All by myself: is loneliness bad for you?

If you're happily married but want to be alone all the time, is it healthy? Or does solitude
start a vicious circle?
Will Storr, The Guardian, Saturday, 15 March 2014
Perhaps I should feel more concerned about my wife's habit of apologizing for me before I meet
anyone she knows. The truth is, I'm not even sure what she's apologizing for, except that I'm
occasionally not that chatty. And I fidget. And my eyes stray about the place when people are
talking to me. And I sometimes ask questions that can come off as a bit direct. There was that
time, too, at the engagement picnic in Hyde Park, when I excused myself from all the socializing
and went and stood by a bush. She was cross about that. I was sorry, but I didn't think anyone
would notice. All that chitter-chatter felt like having my head squeezed.
So although I should feel worse, I don't, because it means the occasions on which my wife
invites me out are becoming ever rarer. Over the last few years, I've come not really to like out.
I work alone, hike alone, go to the cinema alone, eat at restaurants alone. Once a year, I even
holiday alone. As soon as possible, I intend to move even deeper into the countryside. The
reason is people. I used to like them. Then something happened. And now I don't.
I am solitary by nature, and solitude isn't a vice. It isn't binge-eating junk food or abusing drugs
and alcohol, so I've always felt able to indulge myself freely in the soft joys of nobody. But
then I started hearing that, health-wise, it might be dangerous; that you can overdose on alone.
[]
When loneliness takes hold, the ways we see ourselves and others, along with the kinds of
responses we expect from others, are heavily influenced by both our feelings of unhappiness
and threat." I wonder, can it be true? That the unhappily friendless create their own state of
isolation? But surely you can't be described as "lonely" if, like me, you're alone by choice?
According to the book, our particular level of need for social inclusion is inherited. Some of us
don't need so many friends. The pathologically lonely, though, sound as if they can be difficult.
They tend to imagine people are "more critical, competitive, denigrating or otherwise
unwelcoming" than they really are. "Fear of attack fosters a greater tendency to pre-emptively
blame others." This fear can also make them lash out, become desperate to please or cause
them to play the victim. Those poor people. []
I call Professor Cacioppo, co-author of the loneliness book. He's a neuroscientist who, 20 years
ago, felt his colleagues were making a mistake by viewing the brain as a standalone organ.
Because humans are a highly social species (one famous psychologist, Professor Jonathan
Haidt, describes us as "part bee"), he theorized that our brains must be designed to function
correctly only when they're connected to other brains. To test this idea, he studied brains that
lack sufficient social connections. "That condition, of course, has a name," he tells me. "And it's
loneliness."
Cacioppo's breakthrough came when he found that, when they sleep, the lonely suffer more
"micro-awakenings" in the night. His point isn't merely that they typically feel more fatigued
(which, incidentally, they do). For Cacioppo, this was evidence that they experience the world in
an entirely different way. "Take any social species, such as fish," he says. "If you're on the
perimeter, you're more likely to be predated. Your brain goes into self-preservation mode. You
become more aggressive, more anxious, more depressed, there are changes in sleep. Why?
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Because it's dangerous. You show micro-awakenings because your brain remains partially alert
for the presence of an attacker."
Not all scientists agree with Cacioppo. Appeals to evolutionary principles for explanations of
behaviour we show micro-awakenings because of a primal fear of being eaten are
sometimes rejected as speculative Just So Stories, because they're untestable. Also disputed is
his conviction that it's not the number of friends that counts but how we feel about them. "It isn't
objective isolation," he insists. "It's whether you feel isolated. The brain's not sitting there
counting people." []
My journey into the quiet took perhaps 20 years. As a teenager, I'd constantly agitate my friends
to meet outside Woolworths on a Saturday afternoon or go drinking stolen amaretto in the
woods. When they'd sometimes say no, I'd be mystified. How could you possibly not want to go
out? It was fun! It was drama! It was life! I had friends, but also plenty of enemies. On at least
two occasions, I somehow managed to turn almost everyone I knew against me. I was loud,
back then. Disruptive. When I left school, I found an older set of associates, all my classmates
having fled for university. One of them once told me, "When everyone slags you off, I always
stick up for you." I tried to get on with people, but seemed mostly to alienate them. It was
confusing. How do you make friends? What do you do? It didn't help when I drank, and behaved
as I behaved. And I drank a lot.
