, but I could think of nothing more depressing than spending three years sitting on my backside, documenting social isolation. There was plenty I wanted to say on the topic. But how?

A few weeks later, I dashed out to buy some screws from a hardware shop. Ahead of me in the queue was an elderly woman. She lent on the counter, dithering about what she wanted and trying to engage the sales assistants in a riveting conversation about her state of health. Stuck behind her, I quietly fumed: it seemed as if she would never leave.

But as I cycled home, and my frustration ebbed away, I saw what should have been obvious: here was a person who seemed desperately lonely. “Where’s your empathy?”, I asked myself. “Isn’t that what you were writing about?”. What if that conversation was the only one she would have all day? I felt guilty about my feelings in the shop.

When I returned to my desk, I began dashing out a rough poem about a woman living with little to keep her company but memories, who goes to the shops in the hope that she might talk to someone, but discovers that the tills have been replaced with automatic checkouts. As I wrote, it seemed to me that it was trying to become something else: a ballad. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with the topic: I wanted to write an album.

There were just a couple of minor hitches. I can’t read music, I don’t play an instrument and my singing is banned under international law. But I knew who to ask.

I first heard Ewan McLennan while listening to Late Junction on Radio 3, in 2011. I was transfixed by his voice, his playing and what seemed to be an almost supernatural ability to find the heart of a song. He was just 25. I bought his first album, Rags and Robes, and listened to it over and again. Three years later, I heard him interviewed by Mary Ann Kennedy, whose programmes I’ve followed since she began broadcasting on Radio Scotland. He spoke with the same ease of expression I had heard in his music. He was relaxed and funny, politically engaged and plainly fascinated by the roots and text of songs and poems. He came across as a cracking bloke.

I did something I have seldom done: I sent him a fan letter. I invited him to a talk I was giving in his home city, Bristol. He came, and over dinner afterwards we clicked. So, a few months later, with some trepidation, it was to him that I sent my idea of collaborating on a themed album.

To my delight, he agreed. I would start by thinking up a story and writing a rough sketch, which might incorporate some potential hooks, rhymes and choruses. I would send it to him on the understanding that he could do whatever he liked with it. I did not try to write to his style, as I knew he would take from each sketch what he wanted and make the song his own.

I wasn’t wrong. A couple of weeks after I emailed the first sketch to him, I found an audio file in my inbox, and opened it with the excitement of a child at Christmas. It was wonderful – he had turned my base metal into gold. The songs he sent back to me were riveting and heart-wrenching, capturing sensations I have long struggled to express.

The album is a mixture of dark shades and light: sad ballads and stirring anthems. We want to use it as a means of not only talking about loneliness, but, in a small way, addressing it. With advice from charities working on the issue, we are designing our gigs to try to bring people together. I will talk about the themes and Ewan will perform the songs. We will encourage people in the audience to talk to each other; then it will end up with a party in the nearest willing pub. Music naturally makes connections; we want to take it a step further.

In one respect, the album is already succeeding, as the collaboration has relieved the usual solitude in which we both work, making our lives less lonely. I hope it has the same effect on other people.

Breaking the Spell of Loneliness, by Ewan McLennan and George Monbiot, is released on October 14 by Fellside Records.

Here’s a short video about the project, featuring some of the music:

The autumn tour dates are listed at http://www.monbiot.com/music/

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Ewan McLennan has his own website and, unsurprisingly, there are the details of the Autumn tour.

emgm_btspol_frt_loAutumn Tour

12 October Durham Book Festival
18 October St Georges, Bristol
20 October Liverpool Philharmonic
21 October Live At All Hallows, Leeds
22 October Sheffield Firth Hall
23 October Ludlow Assembly Rooms
4 November Bridport Arts Centre
5 November Berry Theatre, Southampton
3 December Kings Place, London

This remarkable collaboration between author George Monbiot and musician Ewan McLennan seeks to address the curse of our age: a crowded planet stricken by loneliness. Using music and the written word, it seeks to make connections in a splintered world.

Now, dear reader, you would be disappointed if I didn’t close today’s post without reference to the value of a dog or two in one’s life, and I have no intention of delivering such disappointment!

From the dozens of pictures that have been presented here over the years I chose this one.

image005Because I have this notion that one can never be truly alone if there is a dog in one’s life.

