Growing Young

by Marta Zaraska

  Preventing Gangrene, Messing Up Sleep

  Lindsay, age thirty, realized she was lonely when she became a mother. “I would stand in front of the window looking out over the neighbourhood…and I would think about how everyone was sleeping…and I felt like I was the only one awake feeling my wretched feelings.” Dani, age thirty-two, says loneliness means not feeling human. “I feel small and curled up, like a tiny animal in permanent hibernation. Nothing gets through and everything’s cold.” To Daniel, age eighteen, loneliness is like a parasite. It “lives in my stomach constantly, and I can feel it eating all my organs with each week that passes.”

  The quotes above come from a website called the Loneliness Project, founded a few years back by Marissa Korda, a twenty-five-year-old graphic designer in Toronto. The landing page is laid out as an apartment block, awake despite the darkness of night, the sounds of busy urban life rising from an invisible street below. In the building’s windows, black silhouettes of people can be seen, one per apartment—reading books, working on computers, or just gazing at the world outside. If you click on them, a window will pop up with a person’s name, their age, and their accounts of loneliness. The images are made up, but the stories are real—stories of not fitting in, of seclusion, of not being understood by anyone. They are submitted to the website by readers and three stories are posted per week. Although they differ in their content, they all make for a heartbreaking read.

  Scientists say loneliness and social isolation are two distinct concepts. The first one is subjective (you feel like there is no one out there for you—no friends, no family, no romantic partner, no caring neighbours), the second one is objective (there really is no one out there for you). You may be surrounded by family and friends, and yet feel lonely. On the flip side, you may be truly alone—think cabin in the Alaskan wilderness—and not experience the parasite of loneliness. But just as is social isolation, loneliness is prevalent in the Western world. One in five Canadians claims to be lonely, while in the US, the number of people reporting loneliness is around 17 percent. Western Europe seems a bit better off, with rates of loneliness hovering around 10 percent. With old age, loneliness rates climb almost everywhere across the globe. In Canada, approximately 50 percent of seniors over the age of eighty say they are lonely.

  All that is bad news, since it’s not only objective social isolation that matters for health and longevity. Subjective feelings of loneliness are important, too. One 2015 meta-analysis of studies established that while objective social isolation may increase the risk of death by 29 percent, reported loneliness ups it by 26 percent. And if you are both objectively alone and subjectively feel alone, your odds of becoming a centenarian go downhill even more, since the effects of isolation and loneliness are cumulative. If you add up multiple positive indicators of social support, objective and subjective, it may all increase your chances of survival by a whopping 91 percent. Eating organic goji berries and doing push-ups doesn’t come anywhere close in giving you this kind of longevity boost. As for specific health effects, loneliness appears to push up the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and even urinary incontinence. And, of course, it can also shorten life rather dramatically by suicide.

  However, here’s one thing about loneliness: it used to be good for us. In fact, we have likely evolved to feel lonely from time to time. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago neuroscientist who was so focused in his career on the study of loneliness that he was jokingly nicknamed “Dr. Loneliness,” liked to compare loneliness to hunger and thirst. Just like the two latter states, he claimed, loneliness is a signal that something has gone awry in our lives, something that we should change, fast. When we are hungry, we should look for food. When we are lonely, we should seek connection with others.

  For our ancestors, the particular biological changes brought by feelings of loneliness may have actually helped with longevity—I’m talking about the times when your centenarian potential was most likely to be ruined by sabre-toothed cats, not diabetes. When our forefathers and foremothers were left on their own, without their tribe, the feeling of loneliness activated a whole set of physiological changes aimed at survival. Imagine you are living fifty thousand years ago somewhere on the African savanna. You have a disagreement with your fellow tribespeople and they kick you out. You are on your own. The squabbling may be over, but now you are at risk of becoming a lion’s next meal. You run around looking for a place to hide, and as you do so, you get scratches all over (those thorny acacias can be a nuisance). If you do get into a scuffle with a predator, and you somehow get out alive, you may have even more scratches and wounds that will soon start teeming with bacteria. To survive, your body needs to start fighting the infection—and it better be efficient.

  When we feel lonely, Cacioppo once told me in an interview, our immune systems switch away from fighting viruses toward a better antibacterial response. In a tribe, viral infections spread easily, so the body has to be ready to take them on. But once a person is secluded, the risk of a virus goes down, while the risk of lion-induced wounds teeming with bacteria goes up, and that’s what the body focuses on. Just as the feeling of hunger turns on your search for food and puts your body in an energy-saving mode, your feeling of loneliness switches on your “alone on a savanna survival mode.” Such a turn away from an antiviral response toward an antibacterial one means that when you feel lonely, inflammatory activity in your body goes up. Circa 50,000 BCE, it could have prevented you from losing limbs, or your life, to gangrene, but circa 2020 it just raises your risk of metabolic syndrome.

  Another biological consequence of loneliness is troubled sleep. If you are all alone on the savanna, succumbing to deep slumber is not a good idea (it makes it too easy for lions to creep up on you). In his lab studies, Cacioppo found that lonely people experience more fragmented and restless sleep, even if they sleep for as many hours as those who don’t feel all alone in the world. That, of course, is bad news for your health—poor sleep can mean heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and ultimately result in a shorter life.