I got sober at 26. I started socializing alone and found it wonderful. Friday nights would be spent
in my rented room with a DVD and some Doritos. I no longer struggled to get on with other
people, because there weren't any under my quilt. As a writer, I came to appreciate the
interview as conversation in its ideal form: I'd ask questions that would ordinarily be considered
rude, while my subjects invariably asked nothing. When people say to my wife, "How can Will
work alone all day in that dark room?" she tells them, "He loves it." And I do. It's safe in here,
with the blinds pulled down. By writing, I get to talk, without the pressure of the listening face.
My deepest intimacies are shared with the blank page on my computer screen. I confide in it
things I keep from my own family. In a way, you're my closest friend.
But having almost no social connections triggers strange symptoms. Like, I'm drawn to public
transport. The top deck of the bus is the perfect party: enveloped in the comfort of the crowd,
yet safe in the knowledge that no one will speak to me (and I'll not be sorely judged for
preferring not to speak to them). After days of not talking to anyone except my wife, I'll
sometimes find myself unable to stop. An editor will phone and I'll pour words down the
receiver, fast and burbling, only to be left with a hot combination of embarrassment and
exhilaration when it's over. On the occasions I do socialize, and it goes OK, I'll feel so high that I
struggle to sleep. I'm obsessed with reality TV. Contestants on Big Brother come to feel like
friends. I care more about Imran on the Fried Chicken Shop than I do my own neighbour. Two
decades after I left the drama of its corridors, I still dream about school.[]
This is loneliness's predatory irony. The more alone you are, the more others want to leave you
alone. The more others want to leave you alone, the more alone you want to be. And so it goes,
until you're there, with the blinds down, scowling at anyone who comes to the door. When your
only contact with the human world is news reports of scandal and murder and the narcissists
and witch-finders on Twitter, your sense of what people are actually like becomes distorted. You
begin to fear them. When I'm not otherwise occupied, the individuals in my life rear out from the
corners of my imagination, each a potential enemy. I have fantasy arguments in my head,
compulsively rehearsing every possible fight I might have in the future. I even make the faces:
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angry, insulted, outraged. I'll be walking to the shops, clenching and re-clenching my fists, not
realizing what I'm doing until a passerby looks at me, alarmed.
The social world becomes a place of war, and everyone in it a villain. But it's a trap, this way of
mind, it's a trick, a terrible illusion. When storytellers create characters that display the traits of
the lonely, it's us who are the villains. In life, we're the eye-rollers, the complainers; we're the
ones who turn the comments sections toxic; the ones whose doorbells children dare each other
to ring. I can guess what the sandbag thief and the leaflet man think of me and, for that
matter, all the others who live around here.
"It's not a character thing," he says. "When something negative happens, and you're concerned
about yourself, that's not because you're not a nice person. Your brain is in self-preservation
mode. You're thinking about what that negative event means for your own survival. All brains do
this, but it's bad to stay in that state."
Quite how bad comes as a shock. Trying to understand how our ideas about the world can
affect our physical bodies is genomics researcher Steve Cole. He often describes the human
body as "permeable", as if it somehow absorbs the events of our days. "People don't like this
idea," he says, acknowledging that this is early science, and disputed by some. "But the more
we look at it, this permeability thing is kind of inescapable."
In one small pilot study, Cole found loneliness can trigger inflammation, which is the body's
way of helping immune cells reach infections and encouraging the healing of wounds.
"Inflammation is the first line of defense against injury," he says. "It's as if the brain perceives
the world as threatening and activates this defensive response before there are actually any
microbes or injuries there. But this bubbling background inflammation is fertilizer for everything
that kills us. It helps the development of atherosclerotic plaque, so you're going to have a heart
attack; it helps disable brain cells, so you've got a neurodegenerative disease now; it helps
a nascent cancer cell grow and metastasize." Cole's study also found a decline in the systems
that defend against viruses. "Loneliness basically rivals cigarette smoking for its total
association with mortality risk. So it's pretty big." []
This is the paragraph in which I'm supposed to write how I'm going to change. After all, excess
solitude has curdled my personality and my long-term health might be at risk. But it's not so
easy. Loneliness is a passive compulsion; to binge, I need only do nothing. I have, however,
recently made two social arrangements with new people. I don't know if they'll be a success.
There's a good chance the occasions might end up being awkward or weird, and my wife might
have to say sorry. All you need to do my perfect, wordless friend is be thankful you don't
have to be there.