Is it really the age of loneliness?

Much as I respect Mr. Monbiot’s views, I hope he is wrong in this respect.

I have long admired the writings of George Monbiot and, as often as not, have republished his essays in this place.

But an essay by George that was published in the UK Guardian newspaper yesterday portrays a frightening picture of modern-day Britain.  It was called Falling Apart and is republished, with George’s permission, today.

I want to offer a personal response to the essay, that immediately follows George’s piece.

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Falling Apart

October 14, 2014

Competition and individualism are forcing us into a devastating Age of Loneliness

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15th October 2014

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void now filled by marketing and conspiracy theories(1). Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous twenty. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”(2), he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominims of East Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults(3). Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50(4), and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day(5); loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity(6). Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut(7,8). We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is now no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses, more than a fifth now say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed(9). A government study in June revealed that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe(10). We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin?

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings(11). We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people now report that the one-eyed god is their principal company(12). This self-medication enhances the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration(13). It strongly reinforces the income-happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The researchers found that those who watch a lot of television derive less satisfaction from a given level of income than those who watch only a little. Television speeds up the hedonic treadmill, forcing us to strive even harder to sustain the same level of satisfaction. You have only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions on daytime TV, Dragon’s Den, the Apprentice and the myriad forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier. Figures published this week show that while the income of company directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a whole have fallen in real terms over the past year (14). The bosses now earn – sorry, I mean take – 120 times more than the average full-time worker. (In 2000, it was 47 times). And even if competition did make us richer, it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.

The top 1% now own 48% of global wealth(15), but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too are assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness(16). Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1 billion in the bank.

For this we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older people(17). But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more, we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are now entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/hj1.html

2. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html

3. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/loneliness-britains-silent-plague-hurts-young-people-most

4. http://www.independentage.org/isolation-a-growing-issue-among-older-men/

5. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/threat-to-health/

6. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/16/loneliness-twice-as-unhealthy-as-obesity-older-people

7. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/loneliness-britains-silent-plague-hurts-young-people-most

8. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/threat-to-health/

9. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11014591/One-in-five-children-just-want-to-be-rich-when-they-grow-up.html

10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10909524/Britain-the-loneliness-capital-of-Europe.html

11. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/FINAL-Age-UK-PR-response-02.05.14.pdf

12. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/loneliness-research/

13. http://boa.unimib.it/bitstream/10281/23044/2/Income_Aspirations_Television_and_Happiness.pdf

14. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4234843.ece

15. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/14/richest-1percent-half-global-wealth-credit-suisse-report

16. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/

17. http://www.independentage.org/isolation-a-growing-issue-among-older-men/

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“Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.“

As closing sentences go, that’s about as tough as it gets.

Nevertheless, I’m going to offer a perspective, something that George doesn’t mention.  That is the importance of community.

Back in 2008 BBC Timewatch screened a programme about the revelations that came from the latest archaeological dig at Stonehenge, near Amesbury in Wiltshire in England.  I wrote about the programme over four years ago: Stonehenge – a place of healing.

Stonehenge is one of Britain’s most famous historical sites, deservedly so because Stonehenge was one of the most important places in ancient Europe.

Stonehenge

But evidence from a dig that was authorised in 2008 has shown that not only is Stonehenge a much older site of human habitation but that it’s purpose is altogether different to what has been assumed.  It was, indeed, a healing place, possibly the most important in Europe.

Professors Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright are the world-renowned archaeologists who believe they have cracked the conundrum of Stonehenge’s original purpose.

If you would like to watch that Timewatch episode, and it is highly recommended, then someone has neatly uploaded it to YouTube.

The programme clearly offers evidence from the carbon-dating of seeds buried under the famous blue stones that dates this settlement to some 9,000 years BP. The detailed examination of ancient humans buried nearby indicates they came to Stonehenge with a range of diseases, many terminal in nature.

So back to George Monbiot’s essay and the element that screams out at me.

We have lost sight of the huge healing benefits that come from old-fashioned, shoulder-to-shoulder communities.

Not to mention the healing properties of a loving dog or two in one’s life!

Loving each other: woman and dog!
Loving each other: woman and dog!