  The UK is the most sleep-deprived country in the world, with 37 percent of Britons claiming they don’t get enough z’s. Canada and the US place third, right after Ireland. For that sad state of affairs we tend to point fingers at crazy work schedules and smartphones. But maybe the fact that we feel so under-slept can also be blamed on the spreading epidemic of loneliness, which makes our hominin bodies all jumpy at night in case hungry lions sneak into our bedrooms. We simply don’t sleep well because our lonely bodies are in savanna survival mode.

  But loneliness is not just about troubled sleep or increased inflammation—there is also the simple stress of it. The closest I’ve ever been to the “alone on the savanna” scenario was when I walked across a national park in Tanzania with a local guide—just me, the guy, and my husband. The guide had a shotgun, yet my heart was still pumping fast, cortisol sloshing in my veins. What if I got lost and was abandoned there? At night? No, thank you. I felt very far away from my “tribe” (family and friends), and wished that our group was larger than just the three of us. I could clearly feel in my own tensed-up body how evolution discourages aloneness. It’s no wonder that lonely people tend to have increased activity of the HPA axis and elevated cortisol levels. You can see it in their saliva—the very next morning after a day filled with loneliness people have more cortisol in their saliva right after they wake up. Ready for fight or flight—perfect in case they open their eyes to a breakfast-ready carnivore staring them down.

  In our evolutionary past, the pangs of loneliness may have served to save our lives. They induced a beneficial anti-wound and anti-predator biological response and made us hunger for connection, so that we would go back begging for forgiveness and inclusion. In the past, loneliness tended not to last long. You either re-connected with others or you got eaten by something. These days, though, the feeling of loneliness is no longer so adaptive. “When we remain lonely in a conte
mporary society for long periods, the costs start to outweigh the benefits,” Cacioppo told me. Poor sleep leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, accelerates tumour growth, and shortens life. Inflammation damages tissues and contributes to cancer. Elevated cortisol messes up your immune system and blood pressure.

  But that’s not the end of it, unfortunately. To find out more about the costs of chronic loneliness and what exactly happens to the bodies of contemporary humans who get kicked out of their “tribe,” scientists study something they call ostracism.

  Shunning, Banning, and Computer Games

  For Robin Thompson, the fear of being ostracized, or excluded from her community, was so great she had suicidal thoughts and developed agoraphobia. “It was very hard for me to leave the house. I would get in my car just to go to a grocery store and I would get to the end of the street and just have to turn around and come back,” she recalls. Her panic attacks got so bad one landed her in a hospital. She was convinced she was having a cardiac arrest.

  Although Thompson was born a Jehovah’s Witness, a daughter of an elder no less, she started having doubts about the religion in her teenage years. “But you are not allowed to question anything. That can be dangerous. You have to suppress these doubts; you can’t talk about them with other Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she says. The danger here is that quitting the religion—or “disassociating” yourself, as it is known—almost automatically brings with it shunning by the rest of the community. They stop talking to you. They pretend you no longer exist.

  Years passed and Thompson got married, yet her doubts didn’t subside. In 2006, she and her husband gave up on the religion for good, but weren’t ready to officially announce their disassociation. They did so two years ago, after they started posting videos on YouTube denouncing issues within the religion. The shunning followed. “I went over to talk to my parents, and it was like they were different people. It was very robotic, the way they spoke to me, and very matter of fact: ‘Well, we love you. And we will miss you. But we can’t have anything to do with you anymore,’ ” Thompson says. Being excluded from the community meant losing her friends and her network of support. “You feel like your entire family died in a horrible accident, yet you know they are still alive. It’s an incredible sadness and loneliness,” she says. The shunning has also likely taken a toll on her immune system and physical health, Thompson says. Even though beforehand she could go years without a cold, in the few months after being shunned she had no less than five flu-like infections. She also says that she suffers from “a lot of pains and aches,” despite being just forty-five.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses is certainly not the only religion that practises shunning: it’s also known in Scientology, orthodox Judaism, and Catholicism. Under the name of ostracism, exile from a community was commonly used as a penalty by ancient Greeks. The citizens would vote on which disliked person to kick out of their town by writing that person’s name on ostraka—shattered fragments of pottery. Luckily, though, contemporary scientists don’t have to resort to writing their subjects’ names on broken ikea mugs and shunning them for years in order to study the effects of ostracism. A simple computer game will suffice.

  The game is called Cyberball and it works like this: you are told you are going to play online. Your goal is to catch and toss a virtual ball with two other participants, whom you won’t see (they are supposedly sitting glued to their own computer screens). You don’t know the other people, and they don’t know you. Cyberball is no Grand Theft Auto with its stunning graphics—it features just three roughly sketched figures throwing a ball around. The secret here is that the other players aren’t real. They are just part of the program, designed to either make you feel included or ostracized. If scientists want to make you experience rejection, the other “players” will pass the ball to you a couple of times, then start acting as if you weren’t even there, playing only with each other. In the scenario where you are to feel included, the little cartoon people will keep tossing the ball to you throughout the whole game.

  By now over five thousand people have been made to feel either ostracized or socially included using Cyberball, and their psychological and physiological responses measured in dozens of ways. One fascinating finding to emerge is that the pain of loneliness is not a mere metaphor—it’s real. In one experiment, researchers asked volunteers to play Cyberball while inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. As some of the participants got sidelined by their virtual ball-tossing buddies, scientists noticed that an unexpected area of the volunteers’ brains kept lighting up—the very same one that would light up if someone punched them in the gut. In other words, social pain activated neural networks that normally respond to physical pain. The hurt of romantic breakups and friendship squabbles, it appears, could be as real as toothache.

  Further Cyberball studies have shown that some people are more susceptible to the pain of loneliness and social rejection than others. Carriers of the GG variant of the oxytocin receptor gene rs53576 feel more gloom if they are ostracized than do those with the AA genotype. It’s hardly surprising—after all, GG people are generally the more empathic and socially sensitive types.

  Yet it’s not just our genes that affect our propensity to experience the parasite of loneliness. It works in the other direction, too, with loneliness changing our genes. Some of the most affected ones are the pro-inflammatory genes, which are overexpressed in people who perceive themselves to be particularly excluded—their genes are working harder than average to convert instructions from the DNA into products such as pro-inflammatory cytokines. In one fascinating but disturbing study, scientists collected reports on loneliness from 181 people. Years later, once all these people had died, their bodies, which had been donated to research, were studied. The results showed that as many as 380 genes had worked differently in these lonely people, most of them in overdrive—genes associated with the immune response, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.

  Being lonely doesn’t just gnaw at your soul, apparently. It damages your body, too, all the way down to your genes. To boost your health and prolong your life, you’d be better off without this unpleasant feeling—and sometimes all you need is a warm shower.

  A Cup of Hot Chocolate

  On November 5, 1981, at 5:21 p.m., nineteen-year-old Lisa D’Amato, clad in a bathing suit, turned on a shower in her dorm at the State University of New York at Binghamton and stepped under the spray. Ten hours later she was still in there, drenched in water, asleep on a rubber mattress. By November 9, her feet were full of wrinkles, but she wasn’t ready to stop showering. D’Amato finally turned the water off on November 10, her shower lasting a world record 121 hours and one minute.

  D’Amato might have attempted the extra-long shower for charity reasons (she was raising money for the American Cancer Society), but studies show that in everyday life people take prolonged showers when they feel lonely, rather than charitable. The first such report came in 2012 when two Yale University researchers calculated that people who consider themselves socially isolated take more warm baths and showers. What’s more, by now plenty of other data has connected our feelings of loneliness with physical temperature. Imagine, for example, that you are eating dinner in your kitchen. How warm is the room? Curiously, your answer will likely depend on whether you are dining alone or surrounded by friends or family. In one experiment, researchers approached dozens of people who were lunching at a food court and asked them to estimate the temperature of the building. Those who ate on their own said, on average, 68.3 degrees Fahrenheit (20.21°C), while those who ate with others guessed 72.6 degrees (22.57°C). In reality, it was 70.7 degrees (21.5°C), somewhere in the middle. In other studies, scientists obtained similar results: the differences in temperature perception are not huge, but they are clearly there.

  And if you want to save on heating, you could try thinking of your loved ones more often. Such recollections can make people estimate the room temperature as
higher than it really is by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2.0ºC). Even a hot cup of tea or coffee can change our perceptions. Holding a steaming drink in their hands makes people more trusting and “warm” toward fellow humans.

  Although the connections between our feelings of social inclusion and physical temperature may seem coincidental, there is a biological explanation for why they should exist. It all boils down to the fact that animals are economical creatures for whom saving energy is a high priority. Consider emperor penguins. In July, when the Antarctic winter hits its coldest and the temperatures plunge below −49 degrees Fahrenheit (−45ºC), male emperor penguins stand patiently trying to hatch their precious eggs. They don’t go anywhere, they don’t hunt, and they don’t eat. They may fast for as long as 115 days, yet have to keep their egg warm and cozy—and they have to survive themselves despite the brutal cold. To do so, they huddle. Tens of thousands of these large birds may squeeze together on patches of snow the size of a football field, elevating the temperature inside the pack to 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit (37.5ºC). If emperor penguins didn’t huddle, their individual fat stores wouldn’t allow them to survive the chilly Antarctic winter and hatch the eggs. They would all starve to death.

  For many animals, huddling allows them to save precious energy resources. In some species, it can lower an individual’s basal metabolic rate by more than 50 percent. That, in turn, ups chances for survival—the creatures need less food and can endure wintry temperatures. Our ancestors weren’t much different. By huddling through chilly days, they warmed each other up, keeping the body surface area exposed to the elements as small as possible. What was important, though, was to know whom you could trust to keep you warm on a cold night. The better a “friend” someone was, the more you could count on them to snuggle up with you.